WE’RE NOT JUST HOOKED, WE’RE CAPTIVE. by chris hayes 34
ROUGH RIDER
SECRETARY OF INTERIOR DOUG BURGUM’S PARADOXICAL LAND MANAGEMENT GAMBIT. by samuel benson
A LOOK AT LIFE ON THE RANGE. by lauren steele
Samoa has the highest rate of rheumatic fever in the world. Our students and faculty partner with local health teams to screen thousands of children each year—saving lives in the spirit of love and service.
Learning by study, by faith, and by experience, we strive to be among the exceptional universities in the world and an essential university for the world.
BYU.EDU/FORTHEWORLD
Love served two terms in Congress from 2015 to 2019, representing Utah’s 4th Congressional District. She was mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, before her election to the U.S. House of Representatives. An excerpt from an essay the 49-year-old Republican leader wrote before she died of cancer in March is on page 13.
A political commentator and Emmy Awardwinning host of “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC, Hayes is the New York Times bestselling author of “A Colony in a Nation” and “Twilight of the Elites.” An excerpt from his latest book, “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,” is on page 42.
An award-winning fine art photographer and author based in New York City, Krantz is best known for her work about cowboys and ranching in the American West, and has published four books on the subject. A photo essay from her latest book, “Frontier: Cowboys of the Americas,” is on page 52.
Foust is an assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. A former adviser for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, he has written about Afghanistan and international aid for PBS, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and The New York Times. His essay on the impact of dismantling USAID is on page 68.
Yale is a freelance writer and documentary film producer based in Montana. Her writing about the environment and communities in the West can be found in Outside, the Alpinist, The Colorado Sun and others. Her story about the strained relationship between Canada and the United States is on page 28.
Dr. Egan is chair of the Department of Anesthesiology at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and has served on the editorial boards of numerous medical journals. His essay on the crisis of public trust in science is on page 62
TALMAGE D. EGAN
ANOUK MASSON KRANTZ
JOSHUA FOUST
MIA LOVE
CHRIS HAYES
THE MAN IN THE ARENA
Doug Burgum, the new secretary of the Interior, is a man shaped by the land. The Badlands of North Dakota are more than a scenic backdrop for him. They’re where, in the shadow of Theodore Roosevelt’s old stomping grounds, he has staked both his political identity and his legacy. The new presidential library rising from the hills outside Medora is the clearest monument to that ambition: a temple to Roosevelt, yes, but also to the idea that conservation, grit, and frontier optimism are not relics of the past but still guiding lights.
A tech entrepreneur turned Republican governor, Burgum briefly tried on the role of presidential candidate, speaking less about the culture wars than about energy policy and artificial intelligence. As secretary of the Interior, he is now the steward of a half-billion acres of federal land, in a moment when fights over public resources are reaching a fever pitch.
Burgum sits at the nexus of those conversations: climate, energy, water, development, and the always-fraught question of federal land management. He inherits a region in flux, where drought and boomtown growth collide, and where historic tensions between states and the feds are once again simmering.
But what stands out in contributing writer Sam Benson’s cover story on p. 34 is less Burgum’s résumé and more his reverence for the land and its history. He’s the kind of person who can recite
Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech from memory. He reads the landscape not only as terrain but as inheritance. He seems to believe — and not cynically — that America is still capable of big, shared projects. That we can still build libraries in the open air. That we can still protect something, together.
That idea may feel increasingly rare in our politics, where shared purpose has been replaced with grievance, and where the interior — of the country, and of our national character — often feels like contested ground.
It’s worth remembering that Roosevelt went West after devastating personal loss, and came back with a new sense of self and of service. “The romance of my life began” in North Dakota, he wrote. Maybe, in some ways, Burgum believes the same. Maybe he sees in the West not only a test of resources, but a test of national imagination.
At its best, the American West has always offered more than open space and natural resources. It has offered perspective — sometimes humbling, sometimes clarifying. We see it in the solitude of the desert, in the enormity of the sky, in the mountain peaks in Zion and Yosemite. In these places, in quiet moments, we remember what it means to take the long view. To be, in Roosevelt’s words, the one “in the arena,” muddy and bruised, but still choosing to fight.
—JESSE HYDE
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OUR READERS RESPOND
Our annual State of the West issue in MARCH featured an exclusive poll that examined public opinion on the longstanding issue of federal land in the West (“Who Owns the Land”). Writer Kevin Lind explained why large majorities throughout the Intermountain West agree the federal government controls too much real estate and that the states should manage more of the public land within their borders. But most readers weighed in on the side of the feds in the contentious question of whether Western states should go to court and to Congress to wrest control of more than 18 million acres overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. “I am constantly befuddled by the folks who push this federal land grab because they are the same folks who virtue signal about the rule of law,” wrote Kerry Soelberg . “We all know who owns the land and we all know who wants to stomp on the deed.” Reader Mike Maxwell noted our story made no mention of Native Americans, who lived on the land for centuries before it was taken over by the United States, and he offered this option: “Give the land back to the tribes, and we’ll see it healthy and flourishing,” Maxwell wrote. “Give it to the state of Utah, and it will be covered with billboards, condos and oil wells bought by the legislature’s favorite lobbyists, making them and a handful of cronies rich.” Richard Turner agreed that despite current assurances that any federal land taken over by the state would not be privatized, future state leaders could take a different approach. “Just a simple analysis of the economics involved (the disparity of revenues vs. management costs) dictates that states would be forced to sell some or most of the land.” But a reader dubbed online as Harrison Bergeron called such fears a “red herring that avoids the real issue. Utah wants public lands to be accessible and used by more people, not fewer. The feds on the other hand are becoming more restrictive and limiting access to only niche users like hikers and cyclists.” Nate Lofland reminded readers that public land has unquantifiable values for Westerners beyond what income it can generate. “So, even if we need to take a hard look at the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of the federal agencies charged with managing public lands, the shared resources themselves are still more than just assets on a ledger. And once they are sold or paved over, they’re gone forever.”
“We all know who owns the land and we all know who wants to stomp on the deed.”
DEATH VALLEY, CALIFORNIA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN HAYMORE
THE AMERICA I KNOW
WHEN TOGETHER, WE GROW. WHEN DIVIDED, WE DIMINISH
BY
MIA LOVE
Let me tell you about the America I know. My parents immigrated to the United States with $10 in their pocket and a belief that the America they had heard about really did exist as the land of opportunity. Through hard work and great sacrifice, they achieved success — so the America I came to know growing up was filled with all the excitement found in living the American dream. I was taught to love this country, warts and all, and understand I had a role to play in our nation’s future. I learned to passionately believe in the possibilities and promise of America.
Watching my father and mother work odd jobs in order to provide for us and maintain their independence taught me valuable lessons in personal responsibility. When tough times came, they didn’t look to Washington, they looked within. Because the America they knew was centered in self-reliance, the America I know is founded in the freedom self-reliance always brings.
The America I know is grounded in the gritty determination found in patriots, pioneers and struggling parents, in small business owners with big ideas, in the farmers who work in the beauty
of our landscapes and the artists who paint them, in our heroic military and our inspiring Olympic athletes, and in every child who looks at the seemingly impossible and says, “I can do that.”
Some have forgotten the math of America — whenever you divide, you diminish. What I know is that the goodness and compassion of the American people is a multiplier that simply cannot be measured. The goodness and greatness of our country is multiplied when neighbors help neighbors, when we reach out to those in need and build better citizens and more heroic communities.
You see, the America I know is built by citizens and leaders who respect, strengthen and serve each other, not based on race, gender or economic status but because we are Americans. We all have a role to play in uniting the country around the principles that have made us extraordinary.
The America I know isn’t just my story, and it isn’t just your story. It is our story. It is a story of endless possibilities, human struggle, standing up and striving for more. Our story has been told for well over 200 years, punctuated by small steps and giant leaps; from a woman on a bus to a man with a dream; from the bravery of the greatest generation to the explorers, entrepreneurs, reformers and innovators of today. This is our story. This is the America we know — because we built it — together.
As my season of life begins to draw to a close, I still passionately believe that we can revive the American story we know and love. I am convinced that our citizens must remember the principles of our story so that our children, and those seeking freedom around the world, will know where to look to find a place for their story.
We must fight to keep the America we know as that shining city on a hill — truly the last best hope on Earth. Like Benjamin Franklin and countless patriots down through the ages, I believe the American experiment is not a setting sun but a rising sun.
In the end, I hope that my life will have mattered and made a difference for the nation I love and the family and friends I adore. I hope you will see the America I know in the years ahead, that you will hear my words in the whisper of the wind of freedom and feel my presence in the flame of the enduring principles of liberty.
My living wish and fervent prayer for you and for this nation is that the America I have known is the America you fight to preserve and that each citizen, and every leader, will do their part to ensure that the America we know will be the America our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit.
ALPHABET CITY
THE INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES BEHIND THE ACRONYMS
AMERICANS LOVE SPY movies. But few understand what the U.S. intelligence community does to help political leaders to navigate a dangerous and changing world. One factor: We learn more about them from Hollywood than the agencies themselves. Secrecy is inherent to their work, like monitoring foreign military operations, courting sources in hostile governments or surveilling terrorist organizations. Today these agencies are under a political microscope, bracing for mass layoffs and budget cuts. But what’s happening behind the curtain? Here’s the Breakdown.
—NATALIA GALICZA
$106.3 BILLION
The intelligence community’s annual budget — more than the Afghan war at its peak — funds 18 specialized agencies and elements within other departments, like Energy and Treasury. The CIA recruits foreign agents and runs covert operations overseas. The NSA intercepts data and decrypts codes. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency analyzes and predicts how events play out on physical terrains. All coordinate with the director of national intelligence, whose office briefs the president daily.
“IT’S AN UNNATURAL ACT FOR SECRET AGENCIES TO BE PUBLIC, BUT IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY DO.”
AMY ZEGART, AUTHOR OF “SPIES, LIES, AND ALGORITHMS: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE”
EXECUTIVE ORDER 11905
The oldest record of intel gathering is Egypt’s “Amarna Letters,” hundreds of cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets that detail social upheaval and geopolitical news across Mesopotamia, as reported by the pharaoh’s emissaries to Canaan and Amurru (in modern Israel and Syria). From Moses to Sun Tzu, the Mongols to the Aztecs, historical leaders and empires have relied on intelligence from spies and other sources to understand the world and make informed decisions.
GEORGE WASHINGTON: SPYMASTER
Before he became the first president, he launched America’s first intel operation. During the Revolutionary War, the general set up spy rings, instituted codes and ciphers, hired a physician to invent invisible ink, and even recruited a double agent close to his red-coated counterpart, Gen. Charles Cornwallis. “Washington did not really outfight the British,” quipped one British agent. “He simply outspied us.”
13,000 SPIES
That’s how many men and women served the Office of Strategic Services at the height of World War II. More than half completed combat and espionage missions overseas.
The OSS was our first attempt to centralize intel operations after the disastrous failure to predict the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Disbanded in 1945, it was soon replaced by the CIA, which now has about 21,575 employees, including field agents, analysts and covert operatives.
President Gerald Ford banned political assassinations in 1976, after the Senate’s “Church Committee” uncovered CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro and others. It reported that the CIA abetted a coup in Chile, drugged and tortured Americans in mind control experiments, infiltrated civil rights groups and recruited 50 journalists as propaganda assets. It also learned that the NSA was digging through the general public’s telephone traffic. More reforms followed in subsequent administrations, limiting intel work for a generation.
