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Vox
02-08-2025
- Climate
- Vox
The surprising reason fewer people are dying from extreme weather
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Torrential rain soaking northern China triggered a deadly landslide, burst riverbanks, and washed away cars on July 28, 2025, with thousands of people forced to evacuate the days-long deluge. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images From the wildfires that torched Los Angeles in January to the record-setting heat waves that cooked much of Europe in June, the first half of 2025 has been marked by what now seems like a new normal of ever more frequent extreme weather. It's easy to feel that we live in a constant stream of weather disasters, with one ending only so another can begin, thanks largely to the amplifying effects of climate change. Yet behind the catastrophic headlines is a much more positive story. For all of the floods and the fires and the storms and the cyclones, it turns out that globally, fewer people died from the direct effects of extreme weather globally through the first half of 2025 than any six-month period since reliable records began being kept decades ago. About 2,200 people worldwide died in storms, floods, heat waves and other 'weather‐climate' disasters in the first six months of the year, according to the risk consultancy company Aon's midyear catastrophe report. They tallied 7,700 natural-hazard deaths overall, but if you take out the roughly 5,500 people who died in a single non-weather geological event — a major earthquake in Myanmar in March — you're left with the smallest January-to-June weather death toll since we began keeping records. (Hat tip to Roger Pielke Jr., whose Substack post was where I first saw these figures.) All of which raises two questions: How have we managed this? And will this trend continue even in an ever-warmer world? The past was deadly I've been writing this newsletter for a few months now, and if I were to boil down its message into one phrase, it'd be this: Wow, the past was much worse than you think. That's certainly the case for deadly natural disasters and extreme weather. As you can see from the chart above, the first half of the 20th century regularly had years when the death rate from natural disasters was as high as 50 deaths per 100,000 people, and sometimes far higher. (In 2024, it was just 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people.) But annualized death rates hide just how bloody some of these events were. In 1931, massive flooding in China's Yangtze and Yellow River killed perhaps 4 million people due to drowning, disease, and starvation. In 1970, a huge cyclone in Bangladesh killed 500,000 people, and perhaps far more. An earthquake that hit Tokyo in 1923 killed at least 143,000 people. Here in the US, a hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1900 killed as many as 12,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster in US history. Until fairly recently, the Earth was a merciless killer. The 21st century has still been marked by the occasional mega-death toll disaster — though most of them have been earthquake related rather than weather-driven — but they've become far rarer. The frequency of storms and floods hasn't abated. The difference is our ability to protect ourselves. It's the money There's a paradox in our improving response to natural disasters: Even as the deaths from extreme weather and other catastrophes have been falling, the cost of those events has been rising. The same Aon report that contained the good news about falling deaths also tallied up an estimated $162 billion in economic losses from global natural disasters — some $20 billion above the 21st century average. These two trends are deeply connected. The single biggest factor behind the sharp increase in the economic costs of extreme weather is the simple fact that the world keeps getting richer and richer. That means more and more expensive property is at risk every time a hurricane spins up in the Atlantic or a flash flood swamps a major city. Yet at the same time, a richer society is one that can invest in warning systems and infrastructure adaptations that can and do vastly reduce the death toll from a disaster. Property in the path of a storm can't move — but people, if they're warned in time, can. Take the terrible Los Angeles wildfires. The total economic impact from the fires may be as high as $131 billion, which would make it one of the costliest disasters in US history. That shouldn't be surprising: The fires ripped through some of the most valuable real estate in the country. The death toll, by contrast, was 30 people. That makes it the second-deadliest wildfire in California history, but it still had a far lower human toll than wildfires from a hundred years ago or more, which killed hundreds and even thousands of people. It's a basic rule of disasters: A richer society has more to lose in property, but it also has the wealth to protect its people. And property, unlike people, can be restored. Bending toward safety From early warning text chains in Mozambique to cyclone shelters in Bangladesh to heat action plans in India, even some of the poorest countries in the world have built warning and response systems that can blunt the death toll of the worst extreme weather. The question for the rest of the decade is whether we can protect livelihoods as well as lives. A new UN report estimates that when the full effects are counted, disasters cost the world over $2.3 trillion every year. We are getting brilliantly good at saving people; we have not yet figured out how to save their homes, crops and jobs. That will require the hard, unglamorous work of preparing for disasters before they happen. It's an investment that should pay off — that same UN report calculates that every dollar spent on risk reduction leads to at least four dollars in avoided losses. Extreme weather and natural disasters have always been with us and always will be, and climate change will mostly make them worse. But we shouldn't lose sight of one of humanity's greatest triumphs: We are learning, year by year, how not to die when the planet turns against us. The arc of human ingenuity still bends toward safety. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
