Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

Spring is here, which means the pests are back. My parents’ house has an ant problem. I found weevils in my pantry, and I know people with wasp infestations in their places. Tick season has begun, and last year’s bedbug scare was legitimately traumatic. I don’t like killing insects, but if they’re in my space uninvited and I can’t just take them outside and easily prevent them from coming back, I’ll do it.

But I do feel bad about doing it, even sparingly. I think it’s plausible that insects feel pain, so I try to make it quick, yet I’m still making the choice to kill them and it’s not one I’m proud of. I think that pests, like all living things, have some moral weight — but there’s not room enough for the two of us. Is it bad to kill them? Is there a more ethical way to approach this?

Dear Bugging Out,

I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling.

You’re right to think it’s plausible that insects feel pain. We don’t know for sure yet, but in recent years, scientists have been accumulating evidence that suggests at least some insects possess sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). 

Bees, for example, appear to play — just for fun. They also actively seek out mind-altering drugs like nicotine and caffeine, which suggests there may be a mind there to alter. Plus, bees seem to experience pain consciously, not merely flinch from it by reflex. In a 2022 study, bees approached a sugary snack even though it meant facing uncomfortable heat, weighing costs against benefits in what scientists call a “motivational trade-off.” A pure automaton couldn’t do that; it would flee heat in every situation. The capacity to weigh competing drives is one of the markers of sentience.

Meanwhile, fruit flies have shown signs of anhedonia — the loss of interest in previously pleasurable things (like food) that we know as a symptom of depression in humans. Treat the flies with a human antidepressant and it’ll suppress the depression-like state in the insects, too. 

One of my colleagues confessed to me recently that evidence like this makes her feel super guilty: When she goes around killing these insects in her kitchen, she asks herself whether she’s “a fruit-fly Nazi.”

But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them. 

Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.  

So, how can you know if or when it’s okay to kill a bug? 

I think the most compelling response comes from Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary philosopher who subscribes to the school of thought known as pragmatism, which sees moral truths as socially embedded and historically contingent, not fixed and objective.

Anderson points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and their energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although some non-Western societies have long ascribed moral worth to animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals,” she writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

Anderson has noted that we feel different levels of moral obligation to different species, and that has to do not only with their intrinsic capacities like intelligence or sentience, but also with their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, or whether they live in the wild. It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us.

Thinking about pests is a great (if gross) way to bring this point home. If you find bedbugs in your house, nobody expects you to say, “Well, they’re maybe sentient and definitely alive, so they have moral value. I’ll just live and let live!” It is absolutely expected that you will exterminate the shit out of them.

Why? Because with pests, Anderson writes, “there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace…Indeed, we have an obligation to our fellow members of society (whether human or animal) to drive them out, whenever this is necessary to protect ourselves.”

Anderson’s point is not that sentience doesn’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

Embracing this value pluralism makes things tricky. It suggests that the best we can do is look at creatures’ intelligence and sentience and relationships to us as clues about how we should negotiate life with (or without) them. But it doesn’t tell us how to weigh those clues — and what to do when they conflict with the interests of other animals, including us.

“There’s no simple formula,” Anderson once told me. “I think that’s a hopeless quest.”

That is, for my money, the most intellectually honest position. The absence of a fixed formula doesn’t mean you should exist in a state of guilty indecision or paralysis. Instead, the best thing you can do is have the integrity to recognize that sometimes life presents you with trade-offs where you have to make a choice. And when it comes to insects, you’re making that choice from a position of considerable power. 

This is the conclusion Robin Wall Kimmerer reaches in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The scientist describes how she had an algae-filled pond in her yard that she wanted to clear out so her daughters could swim in it. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though, she believes that all life has moral worth. So as she raked out the muck and found that it was full of tadpoles, she plucked them all out so they could go on living. Then she inspected the pond water under her microscope and saw a ton of teensy organisms, each one a moral dilemma. She writes:

As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse.

But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil.

In a way, it’s an unsatisfying solution — a lot of us would probably sleep easier if nature came inscribed with clear bright lines and moral instructions. But there you have it. Like Kimmerer, I think you should practice a kind of harm reduction. To the extent that you can “live and let live” with insects, that’s ideal. Try to minimize how many you kill. But when you do make the choice to kill them, try to do it in a way that reduces the risk of suffering (think: quick and painless crushing rather than long and drawn-out poisoning).

That’s not only for the bug’s benefit, but for yours, too. Harming any animal can harm our character if we do it mindlessly or callously, because it desensitizes us to life. But when we let ourselves be touched by life, we can maintain our reverence for it. The reverence — not the guilt — is the thing you want to hold onto. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This piece on “What It’s Like To Be a Worm” taught me that Darwin was obsessed with…worm sentience! He even argued that earthworms are capable of motivational trade-offs: “Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light…and we have seen that when their attention is engaged, they neglect impressions to which they would otherwise have attended; and attention indicates the presence of a mind of some kind.”
  
• This Aeon essay about the history of eugenics is absolutely fascinating. It reveals that some disabled people actually supported eugenics in the 1930s, seeking out sterilization for themselves. I think internalized ableist logic had a whole lot to do with this.
  
• I loved psychologist David DeSteno’s recent piece, “Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?” If you ask me, we keep making the Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking morality is primarily undergirded by rationality. But if it’s undergirded by emotion, it’s a fundamentally embodied human pursuit and the desire to mathematize it is itself irrational.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

For nearly a decade, Lauren served as the animal control manager for a county in North Georgia. It was a round-the-clock, always-on kind of job, in which she and her employees responded to animal cruelty and neglect cases, dog attacks, and animal escapes.

Saving animals was, and still is, Lauren’s passion in life. But some weeks, the cruelty and the stress of the job got to be too much. It came to a head in early 2024 when she showed up to a man’s house and found 27 hound dogs outside exposed to the freezing cold. 

“It was one of the coldest nights, unseasonably, for the state of Georgia,” Lauren told me, and “these dogs are out there with no shelter.” The man was breeding the hounds to be used as hunting dogs, and her department had already told him to get them shelter, but he hadn’t complied. That left Lauren and her colleagues with two choices: let the dogs freeze to death or bring them into the county animal shelter, where they’d remain indefinitely during a cruelty investigation and court proceedings. They took the dogs.

But the shelter was already full, so she and her colleagues had to make a tough call; they euthanized dozens of animals there that day in order to make space for the 27 hounds.

“The shelter worker’s the one that’s got to stand over that body and decide, ‘Is today that animal’s day?’” Lauren said.

“And, I’m sorry, but some of that never leaves you; you carry it the rest of your life,” she said. (Lauren is a pseudonym. She requested anonymity to speak openly on sensitive issues because she’s still involved in Georgia’s animal welfare community.)

Just days later, she responded to a situation in which two dogs had attacked people and were then shot by the police — one dog died, while the other was rushed to a veterinarian’s office. Around this time, the county shelter was also dealing with a severe disease outbreak, and one of her employees got injured while trying to catch a loose animal. 

“How am I supposed to mentally and emotionally deal with all of that at one time?” she told me. Lauren quit a few months later, she said, because the compassion fatigue — the deep emotional and physical exhaustion that can result from intense caregiving — had become too much to handle.

This wasn’t Lauren’s first bout of compassion fatigue. She had worked at an animal shelter in the 1990s where, two to three times a week, she’d have to go into a room and euthanize dogs for hours at a time. 

Animal control and shelter workers, who often work hand-in-hand and share many of the same burdens, “get the trauma heaped on them daily that lasts most people a lifetime, and nobody inside or outside talks about it — it’s the dirty secret of [animal] sheltering,” Lauren told me.

Across the US, animal control officers and shelter staff are overworked and underpaid. Turnover is incredibly high, as many of them become burnt out from bearing the immense emotional and physical burden of the job. Collectively, these workers euthanize an average of over 1,600 dogs and cats each day, while responding to countless cruelty and neglect cases; rounding up millions of strays; routinely putting themselves in harm’s way; and dealing with indifferent, difficult, and even hostile pet owners. 

They are the frontline workers of America’s long-running and ever-evolving pet overpopulation crisis, currently fueled by a decline in spay and neuter rates, the rising costs of veterinary care, and a chronic lack of government funding. 

Then, there are the American consumers, many of whom prefer to buy dogs and cats from breeders, even as millions of animals in need of a good home languish in shelters, where they will be euthanized if they’re not quickly adopted. Last year in the US, almost 6 million pets went to animal shelters. Ten percent were euthanized.

“We live in a throwaway society, be it the animals or their TV,” Lauren told me. “People throw stuff away all the time, and somebody’s got to be there to clean it up.”

“You will not forget the dog’s name”

Animal sheltering, for all its challenges, has come a long way. To see how, just read this New York Times story from 1877, which describes how the city pound euthanized stray dogs by loading dozens at a time into an iron crate and lowering it into the East River for 10 minutes to drown them. 

At the time, large numbers of stray and semi-domestic animals roamed city streets and were generally considered a nuisance for barking, fighting, defecating, rooting through garbage, and biting people. But, in time, the pet overpopulation problem morphed from one of too many stray animals to too many pets. 

By the 1940s, the role of cats and dogs had largely shifted from “working” animals to companions, and advances in veterinary medicine, the growth of the suburbs, and the emergence of large-scale dog breeding operations led to the nation’s pet population doubling in the decade after World War II. But with a boom in the nation’s pet population inevitably came a boom in unwanted pets.

According to one estimate, animal shelters euthanized 13.5 million of these unwanted cats and dogs in 1973. That number had plummeted to 596,000 by 2025, even as the US pet population swelled. Researchers attribute much of this sea change in euthanasia rates to the rise of spay/neuter programs. In the 1970s, shelters and animal welfare groups worked with veterinarians to offer high-volume, low-cost spay/neuter clinics, and since the late 1990s, more than 30 US states have passed laws that require shelter pets to be spayed or neutered before adoption. The growth of animal rescue organizations that facilitate pet adoption has undoubtedly played a big role in reducing euthanasia numbers, too. 

This represents enormous progress. But as the situation has improved for animals, so, too, has our understanding of how gut-wrenching this field’s work can be for the humans who do it.

In the late 1980s, researchers began to interview animal shelter employees about the toll that euthanasia and other parts of the job takes on their well-being. In the decades since, we’ve come to learn that performing euthanasia predicts poorer mental and physical health, including higher levels of work stress; lower levels of job satisfaction; and higher rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse than the general public.  

Some of the stress these employees feel is the result of what sociologist Arnold Arluke calls the “killing-caring” paradox, in which they routinely have to kill animals they’ve spent days, weeks, or months caring for and getting to know. 

“You will not forget the dog’s name, you will not forget the animal’s face,” Caitlan Frazier, director of Aransas County Animal Care Services in Texas, told me. She recounted to me the guilt she felt for having to euthanize a litter of newborn kittens, because there was nobody to provide the round-the-clock care they needed (she certainly couldn’t with two kids and nine animals of her own at home).

She told me a story about a dog named Bougie whose bites put her in the hospital for four days. Despite what he put her through, Frazier said, “I still feel guilty with that dog, because I feel like, if I would have given him more time [for training], maybe he wouldn’t have been put down.” 

But many shelter workers also expressed anger toward the people whose actions drive the pet and shelter overpopulation crisis: owners who acquire a pet when they’re not ready for the responsibility or who fail to spay/neuter or vaccinate their animals when it’s available, as well as those who casually breed dogs and cats and then dump the ones they can’t sell onto shelters.

“It’s draining, heartbreaking, and maddening, especially when the animal is young and healthy and you’re euthanizing for space,” Bailey Smith, who works at the Humane Society of Young County in North Texas, told me over email. “I still cry sometimes.” (I should note that every shelter worker I spoke with also considers euthanasia the greatest gift they can give to animals who are severely injured or diseased or are too aggressive to be adopted.)

Other problems also increase animal control and shelter workers’ stress: bearing frequent witness to animal cruelty and neglect, physical injuries inflicted by the very animals they’re caring for, and the always-on-call nature of the job. 

Keane Menefee understands the strains of the job well. He joined the animal control department in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1997 and worked there until 2010, when he quit due to compassion fatigue. The euthanasia work took its toll, but so did the long hours and the horrors he saw in the field, including a girl who had been mauled to death by a dog. He told me stories of night terrors and attempted suicide.  

The job puts “wear and tear on you on every level of your being,” Menefee told me. He now teaches courses for animal control officers, including one on compassion fatigue. 

Another challenge of the job is dealing with members of the public who get angry at animal shelters and their employees about essential parts of their work, including euthanasia.

In 2008, The Oprah Winfrey Show aired an episode about puppy mills, and Menefee went on to talk about the high euthanasia rate at his shelter — a rate that was so substantial, in part, because of puppy mills churning out a large volume of dogs. 

“I wasn’t ready for what was to happen,” Menefee told me. Within hours, he received over 3,000 emails, and virtually all of them were hateful. Some included death threats, with people going so far as to tell them they knew his home address and the school his children attended. 

“I understand the sensitivity” to euthanasia, Menefee told me. “But this is not the animal control’s fault, this is not the shelter worker’s fault.” Many people, he said, just don’t understand how these industries and laws work to create the conditions that make euthanizing perfectly adoptable animals a necessary part of the job. 

What animal shelter workers want you to know 

When I asked people in the animal control and shelter community what’s most needed to bring down pet overpopulation and make their work sustainable, the answer, invariably, came down to money.