45 DAYS IN 2001
Congress quickly restructured the intelligence community after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. With an increased focus on threats inside the nation’s borders, the Division of Homeland Security was created 11 days later, and the FBI launched its own intelligence unit within a few years. But perhaps the most fundamental changes were tucked away in a 300-page bill enacted that Oct. 26. The Patriot Act authorized pervasive, warrantless domestic surveillance.
7 IN 10 MISINFORMED
At least 71 percent of Americans inaccurately believe that the NSA builds spy satellites, interrogates detainees or targets foreign terrorists. Half don’t know that codebreaking is still a core mission. And it’s still not entirely clear what data or metadata the NSA collects on Americans — much of it likely stored at the Utah Data Center near Salt Lake City. One of the agency’s four such facilities nationwide, it is perhaps the world’s biggest in storage capacity.
$2 MILLION SEED MONEY
In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund, made a modest investment in 2003 Silicon Valley startup Palantir, now a $6 billion analytics giant helping militaries, police and intel agencies to make predictions and decisions using big data and artificial intelligence. Practitioners still argue the merits of traditional spycraft — like HUMINT, or human intelligence — and targeted electronic intercepts, but even the DEA and FBI operate mass data collection programs.
14TH CENTURY B.C.
MOVE FAST, BREAK THINGS
SHOULD CITIES ACCEPT THE E-SCOOTER DISRUPTION?
THEY ARRIVED IN mysterious fashion. Flocks of electric scooters — like motorized skateboards with handlebars — were dropped overnight on the sidewalks of Santa Monica, California, with labels encouraging people to rent them by the minute using an app they could download on their phones. Eight years later, these divisive little conveyances — battery-powered, eco-friendly, zippity quick and stored wherever the rider feels like — have changed how many Americans get around, raising hackles as they go. Cities across the country are still sorting through the implications of their launch, a deliberately lawless approach popular in Silicon Valley: deploy first, ask permission later. Are e-scooters an answer to our urban transportation woes? Or speedy little indictments of well-financed disruption for its own sake? —ETHAN BAUER
COMMERCIAL DISOBEDIENCE
GIVE THE PEOPLE what they want. “Disruption” — a core belief in the tech industry — is a bold expression of that idea. Governments evolve too slowly, often fighting the battles of yesteryear while allowing commerce and regulation to become stagnant. Instead of waiting for them to catch up, disruption tells companies like Uber, Lyft or Airbnb to ignore obsolete or illogical restrictions, long enough to prove that their products or services deserve a place in the market. The bureaucrats will come around.
E-scooters are hyper-efficient. They’re cheaper than cars, more convenient on a small scale than buses or trains, and more environmentally sound than any of the above. Plus, they hardly take up any space. Researchers at Georgia Tech have found that “investing in micro-mobility infrastructure such as e-bikes, e-scooters and bike lanes can reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions in cities.”
The business model is more responsive to people’s needs than traditional alternatives — especially in urban areas and resort towns. The rental paradigm used by Lime and Bird makes e-scooters affordable to users who couldn’t buy one. And with dispersed storage, riders drop off their e-scooters right where the next users probably need them, because humans follow similar traffic patterns, like coming and going from the same mall or movie theater.
Besides, riding these machines is just a fun way to get around. “You rarely see somebody on a scooter who’s not smiling,” said Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas, during one industry-sponsored Q&A. The most recent data, from 2023, shows 69 million rented e-scooter trips across the U.S. and Canada, up nearly 18 percent from the year before. Many of us love the wind in our hair, with a handle to hold onto and no pedaling!
As one CEO put it recently, people are “voting with their rides.” That’s what makes disruption so potent: It introduces incentives for change. “This is a prime example of how the free market works,” according to a 2018 editorial by Investor’s Business Daily. “Without any planning or government involvement, this new service exploded on the scene. As a result, commuters suddenly have a new, efficient, nonpolluting way to get around in cities.”
CASH IS NOT KING
DON’T EQUATE DISREGARD with innovation. Democratic institutions move more deliberately because elected leaders have a duty to let all our voices be heard. They answer to voters, not CEOs, and that requires a process. We task them, among other duties, with keeping our streets safe. Inundating our cities with a new form of transportation without regard to how it fits with our laws and infrastructure isn’t defiance of tyranny. It’s just selfish and dangerous.
Our streets weren’t built for e-scooters. On sidewalks, their speed makes them missiles on wheels as they circulate among unsuspecting pedestrians. In streets and bike lanes, they’re the opposite, slow and unprotected against heavier vehicles. University of North Carolina researchers found in 2023 that small wheels and tires make e-scooters uniquely vulnerable to potholes, grates and other common road hazards.
The rental paradigm so popular for e-scooters is not sustainable. Bird, the sector’s original darling, filed for bankruptcy in 2023. That company and others like it have delivered a service that many people want, but only at an artificially low price made possible by venture capital — until that financial support ends. “Encouraging ownership of bikes and scooters for regular users is the preferable outcome,” Paris Marx writes in Jacobin, “as they’ll last much longer and will always be available to their owner.” But how many consumers will buy them at their true cost? And what happens when a city remakes its roads to accommodate a business that can’t survive?
Throughout their history, e-scooters have created new issues that citizens and governments have had little opportunity to confront before getting swamped. That forces them to make up new rules on the fly, hoping to accommodate the advantages of rented e-scooters while mitigating — or simply ignoring — the negative consequences. But that doesn’t mean these companies have popular support. In 2023, nearly 90 percent of voters in Paris, France, chose to ban the pestilent rides. More recently, the New York borough of Queens implemented a scooter-sharing program that was described by one city council member as a “take it or leave it, this is what it is” solution. One participating CEO said the program was simply too big to pause. This time, he might be right.
PARENTAL INSTINCTS
POLITICS, PARENTING AND SHARING THE LOAD
BY ERIC SCHULZKE
Ianswered the phone at 7:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001. On the line was Jane Huerta, a close friend who lived next door in our apartment complex. “They’re gone,” she said.
Sometime later on that wrenching September morning, I apparently wandered out into the courtyard. I say “apparently” because I actually remember nothing from the remainder of that day. But in writing this article, I spoke with several courtyard friends, including Inji El Ghannam and her husband, Shams ElDin Tantawy. That is how I learned that I am part of their 9/11 memories.
In 2001, our family was nearing the end of several enchanted years at Albany Village, a University of California, Berkeley, student family housing enclave located on the cool, foggy flatlands that stretch out toward San Francisco Bay.
Our courtyard was 1960s vintage, with three long buildings that formed a triangle, gated at each corner. The inner space had two circular grass play areas bounded by rain-friendly asphalt. The complex was designed by William Wurster, a nationally noted architect described as a “quiet modernist master.”
This masterful design blurred the lines between indoor and outdoor, and between your home and mine. Community life bubbled under our front window. If our blinds were up, we could watch our own kids from our living room and chat with neighbors right under our windows.
We pooled money for play structures, held spontaneous potlucks, sat chatting to-
atheists, agnostics, Black, white and every shade of brown. We were students and parents, sharing curiosity about the world and awe of childhood.
“Berkeley is where we became who we are,” my wife, Cheri, would later say.
I THOUGHT OF the courtyard during the run-up to the 2024 election. I wondered how our younger parent selves would have processed recent public strife. A lot of head shaking, I expect.
On the other hand, I think we’d be nodding knowingly at some findings in the latest American Family Survey, conducted by Deseret News in conjunction with the Wheatley Institute and Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University.
gether on lawn chairs in the late afternoons. We strung wheeled toys into “trains” and took turns pulling kids around the circuit. The children wandered in and out of apartments at will.
We had neighbors from Africa and Asia and everywhere between. We were liberals, conservatives, Jews, Christians, Muslims,
The survey found that Republican and Democratic parents expressed very similar perspectives on what matters most to them. Among adults with children under 18, roughly nine out of 10 Republicans and nearly as many Democrats agree that “raising children is one of life’s greatest joys.” And asked about typical family activities with those children, there was again little difference.
The survey also found that parental identity supersedes political identity. On a five-point scale, Democratic and Republican parents ranked parental identity at 4.4 and 4.5, respectively. Career identity fell midway at 3.4 and 3.6. And partisan political identity trailed at 3.1 for Democratic parents and 2.8 for Republicans.
“Partisanship matters a lot, and it colors how we see the world,” says Chris Karpowitz, a political science professor at Brigham Young University who co-authored the study. “But is it the most important identity? Actually, when we ask people, they tell us that their family identities are way more important.”
Karpowitz would get no argument from our Berkeley courtyard. But we might add a bonus. Just by living our lives and raising our kids, we also discovered that our parental identities fostered a trust that turned us outward and helped forge diversity into community.
INJI EL GHANNAM was jarred awake early on 9/11 to a frantic call from a frightened grandmother in Egypt. She turned on her TV and with horror saw the burning buildings, shortly before they collapsed. After, in a daze, she wandered into the courtyard, sitting down to push her baby on a tree swing.
Inji and her husband Shams had recently arrived in the U.S. on a student visa, Egyptians by citizenship and Muslims by heritage. And while they wore those identities lightly, they were Arabs in America on 9/11. And here was a reeling Inji, a self-described “naive” young mother uninterested in politics, tending to her child while an equally stunned neighbor tried to engage her in a conversation she did not want.
Shams recalls looking out the window, getting a hunch his wife might need support. He stepped outside, picked up the conversation with me, and allowed her to retreat gracefully. The two of us were soon joined by two other courtyard fathers.
There was much confusion and few facts in those first hours, Shams notes. We had little to say about the events of
the day, and instead, our conversation rattled broadly on war and morality, from the American use of atomic weapons in 1945 to the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I don’t remember exactly what your opinion was, but everybody else disagreed, and it looked like you felt like we were ganging up on you,” Shams says, remembering that I left the conversation and returned to our apartment.
The rest of that day is vivid in Inji’s mind. “The television doesn’t turn off. It was on all day and people were saying really nasty things about Arabs.” Late that night, Stafford Gregoire knocked on their door with a cake in hand. “Hey, I just baked this cake for you guys to apologize about all the nasty things people are saying about Arabs on TV,” Stafford said.
“THIS IS WHEN I STARTED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT DEMOCRACY IS. YOU CAN TALK FREELY, AND IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT THE OTHER PERSON WILL BE ANGRY BECAUSE YOU HAVE A DIFFERENT OPINION.”
“I will never forget that,” Inji tells me. “For him to say, ‘We are here for you guys.’ That helped me realize that people are not stereotypes.”
Shams says he was surprised the next day to see I wasn’t holding a grudge and even seemed to have forgotten our tense conversation. That possibility was new to him. In Egypt, he says, such sharp disagreements fester.
“This is when I started to understand what democracy is,” Shams says. “You can talk freely, and it doesn’t mean that the other person will be angry because you have a different opinion.” In the weeks that followed, Inji says, the courtyard walked that line, growing stronger as a community.
“We were able to have uncomfortable conversations, but we still were very safe.”
Crucially, Shams and Inji both emphasize that their sense of safety in that moment rested on a shared commitment to children — and often quite literally on sharing children, at least for the afternoon, between homes.
Inji described the rhythm of a courtyard day: caregivers chatting outdoors after breakfast while children ride bikes and play on the grass. “If I need to go inside and cook, then I know the other person is watching my kid. If I can’t find my kid, he’s probably in someone’s house. I wasn’t thinking he had been kidnapped. I just go find out which house he is in.”
INJI’S DESCRIPTION OF neighbors intuitively sharing parental burdens is referred to in academic literature as “alloparenting.” Primates are noted for alloparenting, and humans especially excel at it.
But the instinct to care for children who are not one’s own happens among mammals and birds — very often crossing species lines — and wherever it is found gives the lie to the “selfish gene” theory, which argues that parenting is strictly driven by an evolutionary urge to propagate one’s own genes.