02-08-2025
- Science
- Vox
How the fight over what it means to be human has dramatically changed
Humans are the dominant species on a dying planet, and we're still clinging to the idea that we can think our way out, invent our way out, maybe even upload our way out. But what if the solution isn't more mastery or more control? What if the only way to survive is to become something else entirely? Mark C. Taylor is a philosopher, a cultural critic, and the author of After the Human. It's a sweeping, sometimes dizzying book, one that moves from Hegel to quantum physics to the ethics of soil and fungi. It's packed with hand-drawn diagrams and photos of dirt and discussions of philosophy and the history of technology and day-to-day dilemmas like having too many books for your shelves. I invited Taylor onto The Gray Area to talk about how all this coalesces into a uniquely ambitious attempt to explain what it is to be human, and why we need a new story, a new self, and, really, a whole new way of thinking and being in the world. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. At the very beginning of this book, you write, 'How would your understanding of the meaning of your life change if you knew that next Friday at precisely 12 o'clock midnight, the human race would become extinct?' Why do you want us thinking about total extinction next Friday? Because I think it's a realistic possibility. The real urgency of this book comes out of my concern about climate change, because there's absolutely no doubt that we are facing catastrophic effects in the very near future, and there's a complete blindness or unwillingness to confront the actuality of that problem and to address what needs to be done to dodge it if we can. But it's not just that. It's also the intersection of new technologies and the ways those new technologies have transformed the social, economic, and political systems. And they're all interrelated. The problem isn't just that people are not connecting the dots; people do not know the dots that need to be connected. What do you think it means to be 'human'? Part of what distinguishes the human is that we can ask the question of what it means to be human. That's a level of self-consciousness and self-reflectivity that is important and in some ways distinctive of the human. And you think the problem is that we've come to think of human consciousness as something special, almost separate from nature? Correct. The philosophical foundation to the Anthropocene [the era in which humans have been the dominant influence on the planet] begins with modern philosophy, which begins with Descartes: 'I think, therefore I am.' And what Descartes does is to identify being a human with thinking, and [identifying] everything else as a machine, including the human body. From that point on, there's always this effort to distinguish the human from the non-human. Descartes' identification of the human in terms of cognition becomes the heart of anthropocentrism [the idea that humans are at the center of things], and anthropocentrism is the basis of this Anthropocene. How does that lead us to this situation where we are exploiting nature and wrecking our environment? We view the individual as what is most concrete and most real, and we see groups as formed of individuals. That's wrong because there is no such thing as an isolated individual. Every individual is what it is by virtue of its interrelationship to other individuals and entities. Why is the illusion that we are disconnected and separate so powerful? If you come back to the climate, we're parasites on the earth. It's a parasite-host relationship, and we are in the process of destroying the host upon which we depend. You cut down all the trees in order to serve the economy and we die. It's that simple. So in that sense, the interrelationship is confirmed. When the current politicians pull out of all climate accords, reinforce fossil fuel, they're destroying the planet without which we can't live. So if that's the problem, what is the answer? What kind of vision of the self do we actually need, and what are the ideas that are going to get us there? I think ideas will help us get out of it. Ideas matter. Another way to think about what Descartes does is that he takes mind out of nature, makes everything but the human mind a machine. So part of what you have to do is put mind back into nature. And to do that, you need an expanded notion of mind and of consciousness. You have to rethink what we mean by knowledge, what we mean by cognition, what we mean by intelligence and the like. Part of what I've tried to do is try to understand quantum mechanics in terms of relationality and information processing. There's a very important theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, who understands through this notion of relationality or relativity. Then you begin to see the way in which everything is interconnected. And [when] you look at the biological level, [you see that] biological systems are information processing systems. I have diabetes, and that's one of the ways in which I began to understand this. When you understand how autoimmune disease works, you see that it's a coding problem and a misreading problem. One way to understand the mess we're in now is as