Animal control departments are run by city or county governments, and the vast majority of animal shelters are either government-run or -funded. And they work together to manage their region’s pet overpopulation challenges. One thing they all have in common is that they’re all operating on shoestring budgets (as are the privately run shelters, operated by nonprofits), so there’s never enough staff or space to meet the needs of the animals in their communities. But, ultimately, many of the people I spoke with say a lot of the money should go directly to providing pet owners with low-cost spay and neuter, which has been in shorter supply in recent years. 

“Spay/neuter — it’s not sexy, it’s expensive, it’s constant, but it truly is the number one way to curb our [pet] overpopulation crisis,” Shelby Bobosky, who formerly served as executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network and now teaches animal law at Southern Methodist University, told me. “Overpopulation is a simple math problem.” 

Bobosky also wants to see policymakers crack down on puppy mills, strengthen animal cruelty laws, mandate spay/neuter procedures, and restrict the sale of animals at pet stores. 

Smith, of the Humane Society of Young County in North Texas, told me more pet-friendly housing and low-cost veterinary care are also critical. About one out of five animals surrendered to shelters are given up because their owner could no longer afford them or couldn’t find accommodating housing.

But Smith also wants to see more responsible, thoughtful pet ownership. “People need to think before bringing a pet home,” Smith told me. “Are they ready for the commitment?” 

The costs can add up quickly: food, spay/neuter, vaccination, training, insurance, and veterinary care — not to mention time giving their animals plenty of daily exercise and attention. While a lot of pets are given up due to affordability issues, a lot are given up for less black-and-white reasons, like their owner simply had too many animals, or they didn’t want to deal with a (non-aggressive) behavioral issue. 

Beyond more responsible acquisition and caretaking, the public can help by fostering animals at home and volunteering to walk shelter dogs. 

“An animal starts mentally deteriorating in a shelter within three weeks of being there,” Frazier said. “If you don’t have that extra enrichment or those volunteers or people coming and doing things with these animals…those animals mentally deteriorate so fast that they can’t even be adopted anymore.”

As for the well-being of the animal control and shelter staff, many told me that just talking about the challenges of the job helps. “I’ve had compassion fatigue three times in the last eight years,” Frazier told me. And if it weren’t for talking with her peers and co-workers, she said, “I don’t know if I’d still be in this job.”

Of the numerous training courses Menefee offers, his one on euthanasia and compassion fatigue gets the most repeat attendees. In the course, he’s direct and open about the mental health struggles he’s endured while working in animal welfare because “it’s not said enough in this industry.” He wants people to know they’re not alone, that they’re not weak, that they can handle the job, but also that there are warning signs to watch out for and things people can do to protect themselves.

But as hard as the job is, many people I spoke with also told me how much meaning it gives their life and about the powerful bonds they have formed with others in the trenches. 

“One of the things I love about this industry is just how close-knit the people who work in it are,” Menefee said. “When these individuals get together, they see that we’re all facing the same challenges and they start telling their stories and they…get some comfort in knowing ‘I’m not alone and I’m not the only one.’”

Our relationship with dogs, cats, and other animals kept as pets is often portrayed as joyful and uncomplicated: They love us unconditionally, and, in return, we promise to provide the best care we can for them. There’s some truth to that, but spend just a moment looking under the surface of this story, and you’ll find a darker side to it: millions of people making millions of choices, many of which put unlucky animals through hell and put the people tasked with caring for them into impossible situations. 

We need a more honest and nuanced story to explain our relationship with pets, and we can start by listening to the ones America’s animal shelter workers have to tell. 

Ismail Harerimana grew up in Uganda not knowing why he was always sick. 

His childhood in the 1990s was a string of recurrent infections: malaria, diarrhea, headaches, and skin rashes. By 14, he was scarily thin, at which point doctors put him on a new medication that seemed to help. It was for kidney disease, his father falsely told him. But a classmate with the same prescription knew better. “Are you also suffering from kidney disease?” Harerimana remembers asking him. “And the boy said, ‘No — I’m suffering from AIDS.’”

In the 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of babies like Harerimana were born with HIV each year, contracting the virus from their HIV-positive parents in utero, during childbirth, or while breastfeeding. About half did not live to see their second birthday.  

But those outcomes have changed in radical, often remarkable ways over the past three decades. In some parts of Uganda, as many as one in four infants were once infected with HIV at birth, leading to 32,000 new childhood HIV infections annually in the mid-1990s. Today, that infection rate has plummeted to fewer than 5,000. 

This changed because Uganda — along with much of the world — has diligently perfected the simple interventions needed to keep babies safe from the virus: repeated HIV testing for all expectant parents, and widely available anti-retroviral therapies for those who test positive, which makes the virus virtually untransmittable. In some countries, Botswana among them, new childhood infections are now so exceedingly rare that every new baby born with HIV prompts a comprehensive federal audit.

“I’m filled with hope because now, as Africans, we’re not asking whether elimination is possible,” said Doris Macharia, president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “We are actually confronting what it will take to finish this job. That is profound. That is progress. And that’s where we should be.”

But finishing the job would mean building a world where no babies are born with HIV at all, and many African countries with the highest HIV burdens remain far from that goal. About 120,000 children are still newly infected with HIV each year, most of them before or shortly after birth, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all new infections. That’s one child every four and a half minutes. 

Thanks to advancements in treatments, even babies born with HIV today can go on to live long, healthy, happy lives. But it is more difficult, because the same barriers that prevent their parents from getting on treatment while pregnant mean that many of their children struggle to access care. As a result, roughly 75,000 kids die from AIDS-related causes each year, typically before their fourth birthday. That is almost definitely an undercount, as it likely excludes many of the roughly 34 percent of children living with HIV who are never accurately diagnosed. 

Reaching these kids is what Macharia calls the last mile in preventing childhood HIV. It is also the hardest to cross — and particularly so now. Cuts to foreign assistance from the US and other countries have hampered progress, and in some harrowing cases, even reversed it. A projection by UNAIDS found that sustained aid cuts could lead to 1.1 million additional HIV infections in children between 2024 and 2040, and 820,000 more deaths.

Harerimana, who has found his calling as a community health worker, is already seeing some of those dire scenarios play out. For the first time in years, he’s seen an uptick in babies being born with HIV in his town.

“It takes me back to those days,” he said, “when there was no access to medication, where there was no access to research,” there was only “a disease everyone fears, a disease that has no concrete cure.”

Regression is not inevitable. Even the Trump administration — which deeply destabilized global HIV services last year — has supported the rollout of Lenacapavir, a potentially game-changing HIV prevention drug, for expectant parents at risk of HIV. Stopping babies from being born with HIV is, after all, about as sympathetic a case as you can get with foreign aid. But the very aid systems that have helped us reach the cusp of an HIV-free generation are now confronting a massive transition, one that makes all elements of care far more difficult. 

The secret to making sure kids don’t get HIV

After Harerimana learned he had HIV, he began zoning out in class. He couldn’t understand how a kid like him could get a virus he thought spread only through unprotected sex. 

“I would just sit and get lost. My mind would only think about how I’m going to lose my friends, how I’m going to die very soon,” he said. “And I started to ask God, like, ‘God, where did I get this disease?’”

Even many adults at the time didn’t realize there were other ways to contract HIV. Pervasive stigmas around HIV have made correcting such misconceptions an uphill battle around the world. As recently as 2016, only 56 percent of young women in Uganda knew much about vertical transmission, which is how the vast majority of children acquire HIV. Nearly half of babies born to an HIV-positive parent who is not on treatment will contract the virus. In comparison, there is at most a 1 in 72 chance of contracting the virus if you have unprotected sex with an untreated HIV-positive partner, and a 1 in 158 chance if you share needles with them.

But as awful as it sounds, at the height of the HIV epidemic, there “was not a market” for investing in pediatric treatment and prevention, said Florence Riako Anam, co-executive director of the Global Network of People Living with HIV. That was because “most of the children who acquired HIV did not live long. Many of them did not go beyond months, frankly.”

But some, like Harerimana, did live long enough to see a renaissance of new treatments and discoveries. The medication he began as a teen was an anti-retroviral therapy, or ARV, that these days is so effective, it can virtually eliminate HIV from your bloodstream. 

In 1994, a group of American researchers found that people who are pregnant and on treatment have a minuscule chance of passing the virus on to their baby, results so impressive that they halted their medical trial so they could offer treatment to the placebo group. Nearly 80 percent of HIV-positive pregnant people in the US were on ARVs by 1999. By 2003, just 1.2 percent of those parents passed the virus to their children.

But it would take many years for these miracle drugs to reach most African countries. Philippa Musoke, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Uganda, led a landmark study in 1999 that found just two doses of the HIV drug Nevirapine — which cost $2 at the time per dose — slashed the chance a newborn would contract the virus by 50 percent. Other treatments relied on a “cocktail” of drugs that were much more effective, but often prohibitively expensive, costing $815 for a month-long course in the US.  

“It opened people’s eyes that a simple regimen could actually prevent mother-to-child transmission globally,” Musoke told me. Within a few years, many countries began rolling out free Nevirapine programs  — and later, more effective combined drug treatments — for pregnant people living with HIV. 

Most of the world saw its childhood infection rate collapse, but the undisputed breakout star was Botswana, which, in 1999, became the first African country to offer free HIV drugs to all pregnant women. At the time, a woman in the country had a one in four chance of having HIV, among the highest rates in the world. If she had three children in the years that followed, at least one would likely become infected before or during childbirth or breastfeeding. 

But thanks to the free treatment program, and a robust maternal health system that integrates universal HIV testing, a young Botswanan woman living with HIV today has an under 1.2 percent chance of passing the virus to her kids. Last year, the World Health Organization certified Botswana as the first country in the world with a high HIV rate to eliminate mother-to-child transmissions as a public health threat.

Other countries have also managed to pull off remarkable, albeit more modest, progress. In Kenya, where Anam lives, more than three-quarters of pregnant people with HIV received treatment in 2008, up from virtually none in 2003. In those five years, the number of children newly infected with HIV fell by 75 percent. 

After contracting HIV, “I don’t think many of us thought we could have kids,” not safely at least, said Anam, who tested positive for the virus shortly after giving birth to her first child 26 years ago. “And then over time, with advancement in treatment, it became an option for women.” 

Many of her friends who thought they could never have more children, some of whom lost their first babies to HIV in the 1990s, suddenly found they could have kids safely. Their second children, she says, are now in their tweens. 

Botswana cracked the code. Why can’t everyone else?

Even with all that progress, hundreds of babies are still being born with HIV each day. Other than Botswana, no country with a high HIV rate has managed to all but eliminate childhood HIV. Despite decades of progress and far better treatments, the rest of the world is still stubbornly far from that goal. 

“We’ve really made significant progress, but we’re not there yet,” Musoke said. “That is really unacceptable because we have all the knowledge, we have all the resources” to ensure no child is born with HIV in theory.

Yet about one in six pregnant people living with HIV is still not on treatment. And about half of those who are on treatment don’t take it as consistently as they should. Together, their children account for the vast majority of the 328 infected with HIV every single day.

“We can’t just wait for people to go to the clinic. We have to go to them.”

Doris Macharia, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Reaching these parents is critical. The problem is that many of them do not know they have the virus and live in rural areas where there are few providers who can test them for it. 

“Eliminating pediatric HIV and mother-to-child transmission is no longer a scientific question,” Macharia said. “It’s really a delivery and a systems question,” which will require more outreach workers, especially peer mentors, people living with HIV who’ve been trained to help others like themselves navigate their treatment and prevention options.

Liako Serobanyane tested positive for HIV in 2007, when she was pregnant with her second child. She trained as a mentor mother through the group Mothers2Mothers in Lesotho because she wanted to help “other women going through what I went through, even though I didn’t get the support I needed at the time,” she said. “There is no other model better than this, because we have been there. We know how it feels to be HIV-positive. We know how it feels to be rejected.”

The progress that’s been made so far against mother-to-child transmission has largely stemmed from parents who were easier to reach. They were already receiving prenatal care or giving birth at a clinic or hospital, as 99.8 percent of expectant parents in Botswana do. But there are still many parents with limited access to care. In Nigeria, which accounts for one in seven of the world’s babies born with HIV, about half of parents give birth at home with no skilled health worker present. The country has offered free HIV treatment to its citizens for nearly two decades now. But not enough pregnant people are taking them up on it. It is mentors like Serobanyane who have the best shot at making sure they do.

“We can’t just wait for people to come to the clinic” anymore, said Macharia of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “We have to go to them.” 

The US built the system to keep babies HIV-free. It’s now dismantling it.

But bringing together all of those factors – strengthening delivery systems, hiring more peer mentors, normalizing HIV testing, and convincing more parents to give birth at the hospital – is neither easy nor cheap.

Maybe the biggest difference between Botswana and other countries with high HIV rates is that Botswana has diamonds. Lots of diamonds. Enough diamonds to turn Botswana into one of Africa’s richest countries per capita. 

That’s allowed Botswana to largely bankroll its own HIV response. As Alankar Malviya, Botswana country director for UNAIDS, told me, the country pays for about 70 percent of all testing, treatment, and outreach costs. Other less well-off countries like Nigeria have built about 90 percent of their HIV response primarily with the help of PEPFAR, the US-funded HIV program that began in 2003. It’s no coincidence that much of the world’s success in fighting off childhood HIV infections so far began that year. PEPFAR has helped make sure that at least 7.8 million babies were not born with HIV over the past 26 years. 