The internet pulses with credible stories of dogs nursing abandoned kittens and cats nurturing ducklings and chicks, much to the bemusement of the hen and the rooster. In 2019, an animal shelter in Crimea gave four orphaned newborn squirrels to a mother cat, who added them to her litter and raised them as her own until they were reintroduced into the wild. And that same year a sandhill crane couple in Michigan was observed parenting a Canada goose with its own brood.
In one case, a beluga whale pod adopted a young narwhal, who then swam with them for years. Martin Nweeia, a leading narwhal expert and lecturer at Harvard, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company that the beluga pod adoption shows “the compassion and the openness of other species to welcome another member that may not
look or act the same. And maybe that’s a good lesson for everyone.”
Abigail Marsh, a cognitive scientist at Georgetown University, argues that the extraordinarily slow and demanding infancy and childhood of humans really demands alloparenting. It’s a logistical imperative, she says. Alloparenting also comes with psychosocial benefits. “When children receive care from a network of loving caregivers,” Marsh writes, “not only are mothers relieved of the nearly impossible burden of caring for and rearing a needy human infant alone, but their children gain the opportunity to learn from an array of supportive adults, to form bonds with them, and to learn to love and trust widely rather than narrowly.”
Shams and Inji’s experience seems to take Marsh’s observation to another level. Shared parenting in this case led to reciprocal trust-building among the parents themselves. Shams pointedly noted how often his kids and my kids played at each other’s homes. “We saw how everyone is caring about other people’s kids,” Shams says. “So if you care about my kids, OK, you’re a kind person, a good person.”
Given that the cadence of parenthood so easily transcends species, we should probably not be surprised to find that human alloparenting works across mere cultural or ideological lines. In fact, the 2024 American Family Survey found that the rhythm of family life — the frequency and types of activities families engage in such as dinner hour, kids sports, recreation — was nearly identical among both Democrats and Republicans, once they had crossed the line of parenthood. In behavior as in identity, parenthood trumped partisanship.
SHORTLY BEFORE WE left Berkeley, the university began knocking down the courtyards. In their place, construction crews erected sterile townhouses whose doors face the street and whose windows face nowhere. A courtyard like ours was destined to be bottled lightning. Even William Wurster’s brilliant design was no
guarantee. One of my wife’s best friends who lived in an adjacent courtyard with identical buildings suffered “courtyard envy” when visiting ours.
Few if any human experiences are utterly unique. That this sort of magic occurred once in Albany Village suggests broader possibilities. The role of children as little trust machines who turn diversity into community certainly calls out for attention. There is no simple way to operationalize or test this, of course. But one obvious requirement is children.
We have a marvelous group courtyard photo taken with Shams’ camera on June 29, 2001. The occasion was the third birthday of Shams and Inji’s older son. Seventeen adults stand and kneel, with 19
THE
FREQUENCY AND TYPES OF ACTIVITIES FAMILIES ENGAGE
IN WERE NEARLY IDENTICAL AMONG BOTH DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS, ONCE THEY HAD CROSSED THE LINE OF PARENTHOOD.
children perched around them, ranging in age from newborn to about 8. A quarter century later, the question is unavoidable. Will these children have children?
Fertility rates are cratering worldwide, with sweeping economic and social implications, as fewer people are left to keep the engines of commerce and government running. No one anywhere has any idea how to fix this. Pro-natalist policies have failed wherever tried.
So perhaps the majority in the American Family Survey are just realists: Just 23 percent of Americans support funding policies that encourage more children. The survey does offer some optimism on fertility, though. Asked if they “hope or desire
to have a child someday,” a slight majority of childless adults age 49 and under said yes. But then on a follow-up question, 73 percent of the “yes” responders also said that won’t happen in the next two years. So it remains to be seen.
Among those who do end up having kids, the partisan fertility gap is another concern. Using data from the University of Michigan-based Monitoring the Future, researchers at Duke University and Louisiana State University recently found that Democratic and Republican 12th graders are splitting apart on their desire to have children. Prior to 2004, there was very little difference on that point. The gap began to widen in 2004, and by 2019 young Republicans and Democrats differed markedly on expected fertility. Republicans are now far more likely to want more than a couple of children, and Democrats are now twice as likely to select zero as their expected outcome.
The American Family Survey noted, however, that over 85 percent of parents from both political parties describe parenthood as “one of life’s great joys.” According to Karpowitz, 64 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of Democrats who reported having had no children of any age gave the same response.
That’s a notable partisan gap. But it is nonetheless striking that so many adults of either party who have never had children endorse that definition of joy. As one courtyard friend emphasized to me, you don’t have to have children yourself to engage in effective alloparenting. Many adults with no children of their own do tremendous work transforming young lives and building community trust. “There are diversities of gifts,” the Bible teaches, “but the same Spirit.”
That said, there is something qualitatively different, archetypal and even transcendent in trusting “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” to someone who seems so very different, seeing them do the same, and realizing the two of you differ so little on the one thing you both hold most dear.
FIRED UP
BUDGET CUTS COULD UPEND WILDFIRE RESPONSE ACROSS THE WEST, AND THE COUNTRY
BY ETHAN BAUER
It was a hazy day last August when Brianna Mitrione saw her first wildfire up close. It had broken out a week and a half earlier, when lightning struck near the Idaho-Oregon border, near a largely abandoned copper-mining town called Cuprum whose few remaining residents were, nonetheless, told to get ready to evacuate. Already big enough to be named, the Limepoint Fire engulfed tens of thousands of acres in just over a week, including the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, and covered the Payette National Forest, all the way down to McCall, in an acrid fog. The front lines were staffed by “interagency hotshot crews” — highly trained professional firefighters, the elites who are dispatched to the most intense and threatening fires.
But those 100 or so hotshot crews were no match for the dozens of wildfires burning across the West last summer. They were spread thin across the biggest blazes, leaving other federal firefighters to fill the gaps. Yet sometimes — oftentimes — those gaps also got too big. When that happened, Forest Service employees like Mitrione were next in line to contain the flames.
Mitrione’s official job title was “forestry
technician.” But like many Forest Service workers, she’d also notched some firefighting qualifications, and her boss put her on a “Type 2 handcrew” — a group that, while not considered “hotshot” status, works near the front lines of wildfire response, constructing fire lines and mopping up embers.
THE ADMINISTRATION INSISTS NO FIREFIGHTERS HAVE BEEN TERMINATED. TECHNICALLY, THAT’S TRUE. BUT ABOUT 75 PERCENT OF THOSE RECENTLY LAID OFF ARE QUALIFIED TO COMBAT WILDFIRES IN SOME CAPACITY.
As she and the crew made their way toward the heart of the fire that August day, the air was so smoky you could feel it. Their job was to clear-cut a corridor through the forest so that, should the fire come that way, it wouldn’t have access to as much fuel. A line of people with chainsaws went in first.
Mitrione and the rest of the crew followed, clearing the land. At that point, they still couldn’t see much of the fire. But as evening approached, conditions along the front lines were deteriorating.
“Hotshots were burning,” she remembers about the crews on the front lines. Leadership needed extra crews to staff the periphery, stomping wayward embers before they could light new patches of fire.
Mitrione and her group carried their heavy packs, inhaling smoke and a fine, dusty powder kicked up by the flames as the winds picked up. Now they could not only see the fire; they could feel it. They could hear the tumbling trees, the popping sap. Members of crews like hers, sometimes called “militia” — or “collateral duty fire crews” — aren’t necessarily full-time firefighters; they contribute on an as-needed basis. The problem is, they’re needed more and more often these days as fires burn bigger and hotter. However, as of February, Mitrione was no longer employed by the Forest Service. Neither were thousands of other people who filled similar gaps.
Their firing came from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and
RECENT GOVERNMENT CUTBACKS WILL MAKE CONTAINING BLAZES LIKE LAST YEAR’S LIMEPOINT FIRE ON THE OREGONIDAHO BORDER MORE DIFFICULT IN THE UPCOMING WILDFIRE SEASON.
KELLY NICHOLS WORKED AS A SUPPORT SERVICES SPECIALIST WITH THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE BEFORE BEING FIRED IN FEBRUARY. “THE ADMINISTRATION KEEPS SAYING THAT IT WAS NON-FIRE PROBATIONARY POSITIONS THAT WERE TERMINATED, AND THAT’S JUST NOT TRUE,” SHE SAYS.
RESIDENTS OF HAILEY, IDAHO, GATHER TO PROTEST FEDERAL WORKER LAYOFFS AND CALL ATTENTION TO THE LOOMING THREATS OF WILDFIRE SEASON.
GLENN OAKLEY
RYAN SANTO, A FORMER FISHERIES EMPLOYEE, SAYS THAT WHILE HE AGREES THAT BUDGET CUTS IN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ARE WELCOME, FIRING PUBLIC SERVICE EMPLOYEES DOESN’T “MAKE SENSE” FOR THE GOAL.
the Trump administration’s broader promise of a less wasteful federal government. While nearly everyone can agree that cutting irresponsible spending of taxpayer dollars is a noble goal, DOGE’s early strategies for budget cuts have largely consisted of terminating the jobs of probationary employees. Mitrione, for instance, was terminated for performance with about three months left of probationary employment, even though her performance reviews have never been problematic.
The Trump administration insists that it hasn’t cut any firefighters. Technically, that’s true. But about 75 percent of the folks who have been laid off from the Forest Service during budget cuts are qualified to combat wildfires in some capacity — whether serving on militias, working on trail crews or filling logistical gaps for firefighting crews. Speaking more broadly, the budget-motivated terminations have also targeted federal workers across agencies that manage public lands. Seven trail workers in the Yellowstone Ranger District, which manages and monitors 800 miles of trail, were fired. Yosemite National Park and Grand Teton National Park experienced a hiring freeze for all trail positions, leaving inadequate time to fill positions for the upcoming summer. These shifts follow a 2024 fire season during which the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Forest Service managed a cumulative 14,276 wildfires. These agencies face the annual pressure to combat fires on their own lands, while also cooperating when fires cross borders. And with fewer employees to fight historically larger and hotter fires, fears are growing that this fire season could call for more hands on deck, not fewer.
Wildfire season is coming regardless. And the West could be less prepared than ever before.
RYAN SANTO STOOD outside of Jane’s art store in Hailey, Idaho, on a Wednesday afternoon in February. Middle-aged with
a dark mustache and a “Fish Fever” ballcap, he worked in Idaho fisheries for over 20 years before joining the Forest Service as a fisheries biologist in 2023. He loved it, aside from getting “bogged down” in red-tape policies that made it hard to get some things done. Folks in government positions are broadly open to “efficiency,” Santo says. “If you want to be more efficient, maybe there is some trimming of the fat. But the people who got fired last week, me included, are people on the ground. ... It doesn’t make any sense.”
What bothers him the most is how untargeted the firings have been. Because DOGE relied on a loophole allowing for recent hires on temporary probation to be more easily let go, the cuts felt like they came at random. “What they’re doing is just going in with a hammer — ‘You’re fired!’ Then, ‘Look, look, look, what we did! We cut the government by whatever percent, and now we’re more efficient!’” Santo says. “And it’s the opposite. They’re not going to be more efficient.”
Santo’s role in fire response was to serve as an adviser to the firefighters on the front lines, using his fisheries knowledge to preserve waterways. Last fall, when fires broke out during spawning season for chinook salmon, Santo worked with fire crews to mitigate damage to their spawning run. And when fire crews mistakenly dropped a batch of retardant into a stream, he wrote a report on how to clean up what basically amounted to a chemical spill. He wonders who will do that now.
