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How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law

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Sunday, December 22, 2024

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the U.S. has seen since the 1970s. But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws. Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration. Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.   But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.” The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields: Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case. “We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.” Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped. None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public. In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done. Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County. Read Next Can you tell if a ‘bomb train’ is coming to your town? It’s complicated. John McCracken In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.   As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by petitioners — including the 2018 feasibility study — there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the railway.” Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio — a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project. DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it, because in the three years since the IPO, it has done … nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment. Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies? During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers. “You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement. Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.) While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station. There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them. “This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law on Dec 22, 2024.

Even if the railway promoters win, here's why the train won’t get built.

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

The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the U.S. has seen since the 1970s.

But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws.

Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration.

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.  

But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.”

The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields:

Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.”

Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case.

“We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.”

Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped.

None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public.

In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done.

Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County.

In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.  

As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by petitioners — including the 2018 feasibility study — there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the railway.”

Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio — a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project.

DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it, because in the three years since the IPO, it has done … nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment.

Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case.

Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies?

During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers.

“You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement.

Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.)

While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station.

There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them.

“This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law on Dec 22, 2024.

Read the full story here.
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The Strange Disappearance of an Anti-AI Activist

Sam Kirchner wants to save the world from artificial superintelligence. He’s been missing for two weeks.

Before Sam Kirchner vanished, before the San Francisco Police Department began to warn that he could be armed and dangerous, before OpenAI locked down its offices over the potential threat, those who encountered him saw him as an ordinary, if ardent, activist.Phoebe Thomas Sorgen met Kirchner a few months ago at Travis Air Force Base, northeast of San Francisco, at a protest against immigration policy and U.S. military aid to Israel. Sorgen, a longtime activist whose first protests were against the Vietnam War, was going to block an entrance to the base with six other older women. Kirchner,  27 years old, was there with a couple of other members of a new group called Stop AI, and they all agreed to go along to record video on their phones in case of a confrontation with the police.“They were mainly there, I believe, to recruit people who might be willing to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, which they see as the key to stopping super AI,” Sorgen told me,  a method she thought was really smart. Afterward, she started going to Stop AI’s weekly meetings in Berkeley and learning about the artificial-intelligence industry, adopting the activist group’s cause as one of her own. She was impressed by Kirchner and the other leaders, who struck her as passionate and well informed. They’d done their research on AI and on protest movements; they knew what they were talking about and what to do. “They were committed to nonviolence on the merits as well as strategically,” she said.They followed a typical activist playbook. They passed out flyers and served pizza and beer at a T-shirt-making party. They organized monthly demonstrations and debated various ideas for publicity stunts. Stop AI, which calls for a permanent global ban on the development of artificial superintelligence, has always been a little more radical—more open to offending, its members clearly willing to get arrested—than some of the other groups protesting the development of artificial general intelligence, but Sorgen told me that leaders were also clear, at every turn, that violence was not morally acceptable or part of a winning strategy. (“That’s the empire’s game, violence,” she noted. “We can’t compete on that level even if we wanted to.”) Organizers who gathered in a Stop AI Signal chat were given only one warning for musing or even joking about violent actions. After that, they would be banned.Kirchner, who moved to San Francisco from Seattle and co-founded Stop AI there last year, publicly expressed his own commitment to nonviolence many times, and friends and allies say they believed him. Yet they also say he could be hotheaded and dogmatic, that he seemed to be suffering under the strain of his belief that the creation of smarter-than-human AI was imminent and that it would almost certainly lead to the end of all human life. He often talked about the possibility that AI could kill his sister, and he seemed to be motivated by this fear.“I did perceive an intensity,” Sorgen said. She sometimes talked with Kirchner about toning it down and taking a breath, for the good of Stop AI, which would need mass support. But she was empathetic, having had her own experience with protesting against nuclear proliferation as a young woman and sinking into a deep depression when she was met with indifference. “It’s very stressful to contemplate the end of our species—to realize that that is quite likely. That can be difficult emotionally.”  Whatever the exact reason or the precise triggering event, Kirchner appears to have recently lost faith in the strategy of nonviolence, at least briefly. This alleged moment of crisis led to his expulsion from Stop AI, to a series of 911 calls placed by his compatriots, and, apparently, to his disappearance. His friends say they have been looking for him every day, but nearly two weeks have gone by with no sign of him.Though Kirchner’s true intentions are impossible to know at this point, and his story remains hazy, the rough outline has been enough to inspire worried conversation about the AI-safety movement as a whole. Experts disagree about the existential risk of AI, and some think the idea of superintelligent AI destroying all human life is barely more than a fantasy, whereas to others it is practically inevitable. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Wynd Kaufmyn, one of Stop AI’s core organizers, told me of Kirchner. What might you do if you truly felt that way?“I am no longer part of Stop AI,” Kirchner posted to X just before 4 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, November 21. Later that day, OpenAI put its San Francisco offices on lockdown, as reported by Wired, telling employees that it had received information indicating that Kirchner had “expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.”The problem started the previous Sunday, according to both Kaufmyn and Matthew Hall, Stop AI’s recently elected leader, who goes by Yakko. At a planning meeting, Kirchner got into a disagreement with the others about the wording of some messaging for an upcoming demonstration—he was so upset, Kaufmyn and Hall told me, that the meeting totally devolved and Kirchner left, saying that he would proceed with his idea on his own. Later that evening, he allegedly confronted Yakko and demanded access to Stop AI funds. “I was concerned, given his demeanor, what he might use that money on,” Yakko told me. When he refused to give Kirchner the money, he said, Kirchner punched him several times in the head. Kaufmyn was not present during the alleged assault, but she went to the hospital with Yakko, who was examined for a concussion, according to both of them. (Yakko also shared his emergency-room-discharge form with me. I was unable to reach Kirchner for comment.)On Monday morning, according to Yakko, Kirchner was apologetic, but seemed conflicted. He expressed that he was exasperated by how slowly the movement was going and that he didn’t think nonviolence was working. “I believe his exact words were ‘the nonviolence ship has sailed for me,’” Yakko said. Yakko and Kaufmyn told me that Stop AI members called the SFPD at this point to express some concern about what Kirchner might do, but that nothing came of the call.After that, for a few days, Stop AI dealt with the issue privately. Kirchner could no longer be part of Stop AI, because of the alleged violent confrontation, but the situation appeared manageable. Members of the group became newly concerned when Kirchner didn’t show at a scheduled court hearing related to his February arrest for blocking doors at an OpenAI office. They went to Kirchner’s apartment in West Oakland and found it unlocked and empty, at which point they felt obligated to notify the police again and to also notify various AI companies that they didn’t know where Kirchner was and that there was some possibility that he could be dangerous.Both Kaufmyn and Sorgen suspect that Kirchner is likely camping somewhere—he took his bicycle with him, but left behind other belongings, including his laptop and phone. They imagine he’s feeling wounded and betrayed, and maybe fearful of the consequences of his alleged meltdown. Yakko told me that he wasn’t sure about Kirchner’s state of mind but that he didn’t believe that Kirchner had access to funds that would enable him to act on his alleged suggestions of violence. Remmelt Ellen, an adviser to Stop AI, told me that he was concerned about Kirchner’s safety, especially if he is experiencing a mental-health crisis.Almost two weeks into his disappearance, Kirchner’s situation has grown worse. The San Francisco Standard recently reported on an internal bulletin circulated within the SFPD on November 21, which cited two callers who warned that Kirchner had specifically threatened to buy high-powered weapons and to kill people at OpenAI. Both Kaufmyn and Yakko told me that they were confused by that report. “As far as I know, Sam made no direct threats to OpenAI or anyone else,” Yakko said. From his perspective, the likelihood that Kirchner was dangerous was low, but the group didn’t want to take any chances. (A representative from the SFPD declined to comment on the bulletin; OpenAI did not return a request for comment.)The reaction from the broader AI-safety movement was fast and consistent. Many disavowed violence. One group, PauseAI, a much larger AI- safety activist group than Stop AI, specifically disavowed Kirchner.  