PEPFAR continues to fund lifesaving HIV treatment around the world, according to newly released data, but the Trump administration has severely disrupted its support for prevention and outreach work. That includes cuts to many outreach programs aimed at preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission, though the administration has maintained funding for some services, such as prenatal testing. 

With less funding for HIV screenings and prevention, fewer pregnant people will know they need antiretrovirals in the first place. They won’t have the condoms they need to prevent the spread. And if their babies contract the virus in utero or while breastfeeding, their parents might not know why they are so sick until it is too late.

“We are in a period of transition,” a senior official from the US State Department, which now oversees PEPFAR, told me under the condition of anonymity. “And during that transition, yes, there may be a few people who used to go to a particular community site that isn’t there anymore, and are having to figure out where to get those services from.”

The official insisted that the US still cares about preventing mother-to-child transmission. The Trump administration has shifted the way aid works by channeling it through bilateral agreements that require countries to partially pay their own way. It throws the old, and in many ways, highly successful system of HIV aid — which relied on international organizations as partners — out the window.

“Yes, it saved lives. Yes, it made progress,” the official said of the old aid order. “But it isn’t a model we can keep going with.”

Josephine Nabukenya, a pediatric HIV advocate who, like Harerimana, was born with the virus in the 1990s, agrees that having countries take more ownership of their health care system is a good thing in the long run. “But you do it in a phased approach,” she said, to avoid letting parents and children fall through the cracks. 

So far, that’s not how it’s played out. Mothers2Mothers, an organization that, since 2001, has trained HIV-positive moms like Serobanyane to be peer health mentors — a uniquely effective intervention — lost most of its funding last year. They closed offices in four countries and laid off hundreds of workers and peer mothers, shutting off outreach services for 450,000 people.

Serobanyane is based in Lesotho, one of the few countries where the group still operates. Because of funding cuts, she is one of just two mentor mothers in her district, down from six. “We love our job. We are doing it passionately,” she said, “but not knowing if the funding is going to be there or is going to be cut off is depressing and tiring.” 

She also worries for the mothers whose treatment or testing she can no longer follow as closely. Reminding them to attend their prenatal screenings or refill their treatment prescriptions requires resources and support that are no longer as available to her. 

Lesotho is one of the over 30 countries that have signed bilateral health aid deals with the State Department so far. The country is set to receive $232 million over 5 years from the US, which its government could theoretically use to hire its own mentor mothers and otherwise make up for lapses in HIV care and outreach. “It’s our dream that the mentor mother model be absorbed by the government one day,” Serobanyane said.

But the reality is, said Mpolokeng Mohloai, director of Mothers2Mothers in Lesotho, “the government is not yet ready to absorb it all.” 

“Every child that is infected with HIV is unacceptable.”

In an absolute worst-case scenario, if US-funded HIV programs aren’t adequately replaced, then a total of up to 1.7 million more children could die of AIDS-related causes by 2040, according to UNAIDS, a devastating leap in the wrong direction on an issue where the world had been making so much progress.

Even if governments do manage to plug some gaps, a large number of parents and children will lose access to support in the short term as a result of funding cuts. This means more mothers who don’t know they’re HIV-positive until it’s too late, more parents who fall behind on their medications, and more children who grow up to be very sick.

“Every child that is infected with HIV is unacceptable. Any mom who acquires HIV during pregnancy, breastfeeding, or even before then — that is also unacceptable,” said Macharia of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “Those have to be unacceptable facts for us.”

Harerimana lost his job as a community health worker last year when the Trump administration put a pause on all foreign assistance funding. He has continued to work without pay, supporting children and their parents, some of whom he says have already missed out on critical treatment.

“I can now comfortably say that over the past year, when the aid cuts and confusion started, we are now seeing children getting infected by HIV through mother-to-child transmission again,” he said. “By the time the system stabilizes, the world will know how much the aid cuts have caused.”

Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat. 

Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her comments made sense, though they set off a heated, weeks-long debate among X and Instagram users, who responded with a flood of strange justifications for eating meat, despite the terrible treatment of farmed animals. 

The spat vividly illustrated a psychological phenomenon called the “meat paradox”: the cognitive dissonance and deep discomfort people feel when their behavior of eating meat and other animal products clashes with their fondness for animals.

This paradox has proved an exceedingly difficult hurdle to overcome in encouraging people to change how they eat — and even for having productive conversations about meat without things quickly getting heated (as they did for Eilish). But some research also suggests there are ways out of the meat paradox, which could help relieve the psychological strain for people, as well as the suffering of animals in factory farms. 

How we really feel about eating animals: It’s complicated

Two recent polls reveal just how confusing American attitudes about animal products are.    

The first of those polls asked close to 1,000 US adults for their views on several near-universal practices in animal farming, including stunning pigs unconscious in Co2 gas chambers before slaughter, grinding up newborn male chicks, separating calves on dairy farms from their mothers, and searing off the ends of hens’ beaks without pain relief. 

The vast majority of respondents to this survey, which was conducted by the animal welfare research group Faunalytics, consider these practices “somewhat unacceptable” or “very unacceptable.” 

A separate poll of more than 12,000 US adults, conducted by the Pew Research Center, asked respondents about whether they find a range of behaviors immoral. Those issues covered adultery, gambling, having an abortion, and eating meat. More than almost any other issue in the survey, respondents considered eating meat “not a moral issue.” It ranked as close to the most “morally acceptable” behavior offered, on par with using IVF.

These numbers seem to show just how deep in the meat paradox we are. And that doesn’t surprise Hank Rothgerber one bit. He’s a professor at Bellarmine University who studies the psychology of meat consumption. Rothgerber and other psychologists have conducted dozens of studies that have uncovered the cognitive dissonance people feel when confronted with the fact that their behavior — like eating meat — clashes with their beliefs, such as that animals shouldn’t be harmed.

One possible explanation for this disconnect, he told me, is simple ignorance.  

Most people, it seems, truly don’t know that the cruel practices asked about in these surveys are quite standard on US factory farms — and that nearly all animal products come from factory farms. And so, when people are asked if eating meat is morally wrong, “what’s being done to the animals is not coming to their mind,” Rothgerber said. 

But chalking it up to mere ignorance suggests that “if you just inform people, enlighten them, then everything will be okay, right?” he said. Not quite. “I think the deeper issue with it is that the ignorance is motivated — basically, willful ignorance. People don’t want to know.” 

Rothgerber and other psychology researchers consider willful ignorance, or avoidance, a strategy some people deploy to resolve their feelings of cognitive dissonance.

In a 2017 study, one-third of respondents chose to look at a blank screen instead of a picture showing pregnant pigs housed in tiny crates (a pervasive practice in factory farming), with some participants explaining their choice as wanting to avoid feelings of guilt. In another study, some people said that learning about pig farming could contradict their views on animal welfare or force them to change their meat consumption.

There are several other strategies people use to alleviate the discomfort of living with the meat paradox. One is lowering the moral status of animals. In a clever 2010 study, participants were randomly given either cashews or beef jerky to snack on while filling out a short questionnaire about what they thought of the snacks. Then, the researchers asked a number of follow-up questions, including how much moral consideration cows deserve.

Participants who had been randomly assigned to eat the beef jerky, “viewed the cow as significantly less deserving of moral concern” and with a lower capacity to suffer than did participants who ate the cashews, the researchers reported. This experiment suggested that rather than people’s thoughts and values driving their actions, it might often be reversed.

Researchers have also found that some people work to dissociate meat from its animal origins, or actively try not to think of animals when eating meat. Others try to neutralize their discomfort via ideas that either avoid the problem of animal suffering or absolve them of their complicity, for example, asserting that eating meat is their right, that they only eat free-range meat, or that they hardly eat any meat at all.

The meat paradox puts animal advocates in an extremely difficult position. No one seems to like the cruelty involved in meat, milk, and egg production, yet they like what it produces: cheap animal products. A lot of people feel guilty about what it takes to produce those items, but respond with defensiveness, evasion, or arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny when asked to consider not consuming them.

This has led some academics to consider the problem of factory farming and animal welfare a “wicked problem,” what’s been defined as “a complex, multifaceted issue that lacks a single, definitive solution due to the interconnectedness of its components.” Other such wicked problems include climate change, economic inequality, and global health. And many, many tactics to reduce global meat consumption have failed to move the needle. But a few, backed by new research and results, could work.

How to escape the meat paradox

One way to address the meat paradox is to accept its durability and try to work around it by changing conditions on farms, rather than trying to persuade people to eat less meat. 

For example, a lot of anti-factory farming activists work to make meat and eggs less cruel by lobbying for corporations and governments to ban the very worst farming practices. This has proven quite effective. For example, almost half of the US egg supply now comes from cage-free farms as a result of a number of state laws and corporate animal welfare policies.

Such bans don’t result in humane conditions, but they’re certainly an improvement. And the fact that most people support these measures when they can vote on them shows how we’re much more open to changes in animal welfare when we’re acting as voters instead of consumers.

This approach has its limits, though, because there are dozens of cruel practices to potentially ban in meat, milk, and egg production, and the companies that make up these industries lobby aggressively against such measures, making them difficult to change.  

But outside of avoiding the meat paradox altogether, there are two promising approaches to helping people change their behaviors and are far less likely to cause them to put up defenses. The first involves changing people’s food environments, such as making plant-based meals the default main dish at university and hospital cafeterias (as opposed to merely an option off to the side), making plant-based milk the default milk at coffee shops (so you have to request cow’s milk if you want it), or working to make plant-based meat and milk products taste better and cost less. 

Some research suggests that gently confronting people about animal welfare as they decide what to eat can also be effective. For example, a 2022 study conducted at a Dutch zoo’s cafeteria found that posting the question “Do you consider animal welfare to be important?” above a veggie burger menu item doubled its sales.

In a new study conducted at a university cafeteria in the UK, researchers put a photo of an animal next to a menu item that used their meat — pigs, chickens, fish, and cows — and the odds of diners instead choosing a vegetarian meal increased. 

“Linking meat to its animal source can produce measurable behavioral changes,” the researchers wrote. In other words, this short circuits the meat paradox by making it all but impossible to dissociate meat from animals. Small nudges like this may seem to produce small results. The group that was exposed to menus with pictures of animals ate 3.2 percent less meat. A modest effect, but scaled up by cafeteria directors and restaurant owners across the globe, that one change alone could prevent billions of animals from being factory-farmed for meat. 

The second approach involves deeply engaging with people on the issue. Three interventions that have proven effective in getting people to reduce their meat consumption, at least in the short term, include watching a segment from the animal rights documentary Dominion, wearing a VR headset that puts people inside a pig factory farm, and taking a course on the ethics of eating meat. But such involved interventions would be difficult to roll out on a mass scale. 

Many animal advocates have also written about how to better approach these charged issues so as to have more productive and healthy conversations. One of them is Björn Ólafsson, who recently wrote about the Billie Eilish dustup and included a counterintuitive recommendation: When all else fails, change what you’re asking of people. For example, instead of trying to persuade someone to eat less meat who really doesn’t want to, that person could help instead by making a donation to the very underfunded anti-factory farming movement. 

It’ll take a lot more clever interventions and tactics like these — and people willing to implement them — as well as more robust government and corporate policies to make factory farming a thing of the past. But, along the way, more of us might find our way out of the uncomfortable meat paradox — for good. 

I turned 48 this week, which meant it was time for my annual physical. After the usual battery of questions from my doctor — How much did I drink? Was I exercising? How was I sleeping? — it was my turn to ask a question. I had one prepared: Should I get the shingles vaccine?

According to standard medical guidance, the answer would be no. The shingles vaccine is only recommended by the government for people 50 years or older; the only exceptions are adults whose immune systems are weakened by disease or treatment. And despite the way my back feels when I get out of bed each morning, I wasn’t there quite yet. Our immune systems weaken as we age, but at 48, I was probably still capable of beating back the varicella-zoster virus that causes shingles (and chickenpox).

And yet my doctor was open to the idea for the same reason that I was asking about it: because there is early but growing evidence that the shingles vaccine may be protective against neurodegenerative diseases like dementia. For someone my age, with more time behind me than in front of me, the possibility of developing those diseases — and the desire to do anything to prevent them — is suddenly looming large.

I’m far from alone. Dementia already afflicts more than 6 million Americans today, and a 2025 study in Nature Medicine estimated that the lifetime risk of developing dementia after age 55 is 42 percent, with higher figures for women, Black adults, and those who carry the APOE ε4 allele genetic variant, which is known to increase the risk for Alzheimer’s. That same study projected new US cases of dementia would double by 2060, from 514,000 a year in 2020 to more than 1 million annually, due largely to population aging.

Behind those figures is a universe of suffering. Nearly everyone reading this has watched, or will watch, someone they love succumb to dementia. And once you get to my side of your 40s, that risk starts to feel less abstract and a lot more personal.

Yet the frightening story of the rise in dementia cases as the US population ages obscures real progress that is already being made to prevent it — and the even greater progress that could follow. Dementia may feel inevitable, a cruel side effect of longer life. But it doesn’t have to be.

Dementia epidemiology 101

The Nature study is about incidence — new cases, not the total number of people living with dementia. Separate CDC estimates project nearly 14 million older Americans living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, by 2060.