autoimmune disease, because what autoimmunity involves is the body turning on the body or the body politic turning on itself and destroying itself in certain ways, because it misreads itself. And you can trace this notion of information processing all the way through the physical, biological, the ecological, and try to understand ecological systems as information processing systems. And then extend that all the way up eventually into plant and animal cognition and finally, technology and artificial intelligence. What does it actually mean to think of the mind as something that extends beyond the individual human? I use the images of webs or networks. Think of yourself as a node within an ever-expanding and changing network. That is: things are events, everything's a process, everything's in motion. And what I am constantly becoming is a function not only of what I have been and what I anticipate, but of my relationships to others at this particular moment and ultimately the whole entire web. Everything is co-dependent and co-emergent. Everything is interconnected. And you also need an expanded notion of the mind to understand that there are alternative intelligences. For example, there's some really interesting scientific work being done on plant communication. I mean, Richard Powers's Overstory is an example of that. And there has to be some kind of a recognition of this vital interrelationality or 99.9 percent of the species go extinct. We can go extinct as well. For me, the relationship between thought and action isn't always so neat, right? It is easy to say that we live in this world of interdependence and co-dependence. But then I'll get up and I'll have my coffee and then I moonwalk into a world, into a culture, almost every part of which is designed to reinforce the illusion that I am an ego, that I am separated. And so, you can read the books, you can recite the ideas, you can even believe them. But what does it really take to move from theory to practice, or from belief to behavior? I want to say two things. One is that thinking is a form of action in certain ways. But your point is well taken. And I guess one of the ideas I wish I could get more people to understand is positive feedback. Positive feedback isn't getting good reviews on your book, your podcasts, or your classes. Positive feedback is related to these complex systems where change accelerates. There's a pile of sand, add grain after grain — you know there's going to be an avalanche, but you don't know when it's going to occur. That's the bind we're in now, not just with respect to climate, but with respect to these systems that work the same way. Financial bubbles and climate change work the same way. So my problem is, how do you convey the urgency of the situation without making the situation hopeless? How do you use these ideas then to enact the kinds of changes that need to be made? But until you understand the nature of the problem, you don't see the urgency with it all. I'm trying to imagine myself on the other side as an audience member listening and wondering, Okay, now what? What do you want me to do? The most political, if you will, form of action that I took based on these ideas was that I started a company with a big New York investment banker by the name of Herbert Allen in 1998 called Global Education Network. I started webcasting my classes in 1996 when nobody was doing it. In 1992, I taught a course using teleconferencing with Helsinki. And at that time, I thought that the world would be a better place if everybody could sit down around the table and talk about Hegel or Nietzsche. We tried, and the man I did this with, he put $27 million into that effort, and we failed. I had a vision, and it was all based upon this idea of networks, to make education more widely available through these technologies. Now, what I didn't understand, and I don't think many of us did, was that these technologies that connect also separate. But there was an example of trying to put the ideas into action in a way that would bring us together in certain ways. Do you worry that AI might change our understanding of humanity in even worse ways? That we will just gradually come to think of ourselves more and more as machine-like? Yeah. I mean, look, this man, Herbert Allen, that I mentioned. Not many people have heard about him, but he is my neighbor here in Williamstown. He has a conference in Sun Valley that brings together the people running the world — technology, media, entertainment, sports — for five days. And we were there before [Jeff] Bezos was Bezos and all of that. [Bill] Gates, Warren Buffett — these are really smart guys, but they have a very narrow vision of the world. Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and these people, they have a vision. And I think that what they understand is that whoever controls AI runs the world. What is happening now is creating a condition of algorithmic authoritarianism. We are being programmed. You mentioned Thiel. Thiel was just on Ross Douthat's New York Times podcast. There was one point at which Ross just asked him straight up, 'Do you think the human race should continue?' And he treats it like a gotcha question. He pauses for a while before he can muster an answer to what should be the mother of all 'yes or no' questions. But there is this kind of techno-salvation, techno-utopianism, anti-humanism. You talk about this a lot in the book, this idea that we're going to build these tools and we're going to upload our minds and we're going to escape all the problems that come with being mortal meatbags on this planet. Does that just feel like an old story in a new disguise to you? It is. It's what I call techno-gnosticism, right? Andreessen is a really important player in this. There's an absolute view of