Kelly Nichols worked as a support services specialist, which she explains as “office manager, plus.” The “plus” included serving as the hospital and family liaison for the Sawtooth National Forest — coordinating a response when forestry workers are injured or die and informing the public about wildfires. “The administration keeps saying that it was non-fire probationary positions that were terminated, and that’s just not true,” she says. “We are all fire.”
Nichols was fired just one month short of her probation period ending. Santo’s
notice came eight days prior. His wife had battled cancer for 18 months. His 8-year-old son, like Santo himself, has Type 1 diabetes. “These are real people that this is happening to,” he says. “And it’s not making anything more efficient.” It’s impossible to say exactly how much money the cuts in the Forest Service have saved taxpayers, because the individual salaries of the people involved have not been made public. But the average Forest Service salary, according to DOGE’s own numbers, is $74,414. Assuming the 3,400 fired folks made an average salary (which many did not, since they were newer, probationary employees) that amounts to $253,007,600 in savings — or $1.57 per American taxpayer. The true number is likely much lower, not only because of the probationary status of the fired workers, but because of cost considerations like unemployment benefits, termination paperwork and lawsuits. Not to mention the cost of not having the right people on the lines when fire season starts.
“We did lose a lot of folks that held fire (qualifications),” says Jake Renz, a mustached fire management officer who kept his job. “We’re going to have less folks to cover all the stuff we had to do last year.”
As of April 1 — a long way from peak fire season — there were already 17 large fires burning across the U.S., with nearly 2,500 personnel assigned to combat them. And more serious fires are likely on the way at a time when summer temperatures, fueled in part by greenhouse gas emissions, have risen from an all-time low of 2.32 degrees below average in 1910 to an all-time high of 2.6 degrees above average in 2021; and when nine of the 10 costliest fires for insured loss in American history have occurred since 2017.
Firefighting on the scale of large wildfires requires cooperation across multiple local, state and federal organizations, most of which have signed agreements in advance and are part of established hierarchies. For example, if a fire is burning in a national forest, the Forest Service will respond first. But if the fire threatens private land, local
fire departments can also get involved preemptively thanks to those written agreements. The same would be true of a fire that straddles the line between a national forest and a national park. And each organization has its own chain of command. So a given national forest will have its own fire crew, under the command of a fire staff officer and directed by a local fire dispatch center. When local fires get too big, the fire staff officer can turn to a regional dispatch center for help, followed by the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, which coordinates and commands the hotshot crews. A given national forest might have its own dedicated hotshot crew, but that crew is a national resource that can be sent anywhere
WITH FEWER EMPLOYEES TO FIGHT HISTORICALLY LARGER AND HOTTER FIRES, FEARS ARE GROWING THAT THIS FIRE SEASON COULD CALL FOR MORE HANDS ON DECK, NOT FEWER.
in the country if the National Interagency Fire Center deems it necessary. For that reason, local dispatch centers also maintain their own full-time non-hotshot crews.
“It’s a very specific process,” says Riva Duncan, a former wildland firefighter and fire staff officer who is now the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “You’re ordering additional resources, and it’s usually what’s closest, right? Because that’s more effective, more efficient. And it goes out from there to support whoever’s having large fires.”
This interagency cooperation came into play during the recent catastrophic wildfires in greater Los Angeles. The Eaton Fire, Duncan says, burned right on the border of the Angeles National Forest, which gave
Forest Service firefighters the green light to fight the blaze alongside city and county resources. “It’s kind of all-hands-on-deck when it’s something that catastrophic,” she says. “That’s how it should be.”
The Forest Service claims about 35,000 employees on its website. It doesn’t publish numbers about how many are fire-qualified, but Duncan estimates that it’s somewhere in the 60 to 70 percent range. At least among the folks working in the field. And many of those field stations were understaffed to begin with. “Some of these agencies are already extremely skeletal, and now we’re going to see even less capacity, even more dysfunction,” says Amanda Monthei, a writer, podcaster and experienced wildland firefighter. “I worry about what that’s going to do in the peak of summer, when there’s 1,000 other fires burning all over the American West.”
INSIDE A SEVENTH-DAY Adventist church in McCall, Idaho, Kelly Grenquist’s red hair bobs amid the crowd as she sorts through packets of string cheese and boxes of Rice-ARoni that the local Albertsons market donated for recently fired federal workers like her. Before this community benefit potluck for those who found themselves suddenly jobless, she told another reporter that she planned to take her camper and “just start driving until you can be homeless and not freeze to death.”
Anywhere like that is probably the most at risk for wildfires in the coming years. FEMA maintains a National Wildfire Risk Index that’s dominated by states in the West, Southwest, and near the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. “The Southwest has always had fires,” says Duncan. “Then the monsoons come in, and they’re done, and (those fire crews) help everyone else.” But in the South, climate change is making wildfire more of a threat — especially when the region’s population density is much higher than in the arid West. “It may not happen every year like we see in the West,” Duncan says, “but it’s still happening.” And given the recent wave of federal layoffs, we may
not only be less prepared to fight them; we may also know a lot less about them.
The National Interagency Fire Center maintains daily (during most of the year) and weekly (during winter) Fire Preparedness Level reports, which assign danger levels by region based on a scale of 1 (lowest risk) to 5 (highest risk). These reports help inform where fire resources are sent and where escalations might be expected. They rely in part on forecasts from organizations like the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which both lost thousands of employees to DOGE layoffs. “It’s just another thing that compounds and makes this job riskier than it already is,” says Duncan. Those reports help meteorologists issue “red flag warnings,” which tell firefighters, land management agencies and the public to expect ideal conditions — strong winds, low humidity and a chance for lightning — for wildfires to start. Over 17,000 fires are caused by lightning strikes alone every year, and even a slight shift in winds can spur a conflagration — the sort of devastating blazes that tore through Southern California in January. These forecasts help crews and officials plan firefighting procedures and evacuations accordingly.
Duncan adds that some federal meteorologists, known as “incident meteorologists,” are qualified to assist on wildfires specifically, offering practical advice to crews on how to avoid dangerous weather situations. “We rely on them for specific forecasts about fire danger,” Duncan says. It’s subtleties like that, buried within the inner workings and practicalities of wildfire management, that many federal employees — current and former — feel are getting lost in the chaos of politics. And come summertime, it won’t matter how much money was saved by layoffs if there aren’t enough folks to hold fire lines. At best estimates, DOGE could save an estimated $250 million with layoffs in the Forest Service — 10 percent of the agency’s total calculated salaries. The 2018 Camp Fire that tore through California caused
$16.5 billion in losses, or over 50 times more than those savings are worth. Losses from January’s Palisades and Eaton fires, meanwhile, are estimated to cost $50-75 billion. Those nuances feel lost in the disconnect between the people fighting fires and the administration making cuts.
Considering the circumstances, the mood is upbeat in the church. There’s laughter and chatter and warmth. But nobody really knows what’ll happen once blazes start burning across the West. Or even before, with mitigation projects like prescribed burns and vegetation removal potentially stalled.
Brad LaPlante, a forestry employee and union steward for the local chapter of the
THE AVERAGE FOREST SERVICE SALARY IS $74,414. ASSUMING THE 3,400 FIRED FOLKS MADE AN AVERAGE SALARY, THE LAYOFFS AMOUNT TO $253,007,600 IN SAVINGS — OR $1.57 PER AMERICAN TAXPAYER.
National Federation of Federal Employees, suspects the government will have to rely on more contractors to make up what’s been lost. They already fill in gaps when the Forest Service and local agencies are stretched too thin, but he predicts that relationship will accelerate. And when it does, he wonders if we’ll start to get some answers about real savings. “It is a lot cheaper to have an actual agency that’s able to handle its own mission than to force it to contract out,” he says.
Contractor firefighters are paid, at minimum, around $27 per hour — a standard set by the Department of Labor. However, many companies charge more, and the final cost varies substantially from one company to another (the official U.S. government
spending database, USAspending.gov, reports contracts with well over 500 companies in fiscal year 2024). The average starting salary for an entry-level federal wildland firefighter, meanwhile, is between $15-17 per hour. Right away, there’s a compensation gap. But it can get much wider than $10 per hour. There’s a reason, Duncan says, that contractors have historically been the last line of defense after local, state and federal resources have been exhausted. “It’s because they cost more,” she says. “Contract firefighters are way more than federal firefighters. Everybody knows it.” Yet as far as she’s heard, contract firefighters have not been impacted by DOGE’s cuts. In fact, she’s heard the opposite. When we spoke in March, crews of them were battling fires in the Southeast. They seemingly hadn’t been affected at all. Like LaPlante, Duncan suspects that’s on purpose. “I think it’s totally part of the plan,” she said. “I think they will justify it by saying it provides jobs in the private sector” — even if those jobs end up costing taxpayers more than the ones they’re replacing.
That word, “if,” comes up a lot in these discussions, because everything is changing so fast. Mitrione, for example, filed an appeal to reverse her firing on the very same day that the USDA, which oversees the Forest Service, issued a “45-day stay on termination of probationary employees.” A few days later, she was told that she would be invited back, along with her fired timber crew colleagues. But she has no idea whether the reversal will last, or whether she’ll be fired later on regardless, or whether a new court ruling will eventually make yet another firing null and void. “I just don’t know how things are going to look,” she says. In some ways, the situation mirrors the chaos of an actual wildfire: When containment efforts fail and firefighters are overwhelmed, flames chew through trees and roads and homes at random. They push people out of their way, and they spread, and they consume whatever sits in their path.
If, that is, there’s anything left to burn down.
Find the good in everybody. KIND NESS
Dolly Parton
THE OTHER BORDER
AT AMERICA’S NORTHERN BORDER, CANADA FEELS FURTHER AWAY THAN EVER
BY LAURA YALE
The Slash” is the northern border’s version of “The Wall.” But where a wall creates a barricade, the Slash creates an opening. The name feels a bit like an onomatopoeia, describing the 20-foot-wide, 1,349-mile-long clear-cut of spruce and fir trees that tower over the lakes and blanket the mountainsides of a land so big and untamed it doesn’t feel like it could belong to anyone.
The U.S. and Canada officially agreed on the co-management of the Slash when the International Boundary Commission was created in 1925, but the razing of trees to mark the 49th parallel began in the 1800s, to simply let the “average person” know that they are “on” the agreed-upon border. Today, the U.S. and Canada are each responsible for funding the maintenance of 10 feet (or 3 meters) of their respective sides of the Slash’s center line. That requires a $1.6 million annual budget for the U.S. to cut back any encroaching wilderness and maintain the cameras that surveil more remote stretches of the Slash. The U.S.
government’s half of that bill costs each taxpayer between a half-cent and a penny every year. But at this moment, what’s crossing the border — and what’s not — is coming at a much higher price.
While this region has a violent colonial history and the establishment of the United
CANADA AND THE U.S. HAVE BEEN FLINGING COUNTER-TARIFFS BACK AND FORTH ON GOODS SUCH AS LUMBER, DAIRY, STEEL, ALUMINUM AND ELECTRICITY.
States and Canada bifurcated Indigenous nations and ecosystems along the 49th parallel, the world’s longest international border — 5,525 miles with 120 land ports of entry — has been considered peaceful for more than 100 years since the signing
of the border treaty of 1908. Personal, political and economic relationships have been not only peaceful, but truly friendly and prosperous. The trade relationship between the two nations is one of the biggest in the world, with Canada and the United States both serving as each other’s largest export markets.
However, after President Donald Trump referred to Canada as “the 51st state” and announced a 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods, a trade war has broken out. Canada responded immediately with its own retaliatory tariffs. Since then, Canada and the U.S. have been flinging counter-tariffs back and forth on goods such as lumber, dairy, steel, aluminum and electricity.
