Welcome to the week.
I hope everyone on the east coast is staying safe and weathering these storms. Nothing puts the rest of the news in context quite like being reminded that the planet isn’t waiting around for us to sort ourselves out.
Let’s get to it.
This Week
And more.
Have a great week,
— Willow
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I often come across important stories that don't have an obvious home in the newsletter as it is structured now, but do fit within our scope of coverage. If we added new sections to the newsletter, what should they cover?
Last week, we asked: Without looking it up, do you believe inequality in the US is increasing or decreasing?
You said:
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Increasing, by a lot (70%)
“I think if you removed outliers on the very upper end (billionaires) inequality would be improving, but that's not really the point is it. Billionaires and multi-billionaires absorbing a disproportional amount of wealth is in fact the very definition of inequality.”
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Increasing, marginally (16%)
“I see conservatism wanting women to embrace the manosphere and young men pushing this. I think it will have a large effect in the future and a minor effect now.”
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Holding (3%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Decreasing, little by little (6%)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Decreasing more than we talk about (5%)
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⚡️ Climate change:
Trump is quietly unfreezing renewable energy permits, possibly because he actually wants the power, possibly because his lawyers told him to, and possibly because his deputy chief of staff’s wife is really into solar now (HEATMAP)
The war in Iran is a Rorschach test for the energy transition, with fossil fuel producers seeing proof they need to drill more, importers see proof they need to go electric faster, and everyone is closely watching the Strait of Hormuz hoping neither side blinks first on energy infrastructure (Bloomberg)
🌍 China just released its 5-year plan and the CliffsNotes are that it’s going full send on AI, semiconductors, and clean energy infrastructure, while also walking back coal reduction language (CTVC)
Climate disasters aren’t just destroying Black homes, but are devastating Black wealth, and then the insurance industry is coming in to finish the job (Capital B News)
The Senate just passed a massive bipartisan housing bill that has some climate wins, with grants for weatherization, and disaster recovery infrastructure, but also guts some key environmental protections and the provision to build more housing near transit (HEATMAP)
🦠 Health & Bio:
GLP-1 drugs could be a gamechanger for addiction, with a recent study finding people on GLP-1s were significantly less likely to develop addictions, and for those already struggling, the drugs were linked to a 50% reduction in risk of dying from substance abuse (Nature)
States with abortion bans saw rents drop and vacancies rise as people (especially renters) vote with their feet (The 19th)
A new immunotherapy drug shrank tumors in men with advanced prostate cancer, a disease previously thought to be resistant to immunotherapy (The Guardian)
🌎 India just launched the world’s largest free HPV vaccination drive, offering annual shots to 12 million teenage girls, which is massive as one in four cervical cancer cases globally occurs in India (The Telegraph)
AI-assisted mammograms could double as heart disease screening, particularly for women under 50 who are often overlooked for cardiovascular risk (The Washington Post)
💦 Food & Water:
🌏 Indigenous communities downstream from Canada’s oil sands have been dying of rare cancers at rates up to 13 times the expected average, and now the government is considering letting companies release their toxic wastewater directly into the river (The New York Times)
The new House Farm Bill passed committee but farm groups say it’s a missed opportunity as it cuts conservation funding, strips solar incentives, shields pesticide companies, and leaves SNAP cuts untouched (Civil Eats)
Nearly 40% of California’s conventionally grown produce contains PFAS “forever chemicals” from pesticides, and the industry is doubling down on their use (LA Times)
🌏 Western AI models are missing the mark for farmers in the Global South, with one tool trained on North American forests missing more than half the trees in India (Rest of World)
As wildfires and extreme weather create surging demand for native plants to restore damaged ecosystems, a new Midwest coalition discovered over 500 native species are effectively unavailable for restoration (Grist)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
From your Ring doorbell to Flock’s license plate readers to Palantir’s ICE raid-targeting tool, the infrastructure to surveil nearly every American is already in place, and accelerating (404 Media)
Scary headlines about AI taking your job are based on little more than vibes, as predictions range from 5% to 47% of jobs affected because they’re all just educated guesses, and the actual data so far shows no widespread job loss (Not-Ship)
🌏 The Kenyan workers who train, moderate, and power AI tools for the world’s biggest tech companies are organizing for labor rights after years of working for a few dollars a day while their employers achieve trillion-dollar valuations (404 Media)
Instagram is killing end-to-end encryption for DMs in May, meaning Meta will be able to read our private messages, and given the timing, it’s likely tied to pressure to scan for illegal content (Android Police)
Researchers used basic jailbreaking tricks to get Utah’s AI prescription bot to triple an Oxycontin dose, recommend meth as a treatment, and spread vaccine conspiracy theories (Axios)
🌎 = Global news
Last week’s most popular Action Step was reading this explainer on how gender inequality is deeply connected to climate change.
🌏 Donate to CAMFED to help them reach their goal of educating 5 million girls by 2030.
🌏 Volunteer with Barefoot College to ensure that every woman and girl has access to vocational and educational opportunities that build community resilience.
🌎 Get educated about how your school can join the Green Schools Alliance, and use their tools and resources to create a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable learning environment.
Be heard about expanding access to Pre-K in North Carolina by calling your reps to support the Child Promise Act.
🌏 Invest in tech-driven social enterprises that scale solutions to poverty and climate change with Roots of Impact.
🌎 = Global Action Step
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
Public Health In A Post-Evidence World
Just because we're done caring about an outbreak doesn't mean the outbreak is done with us.
Over the last year, we have watched something unsettling happen in plain sight. The quiet, active dismantling of the systems built to catch outbreaks early, coordinate a response, and keep hospitals and communities from getting overwhelmed.
Websites have been scrubbed, teams have been hollowed out. Early warning signals have gone silent, and at the exact same time, diseases that many of us haven't thought about since childhood, like measles, are being let back into the present, which really leaves a lot of people with the same question, said a little differently than usual.
If the safety net is being shredded, what do we do now?
My returning guest today is Dr. Nahid Bhadelia.
Dr. Bhadelia is the Founding Director of the BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a board-certified infectious diseases physician, and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.
She served as the senior policy advisor for Global COVID-19 Response on the White House COVID-19 response team in 2022-2023, where she coordinated the US global vaccine donation programs and helped lead Project Next Gen, a $5 billion effort to develop next-generation vaccines and treatments for a pandemic prone coronaviruses.
Dr. Bhadelia also served as interim testing coordinator for the White House Impacts Response Team, and she's the founding director and co-founder of BEACON, an open-source outbreak surveillance program.
Today, we're gonna try to make sense of what's being dismantled, what threats don't wait for politics to catch up, what's starting to fill the gaps and most importantly, what you can do right now to protect yourself, your family, and to help rebuild the public health infrastructure we all rely on whether we have to think about it or not.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
How ancient myths shape modern AI
In this issue of The Science of Fiction, Maddie Stone interviews Nina Beguš, a researcher and lecturer at UC Berkeley, about how fictional narratives shape AI, and how we can pull our collective imaginations out of the sexy/killer robot trope by writing better stories.
Not All Crows Think Alike (And That’s The Point)
In this issue of Life Finds A Way, writer Kavin Senapathy explores how we think about neurodiversity when we take a step back and consider cognitive diversity in other species.
At a time when deficit-based thinking about autism and neurodivergence is the norm, and where systems are designed for the neurotypical, understanding neurodiversity as apart of biodiversity reframes the whole conversation. The question isn’t “what’s wrong with different ways of thinking?”, it’s “why would any population evolve to think identically?”
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