the future that these guys have. And Andreessen has a book; the first line of the book is something like 'all serious philosophies are a meditation on death.' For these guys — and again, they are guys — death is an engineering problem. They really believe in anti-aging stuff and they do believe that the human life cycle can be expanded considerably if not infinitely. If you go back to the early years of Christianity, gnosticism was one of its greatest competitors. The word gnosis means knowledge. And gnosticism was a dualistic understanding of being — that the world was completely evil, and the whole point was to get out of this world, and the body was divided between mind and soul. Get the mind out of the water. There were concentric spheres and each sphere had a password, had gnosis, took a certain kind of code to get you out of it, and you gradually became more and more detached from the world. That's what this Mars exploration is about. Gnosis is the code that is going to get us to Mars to populate the universe, because what's going to happen? They're convinced this world's going to go to hell. I mean, it's a complete eschatology. Religion is most interesting where it's least obvious. As you said, it's an old story in a new version. There's this escapism, which is a nihilism. The real is always elsewhere. There's a profound nihilism. The last words of After the Human are amor mundi: love of world. I don't believe there's an afterlife. I always tell my students, I do believe in ghosts; Hegel and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are my ghosts. That's the way we live on, in the lives of others. If individualism is an illusion, and we are part of this web of life, does death mean something different than what we normally think it means? It's the end of a certain kind of subjectivity, but is it more transformation than the end? Just as I was beginning to write the section on consciousness or plant and animal consciousness, my younger brother fell into a coma for three weeks and died. And here I am trying to figure out mind-body problems, consciousness problems. And the first time I entered that hospital room was when he was in this comatose state, and this is the night before I taught my last class in 50 years. He was hooked up to more machines than you can imagine. And I mean, you see the fragility of life. With my brother, you adjust the dial to fix one thing and another thing gets out of whack. [The] first time I walked into that room, he is in his comatose state and his heartbeat increases. What is life? How do you define death? Where is that line? The more interconnected we are, the more fragile everything becomes. My training is in religion. I've written many, many books on theology. I'm always hesitant to invoke the notion of God. But that doesn't have to be some kind of mushy stuff. It's all these complexly interrelated particles and bits. We are events. To bring us back to that thought experiment about imagining the end next week: Do you think we have created a form of life in which it's just too easy to not think about death and therefore too easy to take life for granted? That's fair. I always say I died without dying. I had a biopsy for cancer and went into septic shock. I've been there. And the strange thing for me was that, it was a strange and liberating experience. Sometimes the only way to hold on is to let go. And how does one let go? Learning to let go is one of the hardest lessons of life. But when you're able to do it, life comes back to you differently. Kierkegaard talks about two moments of infinite resignation: the withdrawal, and then the movement, what he calls faith, which is living in the world as a gift. We're not given tomorrow. We're not given this afternoon. You may die this afternoon, as might I. I taught a class at noon, and I taught [Jacques] Derrida's Gift of Death, which he wrote at my urging. And at 7 o'clock that night, I was near dead. That's how fast it happens and how fragile it is. If you could convey the sense of the fragility and the beauty of this world, what more do you want? What more do you want? It's a bit of a ridiculous question, but are you hopeful that we can course-correct? I have to be. I've been jotting down aphorisms, I'm up to about 500. And one of them that I like the best is, 'Hope is an act of defiance.' We have to hope. What are you defying? I'm defying the way the world is heading. I'm defying what is happening not only in this country, but throughout the world. It's suicide. I do think that intelligence and even wisdom involves this ability to see connections where others don't see it. To see these interrelationships, I mean, you can have information without knowledge, you can have knowledge without intelligence and in some instances you can have intelligence without wisdom. There's a hierarchy. You go from cognition to consciousness. You can have knowledge, intelligence. We need to define what all those are. And then you're going to have wisdom. And wisdom is in some sense, I think, trying to understand how this all fits together and how we are an integral — and that's the word — an integral member of this web. And that web is constantly moving. And there will be new forms of life that evolve, right? I don't think human life will go away. But it's also very possible that we will bring about our own extinction. And when I posed that question about the world ending next Friday, it was to try to convey the sense of the certainty of death. And for me, that experience of dying without dying liberated me. It makes life more precious in certain ways because of its fragility. So maybe the real question isn't what would we do if the end came next Friday? Maybe it's what would we become if we lived like that were true? That's a better way of putting it.