It’s a fraught moment that feels upside down, with the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico being quieter than usual while tension in the north flares. Both Canadians and Americans living in border towns are trying to maintain a sense of normalcy, but some are beginning to question if top-down politics has the power
THE “SLASH,” THE PHYSICAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CANADAU.S. BORDER, WHICH IS THE LONGEST INTERNATIONAL BORDER IN THE WORLD.
MIKE BENTLEY, ORIGINALLY FROM MICHIGAN, MOVED TO FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, DURING THE VIETNAM WAR BECAUSE HE DIDN’T BELIEVE IN “KILLING FOR PEACE.”
IN RESPONSE TO PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PROVOCATION OF THE COUNTRY, CANADA’S PATRIOTISM IS SURGING, WITH 78 PERCENT OF CANADIANS MAKING AN EFFORT TO BUY MORE CANADIAN PRODUCTS, ACCORDING TO A RECENT ANGUS REID POLL.
DESPITE WHAT THE NEWS CYCLES BRING, LESTER
“BUD” GRAY AND HIS FRIENDS HAVE A CONSTANT: CRIBBAGE.
THE U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PATROL REPORTS THAT 500,000 FEWER CANADIANS CROSSED THE BORDER IN FEBRUARY 2025 THAN IN 2024 AND NEW DATA SHOWS THAT PASSENGER BOOKINGS ON CANADA-U.S. AIRLINE ROUTES ARE DOWN BY MORE THAN 70 PERCENT EVERY MONTH THROUGH SEPTEMBER, COMPARED TO THE SAME PERIOD LAST YEAR.
to shake the foundations of what makes this region unique and peaceful. Many wonder what will remain, and what won’t, in the aftermath.
“TELL YA WHAT, up here’s about as close to heaven as you can get,” says Lester “Bud” Gray, a rancher born and raised on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. At a cafe on the reservation in northwest Montana, just 12 miles south of the Canadian border, Gray started his morning with some coffee and a casual three-hour cribbage session with
his two friends, Pat Schildt and Stormy Burns, before heading back out to care for his cattle.
“But wait ’til the wind comes, then it’s hell,” he laughs. After a couple of games, the conversation shifts from the winter duties of feeding livestock to politics. The three men shake their heads at recent federal employee layoffs and the chaos of international relations and executive orders that have flooded the news lately.
Schildt, who has been constantly cracking jokes while consistently losing in cribbage,
switches his tone. “People are going to pay with their lives, their livelihoods.”
He runs a domesticated herd of bison on land with a whole handful of borders that also delineate his property line: The Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Canada, the United States, Montana and Glacier County. He says that his bison once busted through the fence and made their way into Canada, only to later find them huddled along the fenceline elsewhere waiting to be let back in. In addition to his bison crossing every so often, he says that many people’s lives and
businesses are naturally integrated on each side of the border. His mechanic is north of the border, and it’s not uncommon for his neighbors to buy animal feed from each other or get groceries on the opposite side of where they live.
Human-made things also snake above and below ground across the border. While the population thins out along the northern border of the United States, most Canadians — 2 out of 3 — live within 62 miles of their southern border. Pipelines, reservoirs, electric transmission lines and industrial goods — nearly $2.6 billion worth of stuff — cross the border each day, according to the U.S. Department of State. The trade war has thrown all of these goods, and relationships, into a tailspin. For example, Ontario Premier Doug Ford slapped a 25 percent surcharge on electricity Canada supplies to Michigan, New York and Minnesota in March. It has since paused, but Ford says he is not afraid to “increase this charge” or “turn off electricity completely” if the U.S. escalates tariffs. But up here (or down there, depending on who you are talking to), there is some immunity to human drama. It’s easy to imagine that more animals — as big as grizzlies and as small as ants — cross the border each day than people. The landscape is vast, and while far from empty, it’s hard not to feel a sense of awe and appreciation for it.
As you get closer to the Piegan Port of Entry border, bison dot the landscape on both sides of the highway (Schildt’s herd is on the east side). Chief Mountain, a sacred place for the Blackfeet, juts up from the plains into sheer walls of 600-million-year-old rock piled atop formations that are at least 400 million years younger. Set against the backdrop of the mountain, the drab government buildings and sleepy border crossing feel extremely insignificant. Silly, really. The Rocky Mountains strut north and only a slight shift in their name indicates any difference in their national identity becoming the “Canadian Rockies” as they cross the border into Waterton Lakes National Park.
For the average American or Canadian citizen, crossing the border is generally a casual affair. There is even an outdoor barbecue at one of the nearby crossings — a friend told me of a time a border agent had him wait a moment while he went to flip the chicken he was grilling.
Pulling up to the Piegan Port of Entry, a young border agent asks the same questions as always. “Where are you going? For how long? Do you have tobacco, alcohol or firearms?” In less than one minute, speed limit signs swap from miles to kilometers per hour, the road that was once Highway 89 is now Highway 2, and the U.S. is in the rearview mirror.
UP HERE (OR DOWN THERE, DEPENDING ON WHO YOU ARE TALKING TO), THERE IS SOME IMMUNITY TO HUMAN DRAMA. IT’S EASY TO IMAGINE THAT MORE ANIMALS — AS BIG AS GRIZZLIES AND AS SMALL AS ANTS — CROSS THE BORDER EACH DAY THAN PEOPLE.
The first town north of the border on Highway 2 is Cardston, which was settled in 1887 by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traveling from Utah. A young man on a very tall horse trots down a road just a few blocks off the historic main street. Shayde Primrose, a senior in high school, wears a black cowboy hat and is easy to talk to. “I don’t pay much attention to what’s going on down south,” he says, “but my mom sure does, and she doesn’t like any of it much.” In addition to being a student, Primrose is a horse trainer. A woman has hired him to train this particular horse for racing. The horse’s name is Donald.
AT A COFFEE shop in Blairmore, Alberta, a group of locals huddled together at a table, discussing the recent news of a family of Venezuelans trying to cross the border from Montana into Alberta on a night that was a bone-chilling minus 22 degrees. “How did they get all the way up here?” one man asks. Canadians are not used to people attempting to cross the border from the U.S. However, numbers have increased both ways in the past few years. First, Trump accused Canada of not being harsh enough on illegal crossings into America. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says 23,721 people were apprehended last fiscal year crossing its northern border, up from the 2,238 caught two years prior. That is a marked increase, but still nowhere near the 1.5 million apprehensions U.S. border agents made at the southern border last year. In response, Canada enacted stricter visa policies and added two helicopters and a fleet of thermal-detecting drones to their border security, and data shows that there are fewer attempted illegal crossings from north to south this year than at the same time last year.
However, as sweeping deportations have come into effect across the States, asylum-seekers are reportedly fleeing north, attempting to make it out of the U.S. and into Canada to avoid being deported. While data has not been released for 2025, government news releases suggest the number of these asylum-seekers escaping into Canada is rising. In Alberta, preliminary data shows that up to 20 people have been apprehended crossing illegally so far this year. In comparison, only seven people were intercepted crossing the border illegally in Alberta in all of 2024.
And while illegal border crossings seem to be rising, the official border crossings, where Americans and Canadians drive through every day to shop, eat, visit family, or even just go hiking or skiing, are eerily quiet. According to U.S Customs and Border Protection data, nearly 500,000 fewer travelers crossed the border from Canada into the U.S. in February 2025 than in February 2024.
“It’s unsettling,” says a woman working at the Duty Free shop on the Canadian side of the border at the Rooseville crossing. Normally, after work on a day like today, she tells me she often drives to Eureka, Montana, to buy groceries, since it’s much closer than driving to Fernie, British Columbia. But this morning, her friend went to buy a few groceries and received a 25 percent tax on them when she came back over the border. “It just no longer makes sense,” she sighs.
But the fact is, folks have to keep making life make sense up here. And so, amid the cafe-stop lunches and the drives to the nearest market, they find ways. At a coffee shop in Fernie, a blonde woman wearing a beanie sitting next to me can’t help but notice that her 6-month-old baby and mine are about the same age, so we strike up a conversation. In between swapping stories about sleep deprivation and starting solid foods, she mentions that her husband is American and they go back and forth often. I ask her if they are worried about the politics of it all. “My husband isn’t, but I am,” she says. “Honestly, it creeps me out. I am feeling World War II vibes.” She then smiles, hands me her computer and asks me which pattern of bibs-with-sleeves she should buy.
walk through spruce and ponderosa. Then, suddenly, there’s an opening. Walking into the middle of the clear-cut, the line looks like it reaches out in both directions forever, only pausing to hop across the blue waters of Lake Koocanusa before picking back up and rising into the next mountain range across the valley. Lake Koocanusa’s name is a blend of “Kootenai” (one of the names of the Indigenous nation whose traditional homelands it is in), “Canada” and “USA,” but the word “Koocanusa” sounds nothing like any of those root names when you say it aloud.
Standing here, I remember reading about something President Ronald Reagan said in 1988, after signing a free-trade pact with America’s neighbor on the northern border: “Let it forever be not a point of division but a meeting place between our great and true friends.”
“PEOPLE ARE GOING TO PAY WITH THEIR LIVES, THEIR LIVELIHOODS.”
There are different ways to define this place we’re at, and to think about this “slash.” Perhaps, in the etymology of the word, this name wasn’t just meant to invoke the image of a slash that cuts two countries apart, like a sword slicing through the forest and national identity, but also a slash — a symbol of “either/or.” Of an indication that things are related enough to be separated by only the most marginal of lines.
Just under the surface of even the most pleasant interaction or expression is a feeling of deep concern and uncertainty. It’s difficult to navigate when overarching political tensions and contentment within our daily lives are constantly battling. It’s a practice of searching (but never actually finding) the right balance.
THE SLASH IS not always easy to find — often far away from any roads or trails. Turning off the main highway, up a dirt road still packed with ice, I leave the car behind and
The outcome of the trade war is still unclear, but Trump’s threats of future tariffs and the challenge to long-standing agreements hang in the air. What is clear is that, right now, trust in the U.S. as a reliable ally and “true friend” is in question.
The breeze is erratic and blustery as another storm hovers above. The sun is setting. The trees on the edge of the Slash sway back and forth, alternately leaning toward and away from each other. It smells of fresh earth and evergreen. In the negative space between the two countries, it becomes easier to feel what connects us.
SHAYDE PRIMROSE, A SENIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL LIVING IN ALBERTA, DOESN’T PAY MUCH ATTENTION TO THE NEWS CYCLE, INSTEAD STAYING BUSY TRAINING HORSES.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a man of the West.
Can it weather his paradoxical approach?
BY Samuel Benson ILLUSTRATION BY C.F. Payne
DOUG BURGUM, THE FORMER NORTH DAKOTA GOVERNOR, WAS THE FIRST 2024 GOP PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY CANDIDATE TO ENDORSE DONALD TRUMP AS THE EVENTUAL NOMINEE. IN TURN, TRUMP NAMED BURGUM HIS PICK FOR U.S. SECRETARY OF INTERIOR.
n the heart of the Badlands,
a shrine to the American West rises from the earth. A mile west of Medora, North Dakota, what is now a heap of dirt, concrete and scaffolding will be, by July 4, 2026 — the country’s semiquincentennial — the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a monument to America’s “conservationist president.”
Roosevelt lived in North Dakota twice — first in 1883 during a prolonged bison hunt, and again in 1884, to heal after his wife and mother died on the same day. “I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” Roosevelt later wrote; it was in the rugged Badlands “that the romance of my life began.”