PauseAI is notably staid—they include property damage in their definition of violence, for instance, and don’t allow volunteers to do anything illegal or disruptive, like chain themselves to doors, barricade gates, or otherwise trespass or interfere with the operations of AI companies. “The kind of protests we do are people standing at the same place and maybe speaking a message,” the group’s CEO, Maxime Fournes, told me. “But not preventing people from going to work or blocking the streets.”This is one of the reasons that Stop AI was founded in the first place. Kirchner and others, who met in the PauseAI Discord server, thought that genteel approach was insufficient. Instead, Stop AI situated itself in a tradition of more confrontational protest, consulting Gene Sharp’s 1973 classic, The Methods of Nonviolent Action, which includes such tactics as sit-ins, “nonviolent obstruction,” and “seeking imprisonment.”In its early stages, the movement against unaccountable AI development has had to face the same questions as any other burgeoning social movement. How do you win broad support? How can you be palatable and appealing while also being sufficiently pointed, extreme enough to get attention but not so much that you sabotage yourselves? If the stakes are as high as you say they are, how do you act like it?Michaël Trazzi, an activist who went on a hunger strike outside of Google DeepMind’s London headquarters in September, also believes that AI could lead to human extinction. He told me that he believes that people can do things that are extreme enough to “show we are in an emergency” while still being nonviolent and nondisruptive. (PauseAI also discourages its members from doing hunger strikes.)The biggest difference between PauseAI and Stop AI is the one implied in their names. PauseAI advocates for a pause in superintelligent AI development until it can proceed safely, or in “alignment” with democratically decided ideal outcomes. Stop AI’s position is that this kind of alignment is a fantasy, and that AI should never be allowed to progress further toward superhuman intelligence than it already has. For that reason, their rhetoric differs as much as their tactics. “You should not hear official PauseAI channels saying things like ‘we will all die with complete certainty,’” Fournes told me. By contrast, Stop AI has opted for very blunt messaging. Announcing plans to barricade the doors of an OpenAI office in San Francisco last October, organizers sent out a press release that read, in part, “OpenAI is trying to build something smarter than humans and it is going to kill us all!” More recently, the group promoted another protest with a digital flyer saying “Close OpenAI or We’re All Gonna Die!”Jonathan Kallay, a 47-year-old activist who is not based in San Francisco but who participates in a Stop AI Discord server with just under 400 people in it, told me that Stop AI is a “large and diverse group of people” who are concerned about AI for a variety of reasons—job loss, environmental impact, creative-property rights, and so on. Not all of them fear the imminent end of the world. But they have all signed up for a version of the movement that puts that possibility front and center.Yakko, who joined Stop AI earlier this year, was elected the group’s new leader on October 28. That he and others in Stop AI were not completely on board with the gloomy messaging that Kirchner favored was one of the causes of the falling out, he told me. “I think that made him feel betrayed and scared.”Going forward, Yakko said that Stop AI will be focused on a more hopeful message and will try to emphasize that an alternate future is still possible—“rather than just trying to scare people, even if the truth is scary.” One of his ideas is to help organize a global general strike (and to do so before AI takes a large enough share of human jobs that it’s too late for withholding labor to have any impact).Stop AI is not the only group considering and reconsidering how to talk about the problem. These debates over rhetoric and tactics have been taking place in an insular cultural enclave where forum threads come to vivid life. Sometimes, it can be hard to keep track of who’s on whose side. For instance, Stop AI might seem a natural ally of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a famous AI doomer whose recent book co-authored with Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, predicts human extinction in its title. But they are actually at odds. (Through a representative, Yudkowsky declined to comment for this article.)Émile P. Torres, a philosopher and historian who had been friendly with Kirchner and attended a Stop AI protest this summer, has criticized Yudkowsky for engaging in a thought exercise about about how many people it would be ethical to let die in order to prevent a superintelligent AI from taking over the world. He also tried to persuade Kirchner and other Stop AI leaders to take a more delicate approach to talking about human extinction as a likely outcome of advanced AI development, because he thinks that this kind of rhetoric might provoke violence either by making it seem righteous or by disturbing people to the point of totally irrational behavior. The latter worry is not merely conjecture: One infamous group who feared that AI would end the world turned into a cult and was then connected to several murders (though none of the killings appeared to have anything to do with AI development).“There is this kind of an apocalyptic mindset that people can get into,” Torres told me. “The stakes are enormous and literally couldn’t be higher. That sort of rhetoric is everywhere in Silicon Valley.” He never  worried that anybody in Stop AI would resort to violence; he was always more freaked out by the rationalist crowd, who might use “longtermism” as a poor ethical justification for violence in the present (kill a few people now to prevent extinction later). But he did think that committing to an apocalyptic framing could be risky generally. “I have been worried about people in the AI-safety crowd resorting to violence,” he said. “Someone can have that mindset and commit themselves to nonviolence, but the mindset does incline people toward thinking, Well, maybe any measure might be justifiable.”Ellen, the Stop AI adviser, shares Torres’s concern. Though he wasn’t present for what happened with Kirchner in November (Ellen lives in Hong Kong and has never met Kirchner in person, he told me), his sense from speaking frequently with him over the past two years was that Kirchner was under an enormous amount of pressure because of his feeling that the world was about to end. “Sam was panicked,” he said. “I think he felt disempowered and felt like he had to do something.” After Stop AI put out its statement about the alleged assault and the calls to police, Ellen wrote his own post asking people to “stop the ‘AGI may kill us by 2027’ shit please.”Despite that request, he doesn’t think apocalyptic rhetoric is the sole cause of what happened. “I would add that I know a lot of other people who are concerned about a near-term extinction event in single-digit years who would never even consider acting in violent ways,” he told me. And actually, he had other issues with the apocalyptic framing aside from the sort of muddy idea that it can lead people to violence. He worries, too, that it “puts the movement in a position to be ridiculed,” if, for instance, the AI bubble bursts, development slows, and the apocalypse doesn’t arrive when the alarm-ringers said it would. They could be left standing there looking ridiculous, like a failed doomsday cult.His other fear about what did or didn’t (or does or doesn’t) happen with Kirchner is that it will “be used to paint with a broad brush” about the AI-safety movement, depicting its participants as radicals and terrorists. He saw some conversation along those lines earlier in November, when a lawyer representing Stop AI jumped onstage to subpoena Sam Altman during a talk—one widely viewed post referred to the group as “dangerous” and “unhinged” in response to that incident. And in response to the news about Kirchner, there has been renewed chatter about how activists may be extremists in waiting. This is a tactic that powerful people often use in an attempt to discredit their critics: Peter Thiel has taken to arguing that those who speak out against AI are the real danger, rather than the technology itself.In an interview last year, Kirchner said, “We are totally for nonviolence and we never will turn violent.” In the same interview, he said he was willing to die for his cause. Both statements are the kind that sound direct but are hard to set store in—it’s impossible to prove whether he meant them, and, if so, how he meant them. Hearing the latter statement about Kirchner’s willingness to die, some saw a radical on some kind of deranged mission. Others saw a guy clumsily expressing sincere commitment. (Or maybe he was just being dramatic.)Ellen told me that older activists he’d talked with had interpreted it as well meant, but a red flag nonetheless. Generally, when you dedicate yourself to a cause, you don’t expect to die to win. You expect to spend years fighting, feeling like you’re losing, plodding along. The problem is that Kirchner—according to many people who know him—really believes humanity doesn’t have that much time.