Vox
26-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Four stories that are more important than the Epstein Files
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. It's not too much to say that the business of America has all but halted because of a years-old criminal the past couple of weeks, one story has overshadowed every other, no matter how important they might be: Jeffrey Epstein. Unless you've been taking your summer vacation on Mars, you probably know the contours of the story. (And if you don't, my Vox colleague Andrew Prokop wrote a useful summary this week.) But what matters here isn't so much the details as it is the sheer, unrelenting attention it has commanded. Between July 6, before the story really began to blow up, and July 13, online searches on the topic increased by 1,900 percent, according to a Newsweek analysis. A CNN analyst noted that over roughly the same time scale, Epstein was Googled 2.5 times more than Grok — this during the AI model's, uh, newsworthy launch — and 1.4 times more than tariffs. The furor over the case has led to Congress essentially shutting down early for the summer, a Republican effort to evade Democrats' sudden and politically convenient demands for transparency. It's not too much to say that the business of America has all but halted because of a years-old criminal case. I'm not saying the Epstein case is totally without importance. The crime was horrific, the investigation details murky, and the political ramifications if the case shakes the president's connection to his political base are obviously meaningful. (And if you want to read about any of that, well, good news — you have no shortage of sources.) But there is virtually no way we'll look back in 20 years and think that the relitigation of the Epstein case was clearly the most important thing happening in the world in July 2025. Related Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US Attention is a finite resource, and you are where your attention is. A story like Epstein is analogous to a mindless, out-of-control fire consuming all the oxygen in a burning house. So I thought I'd put together a list of four stories happening right now that matter far more for the country and the world than the contents of the Epstein Files. And fair warning — they're not all good news stories, but they absolutely are worth your attention. 1) America's dangerous debt spiral Through the first nine months of the 2025 fiscal year, which goes up to this June, the United States spent $749 billion on interest on the national debt, more than it spent on anything other than Social Security. Not the debt itself — just the interest. And our debt problem is accelerating: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), President Donald Trump's recently passed budget bill will add $3.4 trillion to the national balance sheet over the next decade. You might say: So what? Budget scolds have been warning about the debt since at least the 1980s, and the most dire predictions have yet to come true. But as the economist Herbert Simon once warned, referring specifically to unsustainable economic policies: 'If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.' While 'there's no magic number at which the debt load becomes a full-on crisis,' as my colleague Dylan Matthews wrote last year, just about everything that is happening now — including persistently high interest rates, which make debt that much more painful, as anyone with a recent mortgage knows — indicates that crisis point is on its way. And what will happen then? The CBO warns that unless budget patterns shift dramatically, the country will face an unpalatable mix of massive tax hikes, severe cuts to essential services, even default. And our debt problem intersects catastrophically with some of America's other generational challenges, like the fertility and aging crisis (see No. 3) and the country's ability to defend itself (No. 4). 2) A global hunger crisis I've written before about the long-term improvements in child mortality and extreme poverty. Those trends are real, and they represent some of the best reasons to feel optimistic about the world. But positive long-term trends can mask periods of setback. When it comes to childhood hunger, the world is in danger of falling back. A new UNICEF report shows that after more than two decades of consistent progress, child stunting — early-life malnutrition that can lead to less growth and lifelong health problems — appears to be rising again. And while the humanitarian catastrophe that is Gaza at least has the world's attention, if not enough of its help, hunger is spreading in other countries that remain under the radar. In Africa's largest country of Nigeria, nearly 31 million people face acute food insecurity — almost equivalent to the population of Texas. Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Yemen have all seen alarming reversals in childhood nutritional health. Add in surges in food prices driven by extreme weather, and the devastating effects of cuts in US food aid, and you have a recipe for a problem that is getting worse at the very moment when the willingness to help is eroding. 3) A real population bomb When it comes to long-term, world-changing trends, climate change gets most of the attention (if not necessarily the action). But there's another challenge unfolding in nearly every country in the world that will be just as transformative — and for which we may be even less prepared. That's the population slowdown. In 2024, the US fertility rate hit an all-time low of less than 1.6 births per woman, far below the 2.1 required to maintain the current population level. While other countries like Japan or Italy will get there sooner, the US is absolutely on a path to an aging, shrinking future. As early as 2033, annual deaths are predicted to outpace annual births, while by 2050, one in every five Americans will be over the age of 65. An aging and eventually shrinking population will put more stress on everything from health care to pension systems to economic productivity, in ways that — absent some kind of technological miracle — will make us poorer, and will change life in ways we can only begin to imagine. And no one really has any idea how to fix it, or if it's even fixable at all. 4) A generational security challenge The Cold War ended nearly 35 years ago. For all of that time, the US has enjoyed a historically unprecedented position of global military supremacy. Americans have lived with the background assumption that the US would never really face a war with a true geopolitical rival — and certainly wouldn't lose one. Of all our national privileges, that might be the most foundational one. But that foundation is in danger of crumbling. At the same time, America's munitions reserves are dangerously low. In supporting Israel during its recent conflict with Iran, nearly 14 percent of the US's vital THAAD missile interceptor inventory was expended — just replenishing those stores may take up to eight years. Meanwhile, Pentagon authorities temporarily paused shipments of Patriot missiles and other critical air-defense systems to Ukraine amid global stockpile pressures. US air defenses now reportedly have only a quarter of the interceptors needed for all the Pentagon's military plans. Should a major conflict pop up in, oh I don't know, Taiwan, essential munitions could be depleted far faster than production could replace them. That's how you lose wars. None of these stories are scandals, and none of them generate great social media content. They're hard, long-term, wonky, even boring. But they are important. And they deserve our attention. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