The library, its designers say, will offer visitors that same experience. The sprawling, 90-acre plot, filled with walking trails and recreation opportunities, will be the only presidential library accessible by mountain bike or horseback. A mile-long, circular boardwalk will offer panoramic views of the surrounding Badlands, as visitors gaze upon miles and miles of untamed wilderness.
Perhaps no individual has championed the project as stoutly as Doug Burgum. A history buff who relishes tales of the Rough Riders, the horse-mounted regiment Roosevelt commanded during the Spanish-American War, Burgum often
recites the 26th president’s 1910 “Man in the Arena” speech from memory. While governor of North Dakota, Burgum signed into law a $50 million endowment for the library, coming from the state’s oil and gas revenue. To secure the deal, he invited conservation and business luminaries such as Roosevelt’s great-great-grandson and a former Walmart CEO to North Dakota to lobby legislators. Now, as bulldozers and cranes crisscross the land outside Medora, Burgum has turned his attention to the invitation list for the 2026 grand opening, including all living U.S. presidents.
Burgum, for a fleeting moment, aimed to be among the presidents. His short-lived 2024 presidential campaign changed the trajectory of his own career — after becoming the first Republican candidate to drop out and endorse President Donald Trump, he became a top proxy for the eventual winner. In a surrogate pool filled with career politicians and celebrities, Burgum was a unique breed: A former tech entrepreneur,
he was far less eager to discuss “culture war” issues than he was to hypothesize on the future of artificial intelligence or to pontificate on energy policy.
But he was never destined to be president — not this cycle, at least, and not with this electorate. Instead, Trump placed him in a much more natural role: overseeing the 500 million square acres of federal lands; the oil and gas leases that rack up billion-dollar bids; the national parks that Americans are loving to death; the prospect of a massive energy shortage that could kneecap our ability to compete with China or leave us defenseless against it.
As the newly sworn-in Interior secretary, Burgum ascends to the Cabinet at a time when America, and the West, seem poised for massive transformation. Those who know him best — colleagues, friends, fellow officeholders — told me that Burgum is particularly poised for the challenge. As international dynamics shift, the U.S. lurches toward increasing isolation, including with our longtime trade allies. The American energy sector, already producing record amounts of gas, oil and renewables, is drooling for a green light as artificial intelligence will demand more and more. As the West’s population booms, haggling over natural resources — including public lands — will only increase.
It’s a job suited for a Westerner: Since 1949, few Interior secretaries have hailed from east of the Mississippi. But it’s also a job suited for a Rooseveltian heir. Over
a third of the United States’ public lands were designated under Roosevelt; today, a battle is underway between the federal government and Western states over how those lands should be managed and conserved.
Roosevelt enabled the 1906 American Antiquities Act; today, a game of political pingpong is heating up over how lands should be protected under that measure, including the Bears Ears and Escalante national monuments in Utah. Roosevelt set the standard for water reclamation efforts in Arizona and the arid West; today, climate change threatens prolonged drought in the region, even as massive population growth increases demand.
Burgum — the 68-year-old aw-shucks, small-town businessman — finds himself at the center of it all.
THE RAGS-TO-RICHES TROPE finds its perfect vessel in Burgum — a farm boy and literal chimney sweep turned
billionaire. He was raised in Arthur, North Dakota, a town so small that Burgum says it had no paved roads. Three hundred and fifty people called it home when Burgum was growing up; in the five decades since, its population has remained stagnant. His family had spent three generations running a grain elevator. Burgum’s father died when he was a freshman in high school; his mother commuted 30 miles for work in Fargo to keep the family afloat.
Burgum excelled at North Dakota State University. Charismatic and quirky, he won the election for student body president as a junior. As a senior, hoping to rake together some extra cash, he took a job as a chimney sweep. All winter long, as part of a sales gimmick, he donned a black tailcoat and a top hat, fielding requests to sing “Mary Poppins” songs as he scraped soot. On one occasion, his ladder didn’t reach the top of a three-story house. He grabbed a rope, lassoed the vent stack and scaled the house’s icy wall vertically. “I like climbing, being
THE RAGS-TO-RICHES TROPE FINDS ITS PERFECT VESSEL IN BURGUM — A FARM BOY AND LITERAL CHIMNEY SWEEP TURNED BILLIONAIRE.
outdoors, and the money isn’t that bad, either,” Burgum later told a reporter for NDSU’s student newspaper.
The Associated Press picked up the story, and it made its way to admissions officers at Stanford Business School, where Burgum had recently applied. Within months, Burgum was a first-year MBA student in Palo Alto.
Burgum cruised through Stanford, keeping a framed picture of his family’s grain elevator on his desk as a constant reminder. Upon graduating in 1980, he accepted a consulting job with McKinsey in Chicago. But his career took a sharp turn when he was introduced by a co-worker to an Apple II computer, then the latest and greatest in office tech. He watched, mesmerized, as its spreadsheet program automatically performed a string of calculations. “I had just spent four hours doing what that thing did in a minute. It was one of those blow-you-away kind of moments,” Burgum told The Forum, a Fargo newspaper.
Back in North Dakota, a pair of businessmen were a step ahead. At Great Plains Computers, the state’s first Apple retailer,
store owners used those same computers to build an in-house software program to perform digital bookkeeping. Soon, it became clear the accounting platform was their real winner: They stopped selling computers altogether and built out their software offerings. Burgum was so intrigued he mortgaged the 160 acres of farmland he inherited from his father and provided it as seed capital for the burgeoning company. “I literally bet the farm on that tiny software startup,” he later recalled.
The gamble paid off. When Burgum arrived in 1983, the company had 20 employees. By 1990, it had nearly 300, over one-third dedicated to customer service alone, an emblem of Burgum’s customer-first approach. A year after arriving, Burgum convinced his brother, mother, two cousins and an uncle to join in and purchase majority ownership in the company, which they did for $2 million. In 1989, according to Family Business Magazine, Great Plains Software did $22 million in sales.
All along, Burgum kept the organization’s North Dakota peculiarity front and center. Even as glossy tech companies
IN THE EARLY 2000S, BURGUM, RIGHT, WORKED FOR BILL GATES AS SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS SOLUTIONS AT MICROSOFT, WHICH HAD BOUGHT HIS NORTH DAKOTABORN GREAT PLAINS SOFTWARE IN 2001 FOR $1.1 BILLION IN STOCK.
sprouted up in Silicon Valley, Burgum opted to keep the company in the Great Plains and to lean into its geographical uniqueness. At trade shows, while other tech companies hawked their products at glitzy, screen-heavy vendor booths, Great Plains Software employees dressed up like cowboys and led roping lessons. “We basically from the get-go said, ‘Hey, we’re very proud of our North Dakota roots, and we’re going to use that as a differentiator,’” Burgum told The Forum.
Even though the company was geographically isolated, Burgum recognized that the most important thing would be recruiting a talented, young and bright workforce. He’d frequently call worried parents and explain that, yes, a solid career in tech could start in North Dakota. At one point, they implemented a college-esque “parents’ day” to more effectively make the pitch. “When everything that you make and sell comes out of the minds of your team members, the only raw material that you need to be close to is brain power,” Burgum said in 2012. Eventually, Silicon Valley took notice. Steve Ballmer, one of Burgum’s business school classmates, was CEO of Microsoft. He offered to buy Great Plains Software; Burgum said no. He came back a second time, and Burgum rebuffed him again. Finally, on the third try in 2000, the two struck a deal: a $1.1 billion acquisition, folding Great Plains’ accounting software into Microsoft’s portfolio and rebranding it as Microsoft Business Solutions.
Named senior vice president of the division, Burgum stuck around. Microsoft maintained the Fargo office space, eventually growing it into the largest campus outside of its Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Burgum, now at the upper echelons of the booming U.S. tech scene, never lost his small-town persona. Indeed, one Silicon Valley observer wrote, it may have been his greatest achievement: “He managed to remain the aw-shucks, upper-Midwestern, history-buff that he was despite (or maybe because of) his exposure to a more raffish Microsoft culture.”
“EVERYBODY THINKS THEY’RE THE SMARTEST PERSON IN THE ROOM UNTIL THEY’RE IN A ROOM WITH DOUG BURGUM.”
UTAH GOV. SPENCER COX
In 2009, then-Gov. John Hoeven awarded Burgum the Rough Rider Award, the highest civilian honor in North Dakota, named after Roosevelt. At the ceremony, Burgum looked at the governor. “Gee, John, I hope I’m not done accomplishing things,” he said.
BURGUM’S ASCENT TO North Dakota’s highest political office came as a surprise even to the most astute followers of the state’s politics. Burgum had built up a reputation across the state — his time at Microsoft and his role in bolstering downtown Fargo’s real estate helped — but he had no political experience. “I don’t want to be a politician,” he admitted in his speech announcing his run for governor.
The event — featuring a darkened stage and an on-screen PowerPoint behind him — was “more typical for a tech entrepreneur than a candidate for statewide office in North Dakota,” a local newspaper reported. Burgum was immediately pegged as the underdog, facing a North Dakota attorney general who’d accrued 74 percent of the state’s vote in his reelection campaign two years prior. In the gubernatorial primary, though, Burgum romped to a 20-point victory.
Burgum’s time in the governor’s mansion was highlighted by business expansion and economic growth. When he entered office, North Dakota was among the states with
the oldest population; when he left office, it was in the top 10 youngest. But where Burgum made his biggest splash — and won the admiration of many of his fellow governors — was his leadership on energy and conservation. “He’s brilliant,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told me. “I’ve said it before: Everybody thinks they’re the smartest person in the room until they’re in a room with Doug Burgum.” A firm believer in an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy production, Burgum knew his state sat hundreds of feet above massive oil reserves, and he recognized his state’s economy relied on its extraction. A self-described conservationist, Burgum didn’t see his two stances — pro-fossil fuels and pro-environment — in conflict. Instead, he championed North Dakota’s place as the country’s third-largest oil producing state, while setting the goal of becoming the first carbon neutral state. By 2030, he vowed, his state would accomplish it.
Burgum figured North Dakota could innovate its way to clean fuel extraction. It’d use carbon-capture technology, which relies on capturing greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere and storing it underground. Some environmental groups were skeptical that the unproven technology was a viable long-term solution. But to Burgum, the possibility of innovating his way out of a jam was invigorating. Meeting his 2030 goal, he said, would come “without mandates but with innovation.” Within
DOES AMERICAN PROSPERITY HAVE TO COME AT THE EXPENSE OF OUR ENVIRONMENT?
ROOSEVELT DIDN’T THINK SO, NOR DOES BURGUM. BUT ROOSEVELT LIVED AT A DIFFERENT TIME.
a year of his announcement, North Dakota was hit with a “cascade of interest” from investors around the world, Burgum said — to the tune of $25 billion in grants.
HE ARRIVED IN Washington a week before Trump. Burgum’s January 2025 confirmation hearing fell on a Thursday, crisp and cold, one of the Senate’s final orders of business before its Republican members dove into a weekend of inauguration festivities. Burgum, too, was invited to the black-tie galas. But on the day of his hearing, he wore the Trumpian uniform: blue suit, red satin tie, an American flag pin on his lapel. His gray hair was combed back in a long wave. He certainly looked presidential.
The nominee entered clutching his wife’s hand. The room, a wood-paneled conference hall in one of the Senate office buildings, just north of the Capitol, was packed with onlookers and supporters; it was the senators, though, that earned Burgum’s immediate attention. He led his wife, Kathryn, to a seat in the front, before circling the room and greeting many of the senators by name. This group, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would determine whether his nomination would move forward to the rest of the upper chamber. It seemed Burgum already knew most of them on a first-name basis.
With Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee — chair of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee — Burgum bantered about the proper spelling of “bison.” (“It’s with a z,” Burgum insisted.) Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine, contributed a dad joke. (“What did the lady buffalo say to her little boy when he was going off to school?” Answer: “Bye, son.”) Hoeven, the senior senator from (and former governor of) North Dakota, held up a thick stack of letters from his state’s Indigenous tribes, expressing support for Burgum. Kevin Cramer, the state’s other senator, praised Burgum’s track record. “He’s not just an oil guy from an oil and gas state. He is a
conservationist,” he said. “That’s a remarkable balance he brings to this.”
Burgum made it clear to the committee that, while he’s a staunch advocate of renewable energy, like wind and solar, he thinks of them as “intermittent” sources and questions whether they provide the baseload necessary to support the incoming energy wave that will accompany AI. He acknowledged that climate change is a “global phenomenon,” and said he advocates an energy policy that provides as much energy as possible, as cheaply as possible, to as many Americans as possible. His views are squarely in line with some of the leading Republican thinkers on climate: Sen. John Curtis of Utah, the founder of the Conservative Climate Caucus in the House, said he feels “very much aligned” with Burgum. “He brings a dose of reality to the climate conversation,” Curtis told me. “He understands the moving parts. He understands why it’s important for the United States to lead in energy production.”
How the U.S. produces that energy, though, is a chief concern of some environmentalists. Within Burgum’s first days leading the Interior Department, he signed an order that directed his deputies to review the possibility of mining in public lands currently closed to such activities. The order was met by swift backlash from many climate advocates, some arguing that it was the first step in opening protected lands — like Utah’s Bears Ears and Escalante national monuments — to drilling. “This isn’t technology neutral ‘energy abundance,’ it’s a blatant giveaway to the fossil fuel interests who were generous benefactors to Trump’s campaign,” said Alan Zibel, research director at Public Citizen. Indeed, the possibility of extraction at the southeastern Utah monuments was mentioned multiple times during Burgum’s confirmation hearings. Eventually, Sen. Lee interjected. “There is no significant oil in the Bears Ears,” he said. “I don’t know who came up with this idea that someone is getting ready to drill in the Bears Ears National Monument.”
Lee’s issue — and a concern Burgum
DURING THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY, BURGUM LEANED ON HIS BLEND OF CONSERVATION AND EVEN-KEELED BUSINESS SENSE BUT ULTIMATELY FAILED TO CONNECT WITH THE REPUBLICAN ELECTORATE.
shares — is how the boundaries around Bears Ears, and other national monuments, were drawn. It was Roosevelt who first enabled the cartography; his 1906 American Antiquities Act allows presidents to unilaterally designate plots of federal land as protected national monuments. In Utah, each president since Barack Obama has expanded or shrunk the boundaries. (Trump, in his second term, is expected to continue the tradition by shrinking the protected area.)
Burgum seems open to the idea — the key is “local consultation,” he said in his hearing — but he seems much more interested in utilizing public lands in an innovative way to meet crucial needs: energy and housing. “Some (lands), like the national parks, absolutely, we need to support and protect every inch of those,” Burgum told the Senate committee. “But in other cases, we’ve got a multiple use scenario for our lands.” He has expressed support for public-private “land swaps” to allow the construction of affordable housing, and now that he holds the keys to the country’s oil and gas leases, he will make some federal lands available for energy projects — a paradoxical approach likely to mark his time at the Interior Department.
IN FEBRUARY OF this year, for one of his first public appearances as Interior secretary, Burgum addressed his former fellow state leaders at the National Governors Association winter meeting. He made an impassioned plea for a clear-eyed look at the biggest threats on the horizon: China and AI. An all-out investment in American energy, he posited, could solve both. He
begged governors to begin by enacting permitting reform in their states and cutting through red tape that kneecaps energy and infrastructure projects. “We’re in a competition, and the competition we’re in is with other countries that aren’t slowing themselves down with the level of bureaucracy we have,” he said. The rise of AI will require more and more energy, and the U.S. should be at the forefront of producing it, he said. “If our allies have an opportunity to buy energy from us, as opposed to our adversaries, we can stop their ability to wage war for the world,” Burgum said. China is producing coal, nuclear and hydro plants light-years faster than the U.S.; why can’t we catch up? There, of course, lies the tension for Burgum’s tenure atop the Interior. Does American prosperity have to come at the expense of our environment, of our West? Roosevelt didn’t think so, nor, it seems, does Burgum (a Department of Interior spokesperson declined my request to interview the secretary). But Roosevelt lived at a different time: when the outdoors were only loosely regulated and the West still largely “untamed”; when climate science was rudimentary;
when America’s largest threats were almost exclusively abroad. Can a frontiersman’s approach to the West, a century and change later, still hold out?
Burgum aims to find out. By the time the doors on the new Roosevelt Library swing open in 2026, we should have a decent idea, too. The Colorado River Compact of 1922, which allocates water for the Southwestern states, expires next year; Burgum’s Interior Department will be required to renegotiate the terms. The International Energy Agency projects that an AI-fueled electricity demand will be, in 2026, double that of 2022; Burgum will play point on ensuring the U.S. sources that energy, too. The same goes for public lands and housing shortages and pressing climate issues.
Those who know him best suggest that Burgum understands the gravity of the road ahead for the West. “He’s obviously a very smart, driven person,” said Spencer Zwick, who sits on the Roosevelt Library’s board of directors. “But when you’re with him, he’s not worried about popularity. In a very Teddy Roosevelt-esque way, Doug Burgum is worried about just doing the right thing.”
BRANDON BELL / GETTY IMAGES
WE'RE NOT JUST HOOKED ON SCROLLING, WE'RE CAPTIVE
by Chris Hayes
illustration by Stephan Schmitz
with a story from Odysseus’ journey. In Book 12 of “The Odyssey,” our hero is about to depart the island of the goddess Circe when she gives him some crucial advice about how to navigate the perils of the next leg of his voyage.
“Pay attention,” she instructs him sternly:
First, you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.
Odysseus listens as Circe provides him with a plan: Stuff wax in the ears of your crew, she says, so they cannot hear the Sirens, and have them bind you to the mast of the ship until you have sailed safely past.
Odysseus follows the plan to a tee. Sure enough, when the Sirens’ song hits his ears, he motions to his men to loosen him so that he can follow it. But as instructed, his crew ignores him until the ship is out of earshot.
This image is one of the most potent in the Western canon: Odysseus lashed to the mast, struggling against the bonds that he himself submitted to, knowing this was all in store. It has come down to us through the centuries as a metaphor for many things.
Sin and virtue. The temptations of the flesh and the willpower to resist them. The addict who throws his pills down the toilet in preparation for the cravings to come, then begs for more drugs. It’s an image that illustrates the Freudian struggle between the ego and the id: what we want and what we know we should not, cannot have. Whenever I’ve encountered a visual representation of the Sirens, they are always, for lack of a better word, hot. Seductive. From Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison and down through literature, the Sirens are most often a metaphor for female sexual allure. In James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Bloom describes the man who has taken up with Bloom’s wife as “falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties.”
Given this, it is a bit odd to reconcile the original meaning of the word with how we use it today, to describe the intrusive wail of the device atop ambulances and cop cars. But there’s a connection there, a profound one, and it’s the guiding insight to understanding life in the 21st century.
Stand on a street corner in any city on Earth long enough, and you will hear an emergency vehicle whiz past. When you travel to a foreign land, that sound stands out as part of the sensory texture of the foreignness you’re experiencing. Because no matter where you are, its call is at once familiar and foreign. The foreignness comes from the fact that in different countries the siren sounds slightly
HAVING OUR MIND CAPTURED BY THAT INTRUSIVE WAIL IS NOW OUR PERMANENT STATE, OUR LOT IN LIFE. WE ARE NEVER FREE OF THE SIRENS’ CALL.
different — elongated, or two-toned, or distinctly pitched. But even if you’ve never encountered it before, you instantly understand its purpose. Amid a language you may not speak and food you’ve never tried, the siren is universal. It exists to grab our attention, and it succeeds.
The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call.
Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake, we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life. “My experience,” as William James wrote in “The Principles of Psychology” in 1890, “is what I agree to attend to.” Increasingly, it feels as if our experience is something we don’t fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented fashion. That’s true in just about every country and culture on Earth.
In the morning, I sit on the couch with my precious younger daughter. She is 6 years old, and her sweet, soft breath is on my cheek as she cuddles up with a book, asking me to read to her before we walk to school. Her attention is uncorrupted and pure. There is nothing in this life that is better. And yet I feel the instinct, almost physical, to look at the little attention box sitting in my pocket. I let it pass with a small amount of effort. But it pulses there like Gollum’s ring.
My ability to reject its little tug means I’m still alive, a whole human self. In the shame-ridden moments when I succumb, though, I wonder what exactly I am or have become. I keep coming back to James’ phrase “what I agree to attend to”
because that word “agree” in his formulation carries enormous weight. Even if the demand for our attention comes from outside us, James believed that we ultimately controlled where we put it, that in “agreeing” to attend to something we offered our consent. James was rather obsessed with the question of free will, whether we in fact had it and how it worked. To him, “effort of attention” — deciding where to direct our thoughts — was “the essential phenomenon of will.” It was one and the same. No wonder I feel alienated from myself when the attention box in my pocket compels me seemingly against my own volition.
The ambulance siren can be a nuisance in a loud, crowded city streetscape, but at least it compels our attention for a socially useful purpose. The Sirens of Greek myth compel our attention to speed our own death. What Odysseus was doing with the wax and the mast was actively trying to manage his own attention. As dramatic as that Homeric passage is, it’s also, for us in the attention age, almost mundane. Because to live at this moment in the world, both online and off, is to find oneself endlessly wriggling on the mast, fighting for control of our very being against the ceaseless siren calls of the people and devices and corporations and malevolent actors trying to trap it.
My professional life requires me to be particularly consumed by these questions, but I think we all feel this to some degree, don’t we? The alienating experience of being divided and distracted in spite of ourselves, to be here but not present. I bet you could spend day and night in any city or town canvassing strangers and not find a single one who told you they felt like their attention span was too long, that they were too focused, who wished they had more distractions, or spent more time looking at screens.
The social effects of the attention age are well documented, with nearly all of the data we have pointing in the same
direction. There has been a sharp rise in depression and suicide among not just teenagers, but children as well. Self-reported happiness has been in secular decline since the mass adoption of smartphones across all ages in the U.S., but this is particularly acute among teenagers. People are spending less and less time interacting in the flesh and more time interacting through their devices, and along with that, we’ve seen people having fewer and fewer friends. The presence of phones also seems to be having deleterious effects on students across the world. Globally, standardized test scores have been declining significantly since about 2012, across different societies and educational approaches. The culprit, based on the Program for International Student Assessment, which collects the data, is pretty clear. As The Atlantic characterized the findings, “In sum, students who spend more time staring at their phone do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their life.”
Like traffic, our phones are now the source of universal complaint, a way to strike up a conversation in a barber shop or grocery line. What began as small voices at the margins warning us that the tech titans were offering us a Faustian bargain has coalesced into something approaching an emerging consensus: Things are bad, and the technologies we all use every day are the cause. The phones are warbling us to death.
But before we simply accept this at face value and move on with our inquiry, it’s worth poking a bit at this quickly forming conventional wisdom. I mean, don’t we always go through this cycle? Don’t people always feel that things are wrong and that it’s because of kids these days? Or the new technology (printing press, steam engine, etc.) has been our ruin?