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The Scientific American Staff’s Favorite Books of 2025

Here are the 67 books Scientific American staffers couldn’t put down this year, from fantasy epics to gripping nonfiction

Each year around this time, we ask the staff of Scientific American to recommend the best books they read this year. Here are the 67 new favorites and old classics that kept us turning the pages in 2025.Happy reading! Jump to your favorite section here:On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.NonfictionIn alphabetical orderApocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futuresby Lizzie WadeHarper(Tags: History)“This was such an upbeat book about apocalypses! I learned a ton and got a much smarter sense of what people really experienced during these extreme scenarios.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterBad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining Americaby Elie MystalThe New Press(Tags: Policy)“A clearly structured and compellingly argued takedown of 10 terrible laws that could easily be fixed by simply revoking them. It will make you mad but in the most clarifying way.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterThe Black Family Who Built America: The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneersby Cheryl McKissack Daniel, with Nick ChilesAtria/Black Privilege Publishing(Tags: Memoir)“The author’s great-great-grandfather, an enslaved person brought from Africa, started a construction/engineering company in North Carolina and Tennessee that is still in the family and is now run by her. An intimate view of courageous Black lives in the midst of ongoing white prejudice and violence.” —Maria-Christina Keller, Copy DirectorCareless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealismby Sarah Wynn-WilliamsFlatiron Books(Tags: Memoir)“When I finished the prologue of Careless People, I immediately looked up who had the movie rights—the author has a flair for the cinematic in describing her experiences. Besides being a riveting read, this look at the thoughts and thoughtlessness of those running Facebook is crucial to understanding how today’s toxic digital landscape came to be.” —Sarah Lewin Frasier, Senior EditorCHART: Designing Creative Data Visualizations from Charts to Artby Nadieh BremerA K Peters/CRC Press(Tags: Data Visualization)“Nadieh Bremer excels at creating captivating and memorable information-rich data displays. If you’re stuck in a world of bar charts and line charts and looking to stretch your own capabilities beyond standard visualization forms, this book is for you. Examples include several graphics commissioned for Scientific American articles!” —Jen Christiansen, Acting Chief of Design & Senior Graphics EditorThe Football: The Amazing Mathematics of the World’s Most Watched Objectby Étienne GhysPrinceton University Press(Tags: Math, Physics, Sports)“A fascinating mathematical and physical microhistory of soccer balls and the official FIFA World Cup match balls in particular.” —Emma R. Hasson, 2025 AAAS Mass Media FellowThe Harder I Fight the More I Love Youby Neko CaseGrand Central Publishing(Tags: Memoir)“A searing, beautiful memoir by singer-songwriter Neko Case, recalling her lonely, tumultuous upbringing and the way music became a balm and an escape. It is written with the same gut-punching poetic voice that makes her such an incredible lyricist.” —Andrea Thompson, Senior Desk Editor/Life ScienceI Want to Burn This Place Downby Maris KreizmanEcco(Tags: Essays)“A wonderfully slim collection of essays about growing up, getting angry and choosing to change the world for the better. I cringed at how relatable it was at times, but that’s the point!” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerInventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Ageby Ada PalmerThe University of Chicago Press(Tags: History)“You may know Ada Palmer as a science-fiction novelist, but she’s also a historian at the University of Chicago who focuses on the Renaissance. This is a chunky book with many parts, but it’s very readable and thought-provoking. You’ll think differently about the Renaissance—and about how history works.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterLeaving the Ocean Was a Mistake: Life Lessons from Sixty Sea Creaturesby Cara Giaimo. Illustrated by Vlad StankovicQuirk Books(Tags: Humor, Animals)“This charming little book highlights 60 creatures that live in the shallows to the abyssal deep. Each is beautifully illustrated, while the text shares an interesting fact about the animal and a wry inspirational-poster-style motto for human life drawn from its experience. Great for kids five to 10 years old, plus anyone else who wants to be delighted by the ocean’s denizens.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterThe Meteorites: Encounters with Outer Space and Deep Timeby Helen GordonProfile Books(Tags: Space, History)“I’ve never had such an emotional reaction to reading about rocks, but the prose is beautiful, and the passion of the authors pours off every page.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerMore Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanityby Adam BeckerBasic Books(Tags: AI, Technology)“A fascinating look at the so-called philosophies that Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs use to justify sacrificing the present to build a future that will never exist. Equal parts fascinating and infuriating, this book sheds light on the way some of the most powerful people in the world think and also shows you how to argue against it.” —Ian Kelly, Product ManagerOne Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been against Thisby Omar El AkkadKnopf(Tags: Memoir, Politics)“A powerfully written, thought-provoking book with deep moral clarity.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterOwned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Leftby Eoin HigginsBold Type Books(Tags: Political Science)“The story of how tech billionaires are buying out their most vocal critics and trying to change the journalistic landscape. This book helps explain not just how narratives are changing in front of our eyes but why.” —Ian Kelly, Product ManagerPhenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science around Usby Felice FrankelMITeen Press(Tags: Young Adult, Photography)“Photographer Felice Frankel explores the science behind visual characteristics through a series of images paired with artist statements and succinct scientific explanations. Together, this prompts the reader to ponder light and shadow, form, transformation and surfaces.” —Jen Christiansen, Acting Chief of Design & Senior Graphics EditorProto: How One Ancient Language Went Globalby Laura SpinneyBloomsbury Publishing(Tags: History, Linguistics)“Laura Spinney tells engaging tales of archeologists traipsing through fields, linguists working toward professional vindication and many others active in the search for understanding of how these ancient languages traveled, fragmented, warred and traded to eventually became the dominant Indo-European languages today.” —Rich Hunt, Managing Production EditorA Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Liftingby Casey JohnstonGrand Central Publishing(Tags: Memoir)“A gripping combination of memoir and exploration of the history and science of weight lifting. Casey Johnston’s background as a science journalist comes through clearly in the fascinating explanations of how and why lifting can be so beneficial.” —Sarah Lewin Frasier, Senior EditorRaising Hareby Chloe DaltonPantheon(Tags: Memoir)“An atmospheric and cozy memoir about a city slicker workaholic who rescues a newborn abandoned hare and awakens to nature. A great one for animal lovers.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter EditorReefs of Time: What Fossils Reveal about Coral Survivalby Lisa GardinerPrinceton University Press(Tags: Science, Environment)“This is a love letter to past, present and future coral reefs. Gardiner is a close friend of mine. Her stories of fossil and modern polyps—as well as the people that study them—prompted me to think more deeply about resilience.” —Jen Christiansen, Acting Chief of Design & Senior Graphics EditorRipples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar Systemby Dagomar DegrootHarvard University Press(Tags: Science, Space)“A fascinating tour of the environmental history of the inner solar system and how centuries of changes to our neighboring worlds have shaped the human experience.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterSearches: Selfhood in the Digital Ageby Vauhini VaraPantheon(Tags: AI, Technology)“I loved this philosophical look at how and why artificial intelligence and broader technological developments have changed our world and our artistic practice within it.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerThe Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationshipsby Nathan LentsMariner Books(Tags: Sexology, Zoology)“Surprisingly funny and eye-opening book about how the animal kingdom is more sexually diverse than previously understood.