But the rate hasn’t been holding steady — it’s been dropping. A 2020 study that drew on data from six countries across Europe and North America found that age-specific dementia incidence for people of European ancestry had fallen about 13 percent per decade since the late 1980s, and around 16 percent per decade for clinical Alzheimer’s. A 2016 study tracked five-year dementia rates across four periods between the late 1970s and the early 2000s and found them steadily falling, ultimately dropping 44 percent by the most recent period. The authors of the 2020 study project that if the decline in incidence remains steady in the future, 15 million fewer people might develop dementia by 2040 across high-income countries than if the incidence of the disease remained unchanged.

That good news may not be shared by everyone. The 2016 study found that the decline only showed up among people with at least a high school diploma — more on that below — and even then, it wasn’t evenly shared. And the sheer increase in older people means that a continually dropping incidence only blunts the coming dementia wave, rather than blocking it. One study of older adults in England actually found dementia incidence falling through 2008 and then creeping back up; the researchers also found that when you account for the fact that people headed toward dementia tend to die earlier, the drop gets much harder to see. What’s fallen before can rise again.

But what this likely means in practice is that a person turning 80 today is meaningfully less likely to have dementia than a person who turned 80 a generation ago. And it’s reasonable to hope the same will hold for whoever turns 80 next — like, say, me.

The question, though, is why.

How we learned to fight dementia without realizing it

Here’s a veteran health journalist tip: if anyone ever asks you why something is improving in public health, just attribute it to the decline in smoking. There’s a decent chance you’ll be right.

While Alzheimer’s is a brain disease, and dementia is the umbrella term for several kinds of cognitive decline, there is a growing consensus that they are deeply driven by vascular health — meaning what damages your heart and blood vessels is ultimately what damages your mind. Thanks to the development of blood pressure and cholesterol-lowering medicines, better heart disease and stroke management, and perhaps most of all, drastic reductions in smoking, cardiovascular health has been improving. Even with the rise of obesity and diabetes, most vascular risk factors have decreased over the same time that dementia and Alzheimer’s prevalence fell.

The rise in education over the same time period may play a role as well. Americans turning 80 today went to school during a great mid-century expansion in education, while their parents were schooled — or rather, not schooled — in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1940, only 24.5 percent of Americans 25 and older had a high school diploma, and just 4.6 percent had completed a bachelor’s degree or more. By 2017, high school completion had reached 90 percent, and the share of people with a bachelor’s or more had hit 34 percent. And researchers have correlated higher education attainment with lower dementia and Alzheimer’s rates.

Now repeat after me: correlation is not causation. Researchers don’t really know why more years of schooling seem to be associated with a lower risk of dementia, though there are theories that education might boost the brain’s “cognitive reserve.” But the hopeful take is that the decline in incidence is largely driven by behaviors and life conditions we can change. And one of the most unexpected and promising acts is something as simple as routine vaccination.

The vaccine you need to know about

Last April, I wrote about what I called “one of the brightest spots in an otherwise dark field”: a study in Wales that found that older adults who received a vaccine against shingles were 20 percent less likely to develop dementia in the seven years following vaccination than those who did not receive it. It wasn’t a randomized trial, but it was stronger than the usual observational association: the study harnessed a natural experiment in Wales, where vaccine eligibility turned on a birthday cutoff, meaning it was less likely that the results were because vaccinated people were simply healthier.  

Earlier this year, a study in Canada looked at hundreds of thousands of people over the age of 70 and, like the Welsh study, found that those who had taken the shingles vaccine were less likely to develop dementia. And a new analysis from late 2025 of the data in the Welsh study found that the vaccine was associated with benefits that went beyond prevention — it also seemed to slow the disease for those with dementia and reduced deaths attributable to it.

The shingles vaccine in the Welsh study was an older, live-virus version; the current vaccine is a newer recombinant form that can’t accidentally cause shingles, and another study found it was associated with even greater protection from dementia.

These findings are promising but still leave plenty of questions. The Welsh live-vaccine study found a larger apparent benefit in women, who also suffer higher rates of dementia. But the pattern is not settled: the newer recombinant-vaccine study found an association in both men and women, though stronger in women. Shingles may be connected to dementia, though the evidence is still messy: A large 2025 health-records study found recurrent shingles was associated with a modestly higher dementia risk than a single episode, while earlier evidence has been more mixed.

Shingles occurs when the dormant varicella zoster virus — the same virus that causes chickenpox — reactivates. It’s possible that the resulting neural inflammation may feed dementia. A randomized controlled trial published in December tested a related herpes-virus idea, treating 120 adults with early Alzheimer’s or mild cognitive impairment — all with evidence of prior herpes simplex infection — with a medication called valacyclovir. After 18 months, researchers found no significant advantage over a placebo, dampening hopes that herpes antivirals could be an effective Alzheimer’s treatment. 

That’s a real strike against the simplest version of the theory that the virus itself is rotting the brain. But it could mean that the shingles vaccine’s possible protective effects don’t come from shingles at all. A 2025 study found that the newer shingles vaccine and an RSV vaccine that share the same AS01 immune-boosting adjuvant were each associated with lower 18-month dementia risk compared with flu vaccination, and researchers did not find a statistically significant difference between the two AS01 vaccines. The implication is that the benefit might come from giving an aging immune system a jolt, rather than from any one bug it’s aimed at.

You can protect yourself

But as the vaccine science sorts itself out, there are lifestyle changes you can make to help protect yourself without getting a shot. A 2024 Lancet commission found that, in principle, up to 45 percent of dementia cases could be prevented or delayed by addressing 14 risk factors, including not smoking; lowering high LDL cholesterol in midlife; treating hearing loss, especially from midlife on; and limiting obesity. The key period here is midlife, which the commission defined (rather widely in my opinion) as 18-65. Which, for someone my age, means there’s no better time to focus on prevention.

I don’t know whether I’ll go ahead and try to get the shingles vaccine early, and to be clear, I’m not telling anyone they should. The science is still uncertain, and I am, obviously, not a medical doctor. But the lifestyle factors that have been shown to protect against dementia — which are largely the same ones that help cardiovascular health — can be adopted by everyone, for their health now and in the future.

No one knows for sure what the future holds, for me or for you. What’s certain is that, barring a medical miracle, the sheer number of dementia cases will continue to rise as our population ages, and that some of us will be in that number. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the coast of Maine, where they were fattened up to be slaughtered and sold under the brand name True North Seafood at grocery stores across the Northeastern US.

But Wing had a secret: She was there undercover, wearing a hidden camera on behalf of the animal protection nonprofit Animal Outlook. During her time at Cooke’s hatchery, she documented:

• Workers culling diseased fish by repeatedly striking them against the sides of tanks and stomping on their heads
• Live fish left in buckets to suffocate or be crushed to death by other fish
• Fish overcrowded into tanks, some of them born with spinal deformities or dying from painful fungal diseases that ate at their faces

Shortly after Animal Outlook released a video of the investigation, Cooke Aquaculture CEO Glenn Cooke apologized. 

“As a family company, we place animal welfare high in our operating standards and endeavor to raise our animals with optimal care and consideration of best practice,” he wrote in a statement. “I am very sorry that this has happened.”

Maine’s department of agriculture investigated the hatchery but didn’t file any charges because Cooke had committed to retraining its employees and updating its facility management plan, among other measures. 

But it appears that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook sent a second investigator into the same hatchery and recently released a second exposé, this time finding similar behavior and welfare issues. 

To Animal Outlook, it didn’t come as a surprise. 

“I would’ve been more surprised had we seen the conditions improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, executive director of Animal Outlook, told me. “We know that fundamentally crowding this many animals in these kinds of tanks is going to lead to welfare problems. Treating these animals as commodities is going to lead to cruelty.”

That cynicism is the product of hard-won experience. Animal protection groups have conducted nearly 200 investigations into US farms raising chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and fish, gathering a staggering amount of evidence on standard, yet inhumane, practices and living conditions and often documenting malicious cruelty along the way. 

In some instances, investigations have led to companies making substantive changes, such as phasing out small cages for pigs and chickens. But like with Cooke Aquaculture, most farms and companies promise to make reforms after they’ve been exposed, only for follow-up investigations to reveal continued abuse and miserable living conditions. This pattern highlights the limitations of such investigations, which have proven essential to building our understanding of conditions on factory farms but insufficient to significantly improve them. 

Though, they reveal that, for much of the livestock industry, cruelty is the norm. What that means is that, in the absence of government oversight and federal animal welfare laws for farms, there’s little reason for consumers to take meat companies at their word when they promise to do better. 

What happened when an investigator returned to Cooke’s fish hatchery 7 years later

Animal Outlook’s second investigator worked at Cooke’s Maine hatchery in late 2025 (the investigator isn’t named due to the covert nature of their work). Like Wing, the second investigator documented numerous severe welfare issues, including workers:

• Culling fish by repeatedly beating them with metal rods on more than a dozen occasions, despite the availability of stunning equipment on-site (hitting fish like this is a common method to stun them, but it should be done in such a way that rapidly renders them unconscious)
• Leaving some bludgeoned fish to thrash on the ground out of water for as long as 90 seconds to suffocate, and two instances of employees dropping live fish into buckets to suffocate 
• Shooting and bleeding out fish that were not fully anesthetized, causing “some of the worst suffering documented at the facility,” according to the organization

In one scene, a worker is shown cutting into a fish while the fish’s heart is still beating.

All told, Animal Outlook documented 133 instances of what appeared to be improper killing, throwing, and rough handling, along with fungal and bacterial infections (which indicate poor water quality), deformities, overcrowding, and other animal welfare problems. 

“It looks to me like they have a systemic welfare issue at this farm,” Culum Brown, a professor and prominent researcher on fish welfare at Macquarie University in Australia, told Vox over email. 

There were also multiple unexplained mass fish mortalities of hundreds or even tens of thousands of fish dying.

Cooke Aquaculture did not respond to an interview request for this story and declined to respond to detailed questions about the investigation. “Cooke USA takes animal welfare very seriously,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox in which the company acknowledged the hidden camera investigation and said it’s reviewing the footage. “Appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken with respect to employees who have not followed company policy.”

The company is certified by Best Aquaculture Practices, a program that promises “safe, responsible and ethical farm-raised seafood.” Best Aquaculture Practices declined an interview request for this story and said an investigation into Cooke Aquaculture is currently underway.

The advocacy group Aquatic Life Institute rates Best Aquaculture Practices as having the lowest animal welfare standards among nine aquaculture certification programs it reviews because of how it compares to other certifiers on key issues, such as overcrowding, environmental enrichment, transport, and stunning and slaughtering. Best Aquaculture Practices, which is among the largest of the nine, said in an emailed statement to Vox that it is “actively engaged with ALI [Aquatic Life Institute] and has integrated several of their recommendations.” 

The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry confirmed to Vox that it is conducting an animal welfare investigation in response to Animal Outlook’s investigation.

Animal Outlook also documented problems that went beyond animal welfare at the hatchery. 

When farmed salmon escape into rivers and streams, they compete with wild salmon for resources. They also mate with them, contributing to what researchers call “genetic pollution,” which has created a hybrid breed of salmon that can have lower survivability rates. 

In the investigation video, a worker said that the company had failed to follow one of its escape prevention protocols of putting a screen on the waste discharge pipes, from which fish can escape, that release into the Kennebec River. “They have screens that are supposed to be down,” a worker said, “but there’s so much shit in there that… we pretty much just keep them up all the time.”

This alarmed Neville Crabbe of the conservation nonprofit Atlantic Salmon Federation, because the Kennebec River is home to endangered Atlantic salmon and the site of a $300 million project to restore their populations.

“The escape of farmed fish…is a significant contributor to population collapse and loss,” for wild Atlantic salmon, Crabbe told me, and “Cooke is basically intentionally allowing” their release. 

Some employees also suggested that a general culture of callousness pervades the company. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” a manager told the Animal Outlook investigator. “Kinda why our vet[erinarian] left too.” Speaking about the veterinarian, one employee said “they just disregard her shit all the time.”

In one part of the investigation, a manager who Animal Outlook alleges worked at the hatchery in 2019 when Wing investigated it and was still employed there in 2025 said of Wing: “I hunted her down and I found her on Instagram… I was gonna send like a horse tongue or something to her mail… I was gonna send like a deer tongue or something, or like some brains. Cause she’s like an animal activist… Bitch.”

I asked Wing what she felt when she heard this recording. She expressed concern for her family’s safety and also that she believes this shows how those at the company are “not sorry that they did what they did — they’re sorry that they got caught.” But she also expressed empathy for the employees who have little control over how the company operates. 

Why we can’t take animal agriculture companies at their word

The juxtaposition between the CEO of Cooke Aquaculture’s heartfelt apology in 2019 and the grisly findings of Animal Outlook’s follow-up investigation is unsettling, but it isn’t unique. It’s a pattern that animal protection groups have witnessed for decades: They investigate farms that supply meat, milk, and egg companies and find that some employees maliciously abuse animals. The farm or company apologizes and promises to change, sometimes firing a handful of workers. Then, the advocacy organization investigates another of the company’s supplier farms, only to find the same problems. 

This includes many of the largest animal protein companies, such as Foster Farms (six investigations), Butterball (four investigations), Cal-Maine (two investigations), Smithfield Foods (around nine investigations), Tyson Foods (10 investigations), and Fairlife (around five investigations, though Fairlife has denied sourcing from some of the investigated farms).

The companies’ initial responses often give the illusion that justice has been served — that the bad employees will be punished and the bad farm will be improved. The responses lead many consumers and regulators to believe that these are cases of rogue actors rather than a fundamentally cruel system.