26-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
What the right's war on college is really about
Project 2025 laid out the battle plan pretty clearly: Get rid of the Department of Education, shut off federal funding, take control of the accreditation system, and take down diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. And, in the end, change what students are encouraged to study and what professors are allowed to teach. So why is this happening? And is it working? Michael Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of several books about college, including Beyond the University and The Student: A Short History. He's also one of higher education's most vocal defenders, and one of the few prominent university presidents willing to take a moral and political stand against authoritarian overreach from the government, which he sees as an attack not just on colleges and universities, but on civil society itself. I invited Roth onto The Gray Area to talk about the political backlash against universities and why it matters. We also discuss where American universities have gone wrong, what needs to change, and what he thinks college is actually for in the world of AI. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You said recently that the federal government is 'trying to destroy civil society by undermining the legitimacy of colleges and universities.' That's a pretty dramatic statement. What do you mean? I think it's extraordinarily clear that the Trump administration is hell-bent on destroying civil society — that arena of our culture and our polity that has sources of legitimacy independent of the ideology of the person in the White House. You see that in the attack on law firms. You see it in the attack on the press. The war on universities is similar. They're not really going after universities that have egregious issues of civil rights violations. They're going after the high-profile, high-legitimacy institutions like Harvard, like UVA, like the other Ivy League schools, with the exception of Dartmouth. They're doing that because these schools have a claim on our allegiance or our respect that is not founded in the ideology of those currently in the White House. When you say 'destroying,' what do you mean? What is the administration actually doing? Well, they start with easy things, right? Trans women athletes. There are fewer than 10 trans athletes in the country in NCAA varsity sports. That's a winning issue for a variety of reasons. The White House is going to determine who plays volleyball, and then they're going to determine how to teach Mideast or near Eastern Studies. They're going to say, If you don't teach near Eastern Studies the way we want you to with appropriate respect for Israel, then you're not going to get money for Alzheimer's research. What happens is that everybody in higher education starts moving away from anything that might offend those in the White House. You have this slide from the university as fostering an oppositional culture, which it has in the United States for a long time, at least since the Second World War, towards the universities as institutions in which people with money, power, diplomas, and legitimacy start trying to anticipate what they should say to not annoy — or even to please — the president and his friends. I don't think President Trump really cares about Alzheimer's research at Harvard, but he wants to make sure that people at Harvard — and then everyone who doesn't have the resources that Harvard has to fight — line up. I think that's why you don't see a lot of opposition from colleges, universities right now because everyone has already started lining up. As you know, a lot of people shrug their shoulders at all of this. They think, What's the big deal? These campuses are full of privileged people with predictably extreme views, views that aren't representative of most of the country, so who cares? To that sort of reaction, what do you say? Well, it's been an orchestrated reaction. I think that at UVA, the fastest-growing major is computer science and the fastest-growing minor is data science. Hardly the stuff of 'woke' lunatics. At Harvard, the most popular majors are the ones that lead to Wall Street. Again, this notion that Harvard or UVA is filled with people with extreme views who are unrepresentative of America — they're unrepresentative of America because they're really smart. 'Yes, universities have real problems, but I don't think that those problems are what has led to the assault on…the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit.' It's unfortunate because in a democracy, you can be really proud of people who excel, even though they do things we can't do. When I watch, I don't know, Patrick Mahomes, play quarterback and escape a crazy rush, I'm filled with admiration. Or the elite fighters in the Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers — we don't think of them as elitist, we just think of them as exceptional. But at some of these schools, we resent them for having created an environment where people like those guys can thrive and the rest of us don't have access to it. In a healthy democracy, you allow people to experiment with ideas, art, science, and politics, it's never totally open-ended. Of course, there are always some guardrails. What we're seeing now is a concerted effort to bring those guardrails in so that people have to resemble those in power. That is unusual in the history of the United States. You used the word 'orchestrated.' Do you think this is completely manufactured? Even if some of this backlash is cynical and engineered, and no doubt a lot of it is, how much have universities contributed to it through leadership failures or bad policies? Yeah, it's a fair question. Yes, universities have real problems, but I don't think that those problems are what has led to the assault on free speech, on freedom of association, and on the ability of schools to educate students the way they see fit. The problems of universities are political problems and we haven't done a good job in solving them. Let me just mention two