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerSociopath: A Memoirby Patric GagneSimon & Schuster(Tags: Memoir, Mental Health)“I picked up this book after I read our own July/August 2025 article about treating childhood psychopathy and wanted to know more. The author describes with vivid honesty how it felt to grow up as an undiagnosed sociopath and how she came to learn about herself and create her own path to treatment. As someone who is fascinated by different neurotypes, I was hooked from the start and came away with (somewhat ironically) a newfound empathy for those who don’t themselves experience empathy like most people do.” —Amanda Montañez, Senior Graphics EditorSpeak Data: Artists, Scientists, Thinkers, and Dreamers on How We Live Our Lives in Numbersby Giorgia Lupi and Phillip CoxChronicle Books(Tags: Data)“A collection of thoughtful interviews with people who spend their days thinking about and working with data—including scientists, artists, activists and business leaders. I loved that each interviewee defines data in a different way.” —Amanda Montañez, Senior Graphics EditorStrata: Stories From Deep Timeby Laura PoppickW. W. Norton(Tags: Geology)“The deep history of Earth can be overwhelming—the sheer scale of billions of years, with only the opaque names of eras and epochs to navigate by—but Strata is different. In it, geologist-turned-science-journalist Laura Poppick carries the reader on our planet’s adventure by highlighting four pivotal phenomena: air, ice, mud and heat.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterSweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Loverby Sarah PerryMariner Books(Tags: Essays, Food)“The sweetest essays about some of my favorite candy indulgences. It was sometimes funny, touching and even educational. This would be a nice palate cleanser to get someone out of a reading slump. The illustrations and formatting, with sections broken up by candy color, was a cute touch.” —Isabella Bruni, Digital ProducerTigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and Chinaby Jonathan C. SlaghtFarrar, Straus and Giroux(Tags: History)“A heart-in-your-mouth saga that tells the stories—terrifying, riveting and sad—of the adventurer scientists who saved the disappearing Amur tiger. Slaght gives us an inspiring account of a wilderness where brown bears fight tigers and the too-brief geopolitical thaw that reshaped the lives of both man and tiger.” —Dan Vergano, Senior Editor, Washington, D.C.FictionIn alphabetical orderAmong Friendsby Hal EbbottRiverhead Books(Tags: Literary Fiction)“This is simply about a birthday weekend spent between two families that goes wrong, but I was locked into the drama right away. Lesson learned: some friendships are best left in the past.” —Isabella Bruni, Digital ProducerThe Antidoteby Karen RussellKnopf(Tags: Historical Fiction)“Thrilled my book club made me read this! I loved this new take on a witch in the American West.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerAtmosphereby Taylor Jenkins ReidBallantine Books(Tags: LGBTQ+, Astronauts)“A gorgeous romance interspersed with a thrilling mission story about fictional astronauts in the space shuttle program in the 1980s.” —Clara Moskowitz, Chief of ReportersThe Botanist’s Assistantby Peggy TownsendBerkley(Tags: Mystery)“A fun murder mystery steeped in the world of scientific research and botany.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterEat The Ones You Loveby Sarah Maria GriffinTor Books(Tags: Fantasy)“Creepy and weird in all the best ways! More horror stories should examine violence through botany and abandoned malls.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerEmily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Talesby Heather FawcettDel Rey Books(Tags: Fantasy)“I find the world and characters so endlessly endearing I’d read about them if they were just sitting around having tea! The combination of monster hunting, academic woes and romantic high points was just what I was looking for.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerFor Whom the Belle Tollsby Jaysea LynnS&S/Saga Press(Tags: Romance, Erotica)“A woman dies of cancer, explores the afterlife, enjoys customer service and finds two kinds of love. It’s a nice blend of romance, plot and characters that feels like a warm cozy hug of a book.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterI Got Abducted By Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Comby Kimberly LemmingBerkley(Tags: Erotica, Science Fiction)“As a longtime Lemming fan, I was still shocked to see her foray into science fiction. She satirizes the field’s desperation and tunnel vision for experimentation and documentation well while still showcasing hysterically self-aware protagonists and introducing new, weird and hot aliens.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerIsaac’s Songby Daniel BlackHanover Square Press(Tags: Historical Fiction)“A heart-wrenching read on grief, love, family and identity. Set in the 1980s, it’s a poetic journey about dealing with generational trauma and writing your own story.” —Fonda Mwangi, Multimedia EditorRejectionby Tony TulathimutteWilliam Morrow Paperbacks(Tags: Short Story Fiction, Satire)“As someone who spends way too much time on the social Internet, this book made me spiral. It’s a scathing look at Internet losers, woke politics and a self-hating generation of people just looking to be accepted.” —Carin Leong, Editorial Contributor“This book was as startling as it was eye-opening. Going to be hard to forget this one.” —Isabella Bruni, Digital ProducerThe Rest Is Silenceby Augusto Monterroso. Translated by Aaron KernerNew York Review of Books(Tags: Academic Satire)“A hilarious and touching bludgeoning of the provincial éminence-grise-type, in translation from the original Spanish. A short, savage antidote to every unblemished saccharine Festschrift of the scholarly world. Will make you want to go back and read Don Quixote, around which the critic at the center of the story has mislaid his entire oeuvre.” —Dan Vergano, Senior Editor, Washington, D.C.The Salvageby Anbara SalamTin House(Tags: Historical Fiction, Mystery)“There are ghosts in the icy waters east of Scotland. In 1962 a marine archaeologist raises them to the surface from a century-old shipwreck. But she is haunted by ghosts of her own. Dead men’s shadows, creaking cupboard doors and poisoned relationships make for a gothic takeover of the science in this tale. I liked the way our archaeologist is gradually convinced of the supernatural terrors, even while a supposedly superstitious islander counters with evidence rooted in the everyday world.” —Josh Fischman, Senior Editor/Special ProjectsSmall Boatby Vincent Delecroix. Translated by Helen StevensonHope Road Publishing(Tags: Philosophical Tragedy, Historical Fiction)“A minimalist and morally complex retelling of the 2021 English Channel disaster that suggests there’s no one to blame but us all.” —Cynthia Atkinson, Marketing & Customer Service AssistantSunrise on the Reapingby Suzanne CollinsScholastic Press(Tags: Dystopian Fiction)“Suzanne Collins really delivered with Sunrise on the Reaping. The backstory of Haymitch, Katniss’s mentor during the Hunger Games, is finally revealed, and the result is gutting—it is rip-out-your-heartstrings devastating.” —Isabella Bruni, Digital ProducerVanishing Worldby Sayaka MurataGrove Hardcover(Tags: Science Fiction, Dystopia)“This dystopian tale imagines a world where sex for procreation has become obsolete, replaced entirely by artificial insemination and clinical reproduction. Here intimacy is viewed as unnecessary, unsanitary and even taboo. It’s an unsettling exploration of how the erosion of romantic love and pleasure and the human bonds they forge can profoundly reshape the meaning of family, friendship and society at large.” —Sunya Bhutta, Chief Audience Engagement EditorWe Love You, Bunnyby Mona AwadS&S/Marysue Rucci Books (Tags: Fantasy, Thriller)“This was the perfect spooky-season read—and dare I say, I preferred this to the prequel. Mona Awad hits the nail on the head with this dark academia freaky fever dream. The origins of this New England MFA student clique are revealed, and we get all the witchcraft and laughter that bring the ‘Bunnies’ to life. —Isabella Bruni, Digital ProducerWhere the Axe Is Buriedby Ray NaylerMCD(Tags: Science Fiction)“It’s less interested in the apocalypse than it is in those who shape its course. No perspectives are off limits in this far-too-familiar future, a prospect that’s as chilling as it is riveting.” —Cynthia Atkinson, Marketing & Customer Service AssistantWild Dark Shoreby Charlotte McConaghyFlatiron Books(Tags: Climate Fiction)“A riveting drama set on a remote island near Antarctica, where a man and his three children are caretakers for an underground vault protecting vital samples of the world’s plant seeds. Personal mysteries and dangerous climate-change-induced weather make this a suspenseful page-turner.” —Clara Moskowitz, Chief of ReportersBountiful BacklistIn order of publication yearJournal of a Novel: The East of Eden Lettersby John SteinbeckPenguin Books, 1990(Tags: Diary, Creative Writing)“A fascinating look into an author’s process, especially his insecurities and what he believed the story of East of Eden was truly about. It inspired me to write more in pencil!” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerKilling Rage: Ending Racismby bell hooksHolt Paperbacks, 1996(Tags: Essays)“A necessary confrontation with the realities of racism that demands to be read. Be ready to question yourself and the country you live in.” —Charlotte Hartwell, Marketing ManagerTo Liveby Yu HuaVintage, 2003(Tags: Historical Fiction)“Set in 20th-century China, it’s an unforgettable reminder of what’s left when relentless misfortune and tragedy strike. There are plenty of moments that are unsettling, but you can’t help but keep reading such a human story.” —Cynthia Atkinson, Marketing & Customer Service AssistantThe Thing around Your Neckby Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieVintage, 2009(Tags: Short Stories)“I find I barely have any time to read these days, but Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 collection of short stories about postcolonial Nigeria is an absolute page-turner. I finished it in just two days, but each narrative has the potency that will keep me coming back to read them over and over again.” —Claire Cameron, Breaking News ChiefThe Night Circusby Erin MorgensternVintage, 2012(Tags: Fantasy)“A beautiful love story told through secrets, magic and circuses. Erin Morgenstern is the kind of spectacular writer who can convince me to follow her anywhere, no matter how fantastical the plot may seem at first glance.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerTo Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Partyby Heather Cox RichardsonBasic Books, 2014(Tags: History)“A history of the Republican Party that helps explain how we got to our current political situation.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterPachinkoby Min Jin LeeGrand Central Publishing, 2017(Tags: Historical Fiction)“One of the best books I’ve ever read. Isak’s life story completely broke my heart, and just thinking about it makes me teary-eyed all over again.” —Brianne Kane, Associate Editor/Books & Rights ManagerThe Apollo Murdersby Chris HadfieldMulholland Books, 2021(Tags: Space Thriller)“This riveting thriller by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield imagines a cold-war-era Apollo mission gone wrong, with lots of exciting intrigue between astronauts and cosmonauts.” —Clara Moskowitz, Chief of ReportersThis Time Tomorrowby Emma StraubRiverhead Books, 2023(Tags: Science Fiction)“I normally don’t go for time-travel books, but this had just the right sprinkle of magical realism. The book is rooted in the relationship between a father and daughter and hooked me with its tenderness and humor. It reminded me of The Midnight Library, [by Matt Haig], too.” —Isabella Bruni, Digital ProducerAbortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Winby Jessica ValentiCrown, 2024(Tags: Health, Politics)“Everything you need to know about the antiscience tactics being used to keep people from the health care they need. It’s a supersmart guide to seeing the whole context of how abortion is treated in the U.S.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterAlways Bring Your Sunglasses: And Other Stories from a Life of Sensory and Social Invalidationby Becca Lory HectorSelf-published, 2024(Tags: Parenting)“A beautifully honest account of the author’s experience growing up as an undiagnosed autistic person—part memoir, part guide for parents and other caregivers who want to better understand and support the autistic children in their lives.” —Amanda Montañez, Senior Graphics EditorCustodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Aliveby Eliot SteinSt. Martin’s Press, 2024(Tags: Society and Current Affairs)“A lovely adventure profiling 10 nearly lost traditions from around the world. It explores the history of each one and the handful of people fighting to keep them alive.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterFaux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stopby Serene KhaderBeacon Press, 2024(Tags: Politics)“A detailed reckoning of how white feminism has failed everyone, this book paints a beautiful picture of the way the world could be instead.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterFever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Themby Timothy EganPenguin Books, 2024(Tags: History)“This is a beautifully written book about a terrifying period in U.S. history. It’s also a reminder that there are always those whose hearts, corrupted by racism and power, would happily trade in freedom to enact their own tyrannical white supremacist fever dreams. Egan reminds us that the privilege of living in a democracy is the unending work that goes toward maintaining it.” —Kendra Pierre-Louis, Editorial ContributorThe Javelin Programby Derin EdalaSelf-published, 2024(Tags: Science Fiction)“This Web-series-turned-book has everything one could ask for in character-driven hard science fiction. It’s a compelling snapshot of a potential future society, full of gripping mysteries, anthropological intrigue and complex but (as far as I can tell) accurate physics. But be warned: because it was initially released as a chapter-by-chapter web series, the ending of the first book on its own will not be satisfying.” —Emma R. Hasson, 2025 AAAS Mass Media FellowThe Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earthby Zoë SchlangerHarper, 2024(Tags: Botany)“Most people think of plants as mindless, unfeeling creatures. Zoë Schlanger’s compelling, lucid tour of the latest research on the ‘plant experience’ proves this is far from the case.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter EditorThe Ministry of Timeby Kaliane BradleyAvid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2024(Tags: Science Fiction, Time-Travel Rom-Com)“A really fun premise of historical figures plucked from their own eras and unwillingly expatriated to present-day London, where they’re forced to reckon with modern technology and with the moral legacy of the British Empire that brought them there. I love a character who yearns!” —Carin Leong, Editorial ContributorThe Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Centerby Rhaina CohenSt. Martin’s Press, 2024(Tags: Lifestyle)“This book is about a type of relationship that we have no set vocabulary for: friends who have chosen to become life partners. Rhaina Cohen, who has herself experienced one of these platonic partnerships, profiles pairs of friends whose relationships have broken out of the conventional molds. It was so striking how each of these pairs felt like they were inventing something wholly new with their love and commitment to each other—even though, historically, there’s nothing new about it at all.” —Allison Parshall, Associate Editor/Mind & BrainThe Phoenix Keeperby S. A. MacLeanOrbit, 2024(Tags: Fantasy)“This was such a delightful read! It’s billed as cozy, which I don’t think is fair—a couple guns do eventually show up—but it’s a very heartwarming story set in a magical zoo, following the revival of a defunct phoenix-breeding program.” —Meghan Bartels, Senior ReporterThe Safekeepby Yael van der WoudenAvid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2024 (Tags: Historical Fiction)“This novel absolutely slammed into me. Set in the postwar era of the Netherlands, it features a sour central character, a family history slowly oozing out onto the pages and an interloper who isn’t what she seems. I read this in one sitting—it is richly written, breathless and surprising! You’ll be as obsessed with this as the two main characters are with each other.” —Arminda Downey-Mavromatis, Former Associate Engagement Editor The Vaster Wildsby Lauren GroffRiverhead Books, 2024(Tags: Historical Fiction)“A lyrical tale of survival in a harsh undeveloped version of colonial America. Groff seamlessly blends a psychological exploration of oppression and class with a naturalist’s view of the living world. It is both a feminist story and an ode to freedom.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter EditorWhat If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futuresby Ayana Elizabeth JohnsonOne World, 2024(Tags: Climate, Technology)“The interviews, poems, essays and artwork by a wide range of contributors, including scientist Kate Marvel, artist Erica Deeman, journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis and architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli provide frameworks and nudges to propel us forward. The book provided me with much needed hope and an energy boost.” —Jen Christiansen, Acting Chief of Design & Senior Graphics Editor