But that system is cruel, as its many relapses and false pieties reveal. And while instances of malicious abuse are hard to stomach, standard practices and conditions on farms — including intensive breeding, overcrowding, and pervasive disease — cause even more suffering than the occasional beatings caught on camera.

The companies that make up this system have an unbelievably immense responsibility: the welfare of billions upon billions of animals. And yet, they are accountable to no one. Undercover investigations make this reality plain to see. Maine officials didn’t hold Cooke accountable after the first investigation. Lawmakers didn’t pass new animal welfare standards. Regulators didn’t commit to meaningful oversight. 

Meat, dairy, and egg companies reveal who they are when they think no one’s watching, and we should listen. Everything else — the statements, the apologies, the promises to reform — is just noise. 

“Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.”

It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket challenge — a viral social media trend to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research that involved soaking yourself with ice water and pressuring others to do the same — was in full swing. Gates had been challenged by Mark Zuckerberg, who’d been challenged by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with whom Zuckerberg had appeared on Oprah a few years prior to announce a $100 million donation to Newark schools. 

By the time Musk tweeted out a video of his kids drenching him with their own makeshift ice bucket gizmo a day after Gates, the challenge had already reached tens of millions of people worldwide. Among the participants were Jeff Bezos, Justin Bieber, David Lynch — and Donald Trump.

As if under an icy spell, the world came together in a way it never would again. Today, the ice bucket challenge and the litany of surreal, grainy videos it spawned are a time capsule of a bygone era, or at the very least, a bygone internet. 

In the early 2010s, platforms like Facebook “actually had the potential to be this century’s agora, a marketplace of ideas,” said Asha Curran, who co-founded GivingTuesday, a philanthropic counterweight to Black Friday, in 2012. “The social media environment wasn’t this sort of existential threat to our mental health and our democracy and our isolation that it is now.”

But it wasn’t just a different era for social media. Back then, generosity was trendy for the one percent and 99 percent alike, and Bill Gates — alongside both his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett — was influencer number one. In 2010, the Gateses and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the ultra-wealthy to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. At the campaign’s peak, about one in seven American billionaires — including Musk, Zuckerberg, and a broad swath of the country’s rising tech billionaire class — pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. Together, they promised to usher in a new golden age of philanthropy.

They also aimed to inspire giving from Americans of more modest means, who flocked to viral clicktivism campaigns while sporting TOMS shoes and (PRODUCT)RED iPod nanos. The idea was seductive: You too could help save the world while making a show of your generosity. 

Today’s billionaires appear more cynical than they used to be, and the rest of us seem to be, too. Gone are the days when tech overlords challenged one another to charity stunts rather than cage matches. If social media once seemed poised to save the world one hashtag at a time — think #Movember, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls — then today, it feels considerably more likely to tear us all apart. 

For much of the past decade, fewer Americans have chosen to give to charity each year, while most billionaires appear to be giving away a diminishing share of their ballooning fortunes. The Giving Pledge, which held so much promise in 2010, has lost much of its steam and even come under direct attack from techno-cynics like Peter Thiel. The vibes have turned very bad.

It’s no wonder today’s youths yearn for the hopecore, the millennial optimism, of the early 2010s, that mediascape of messy buns, post-recession electropop, and sincere posting about causes everyone cared about for a week or two. The internet’s Earnest Era propelled a culture of giving even among billionaires, who shared a fear of missing out on the next hashtag cause. But today’s more fractured internet has kneecapped that positivity. To some degree, it made even the idea of trying to save the world cringe. The problem is not so much a giving crisis, as it is an attention crisis, one that’s been exacerbated by rising inequality and the decline of generosity as a collective cultural value, the kind of virtue worth signaling. 

“For a while, you almost needed to pick a charity as part of your online persona,” said Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter turned founder of Charity: Water, a celebrity darling back when “it was really cool” to give in the early 2010s. He has struggled to fundraise in recent years. “It’s not on trend. It’s not what people are doing. It phased out. The cycle ended.”

I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad

2010 was a transformative year for generosity for two important reasons: The economy had passed through the very worst of the Great Recession, and for the very first time, more Americans were about to be on social media than off of it. 

Surveys of young people in the early 2010s showed that they were stubbornly, discordantly optimistic despite graduating into underemployment.

One of those millennials was Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2010 was named Time’s person of the year at 26 years old for building a platform “fundamentally changing the way the Internet works and, more importantly, the way it feels.”

Social media made the world feel smaller. When a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January of that year, it became the first major live-tweeted natural disaster. Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean were among those soliciting their followers for donations in the aftermath of the quake. Within a week, Jean’s own charity raised $2 million and the Red Cross raised $8 million. Celebrities released a “We Are the World” charity cover, and Americans ultimately gave about 15.3 percent more to international aid that year than they did the year prior. 

People who donated told their friends about it — publicly, online — and they told their friends about it in turn, in a charitable daisy chain that thrived under newly digitized social pressures. If you told the internet about your good deed, you’d look cool. If you were the only one of your friends who didn’t, well, you’d look like a bit of a jerk, in a much more visible way than in the past. 

Then, on June 16, 2010, news broke of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett’s plan to ask the nation’s billionaires to commit to giving away half of their fortunes. One week later, the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars song “Billionaire” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was an ode to getting rich not just to get rich, but to give it all away: “Not a single tummy around me would know what hungry was, eatin’ good, sleepin’ soundly.” 

By 2014, the Giving Pledge had 130 signatories, amounting to one in seven of the country’s billionaires, the majority of whom shared their motivations for joining in public letters online.

“People signed it because it was the cool thing to do,” said Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog that advocates for progressive practices in the philanthropic sector.

The Giving Pledge was perhaps the single biggest manifestation of philanthro-capitalism, or the idea that “rich people can save the world” by applying their business acumen to charitable causes, was “all the rage” at the time, he said. While the pledge was not legally binding — and came with few expectations — most signatories “honestly believed they were going to live up to the terms.”

While the rest of the world heaped praise on the Pledgers, Dorfman wrote a series of articles in the Huffington Post critiquing the Giving Pledge when it was first announced. “I remember thinking this is insane. Everybody thinks this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread and it’s just not,” he told me recently. At the time, he believed that the way billionaires gave was too slow and self-serving to actually make a dent in serious global problems. “There’s no way it can possibly make that much of a difference.”

How to #SaveTheWorld, one hashtag at a time

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only millennial to believe he could save the world. 

Facebook, and other platforms like it, helped inspire a boom in viral kindness and giving campaigns in the early 2010s. While celebrities often acted as superspreaders — some, like Justin Bieber, signed a “Hollywood Pledge” modeled after the Giving Pledge in 2011— social media was not the influencer-dominated, algorithmized cesspool it is today.

When Curran helped launch GivingTuesday in 2012, “it immediately crossed what today we would think of as algorithmic bubbles,” she said. The White House blogged about it, and #GivingTuesday quickly became a top trending topic on Twitter. That first year, the hashtag raised at least $10 million for charity in 24 hours, a 53 percent spike from the year prior. 

“The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

Asha Curran, GivingTuesday

“We were catching a wave,” Curran said. “The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

That same year, over 1 million men grew mustaches — and raised over $100 million — for Movember’s annual men’s health awareness campaign, driven in part by a PSA starring the mustachioed actor Nick Offerman. The charity Invisible Children went viral for its 30-minute YouTube video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, kindling the #Kony2012 craze, a campaign now chiefly remembered for being offensive and ineffective. 

Few charities mastered social media quite as successfully as Charity: Water, which gained a huge following in part by flying tech entrepreneurs to Ethiopia and convincing celebrities to share their birthday fundraisers. Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith kicked off the trend in 2010, and a year later Justin Bieber asked his Beliebers to donate $17 each for his 17th birthday. By 2013, Charity: Water had raised over $100 million from thousands of people online, enough to build over 8,000 wells and other clean water projects. 

“The beauty was the average birthday fundraiser brought in 10 of their friends and family,” Harrison said. “It almost had an implied virality, and it cost us nothing.” 

By the time a majority of Americans had smartphones in 2013, the internet was being flooded with selfies and short video trends. (Rest in six seconds of peace, Vine.) The Norwegian Army danced to the Harlem Shake in the snow. And golfers were drenching themselves with cold water as a way to bring attention to their favorite charities online. 

In July 2014, one of those golfers, a man named Chris Kennedy, poured a bucket of ice water on his head for the ALS Association, and then challenged his cousin, whose husband had the disease. She accepted, and the videos began pulsating through her social networks until they reached Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both young ALS advocates.

From there, “it just continued to snowball,” said Brian Frederick, who the ALS Association brought on to help manage the trend. Over 17 million people participated that summer. “There was a period in August where for eight straight days, we were raising over $10 million a day.” The association had to reserve an entire office in its headquarters just to store all of the checks that people were sending in. 

The association raised about $115 million in just eight weeks, money that helped fund 130 research projects in 12 different countries. But while social media moves at light speed, medical research is a bit slower. Only in recent years have ALS patients begun to see breakthroughs in treatment from that enormous infusion of funding for a rare disease that most Americans had never heard of before 2014. By the time their donations started to pay off, most of them had likely forgotten whatever they’d once known about the disease.

“It dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS. It led to new genes being discovered, new research collaborations, new treatments in the pipeline,” said Frederick, but for most people who soaked themselves with icy water that summer, “that was just a one-time thing for them. They’ll never know that they really did make a difference.”

When generosity became cringe

The ice bucket challenge was the last real do-gooder social media trend of its kind. 

A week after it started coursing through the internet, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, drawing an outpouring of grief and outrage on social media. Both the #IceBucketChallenge and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, the hashtag most associated with the protests that followed Brown’s killing, proliferated explosively and “almost simultaneously” across the internet, the writer Jia Tolentino noted at the time, yet they spread “entirely discreetly: twinned channels of wildfire blazing through quadrants of your attention that barely touch.”

Cracks were beginning to show in an internet that would soon become irrevocably siloed, one where digital attention, which felt so boundless and empowering earlier that decade, would come to feel like a precious commodity, monetized and increasingly stretched thin. With the Ferguson protests, that shift coincided with a massive political awakening and major domestic unrest and anger. To some corners of the internet, the performance of mass apolitical acts of generosity began to feel like an irreconcilable distraction in a competition for finite attention. 

As a result, the viral monoculture of the early 2010s fractured, giving way to an internet driven less by personal connections and more by hyper-targeted algorithms designed to keep you scrolling. “I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore,” Ethan Zuckerman, a digital media scholar and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. “They feel trapped by them. They feel like they want to escape these tools.” 

The vibe shifted, and the internet’s new feeds rarely rewarded the kind of mass earnestness that drove engagement on early social media platforms.

“I wish that I had known that it was the last time so that I could have marked it in my mind,” Curran said. “I’m not sure that a Giving Tuesday could work if it were launched today.” 

“I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore. They feel trapped by them.”

Ethan Zuckerman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

That’s not to say that people aren’t generous anymore. But they are significantly less likely to give to charity than they used to: Fewer than half of American households donate at all these days, down from 66 percent in 2000. Those who do give give an average of 1.2 percent of their income, down from nearly 2 percent in 2017. 

America’s richest families have given more to charity in total dollars over the past decade — enough, in fact, to make up for the decline in everyday donors and then some. But as a percentage of their ballooning wealth, most billionaires — including those who signed the Giving Pledge — appear to be giving less to charity than they used to. 

Rising inequality — and the belief that the wealthier should donate instead — explains part of this decline for everyday Americans, among other factors. But it also reflects a broader pattern in which Americans have largely moved away from performing their giving, or earnestness more broadly, at least online. It’s just not swaggy anymore; it doesn’t give you the insane aura that it used to. 

“These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

Scott Harrison, Charity: water

“It’s not in my feed. You’re not getting hit up for charities from your friends the same way you were,” Harrison said. “I can’t tell you the last celebrity that was in my feed asking me to give to their favorite charity, it’s been years. They are selling lipstick. They are selling protein powders. These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

GivingTuesday is actually a much bigger movement today than it was in 2012, raising about $4 billion last year, but it’s no longer primarily a social media phenomenon. “Neighbor-to-neighbor generosity is more important than ever because that’s the way you escape the algorithmic bubble,” Curran said. “You almost have to get offline entirely.” Americans who do give online increasingly do so through ever more individualized channels like GoFundMe, which got its start in 2010, but has exploded in popularity in recent years. More than three-quarters of Americans say they believe that political polarization has made people more reluctant to give, and 60 percent said they’ve personally shied away from charitable activities that may involve people with opposing political views. In the absence of a shared civic culture, deeply siloed — and often distrusted — platforms like GoFundMe have become many Americans’ chosen way to give.

And where have the billionaires been? For the most part, accumulating wealth far faster than they gave it away. Zuckerberg, who once critiqued philanthropists for waiting until old age to fork up their fortunes, has seen his wealth increase by over 4,000 percent since signing the Giving Pledge, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. That $100 million for Newark schools that he announced on Oprah to such fanfare in 2010? It’s now widely regarded as a colossal failure built on a foundation of philanthro-capitalist buzzwords instead of actual community needs. A few weeks after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration and appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic initiative announced that it would stop funding causes like education reform and social justice last year. While Zuckerberg gives much more in total charity today than he did 15 years ago, he gives far less as a percentage of his wealth. Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to Newark in 2010, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of his net worth at the time. Last year, he and his wife donated $608 million, but it amounted to just 0.3 percent of his now gargantuan fortune.