quick things. One problem is the ideological conformity or the ideological narrowness of faculty in most colleges and universities, especially at those like mine and the highly selective schools in the Northeast. All over the country, university faculty are mostly people left-of-center, and that has gotten much worse over time. I think it's about prejudice on the part of the faculty, not only prejudice, but that faculty members hire folks with whom they're comfortable. They hire people whose political views they're more comfortable with. I think that's a problem that should be fixed by the faculty itself. They should be aware of their prejudices and counteract them as best they can. I think that's a significant problem. The broader cultural problem is that American higher education has defined its quality on the basis of the number of people that are excluded from it. We prize being highly selective. I used that phrase myself a few moments ago. What does that mean? We reject most people who want to go there. That's a very American thing. It's not only American, but you want the thing you can't get access to. That's a traditional capitalist bourgeois fact that lots of people want the thing that they have trouble getting access to. Colleges and universities have cultivated condescension rather than democratic practices. I think the basic problem that elite colleges in particular have right now is that people outside of these institutions increasingly think they are places where ideology has been confused with inquiry, where education has been confused with activism. Is this a problem for you? Or is this just what free speech ought to look like? Well, I think it is both of those things. It is a problem when schools define activism or civic engagement in an ideologically restricted way. I think it's an intellectual problem. I think it's a moral problem for schools. I'll give you an example. I gave a talk at a conference and a guidance counselor from a high school said, 'If one of my students was applying to Wesleyan and she said her engagement was protecting the rights of the unborn, it would be professional malpractice for me to allow her to put that in the application.' Now, I guess I was naive. I was shocked by that. That was to me a slap in the head that I needed because I have no reason to doubt that he was right. I think that's the way in which the soft despotism of prejudice constricts free speech. I've been fighting against it now for the last decade or so, both as a person who has access to the media and writes articles about such things, but also as a teacher, adding more conservative voices into my own classes. I've always privileged the kind of mavericks and philosophy or political theory, but now I'm also adding to my classes criticisms of those voices or those progressive thinkers. Students are totally capable of dealing with the issues. They may not on their own gravitate towards conservative critiques of progressivism, but once exposed to them, they're perfectly happy and willing, able to deal with a variety of perspectives. All of that is to say that a school can define a civic purpose, I think, that's not in tension with its educational purposes. Most schools in the United States ever since the 1700s have had a civic purpose as part of what they do. I think it's nonsense that some college presidents are saying, 'Oh, we're just for the pursuit of truth.' Colleges in America have always been about character and civics. We can embrace that, but we can't do it in a parochial way. If we do it in a parochial way, we're limiting the educational potential of our students to explore ideas that may not be currently fashionable in their generation or among the faculty. Let's zoom out from this a little bit because there's a more fundamental question that we've wrestled with on this show, which is: What is college actually for? Is it just job preparation, a credentialing machine, or is it more? I believe that college is for three things. The first is to discover what you love to do — what makes you feel alive when you're working. It's important for students to have the freedom to make that discovery because at a selective school, they say, Well, I got As in this subject, but they may not like doing that, or they've never tried engineering, astronomy, poetry. A place where they can discover the kinds of things that give them meaning when they do those things. The second thing is to make the person who's discovering what they love to do get much better at what they love to do. We can do a better job of that. Grade inflation drives me nuts, makes me feel like the old man that I am. I think we need to kick the student in the butt because a lot of the time they think they're pretty good at something and maybe they're pretty good, but they can get a lot better. I think it's really important that every student works really hard. It's so against the grain of the American consumer view of higher education, which is that it should be this time in your life where you get to have so much fun. You make your friends, you get married, have a lot of sex, and that's fine. That's discovering what you love to do in a way, but I think students should go to a school where there are people who are making you better at what you love to do. The third thing is that you learn how to share what you've gotten better at and you love to do with other people. That usually means selling it. It means getting a job where you can continue to practice the things you love to do and that people will pay you for doing it. People will say to me, Well, I discovered I love poetry, so I sit in the basement and write poems. No, no, no. I mean, you've got to get better at it and then you've got to be able to take it out into the marketplace, out into the world. If you have those three things — discovering what you love to do, getting much better at it, and learning to take it out into the world and finding a job where these things are aligned — that is a way that college can help people thrive long after they graduate. Are you worried that AI is a threat to the model of education you just described? It can be a tool for the model I just described. I mean, I use AI all the time when I'm trying to find out information about things or get various takes on an issue. I think it's really helpful. I do worry that the joy that I've tried to describe of thinking for yourself in the company of others or discovering what you love to do and getting better at it — that you might not have that experience because you can outsource it to a bot. Now, take athletes as a counterexample. If I say to somebody on the football team, Instead of hitting that guy or running laps, why don't you just play Madden or something. Have a very good AI version of football, put your immersive thing on and you don't have to play. I think they'll look at me like I'm crazy because it's an embodied practice.