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‘The dinosaurs didn’t know what was coming, but we do’: Marina Silva on what needs to follow Cop30

Exclusive: Brazil’s environment minister talks about climate inaction and the course we have to plot to save ourselves and the planetSoon after I returned home to Altamira from Cop30, I found myself talking about dinosaurs, meteors and “ambassadors of harm” with Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva.No one in government knows the rainforest better than Marina, as she is best known in Brazil, who was born and raised in the Amazon. No one is more aware of the sacrifices that environmental and land defenders have made than this associate of the murdered activist Chico Mendes. And no one worked harder to raise ambition at Cop30, the first climate summit in the Amazon, than her. So what, I asked, had it achieved? Continue reading...

Soon after I returned home to Altamira from Cop30, I found myself talking about dinosaurs, meteors and “ambassadors of harm” with Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva.No one in government knows the rainforest better than Marina, as she is best known in Brazil, who was born and raised in the Amazon. No one is more aware of the sacrifices that environmental and land defenders have made than this associate of the murdered activist Chico Mendes. And no one worked harder to raise ambition at Cop30, the first climate summit in the Amazon, than her. So what, I asked, had it achieved?“This Cop revealed the truth that efforts until now have been insufficient,” she told me in a video call from Brasilia. “Our climate efforts continue, as ever, to buy time when we have no more time.”In a tearful and defiant address to the closing plenary of the conference in Belém, Marina had told applauding delegates that she – like many others – had dreamed of achieving more when they attended the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, which set up UN conventions for the climate, biodiversity and desertification. What had she meant by that?The then US president, George HW Bush, signs the Earth pledge at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: M Frustino/AP“Reality itself says we did less than was necessary,” she replied. “But what gives us hope is we managed to maintain the connection between dream and action during these 30 or so years. If we didn’t have the Paris agreement and the efforts that preceded it, the planet would be on course for 4C of warming [above preindustrial levels].“Thanks to these efforts, global heating hasn’t reached that level and if that were to be counted in lives, in food systems, in energy systems, in technological advances, we would see that we have had many gains, that we have avoided many catastrophes, that we have saved many lives, many portions of food, and we have managed to preserve more areas of land from being totally devastated by desertification or by the rise in sea levels.“But our efforts are still insufficient. And now there is no more room for insufficiency, only a tiny crack for action remains. And when possibilities narrow, efforts to broaden them must be carried out with all speed, intensity and quality.”No one in the Amazon could doubt the need for urgency. The rainforest has dried up like never before in the past three years. On the way home, I was horrified to see a new stretch of forest had been burned along the side of the road during the three weeks I had been away.Marina said she had hoped that visitors to the Belém conference would see that a climate collapse was already under way in the rainforest. “Having a tropical forest that is losing humidity is science materialised in three dimensions: mighty rivers that dry up for long periods, to the point of killing the fish, harming biodiversity and isolating populations that have always remained integrated with each other through natural water channels,” she said. “I think Cop30 in the Amazon was a place to demonstrate and denounce what is happening and a place to initiate a response.”Houseboats and other vessels stranded at David’s Marina in October 2023, when the water level at the Rio Negro river port hit its lowest in 121 years. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/ReutersThe response came in the form of a bold move, supported by more than 80 countries and civil society, which dominated debate in Belém – a push to set a course for a just and planned transition away from fossil fuels and deforestation. It was backed by climatologists, championed by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and largely orchestrated by Marina.The plan was cut from the final mutirão or joint decision – along with all mention of fossil fuels – after opposition from Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing states.But the idea of creating roadmaps to reduce dependency on oil, coal and gas will be taken forward by the Brazilian Cop presidency over the coming year. Marina insisted this was a great start. “The scientific community is celebrating that finally something has been put on the table to debate what really matters,” she said. “We recognise the outcome was not yet enough, but we must also recognise that what was put on the table is the response that we should have been working on for the past 30-odd years.”Each country should choose its own speed, she said. Oil and coal producers might need to move more slowly, but everyone needs to move in the same direction: “Being fair does not detract from the need to act. Being fair is just the basis on which we will take action.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThe power of extractivist economic interests to delay and reverse climate action has also been apparent in Brazil. Congress, which is dominated by agribusiness interests, overturned several of Lula’s vetoes of a controversial bill to dilute environmental licensing just days after Cop30.Given these forces, how could governments ever push forward progressive policies on the climate and nature? For Marina, it is necessary to go to a deeper level of values. Ultimately, she said, it is a matter of survival – not just of an individual or a species, but the very conditions in which life is possible.Compared with the huge efforts to preserve the economic system after the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, and the immense military spending under way in Europe, itwas incredible how little was going into the campaign to stabilise the climate and nature, she said. “Something is wrong. And it’s not just wrong with the dynamics of multilateralism. It’s wrong with the ethical values ​​that are guiding our decisions.“Recently we moved to confront the problem of Covid-19. Why are we only able to do this when the harm has already been done? Why don’t we show that ability when the problem has been detected and proven and already sending us its most malevolent ambassadors in the form of fires, heatwaves, ever-more-intense typhoons and hurricanes, loss of areas that were previously used to produce food and reduction in hydroelectric power generation capacity?“The visits of these sinister ambassadors should be enough for us to make preparations in a way the dinosaurs were unable to do. They didn’t know a large meteor was coming towards them. We know what is coming towards us, we know what needs to be done and we have the means to do it, yet we don’t take the necessary measures.”Marina is planning to do all she can to change that. The Brazilian government will push forward with a debate on roadmaps to halt deforestation and fossil fuels. It will participate in the first international conference on a just transition away from oil, coal and gas in Colombia next year.And it will try to lead by example, she says. “I am inspired by the fact we have reduced deforestation by 50% in the Amazon and agribusiness has grown by 17% in the last three years. This demonstrates it is possible to do this,” she said. “If we are not determined to achieve, we will apparently remain in the same place. And I say apparently because we are already heading towards an unthinkable place, where the very conditions of life are diminished.”

Activism
Climate
Forests

NYC Comptroller Push to Drop BlackRock Creates Test for Mamdani

By Ross Kerber(Reuters) -New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging city pension fund officials to rebid $42.3 billion managed by BlackRock...

(Reuters) -New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging city pension fund officials to rebid $42.3 billion managed by BlackRock over climate concerns, the first major move by a Democrat to counter pressure on financial companies from Republican allies of the fossil-fuel industry.Lander's term in office ends on December 31, but his recommendation, to be unveiled on Wednesday, will put Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in the hot seat when he takes office in about five weeks. Mamdani's appointees will take key positions that hold some sway over the pension boards that decide where to invest retirement funds for some 800,000 current and former city employees.In a November 25 memo to other pension fund trustees, seen by Reuters, Lander urged the funds to re-evaluate contracts with New York-based BlackRock, which is both the world's largest asset manager and the city's largest manager of retirement assets.Lander cited what he called "BlackRock's restrictive approach to engagement" with about 2,800 U.S. companies in which it owns more than 5% of shares.'ABDICATION OF FINANCIAL DUTY'Under pressure from the Trump administration, BlackRock in February said it would not use its discussions with executives to try to control companies. That ran contrary to the hopes of Lander and other environmentally minded investors, who wanted the investors to press executives on priorities like disclosing emissions.In an interview, Lander said the change was "an abdication of financial duty and renders them unable to meet our expectations for responsible investing."His recommendation must still be approved by pension boards that traditionally take cues from the comptroller's office. Representatives for Mamdani and for New York's incoming Comptroller, Mark Levine, did not respond to questions on Tuesday.Lander, a rival-turned-ally of Mamdani during the mayoral campaign, recommended that the pension plans keep BlackRock to manage non-U.S. equity index mandates and other products. Lander also recommended the three systems continue using State Street to manage $8 billion in equity index assets, and that they drop deals with Fidelity Investments and PanAgora, which he said also do not press companies sufficiently on environmental matters like decarbonization.A number of Republicans, some from fossil-fuel-producing states, have withdrawn money from BlackRock and other money managers, accusing them of basing investment decisions on social or environmental issues. New York City funds would be the first large Democratic or liberal-leaning asset owner to respond in kind.Environmental activists also want Lander and other public officials to take a harder line by backing more shareholder resolutions that push corporate boards to embrace policies that combat climate change. Speaking before Lander's decision was announced, Richard Brooks, climate finance program director for the advocacy group Stand.earth, said dropping major asset managers "will be one of the first tests of the climate credentials of the incoming mayor and comptroller. I hope they will recognize the importance and lead on getting these recommendations passed."(Reporting by Ross Kerber; Editing by Dawn Kopecki and Thomas Derpinghaus)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

Activism
Climate

What’s for Dinner, Mom?