In recent years, a cadre of right-wing billionaires led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel has also begun to actively denigrate the Pledge for what they see as a left-wing bias, despite the fact that it has always been intentionally apolitical. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel, who accused the Pledge of being an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club,” told the New York Times. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join,” he said, claiming that some Pledgers feel “blackmailed” to stay on the list once they sign.

As the rest of America has stratified and become more partisan, so too have the nation’s billionaires. And apolitical promises, like sheer generosity itself, just don’t hold the same allure that they used to. 

“Peter Thiel used to be an outlier, but now many tech billionaires are coming together around this radical anti-social” worldview, said Chuck Collins, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Burned by Billionaires. “They’re opting out of the social institutions that the rest of us depend on.”

You say performative like it’s a bad thing

Craig Newmark is not like those other tech billionaires. The founder of Craigslist is not and has never been a billionaire at all, he says, despite what Forbes might have to say about it. 

“I am a peasant at heart,” he told me, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times defending the Pledge against its partisan detractors. “My favorite luxury at my age is a walk-in shower with grab bars.” 

Newmark is a new recruit, having only signed the Giving Pledge himself last December. He was already a prolific philanthropist, having donated hundreds of millions of dollars to military families, cybersecurity, pigeon rescue, and my alma mater. So why add his name now? 

“It seemed to me that signing up for it would be funny,” he said, referring to the “absurd” idea that a “nerd patient zero” like himself could rub shoulders in an elite philanthropy club. “Funny is highly motivating for me. I know I’m not as funny as I think I am, but given the toxicity of our culture these days, anything funny is highly welcome.”

When I pressed him, Newmark conceded that signing the Pledge was also his way of “putting a stake in the ground.” Seeing other billionaires pull away from giving now is “disappointing,” he said, “because the world needs people who have too much money to pitch in” to help improve people’s lives at a time of vast inequality. “There are Americans who are going hungry,” he said, and “that kind of pisses me off.”

But primarily, he insists, he’s just trying to be funny. “We all need positive entertainment these days.”

And maybe that’s the point, because the Giving Pledge, like the ice bucket challenge and #Movember, was built on performance. Newmark is now engaging in that performance with the kind of wry, ironic humor befitting of today’s internet culture, rather than the gravitas and sincerity of the Pledge’s early years. But it was always, to some extent, a performative spectacle. While some signatories have turned out to be extraordinarily generous — MacKenzie Scott and Laura and John Arnold come to mind — there’s little evidence that the Pledge has accelerated their giving or made the ultra-wealthy more charitable as a cohort. 

Having skimmed through dozens of early Pledger letters, I’ve found that many claimed to have already been well on their way to giving it all away prior to making a public commitment. “Until now, I have done this giving quietly,” wrote Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in 2010. “So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to,” he wrote, for the purpose of “‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”

The Pledge’s original 2010 signatories — including Gates and Zuckerberg —  have donated about $206 billion as of last year, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, most of which went into their private foundations and DAFs, which slowly dole out grants to charity. The Arnolds are the only living original signatories to have given away enough to fulfil their Pledge, and of the 22 Pledgers who have died since 2010, only eight fulfilled their promise to give away at least half of their wealth during their respective lifetimes or in their wills. At the rate that Musk and Ellison are going — they’ve given away 0.06 percent and 0.03 percent of their wealth, respectively, according to Forbes — it seems unlikely that today’s living Pledgers will fare much better. And they’re in good company. Four in five of the wealthiest 400 Americans have given away less than 5 percent of their fortunes as of last year, most under 1 percent.  

Likewise, only about one-fifth of those who participated in the ice bucket challenge actually donated to the fight against ALS. The one in five who did donate gave about $220 million to ALS worldwide, and $115 million to the ALS Association, which raised about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior. While there was a genuine desire to help people through the trend, at the same time, Frederick said, the majority of people were “just doing what their friends were doing.” 

@brookemonk_

The #uscicebucketchallange is rasing awareness for such an important topic. Please don’t be afraid to speak up 🫶 You have 24hrs @Cassie @leah halton @Sam Dezz

♬ original sound – Brooke Monk

They were virtue signaling, but that’s not such a bad thing — philanthropy, after all, can do good no matter the intention behind the giving. An internet where people feel the need to do charity stunts for clout en masse is still better than one that rewards you for trying to hammer yourself a better jawline. On the rare occasion that earnestness does go viral today, as it did during the Artemis II launch or after Alysa Liu’s ebullient free skate routine, “it just makes me long for a time when communal awe was more prevalent than it is now,” said Curran. But while today’s social media tends to reinforce the idea that Americans “hopelessly hate each other,” she said, “if you get down to the community level, you actually see all these really beautiful things happening.”

Last year, a group of undergraduates at the University of South Carolina decided to revive the ice bucket challenge as a fundraiser for youth mental health. They hoped to raise $100, maybe $200, Alison Malmon, founder and executive director of the charity Active Minds, told me. 

Most of the students were barely out of preschool when the first ice bucket challenge went viral. But suddenly, college kids, beauty influencers, and celebrities were once again racking up views by drenching themselves in frigid water online. The revived ice bucket challenge raised over $500,000 for Active Minds. It never came close to its predecessor’s stratospheric levels of popularity — things just don’t go viral like they used to anymore — but it did, for a moment, revive a sense of earnest do-gooderism that, for over a decade, felt increasingly relegated to the internet’s far fringes. 

The phrase millennial optimism was born a few months later, driven by nostalgia for a bygone and vaguely naive internet culture that most young adults today are old enough to remember, but young enough to romanticize. So far, there’s no indication that Gen Z’s rediscovery of indie sleaze portends a sustained, serious resurgence of viral earnestness culture, from billionaires or from the rest of us. But as MGMT would put it, maybe now it really is time to pretend.

Editor’s note, June 14, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on June 8, 2025.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

My husband and I have a good relationship. We’re both committed to personal growth and continual learning and have developed very strong communication skills. A couple of years ago we were exposed to some friends with an open marriage and had our own conversations about ethical non-monogamy. At first, neither of us were interested. 

Now, my husband is interested and currently is attracted to a colleague who is also into him. She’s married and has no idea that he and I talk about all of their interactions. He doesn’t know what her relationship agreements are with her husband.

I’m not currently interested in ethical non-monogamy. I see things in our relationship that I’d like to work on together with my husband. I want more of his attention and energy, to be frank. I don’t want his attention and energy being funneled into another relationship. I don’t have moral issues with ethical non-monogamy, I just don’t actually see any value-add for me right now. The cost-benefit analysis leaves me saying “not now.” 

My husband admitted that he’s hoping I will have a change of mind. I don’t want to force his hand, although I am continuing to say very clearly what I want in my relationship. How do we reach a compromise? If he cuts ties with this woman, he has resentment towards me. If he continues to pursue something with her, I feel disrespected, and while I don’t want to leave him I would feel the need to do something.

Dear Monogamously Married,

I want to start by commending you for two things. First, for your openness to discussing and exploring all this with your husband. Second, for your insistence on clearly stating what you actually want — and don’t want. 

I think Erich Fromm, the 20th-century German philosopher and psychologist, would back me up in saying that you’d do well to hold tight to both those qualities. For starters, radical openness is important because, according to Fromm, the basic premise of love is freedom. He writes:

Love is a passionate affirmation of its “object.” That means that love is not an “affect” but an active striving, the aim of which is the happiness, development, and freedom of its “object.” 

In other words, love is not a feeling. It’s work, and the work of love is to fully support the flourishing of the person you love. That can be scary — what if the person discovers that they’re actually happier with somebody else? — which is why Fromm specifies that only someone with a strong self “which can stand alone and bear solitude” will be up for the job. He continues:

This passionate affirmation is not possible if one’s own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.

So far, it might sound like Fromm is saying that to be a good lover is to be a doormat: You just have to do whatever’s best for the other person, even if it screws you over. But his view is very much the opposite. 

In fact, Fromm cautions us against both “masochistic love” and “sadistic love.” In the first, you give up your self and sacrifice your needs in order to become submerged in another person. In the second, you try to exert power over the other person. Both of these are rooted in “a deep anxiety and an inability to stand alone,” writes Fromm; whether by dissolving yourself into them or by controlling them, you’re trying to make it impossible for the other person to abandon you. Both approaches are “pseudo-love.”

So although Fromm doesn’t want you to try to control your partner, and although he suggests that the philosophical ideal is for you to passionately affirm your partner’s freedom, he’s not advising you to do that if, for you, that will mean masochism. 

If you’re not up for ethical non-monogamy — if you feel, like many people, that the idea of giving your partner free rein is too big a threat to your relationship or your own well-being — then pretending otherwise is not real love. It’s just masochistic self-annihilation.

I’m personally partial to Fromm’s non-possessive approach to love. But I equally appreciate his point that the philosophical ideal could become a practical bloodbath if it doesn’t work for the actual humans involved. I think the question, then, is this: Do you think it’s possible for you to get to a place where you genuinely feel ready for and interested in ethical non-monogamy?

It sounds like you’re intellectually open to the idea, and given that you said you’re committed to personal growth and continual learning, non-monogamy could offer you some benefits; lots of people who practice it say that part of its appeal lies in the growth it catalyzes. And if practicing non-monogamy makes you and/or your husband more fulfilled, it could enrich your relationship and deepen your appreciation for each other.

But right now, you’ve got a problem: Your husband is pushing on your boundaries by flirting with a woman even after you’ve expressed that you don’t want him pursuing something with her. And you already feel like he isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, so the prospect of having to divvy up those resources with another woman feels threatening. Fair! 

Notice, though, that that isn’t a worry about non-monogamy per se — it’s a worry about the state of your current monogamous relationship.

In a marriage, what partners typically want is to feel emotionally secure. But that comes from how consistently and lovingly we show up for and attune to one another, not from the relationship structure. A monogamous marriage may give us some feeling of security, but it’s obviously no guarantee; some people cheat, some get divorced, and some stay loyally married while neglecting their partner emotionally.  

“Monogamy can serve as a stand-in for actual secure attachment,” writes therapist Jessica Fern in Polysecure, a book on how to build healthy non-monogamous relationships. She urges readers to take an honest look at any relationship insecurities or dissatisfactions that are being disguised by monogamy, and work with partners to strengthen the emotional experience of the relationship. 

Since you feel that your husband isn’t giving you enough attention and energy, be sure to talk to him about it. Explain that it doesn’t feel safe for you to open up the relationship without him doing more to be fully present with you and to make you feel understood and precious. See if he starts implementing these skills more reliably. 

In the meantime, while you two are trying to reset your relationship, it’s absolutely reasonable to ask him to cool it with the colleague he’s attracted to; he doesn’t have to cut ties with her entirely (and may not be able to if they work together), but he can certainly avoid feeding the flames with flirtation. Right now, the fantasy of her is a distraction from the work he needs to be doing to improve the reality of your marriage. He should understand why a healthy practice of ethical non-monogamy can’t emerge from a situation where he’s pushing things too far with someone else before you’ve agreed to change the terms of your relationship (and if he doesn’t, have him read Polysecure!).

It’s probably a good idea for you to each do your own inner work, too. Fern, like Fromm, insists that if we want to be capable of a secure attachment with someone else, we need to cultivate that within ourselves. That means being aware of our feelings, desires, and needs, and knowing how to tend to them. Understanding your attachment style can help with this; for example, if you’re anxiously attached and you very often reach out to your partner for reassurance, you can practice spending time alone.

After taking some time to work on these interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, come back together to discuss how you’re feeling. Do you feel more receptive to opening up the relationship? Do you think it would add more than it would subtract? 

If the answer is “yes” or “maybe,” you can create a temporary relationship structure — or “vessel,” as Fern calls it — to help you ease into non-monogamy. One option is to adopt a staggered approach to dating, where one partner (typically the more hesitant one) starts dating new people first, and the other partner starts after a predetermined amount of time. Another option is to try a months-long experiment where both partners initially engage in certain romantic or sexual experiences that are less triggering to each other, then assess what worked and what didn’t, and go from there.

If the answer is “no” — if you’re not receptive to opening up your relationship — then by all means say that! Given you’ll have sincerely done the work to explore whether non-monogamy works for you, your husband doesn’t get to resent you. He can be sad, he can be disappointed, and he can choose to leave if the outcome is intolerable to him. But he’ll have to respect you, and what’s more important, you’ll have to respect yourself.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This week’s question prompted me to go back to the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was influenced by Fromm. Maslow spoke of two kinds of love: Deficit-Love and Being-Love. The former is about trying to satiate your own needs, while the latter is about giving without expecting something in return. Maslow characterizes Being-Love as an almost spiritual experience, likening it to “the perfect love of their God that some mystics have described.”

• In addition to Polysecure, which has become something of a poly bible in the past few years, I recommend reading What Love Is and What It Could Be, written by the philosopher Carrie Jenkins. I appreciated Jenkins’s functionalist take on romantic love: She explains that we’ve constructed the idea of romantic love a certain way in order to serve a certain function (structuring society into nuclear family units), but we can absolutely revise it if we want. 

• Many people are already revising the traditional view of romantic love. As a piece in Wired documents, millennials and Gen Z are increasingly forming non-hierarchal relationships with multiple partners and friends. This is often referred to as “relationship anarchy,” a term coined in 2006 by writer Andie Nordgren, who said it “questions the idea that love is a limited resource that can only be real if restricted to a couple.”