Vox
19-07-2025
- Health
- Vox
The brain tech revolution is here — and it isn't all Black Mirror
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. When you hear the word 'neurotechnology,' you may picture Black Mirror headsets prying open the last private place we have — our own skulls — or the cyber-samurai of William Gibson's Neuromancer. That dread is natural, but it can blind us to the real potential being realized in neurotech to address the long intractable medical challenges found in our brains. In just the past 18 months, brain tech has cleared three hurdles at once: smarter algorithms, shrunken hardware, and — most important — proof that people can feel the difference in their bodies and their moods. A pacemaker for the brain Keith Krehbiel has battled Parkinson's disease for nearly a quarter-century. By 2020, as Nature recently reported, the tremors were winning — until neurosurgeons slipped Medtronic's Percept device into his head. Unlike older deep-brain stimulators that carpet-bomb movement control regions in the brain with steady current, the Percept listens first. It hunts the beta-wave 'bursts' in the brain that mark a Parkinson's flare and then fires back millisecond by millisecond, an adaptive approach that mimics the way a cardiac pacemaker paces an arrhythmic heart. In the ADAPT-PD study, patients like Krehbiel moved more smoothly, took fewer pills, and overwhelmingly preferred the adaptive mode to the regular one. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic agreed: The system now has US and EU clearance. Because the electrodes spark only when symptoms do, total energy use is reduced, increasing battery life and delaying the next skull-opening surgery. Better yet, because every Percept shipped since 2020 already has the sensing chip, the adaptive mode can be activated with a simple firmware push, the way you'd update your iPhone. Waking quiet muscles Scientists applied the same listen-then-zap logic farther down the spinal cord this year. In a Nature Medicine pilot, researchers in Pittsburgh laid two slender electrode strips over the sensory roots of the lumbar spine in three adults with spinal muscular atrophy. Gentle pulses 'reawakened' half-dormant motor neurons: Every participant walked farther, tired less, and — astonishingly — one person strode from home to the lab without resting. Half a world away, surgeons at Nankai University threaded a 50-micron-thick 'stent-electrode' through a patient's jugular vein, fanned it against the motor cortex, and paired it with a sleeve that twitched his arm muscles. No craniotomy, no ICU — just a quick catheter procedure that let a stroke survivor lift objects and move a cursor. High-tech rehab is inching toward outpatient care. Mental-health care on your couch The brain isn't only wires and muscles; mood lives there, too. In March, the Food and Drug Administration tagged a visor-like headset from Pulvinar Neuro as a Breakthrough Device for major-depressive disorder. The unit drips alternating and direct currents while an onboard algorithm reads brain rhythms on the fly, and clinicians can tweak the recipe over the cloud. The technology offers a ray of hope for patients whose depression has resisted conventional treatments like drugs. Thought cursors and synthetic voices Cochlear implants for people with hearing loss once sounded like sci-fi; today more than 1 million people hear through them. That proof-of-scale has emboldened a new wave of brain-computer interfaces, including from Elon Musk's startup Neuralink. The company's first user, 30-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh, told Wired last year he now 'multitasks constantly' with a thought-controlled cursor, clawing back some of the independence lost to a 2016 spinal-cord injury. Neuralink isn't as far along as Musk often claims — Arbaugh's device experienced some problems, with some threads detaching from the brain — but the promise is there. On the speech front, new systems are decoding neural signals into text on a computer screen, or even synthesized voice. In 2023 researchers from Stanford and the University of California San Francisco installed brain implants in two women who had lost the ability to speak, and managing to hit decoding times of 62 and 78 words per minute, far faster than previous brain tech interfaces. That's still much slower than the 160 words per minute of natural English speech, but more recent advances are getting closer to that rate. Guardrails for gray matter Yes, neurotech has a shadow. Brain signals could reveal a person's mood, maybe even a voting preference. Europe's new AI Act now treats 'neuro-biometric categorization' — technologies that can classify individuals by biometric information, including brain data — as high-risk, demanding transparency and opt-outs, while the US BRAIN Initiative 2.0 is paying for open-source toolkits so anyone can pop the hood on the algorithms. And remember the other risk: doing nothing. Refusing a proven therapy because it feels futuristic is a little like turning down antibiotics in 1925 because a drug that came from mold seemed weird. Twentieth-century medicine tamed the chemistry of the body; 21st-century medicine is learning to tune the electrical symphony inside the skull. When it works, neurotech acts less like a hammer than a tuning fork — nudging each section back on pitch, then stepping aside so the music can play. Real patients are walking farther, talking faster, and, in some cases, simply feeling like themselves again. The challenge now is to keep our fears proportional to the risks — and our imaginations wide enough to see the gains already in hand. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