The women who want to change the way America eats

Illustrations by Lucas BurtinSometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe’s in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. “Happy Mother’s Day!” she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food—what to eat and how to acquire it. Once a week I dashed clumsily through the store’s aisles, grabbing cans of beans and bags of apples while trying not to breathe, like a contestant on a postapocalyptic episode of Supermarket Sweep.Food then was interlaced with a sense of danger, the coronavirus potentially spreading (we worried, absurdly it turned out) even by way of reusable totes. Meanwhile, I knew from my relentless pregnancy apps that what I ate could have monumental implications for my future children’s eating habits. I was scared, and I felt powerless, and food seemed like one of the few things I could control, or at least try to.[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]What I didn’t yet know was that I was tapping into a deep-rooted tradition—or that, even as I panic-shopped, it was evolving. Mothers are our first food influencers, and for most of history, they have been our primary ones. The process starts even before we’re born, we now know: The tastes we’re exposed to in utero inform the preferences we’ll have much later in life. Culture, “at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother,” Michael Pollan wrote in his best-selling 2008 book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Up until the mid-20th century or so, we humans ate much as our parents did, and their parents before them, and so on: food cooked at home, from fresh ingredients, made predominantly by women.But a flurry of destabilizing changes followed the Second World War, which had accustomed Americans to mass-produced boxed meals via rations issued to the military. Technological developments on multiple fronts brought prepackaged meals, frozen food, industrialized agriculture, the microwave oven. Marketers were learning how to subliminally manipulate shoppers. Perhaps most significant of all was a shift taking place at home: Women were joining the workforce, happily ceding the task of dinner to Big Food.[Read: Avoiding ultra-processed foods is completely unrealistic]By the 2000s, the consequences of all these changes were becoming calamitous. In the 1960s, 13 percent of American adults and about 5 percent of children were obese; by 2005, the number had risen to 35 percent of adults and more than 15 percent of children. Food companies had long since mastered the art of engineering products to encourage mindless overconsumption with every lab-perfected crunch, crisp, and snap. They’d also figured out how to maximize their sway over U.S. food policy, donating to politicians and directly funding scientists. And they did so while decrying as intrusive any efforts to rein in the ruthless lobbying tactics laid bare by the nutritionist and advocate Marion Nestle in her 2002 book, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health.Nestle, whom The New York Times has called “one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement,” has spent the two decades since then trying to help Americans understand the extent to which the systems that feed them are implicated in sickening them for profit. Big Food, she was among the first to highlight, often bypasses parents to target kids directly using cartoon mascots and promotional collaborations with toy companies. (One of the prized possessions in her archive is an Oreo-themed Barbie doll.) Until recently, Nestle’s war against the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger looked unwinnable, as she observes in her new book, What to Eat Now: The Indispensable Guide to Good Food, How to Find It, and Why It Matters. An update of her 2006 field guide for supermarket shoppers, it demonstrates how lamentably little progress has been made since then.Supermarkets and supply chains are even more consolidated than they were 20 years ago, and corporations are more empowered, as Nestle writes, “to sell food products no matter what they do to or for your health.” Nearly three-quarters of American adults are now overweight or obese. An array of new products since 2006—oat milk and gluten-free pasta, more global ingredients (gochujang, sumac), plant-based “meats,” CBD-infused everything—has added variety, but also confusion. What counts as healthy? The influx certainly hasn’t halted a rise in consumption of ultra-processed foods (those heavily reliant on industrial ingredients and methods far removed from anything you’d cook at home). They now make up more than half of the average American adult’s diet and two-thirds of what children eat. The food system in America, Nestle explains, produces twice the amount of calories we actually need, while ravaging the environment we can’t survive without. (Industrialized farming results in water and air pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, and a loss of biodiversity.)But something perplexing has also been happening for half a decade or so now: Once again, patterns of influence over what we eat are being upended. Enabled by social media, certain mothers have been mobilizing, intent on reasserting their authority over mealtime. I wasn’t the only one obsessed with food during the pandemic; something about the confluence of fear, frustration, and way too much time online ignited an impassioned, women-led, influencer-stoked, food-centered movement. A lot of the focus on fresh, homemade meals that this missionary crew has been advocating for has felt familiar—and sensible—to parents like me, dealing with uneaten strips of bell pepper and endless requests for snacks heavy in high-fructose corn syrup. Much has also felt wholly reactionary, rooted not just in the dietary and agricultural traditions of bygone days, but also in old-style gender politics.The past few years have seen a glut of wellness content about the dangers of seed oils and chemicals, as well as nostalgic imagery disseminated over social media by women labeled “tradwives”: freshly baked bread emerging from a weathered Dutch oven in a lovely country kitchen, cows being milked in bucolic bliss, chubby-cheeked toddlers waddling through vegetable patches. And then “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan that began life as a winking provocation in a 2016 Sweetgreen ad, morphed into a more politicized mantra among an improbable coalition of personalities who also want milk unpasteurized, food dyes banned, vaccines eliminated—and who also seem to want women re-enshrined in their rightful place in the kitchen.“Who isn’t a food person these days?” the chef Ruby Tandoh asks in her new essay collection, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, surveying a culture in which everybody seems to be “talking about almost nothing else.” What’s striking is that these days, most of us recognize that America’s diet needs an intervention that goes beyond talk—and medication: GLP-1 drugs, however remarkable their effects may be, can’t feed kids. Yet the dramatic showdown between profit-greedy Big Food and proselytizing Big Family is eclipsing a middle ground of parenting pragmatists. Contradictory nutrition advice online drowns out a basic consensus: Experts overwhelmingly agree that a healthy diet still aligns with the same boring guidelines we grew up hearing—eat your fruits and vegetables, avoid ultra-processed (formerly “junk”) foods, limit sugar. How has the discussion become so polarized? And what might it take to actually fix dinner?We’ve seen politicized food fights before. In the mid-2000s, a harried mother in Chicago, navigating a fast-track, dual-career schedule with her partner, began to rely on quick fixes when feeding her kids: takeout, ready meals, prepackaged snacks. One day, at a routine doctor appointment, she learned that both of her daughters were on the path to becoming overweight, a warning that spurred her to overhaul the way her family was eating. “I was grateful for the time and the effort that I saved with these kinds of products,” Michelle Obama told a gathering of food-business executives in 2010, after she became first lady of the United States. “But I was also completely unaware that all that extra convenience sometimes made it just a little too easy for me to eat too much, for my kids to eat too much, and to eat too often.” She was unprepared, too, for the partisan ruckus that was about to begin.The chef, advocate, and policy adviser Sam Kass recounts this story in his wide-ranging and pragmatic new book about America’s food failings, The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Coming Food Crisis. Kass was just a few years out of college when he was hired by Obama in 2007 to help improve what and how her family ate at home. He then moved to Washington to work with the first lady on expanding her healthy-eating revolution from a personal goal into a political project. At the time, Kass notes, he’d been radicalized by Pollan and Nestle, who were giving shape to an intellectual, leftish, Berkeley-centric movement advocating for sustainable food production and more health-oriented food policies: “I shopped at farmers markets. I ate organic. My beef was grass fed. I thought that everyone should eat that way.” He arrived in the capital, he writes, “ready to decisively take on Big Ag—until reality reared its ugly head.”In February 2010, Obama announced her first major initiative as first lady: Let’s Move, a public-health campaign aimed at lowering childhood-obesity rates in the U.S. Improving the nutritional quality of school meals nationwide was a centerpiece; for children living in poverty, those breakfasts and lunches could be their main source of sustenance. Conservatives instantly caught the scent of a culture war. Figures such