In just 10 days over the summer of 1854, 500 people died of cholera in the Soho neighborhood of London. The city’s population had more than doubled to 2.3 million people in the first half of the 1800s, and its sewage system could not keep up. But the streams of human waste flowing into the street and seeping into the water supply were considered unconnected to the cholera crisis. The prevailing theory of the day was that bad air — miasma — caused illness.

The English physician John Snow thought differently. Five years before the outbreak he had suggested that the diarrheal disease was actually caused by a waterborne infection rather than miasma. He soon had a chance to test his theory, mapping the location of cholera-related deaths in Soho. Snow realized that the victims used one specific water pump on Broad Street, and he persuaded city officials to remove the pump’s handle to prevent anyone else from using it. With the source eliminated, the outbreak, which had already passed its peak, ended in days. 

Though it took years for Snow’s theory to achieve widespread acceptance, his approach is central to modern epidemiology. Investigating the source of outbreaks can prevent new cases, but it also gives us a better understanding of diseases and helps manage public fear. Even when infections have stopped, outbreak investigations are useful to develop strategies for preventing — and, failing that, responding to — future outbreaks. 

Two recent outbreaks have demonstrated the necessity — and the challenges — of such investigations, almost two centuries after Snow’s pioneering work. The first was the hantavirus outbreak that dominated headlines last month. Then, on May 17, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern, the highest level of global health alert, in response to an outbreak of the deadly hemorrhagic disease Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which, as of June 2, had killed 62 people, with 363 confirmed cases. It’s the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC and one of the largest on record. It has spread to neighboring Uganda, where, as of June 4, there are 16 confirmed cases, one confirmed death, and one probable case and likely death. 

The first confirmed case, a healthcare worker in Bunia, DRC, died on April 24, but the outbreak may have been spreading undetected since as early as January. Investigators haven’t identified patient zero — the index case — and still don’t know how this outbreak began. Abdou Sebushishe, a doctor working with the International Medical Corps in Goma, DRC, told CBS News that up to 20 percent of current patients are themselves healthcare workers. He estimated that it may be more than six months before the outbreak could be controlled, given that the disease is outpacing the current response.

Part of the challenge is that the current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is relatively uncommon and has a genome about 30 percent different from the Ebola viruses that usually spark outbreaks. Testing for more common variants didn’t pick up the Bundibugyo virus right away, and ongoing conflict in the DRC contributed to the delay and continues to make contact tracing difficult. Unlike other strains, the Bundibugyo virus has no approved therapeutics or vaccines.  

In the past, researchers have had some success identifying the index case of Ebola outbreaks. Investigators managed to identify the first patient of the 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic — the largest and deadliest in history, with more than 15,000 confirmed cases and 11,000 deaths — as a toddler in the west African nation of Guinea. What’s harder to definitively determine is how the boy, who died in December 2013 before the outbreak had been identified, contracted it. It’s possible that he came into contact with an Ebola-infected fruit bat or its droppings while playing in a hollow tree, but scientists can’t say for sure.

Investigating outbreak origins is inherently fraught and can lead to the international fingerpointing that characterized much of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it’s not primarily about assigning blame. Instead, knowing where and how outbreaks began informs how we respond to them, halt transmission, communicate to the public, and prevent them from happening again. It can identify high-risk regions and influence how public health officials monitor a disease. As the recent Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks demonstrate, however, that effort is often complicated by a host of factors, and the resulting uncertainty makes it that much harder to manage public health concerns efficiently and well. 

The curious case of Legionnaires’ disease in New York City

Our epidemiological tools have come a long way since John Snow used hand-drawn maps to identify the source of the Soho cholera outbreak. The value of these new tools lies in the information they generate — which is crucial to fighting outbreaks. 

Take the case of New York City’s biggest — and deadliest — outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease (LD), a bacterial infection that causes a severe pneumonia and has a fatality rate of 10 percent. By the time public health investigators detected it in the summer of 2015, dozens had already been hospitalized. It was the second-largest LD outbreak in US history, infecting 138 people and killing 16. 

The initial epidemiologic investigation started with contact tracing to find the source of the disease, but the results didn’t suggest any shared exposures. Cooling towers, which provide water for air conditioning systems in the form of an inhalable mist, had been involved in previous LD outbreaks, but officials didn’t know how many cooling towers there were in the city or how well-maintained they were. 

Investigators ultimately located and tested 55 cooling towers in the South Bronx, where cases were clustered, for Legionella. They identified the source: a single cooling tower atop the Opera House Hotel. The hotel disinfected the tower, and New York’s City Council passed new regulations requiring every building in the city with a cooling tower to register it with the health department, test it every 90 days, and remediate it if Legionella was found. 

Within a year, the health department inspected almost 80 percent of the city’s towers — detection and disinfection that would have never been conducted otherwise. No large LD outbreaks emerged — until inspections declined in 2025. “Regulations do not enforce themselves,” Jay Varma, a physician and epidemiologist who served as incident manager for the 2015 New York outbreak, wrote last year in Healthbeat. “The Covid pandemic has sparked a strong backlash against government authority, and austerity budgets are now starving public health agencies. Infections may be inevitable, but outbreaks are a choice.”

Cholera and LD are waterborne, but Ebola and hantavirus, which first cross over to humans from animal reservoirs, present a different challenge. 

The challenge of hantavirus and Ebola

“The end of the world, the beginning of everything” is the motto of Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city on the planet, where tourists flock to watch birds and embark on cruise ships. It’s the main gateway to Antarctica, making up 90 percent of all cruise departures to the continent. 

It’s here that a Dutch couple may have contracted the Andes virus, the only strain of hantavirus known to spread from person to person, before sparking an outbreak on the MV Hondius. The Argentinian government’s prevailing theory is that the couple got infected while birdwatching at a landfill in Ushuaia before the cruise, coming into contact with the rodents that carry the Andes strain. 

Well, maybe not. 

“The current theory of a couple birdwatching in southern Argentina may not be plausible, because the [long-tailed pygmy] rice rat that is responsible for spreading the Andes strain of the virus is usually found in northern Argentina or Chile, and we know the birdwatching at the landfill occurred in the southern part of Argentina,” Omer Awan, a physician and public health expert, told me over email. There have been no recorded cases of hantavirus in Tierra del Fuego province, where Ushuaia is located, before. 

“Understanding the origins of the outbreak will be helpful in guiding interventions like rodent control, isolation protocols, and…how the rare Andes strain of Hantavirus is transmitted,” Awan said. “[And] identifying the source of the [2026] ebola outbreak can influence response strategy and how public health officials monitor the virus.”

Delayed detection and human movement — especially for illnesses like hantavirus and Ebola that can incubate over the course of weeks — make tracing the source of an outbreak difficult, even in the best of circumstances. We still don’t know the original source of the first Ebola outbreak in 1976, which occurred in two simultaneous waves. Debates still rage over whether Covid-19 emerged naturally through zoonotic spillover — the virus jumping from an animal host to humans — or if it potentially escaped from a lab in an accident. We know that the hantavirus and Ebola outbreaks are natural in origin, but there are still international efforts to shift the “blame” from Argentina to neighboring Chile, especially with economic interests on the line.

Such spillover events have only become more likely as humans destroy ecosystems and infringe on animal habitats. Climate change exacerbates existing infectious disease risk. “Because of our choices as a society, there’s a one-in-five chance that another pandemic will occur in the next decade that will kill at least 25 million people,” Neil Vora, the executive director of Preventing Pandemics at the Source coalition, wrote in Time Magazine. 

Determining the source of outbreaks is even more difficult — and politically perilous — in the post-Covid era. The US and Argentina have pulled out of WHO. Global health funding cuts, on the part of the US as well as other countries, have weakened our biosurveillance architecture and ability to effectively respond to infectious disease. 

Compared to Covid, the scale of the 2026 Bundibugyo and hantavirus outbreaks are small. It’s still proving hard to get answers. That’s going to be a serious problem whenever the next pandemic arrives — and it is a matter of when, not if. 

An evolving threat landscape

Although we face escalating spillover risks from habitat destruction and climate change, we can’t count on the next global infectious disease threat being naturally occurring in origin when it does come. 

“It’s very clear that artificial intelligence capabilities are advancing incredibly rapidly,” Jaime Yassif, senior advisor for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), told me. “[That could] make it easier for novice actors to engineer pathogens that we [already] know about or for sophisticated actors to engineer novel pathogens that are more dangerous than what’s found in nature.”

If there is an outbreak of uncertain origin — where it’s unclear if it’s natural, accidental, or deliberate — we lack robust international mechanisms that can investigate the source and quickly arrive at a conclusion. That would make it harder to address the source proactively, whether that means stopping future natural spillover events, preventing lab accidents, or holding bad actors to account. 

Public health professionals would need to take additional precautions if there was a risk of a deliberate outbreak, as we saw with the 2001 anthrax attacks, where letters laced with Bacillus anthracis were sent in the mail, infecting 17 people and killing five. A naturally-occurring anthrax exposure would have required a different response, since a bioterrorism investigation has to contend with the additional challenge of determining criminal responsibility. 

And as we’ve seen with the debates around Covid-19 origins, suspicion that something was caused by human activity can be incredibly corrosive to international trust, making necessary geopolitical cooperation in the face of outbreaks significantly harder. 

NTI identified that preparedness gap and proposed a Joint Assessment Mechanism to identify the source of outbreaks of uncertain origin. It would be housed in the UN Secretary-General’s Mechanism for Investigation of Alleged Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (UNSGM) in order to pull together different components of the UN system and bridge security and public health. 

That project (which I supported and advocated when I worked at NTI from 2022 to 2024) is currently on pause. “We still think it’s a vital gap and really important, but we just couldn’t get the political will to move it forward in the system, notwithstanding the significant support for it internationally in various quarters,” Yassif said.

We are simply unprepared domestically and internationally to prevent, detect, and respond to global infectious disease threats. Emerging infectious disease outbreaks threaten us all, and we are nowhere near where we should be in order to protect vulnerable populations and countries around the world. While the current Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks are very unlikely to become pandemics on the scale of Covid-19, they’re still dangerous and deadly. Unless we can determine where and how they began, we’ll be ill-equipped to stop them from recurring. And next time, things could be far worse.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. 

The questions I tackle in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house. 

My partner is due to give birth to our first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. I decided to tackle her dilemma in my last column before beginning my parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward. 

We’re about to have our first baby. I’m so excited! But I’m also a bit overwhelmed by all the actions and choices that go into trying to raise a kid who’s happy and healthy. I feel like the modern world’s never-ending desire to optimize everything has crept into parenting. Yet the world is so unpredictable. And there are so many opportunities to mess up and harm a kid in ways both big and small.

The questions swirling through my mind range from “How soon after birth should we take the baby into crowded indoor places, knowing their immune system isn’t fully formed?” to “When should we introduce our kid to sugar?” to “How much unsupervised play time should we let them have as they get older?”

There’s not a lot of definitive data about certain things. And a lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible. For example, I’ve heard some parents aren’t letting their kids go to sleepovers anymore because they’re worried someone will touch them inappropriately. The likelihood is that sleepovers are going to be positive experiences for most kids, but there’s always a small chance of something negative happening. Trying to think through these situations feels like a little bit of torture. If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?

Dear Parent-to-Be,

Can I confess something? When you voiced this question, I actually felt relieved, because the same question has been secretly hammering at me for months. 

I haven’t talked about it much because I thought maybe it was just a function of my own anxiety. But I’m starting to think it’s more common than I realized. So I’m going to share the idea that has helped me the most with it. It doesn’t come from a parenting book or even the mental health field, but from that philosopher I’m always yammering on about, Bernard Williams. 

In 1976, Williams coined the term “moral luck.” It’s a surprising term, because what does morality have to do with luck, right? Surely what matters for my moral status is “what I did” and not “what the world did”! But Williams’s point is that life does seem to present us with situations where our goodness or badness depends a lot on factors that are out of our control — on whether we get lucky or unlucky. 

How can that be?

To illustrate, Williams invites us to imagine a truck driver who accidentally runs over a kid. The driver isn’t drunk or careless or negligent. He’s just driving along when suddenly a child darts out into the road. The kid gets hit and dies.

Clearly, a terrible harm has occurred. But has the driver done anything wrong?

Now let’s imagine another truck driver. He sets out that same day on that same road. But this guy is drunk. He careens down the road carelessly. He could easily hit somebody. But guess what? It just so happens that no kid darts into the road. The driver makes it home without incident.

In this scenario, no one’s been harmed. Yet the driver has obviously done something wrong. But for fortune, he would forever be branded a killer. He just got morally lucky.

What’s useful about this thought experiment is the way it clarifies that harm and wrongdoing are two separate things. We usually clump them together in our minds, because it’s often the case that a harm results from someone doing something wrong. But they can occur separately.

And when they do, how guilty should a person feel? Take the first driver, who wasn’t drunk or careless and yet ended up killing a child. It wouldn’t make rational sense to feel remorse, per se, because it’s not like he voluntarily did a bad thing. It’s more like the bad thing happened to him. At the same time, he certainly won’t feel nothing. He’ll probably feel pained in some nebulous, hard-to-name way. 

Well, Williams came up with a name for that: “agent-regret.” It’s the feeling you might experience if you inadvertently do a bad thing through bad luck.  

What’s the upshot for you, me, and everyone who fears failing or accidentally harming someone they love? 

Your goal is not to control every possible outcome. The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.

Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.

Could something bad still happen? Yes, and that’s gutting. But remember that even if harm occurs, that doesn’t mean you were guilty of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t mean you deserve blame. It means you deliberated as well as anyone could have expected of you and something terrible happened anyway. That’s not your fault. 