as Sarah Palin and Fox News’s Glenn Beck regularly fulminated against nanny statism and accused the Obamas of trying to overrule the sacred rights of American parents.Some of the backlash was bipartisan. When Kass tried to eliminate a policy that offered White House employees free Coke—after all, the administration was trying to get the nation to drink less of it—Michelle Obama’s deputy chief of staff responded, “Over my dead body.” And when Kass and the first lady spearheaded a national campaign to get people to drink more water, they were criticized by some of their public-health allies—Nestle among them—for not considering the environmental impact of plastic bottles.The uproar, in retrospect, is illuminating. Food is deeply personal. Our natural response to being told what to eat is defensive: We tend to be attached to the foods we associate with family, comfort, and care. Obama had presumed that the straightforward changes that had worked for her family might benefit the wider public—and to her credit, she aimed to provide healthier meals for all American children, through broad institutional reform. Kass cites a study showing that the odds of poor children developing obesity would have been about 50 percent higher without the school-meal interventions. Crucially, though, childhood obesity was soon rising again. And Let’s Move, rather than surging in popularity, was cast as elitist coercion, and Obama as the mean mommy forcing America to finish its vegetables.[Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes]In hindsight, Kass concludes, almost nothing Let’s Move could have suggested would have pleased conservatives at the time. But he also infers that the biggest failure of Let’s Move was one of communication. If you come across as instructing people on what to eat or, especially, what not to eat, you’re more likely to prompt a raised middle finger than compliance. Slide gracefully into people’s subconscious by enlisting the power of suggestion—visually presenting healthier products in a way that elicits an emotional response, say, or evokes a sense of home or prosperity—and you can help an idea take hold. There’s a reason the MAHA movement caught fire as social-media use escalated. “Marketers will tell you this,” Kass writes: “When you are trying to shift culture, seek out the influencers.” Illustration by Lucas Burtin One thing that Big Food, and now MAHA moms, understands is that what we see fundamentally affects our attitudes about what we eat. In 2010, the same year that the Obamas were hustling to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, two software engineers debuted a photo-sharing app that they named Instagram, unwittingly ushering in a new hyper-visual food era of “serial virality,” as Tandoh puts it. Three years later, when the French pastry chef Dominique Ansel debuted the cronut (a hybrid of French patisserie and American deep fat frying), Instagram had 100 million users, many of whom responded to photos of his concoction with ravenous abandon. “People just shared the cronut, a platonic torus of golden dough with a sugar-salt-fat ratio to please the gods,” Tandoh writes. “Instead of spreading person to person through word of mouth, it spread exponentially, like a contagion.”The cronut wasn’t remotely healthy, but it was totemic of food trends in the 2010s, as community bonding through photo sharing took off. While the Affordable Care Act fueled attacks on Democrats as the party of Big Health Care, an alternative subculture was gaining momentum. In September 2008, the Oscar-winning actor Gwyneth Paltrow launched Goop, a newsletter of recipes and recommendations intended to foster—and eventually monetize—a more intimate relationship with her fans.Paltrow, who had lost her father to cancer, was now the mother of two young children, and believed passionately in the connection between food and health. “I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid the growth of tumors,” she told an Italian newspaper, drawing fierce pushback from doctors and dieticians—but not from her audience. Paltrow seemed to intuit the mood of many women in the aftermath of the Great Recession: their concerns, their exhaustion, their eagerness for an escape from their own cramped kitchens offered by images of delightfully wholesome domesticity. Goop gave an air of both glamour and accessibility to the kind of alternative lifestyle that had previously existed only on the crunchy fringes.[Read: The baffling rise of Goop]Since Goop’s debut, the wellness market has ballooned and is now worth more than $6 trillion, with the U.S. making up about a third of that figure. Paltrow’s association of food with health helped instill in people’s minds a connection between what they ate and how they felt. “I would rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” she told an interviewer in 2011. And mothers were especially vulnerable to this messaging. We worry endlessly; we (traditionally) manage doctor appointments and household budgets, to the tune of an estimated $2 trillion a year in America.Over the course of the 2010s, even as the Alice Waters–inspired farm-to-table cause of the 1980s was enjoying a boost from Pollan and company, a different cottage industry of food and wellness advocates gained influence online. It tapped into valid concerns about health in America, while also hyping fearful ideas about a contaminated state of modernity (ridden with parasites, carcinogens, and GMOs, as well as vaccines and prescription drugs). Zen Honeycutt, a pro-organic-farming and anti-vaccine activist—now one of many mom acolytes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—founded the pressure group Moms Across America in 2012. “We, the mothers who buy 85% of the food and we women who make 90% of household purchasing decisions, have the power to shift the marketplace and protect our people and the planet,” the group’s website proclaims.In 2020, amid the anxiety and embattled politics of the pandemic, the 21st century’s wellness fads, paranoid tendencies, and regressive gender dynamics consolidated. The horseshoe gap between leftist naturopaths and libertarian farmsteaders began to close, enabled by health influencers, podcasters, and the cheap thrill of algorithmic engagement. Today, the people most likely to be advocating online for slow food are homesteaders and tradwives, canny content creators who post reels of themselves churning butter and pulling dirt-dusted produce out of the soil.Yet you don’t have to be a homesteader to be anxious about the food systems and environments that your children grow up in. Many of us parents have been buying organic and baking from scratch and trying to get creamed spinach off upholstery since our kids were born. We give them whisks and make cooking time part of family time, and do our best to serve them fresh, colorful meals. Though we may rarely live up to Waters’s edict about lovely food preparation and presentation—“Beauty is a language of care,” as she writes in her new book, A School Lunch Revolution—there’s always the joy of messy participation.What few of us have is the tradwife’s luxury of retreating to the Instagrammed home, of opting out of an external reality where food conglomerates go unchecked and food deserts unchanged. “Don’t overcomplicate it,” the homesteader known online as Greenview Farms posted this summer, in text overlaying a video of a sunset. “Just marry your best friend, have his babies, spend your days on the land, plant a garden, get a few chickens and a cow, and live a simple life.” (This surfaced in my feed, shared approvingly by a distant relative, a woman who—for the record—works in finance.)[Read: The wellness women are on the march]If you overlook the very real public-health ramifications of vaccine hesitancy and raw milk, the rise of the MAHA movement might offer some promise. Trump “sounds just like me when he talks!” Marion Nestle exclaimed back in February, laughing at the absurdity of a hard-core McDonald’s eater railing against “the industrial food complex.” RFK Jr. and his merry band of mothers have, if nothing else, made the importance of good food in encouraging good health more prominent in our culture, and more bipartisan.But unlike, say, Michelle Obama, MAHA proselytizers simply want moms to take on more responsibility, turning what should be a multifaceted effort into an atomized, individualistic one. The onus isn’t on the administration to regulate food companies or restrict marketing to children. It is on mothers to obsess over what their families are eating.[Olga Khazan: Doomed to be a tradwife]The irony is that plenty of parents who don’t dream of returning to the land are already on board for back-to-basics meals, made as manageable as possible. The Instagram account for Feeding Littles, which gives guidance on how to raise “adventurous, intuitive eaters,” has 1.9 million followers. The most popular Substack newsletter under the category of food and drink is titled “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking”; it dishes out quick, practical recipes oriented toward exhausted parents and has more than half a million subscribers. We care not just because we’re fixated on health, or on our own homes. We’re also reminding ourselves, and showing our kids, that eating is more than a solo need; it’s a communal enterprise, one that thrives on dealing as carefully and fairly with food resources as we can. “You eat. Willingly or not you participate in the environment of food choice,” Nestle writes toward the end of her new book. “The choices you make about food are as much about the kind of world you want to live in as they are about what to have for lunch.”This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “What’s for Dinner, Mom?”

Activism
Agriculture
Business

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