Risk of tragedy is just the cost of living in our world. 

And I do think you should live in it. Fully. Bravely. Without endlessly second-guessing every move you make.

That brings me to the contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, one of Williams’s best interpreters. In her essay “The Moral of Moral Luck,” she questions what we should take away from his concept.

“Morality is deeply and disquietingly subject to luck,” Williams wrote. But, Wolf asks, is that just the result of our own irrational judgments?

Wolf considers a slightly different truck driver thought experiment. In her version, two equally negligent truck drivers set out on the road. One has good luck: No child darts into the road, so no one gets hurt. But the other has bad luck: A child darts in front of the truck and is instantly killed. 

If humans were purely rational beings, surely we’d judge both drivers just as harshly, even though one killed a kid and the other didn’t. That’s because they’re both equally guilty of wrongdoing. But Wolf observes that, in reality, the driver who strikes the child is probably going to feel a lot more guilt. And members of society are likely to direct a lot more blame at him — after all, he actually killed someone, and they’re going to feel angry about that (while they won’t even know the other guy was ever driving negligently).

It’s tempting to say that this condemnation doesn’t tell us anything real about the unlucky driver’s moral status — it’s just an artifact of human irrationality, and we should toss it out. But Wolf doesn’t want to go that far. She thinks it’d be “positively eerie” if the driver who struck a child saw himself as being in the exact same moral position as the driver who didn’t. He’d be revealing a sense of himself “as one who is, at least in principle, distinct from his effects on the world.” 

Wolf suggests that there’s a better way to see ourselves: 

We are beings who are thoroughly in-the-world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control, and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately. 

To form one’s attitudes and judgments of oneself and others solely on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way, to extricate oneself and others from the messiness, and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet. 

This is a beautiful passage that describes a beautiful virtue: the ability to recognize that none of us is a separate and independent self. Wolf says this virtue has lived without a name, so she calls it “the nameless virtue.”

But I think it’s only nameless in Western philosophy. In Buddhism, it’s a foundational principle known as “dependent co-arising” or “interbeing.” The idea is that nothing has its own fixed, boundaried essence. Everything is always changing, because everything is subject to different causes and conditions, which act upon it all the time. That includes us human beings. We are constantly remaking each other — through the kind or unkind things we say to each other, through the ideas we expose each other to, through the actions we do or don’t perform. 

We are all each other’s causes and conditions. 

This undercuts the traditional Western understanding of agency. According to that view, I’m a discrete agent and when I decide to take a certain action, that decision starts in my own mind. My intent is what sets a causal chain in motion. Therefore, if I decide to do a bad action and harm results, I’m blameworthy.

But from the Buddhist perspective, we can’t say that my decision “started” with me. The “I” that decides isn’t a self-contained originator of action — it’s a node in a web that runs in every direction. That means the clean line between “what I did” and “what the world did” was always a kind of fiction. All my decisions have been conditioned by everything and everyone that ever influenced me in life. Which means blame, in the clean Western sense, doesn’t really hold up.

Williams found moral luck disquieting because it seemed to undermine the self-originating agent at the heart of Western ethics. But in the Buddhist view, there was never such an agent. That means that when something bad happens, it’s appropriate to recognize that you’re part of the causal web that yielded harm — but not to blame yourself as an individual.

You asked me: “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?”

No, I don’t think you always will. Although you’ll probably feel pained if some decision of yours leads to harm, eventually, your pain will not take the form of “I’m a terrible person.” It’ll take the form of “I was doing the best I could with the information and awareness I had at the time — with the conditions I was given. I wish that the conditions could have been different.” 

We’re all so used to the Western understanding of agency that our brains default to it in situations of crisis or panic, making us prone to self-blame. But I’ll be there to remind you of this other understanding. And I feel lucky knowing you’ll do the same for me.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of the world being so unpredictable…I’m excitedly digging into Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI, by the philosopher Carissa Véliz. She argues that predictions are often power plays in disguise.
  
• On a new episode of the podcast Philosophy Bites, a professor of Buddhist philosophy tackles the question: Without an enduring self, can there be moral responsibility?
  
• I’m loving the illustrated book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts. It shows just how normal it is for new parents to have an inner monologue that runs something like: “What if I drop him? What if I snap and hurt my baby? Mothering is so hard. I don’t know if I really want to do this anymore. Gosh, I’m so terrible for thinking that!”

Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once thriving tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a legal end.

On Monday, a jury ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, which contended that Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence in an attempt to discredit both men and prove they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry. 

Musk claimed he was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, and was suing for $150 billion in financial restitution alongside major changes to OpenAI’s leadership and governance structure. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s decision that Musk failed to bring his lawsuit within the three-year statute of limitations, given that OpenAI first added its for-profit arm in 2018. However, it’s possible that the evidence put forth at trial will still be enough to convince state regulators to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit enterprise to begin with.

Lawyers tell me that Musk will likely choose to appeal the ruling, meaning the catfight might not be over yet. But even beyond the outcome, the trial shone an often uncomfortable spotlight on the inner workings of Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Here are five major revelations from the trial.

OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty

Musk’s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members if it meant advancing his interests.

Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. Altman’s “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” led directly to his temporary ouster as CEO in 2023, said Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a tendency of “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, testified. In one instance, she said, Altman explicitly lied to her about the safety review required to vet a new AI model.

Greg Brockman kept a diary — and he probably wishes he hadn’t

Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.

“Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” he wrote in one 2017 entry. “It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,” meaning Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. “He’s really not an idiot,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end.”

Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; “It would be nice to be making the billions,” he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be worth about $30 billion.

Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with 

OpenAI built a bot in 2017 that was so advanced, it could beat top professional players at strategic multiplayer battle game Dota 2, a major milestone for the budding lab. “Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk emailed Brockman. 

Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to “butter us up,” Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” for discussions of a possible OpenAI for-profit arm, where whiskey was served by Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard. 

At one point, Musk became so irate at his guests’ insistence that they share control of OpenAI — rather than cede absolute control to Musk — that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman testified. In the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla absorb OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in one “particularly hair-raising moment,” he mused that OpenAI should pass on to his children. 

Musk ultimately left OpenAI in 2018 to begin building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk got into another tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. “He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam testified. For Achiam’s valor, two OpenAI employees — including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic — awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the message, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”

Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race

Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft — which is named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up. 

“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial. “It was becoming even more core and important that we had real agency at every layer of the stack,” Nadella testified.

That meant ingratiating itself in every corner of OpenAI’s world. Microsoft played a crucial role in bringing Altman back to power after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as “amateur city, as far as I was concerned.” In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to vet various members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of directors, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit. 

By this summer, Microsoft will have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of the company’s executives testified. The company was awarded a 27 percent stake in OpenAI last fall. 

Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence)

Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. By contrast, their own introspection mostly took a back seat to ambition.

“We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” Musk testified, to apparent eyerolls from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and sometimes failed to steer the trial away from discussions of AI’s existential risks. “If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,” Musk said, “I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world.”

Over a decade ago, Musk came together with OpenAI’s cofounders to build a charity equipped to take on a different threat then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk’s dictatorial attempts to secure absolute control of artificial general intelligence, Musk portrayed himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge. 

“It is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” Gonzalez Rogers at one point told Musk’s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come under fire this year for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. “I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn’t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”

Update, May 18, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the conclusion of the trial.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

For more than a century, the world has run on coal.

When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear era, the dash for natural gas, and decades of back-and-forth climate policy. From the 1970s through the mid-2010s, coal supplied somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the planet’s electricity, a steady if sooty presence powering modern life.

Then last year, it lost the lead. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal. It was the first time those two lines had crossed since 1919, when the global grid was still small enough to run mostly on hydropower.

As coal has declined — at least on a relative basis — the sun has risen. When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, solar produced just 256 terawatt hours of electricity globally. Nuclear power plants, at the time, were pumping out about 10 times that, while wind was responsible for three times as much electricity as solar. 

A decade later, solar is producing 10 times more power: 2,778 TWh, roughly what the entire European Union consumes in a year. Its production has doubled in the past three years alone. For 21 years running, solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet. In 2025 it surpassed wind for the first time, and is now on pace to pass nuclear this year.

While the world still burns a huge amount of coal — some 8.8 billion tonnes in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) — solar alone covered 75 percent of the rise in global electricity demand. Put wind and solar together, and you’ve met 99 percent of it. Fossil fuel power generation — coal, oil, and gas combined — fell 0.2 percent in 2025, the first decline since the pandemic and only the fifth year this century that fossil generation didn’t rise. 

Clean sources are now growing fast enough, on their own, to absorb just about everything the world is adding to its grid. And there’s a decent chance that, thanks in part to what’s happening right now in the Middle East, that transition may speed up.

Why solar is no fluke

It all starts with cost.

Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40 years, a pattern so durable it has its own name, Swanson’s law, the observation that the price tends to drop by 20 percent every time the total number of solar panels ever built doubles. This rule has held through supply gluts, trade wars, and pandemics. In the mid-1970s, a solar module cost more than $100 per watt. In late 2025, one panel cost about 10 cents per watt. No other major energy source in modern history has gotten that cheaper, that fast.

The oldest objection to solar — that it goes dark when the sun goes down — is becoming obsolete because we can increasingly store the daytime electricity solar units generate. Battery costs dropped 20 percent in 2024 and another 45 percent in 2025. Global battery deployment grew 46 percent last year, to 250 gigawatt-hours. Solar plants built with enough batteries to deliver power round the clock now sell electricity in the US for around $76 per megawatt hour, cheaper than building new natural gas capacity.

The China story

The world’s long-time manufacturing powerhouse — China — has made this shift possible. Chinese factories now make around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and an even larger share of the polysilicon, wafers, and cells that feed into them, a dominance built over two decades of state-backed investment, enormous scale, and ferocious price competition. The result is the cheapest energy technology in human history, produced at a pace the rest of the world has not matched. 

Chinese dominance has also made clean power a geopolitical story: tariffs, trade disputes, arguments in Washington and Brussels about whether to build parallel supply chains. For the climate, though, the math is simple. Cheap panels built anywhere cut emissions everywhere.

The demand side has moved too. For most of the last two decades, the global coal story has been a Chinese story. When China’s electricity demand surged, so did coal. When it slackened, so did coal. That relationship cracked in 2025: China’s fossil generation fell 0.9 percent, its first decline since 2015, even as the country’s electricity demand rose 5 percent. India’s fossil fuel generation fell as well, by 3.3 percent, while its renewables grew 24 percent year over year. In both cases, new clean energy capacity outran new demand. Ember found that renewables in China now produce more electricity than every household and service-sector business in the country, combined.

Don’t get carried away — yet

A flat year for coal is not the same as a falling one. Power-sector emissions in 2025 were still close — within a rounding error — of 2024’s levels, which set a record high. In its report, Ember calls this moment “the era of clean growth,” which should be understood as the start of real decarbonization, rather than a final state of decarbonization.

Coal’s share is shrinking — from a peak of 41 percent of global generation in 2013 to 33 percent today — but the fleet itself isn’t going away. China approved more than 40 gigawatts of new coal capacity in just the first three quarters of 2025. Thanks to growth in renewables, these plants are increasingly becoming a backup source, rather than a primary one. But those plants exist, they burn coal when they run, and they’ll burn coal for years.

Then there is the US. The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended the residential solar tax credit in December and tightened eligibility for commercial projects. Rhodium Group, a research institute, projects the law will cut US clean-capacity additions through 2035 by more than half. America is in danger of getting left behind.

That sounds bad, and in the short run it is. But policy can slow a market; it has a harder time stopping one when the economics have already shifted. BloombergNEF reported that global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8 percent from 2024. China alone put roughly $800 billion into clean energy last year; India’s clean-energy spending climbed 15 percent to about $68 billion; the EU has been accelerating renewables spending ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut its pipeline gas. Even if Washington slows down, the rest of the world is building solar farms and battery plants as fast as the supply chains allow. The US is trying to run against a market it no longer controls.

There is, however, the AI wild card. The IEA estimates global data-center electricity use rose 17 percent in 2025, with AI-specific demand growing faster. In the US, gas is currently the biggest single source of new data-center supply. Artificial intelligence is the one uncontrolled variable that could swamp clean-power gains in the back half of this decade.

Strait talk

The last big oil shock rewrote the global energy system. After the 1973 OPEC embargo, President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, founded the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, and signed the country’s first appliance efficiency standards into law. Ronald Reagan undid much of that work, but the seed technologies — photovoltaic R&D, efficiency standards, CAFE rules for cars — kept developing in the background for decades.

This time, the shock is being felt by a system where clean alternatives are already the cheapest option in most places. The US-Iran war has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of global LNG normally flow. The IEA called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The response has been exactly what cheap clean power makes possible. In March, global solar generation grew 14 percent year over year and wind grew 8 percent; solar alone saved European buyers some $3.5 billion in gas costs for the month. Countries that might have responded to an oil crisis in 2006 by drilling faster are instead moving up construction for solar farms, offshore wind, and grid-scale storage. Where the 1970s planted seeds that took 40 years to sprout, 2026’s shock is meeting an industry already at commercial scale.

The climate case for clean power has always rested on a simple bet: that the technologies would keep getting cheaper faster than the politics got worse. Today, solar is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the history of electricity, while coal looks to be on a terminal decline. Batteries are starting to make it a 24-hour fuel. What comes next is a question of speed — and speed, mostly, is a question of choice.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!