In plato’s “phaedrus,” Socrates goes on a long rant — half persuasive and half ludicrous — about the peril posed by the new technology of ... writing: “If men learn (the art of writing),” Socrates warns, “it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”
It seems safe to say in hindsight that writing was a pretty big net positive for human development, even if one of the greatest thinkers of all time worried about it the same way contemporaries fret over video games. Indeed, it often feels that for all the legitimate criticism of social media and the experience of ubiquitous screens and connectivity, a kind of familiar neurotic hysteria undergirds the dire warnings. An entire subgenre of parenting advice books and blocking
software now exists to manage “screen time” and the mortal peril introduced by our devices into the brain development of children; the broader cultural conversation has taken on all the overdetermined ferocity of a moral panic. In 2009, the Daily Mail alerted its readers to “How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.” The New York Post warned that screens are “digital heroin” that turn kids into “psychotic junkies.” “Teens on social media go from dumb to dangerous,” CBS cautioned. And The Atlantic was just one of many to ask the question: “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?”
In 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published “The Anxious Generation,” which argues that ubiquitous access to smartphones has consigned an entire generation of teens and children to unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety and self-harm. While some scholars who studied the issue criticized Haidt’s polemic for being overcooked, it was a runaway bestseller, and parents and schools across the country organized efforts to keep phones out of schools, as the book urged.
Some of the most grave and chilling descriptions of the effects of the attention age come from the workers who have engineered it. The hit Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” relies heavily on former Silicon Valley figures like whistleblower and former Google employee Tristan Harris to warn of the insidious nature of the apps mining our attention. Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and one of Facebook’s earliest investors, describes himself as a “conscientious objector” when it comes to social media: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he has said. He is very much not alone. A New York Times Magazine article from 2018 tracks what the author calls the “dark consensus about screens and kids” among the Silicon Valley workers who themselves helped engineer the very products they now bar their own children from using. “I am convinced,” one former Facebook employee told The New York Times in 2018, that “the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”
I’m inclined to agree, but also find myself shrinking more than a little at how much the conversation around the evils of our phones sounds like a classic moral panic. Sociologist Stanley Cohen first coined the term “moral panic” in his 1972 book “Folk Devils and Moral Panics,” a study of the hysteria that surrounded different kinds of youth culture, particularly the Mods and Rockers in the U.K. in the 1960s.
We can also see this familiar pattern when the target is a new technology rather than a cultural trend or group: excitement and wonder that quickly turn to dread and panic. In 1929, as radio rose to become a dominant form of media in the country, The New York Times asked, “Do Radio Noises Cause Illness?” and informed its readers that there was “general agreement among doctors and scientific men that the coming of the radio has produced a great many illnesses,
THE SCALE OF TRANSFORMATION WE’RE EXPERIENCING IS FAR MORE VAST AND MORE INTIMATE THAN EVEN THE MOST PANICKED CRITICS HAVE UNDERSTOOD.
particularly caused by nervous troubles. The human system requires repose and cannot be kept up at the jazz rate forever.”
The brilliant illustrator Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic “xkcd,” captures much of this in a timeline called “The Pace of Modern Life,” chronicling the anxiety of contemporary critics about the development of industrial modernity, particularly the speed of communication and proliferation of easily accessible information and its impact on our minds. He starts with the Sunday Magazine in 1871 mourning the fact that the “art of letter-writing is fast dying out. ... We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper.” He then quotes an 1894 politician decrying the shrinking attention spans: Instead of reading, people were content with a “summary of the summary” and were “dipping into ... many subjects and gathering information in a ... superficial form” and thus losing “the habit of settling down to great works.” And my personal favorite, a 1907 note in the Journal of Education that laments the new “modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favorite magazine.”
All of this now seems amusingly hyperbolic, but there are two different ways to think about these consistent warnings and bouts of mourning for what modernity has taken from us. One way is to view it all as quaint: There will always be some set of people who will freak out about the effects of any new technology or media, and over time those people will find out that everything is fine; that the rise of, say, magazines, of all things, doesn’t rot children’s brains or destroy the fabric of family life.
But I don’t think that’s right. Rather, I think these complaints and concerns about accelerating technology and media are broadly correct. When writing was new, it really did pose a threat to all kinds of cherished older forms of thinking
and communicating. Same too with the printing press and mass literacy, and then radio and television. And it is when a technology is newest, when it’s hottest to the touch, that it burns most intensely.
The very experience of what we call modernity is the experience of a world whose pace of life, scope of information and sources of stimulus with a claim on our attention are always increasing. At each point up this curve, the ascent induces vertigo. When Henry David Thoreau escaped to Walden Pond in the summer of 1845, it was as a refuge from this precise experience, the invasive omnipresence of modernity and the way it can cloud a person’s faculties. Of our so-called modern improvements, he writes, “There is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance. ... Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”
To achieve clarity about what it means to be human in this specific era, it’s necessary at each moment to ask what’s new and what’s not, what’s being driven by some novel technology or innovation and what’s inherent in human society itself. For example, it’s not a new phenomenon for masses of people to believe things that aren’t true. People didn’t need Facebook “disinformation” for witch trials and pogroms, but there’s also no question that frictionless, instant global communication acts as an accelerant. Also not new: our desires to occupy our minds when idle. Look at pictures of streetcar commuters of the early 20th century and you’ll see cars packed with men in suits and hats, every last one reading the newspaper, their noses buried in them as surely as modern commuters are buried in their phones. But there’s also no question that the relationship we have to our phones is fundamentally different in kind than the relationship those streetcar commuters had to their newspapers.
In his book on the attention economy, “Stolen Focus,” writer Johann Hari gets into a bit of this debate with Nir Eyal (author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”). Eyal makes the case that the freak-outs about social media are today’s version of the mid-20th-century moral panic over comic books, which got so heated there were a series of high-profile Senate hearings into what comic books were doing to America’s youth. All the grave warnings about phones and social media are, he contends, “literally verbatim, from the 1950s about the comic book debate,” when people “went to the Senate and told the senators that comic books are turning children into addicted, hijacked (zombies) — literally, it’s the same stuff. ... Today, we think of comic books as so innocuous.”
In the end, it turned out comic books weren’t worth the worry, which is why the panic looks silly in retrospect. But that’s another key question, isn’t it? Along with the question of what is and is not new, there’s also the deeper question of what is and is not harmful. It is easy to conflate the two. When tobacco use first exploded in Europe, there were those who rang the alarm bells. As early as 1604, England’s King James decried the new habit as “lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmeful to the braine, daungerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.” As hysterical and prudish as that must have sounded at that time, it was 100 percent correct. When I recently watched the incredible Peter Jackson documentary about the Beatles’ “Let It Be” sessions, the sheer number of cigarettes being inhaled in every recording session was both distracting and unsettling. In 1969, when the Beatles were recording what would become their final released album, there was already substantial research demonstrating that cigarettes were dangerous. It would be another 30 years until culture and law and regulation turned decisively against smoking and the practice started to decline and disappear from most public spaces.
One wonders sometimes if 50 years from now, people will look at footage from our age, with everyone constantly thumbing through our phones, the way I look at Ringo Starr chain-smoking. Stop doing that! It’s gonna kill you! In fact, the surgeon general of the United States has called for social media to come with a mandatory mental health warning label like the ones on cigarette packs. In response, researchers who study teen mental health have pushed back, saying the research just doesn’t justify such a drastic step. The debate over our digital lives, at least as it’s been reflected in the discourse, basically comes down to this: Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?
What i want to argue here is that the scale of transformation we’re experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood. In other words: The problem with the main thrust of the current critiques of the attention economy and the scourge of social media is that (with some notable exceptions) they don’t actually go far enough. The rhetoric of moral condemnation undersells the level of transformation we’re experiencing. As tempting as it is to say the problem is the phones, they are as much symptom as cause, the natural conclusion of a set of forces transforming the texture of our lives. The attention economy isn’t like a bad new drug being pushed onto the populace, an addictive intoxicant with massive negative effects or even a disruptive new form of media with broad social implications. It’s something more profound and different altogether. My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource — our attention — is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.
We all intuitively grasp the value of attention, as least internally, because what we pay attention to constitutes our inner lives. When it is taken from us, we feel the loss. But attention is also supremely valuable externally, out in the world. It is the foundation for nearly all we do, from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers and citizens. Attention is a kind of resource: It has value, and if you can seize it, you seize that value. This has been true for a very long time. What has changed is attention’s relative importance. Those who successfully extract it command fortunes, win elections and topple regimes. The battle to control what we pay attention to at any given instant structures everything from our inner life (who and what we listen to, how and when we are present to those we love) to our collective public lives (which pressing matters of social concern are debated and legislated, which are neglected; which deaths are loudly mourned, which ones are quietly forgotten). Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.
How did it get this way? Toward the end of the 20th century, many wealthy nations began moving from an industrial, manufacturing economy to a digital one. In 1961, six of the 10 largest U.S. companies by assets were oil companies. The assets these companies controlled — fossil fuels — were the single most valuable resource in the postwar global order. Alongside fossil fuel companies were car companies like Ford Motor and industrial behemoths like DuPont.
Today, Forbes’ list of the largest U.S. companies is dominated by banks and tech firms: Microsoft; Apple; Google’s parent, Alphabet; Meta; and Amazon. The central locus of economic activity has moved from those firms that manipulate atoms to those that manipulate bits. Typically, we tend to think of the rise of this new form of economic production as being dependent on information and data. “Data is the new oil” has become a kind of mantra of the age; whoever controls large stores of information are the power brokers of our time.
This view is not completely wrong; information is vitally important. But it crucially misstates what’s both so distinct and so alienating about the era we’ve entered. Information is the opposite of a scarce resource: It is everywhere and there is always more of it. It is generative. It is copyable. Multiple entities can have the same information. Think for a moment about your personal data, information about who you are and what you like. Maybe there are half a dozen firms that have it or maybe there are a hundred, or maybe a thousand, and while it might have some effect on you in terms of which advertising you get, you don’t really know and functionally it doesn’t really matter. But if someone has your attention, you know it. It can’t be in multiple places at once, the way information can.
If we return to the largest corporations of our times, they are dominated not by information companies, but more accurately by finance and attention companies. Apple is the company most singularly responsible for inaugurating the attention age with its 2007 introduction of the iPhone. Microsoft runs the operating system that hundreds of millions of people spend their attention on all day long, along with another attention magnet, the Xbox gaming console. Alphabet runs YouTube, as well as the internet’s largest advertising network, which profits from our attention. Meta and the Chinese social media company Tencent (which makes WeChat, the largest social network in China) similarly convert eyeballs into cash. Amazon is also on the list of largest companies and is the world’s largest online retailer outside China, but even to call Amazon a “retailer” misstates the source of its market power. Amazon is an attention and logistics company, and the products it sells are an afterthought. You see this anytime you search for a product on Amazon and are confronted with dozens of nearly identical versions, all produced by companies you’ve often never heard of, in places you couldn’t name, primarily competing for the attentional space at the top of the search results, attentional space that Amazon owns. In many cases, Amazon has seen which products dominate that attentional space and then started producing them itself, cutting out the middleman.
Amazon is the most extreme example of how in the attention age, even the sale of stuff to consumers has more to do with getting their attention than making the stuff itself. The basic model of industrial age advertising was that a firm developed a product or service and then sought to advertise and market it, to capture people’s attention as a means of introducing them to the firm’s wares. But there’s another model, also present from the early days of the industrial age, which is the snake oil and supplements model. In the snake oil model, the attention and marketing are the most important part of the enterprise — capturing the imagination of customers — and the product is an afterthought, in fact often outright fraudulent.
As global incomes rise, and the variety of consumer choices expands accordingly, attentional competition becomes ever more ferocious. We’re seeing the relative emphasis between these two models shift rapidly. In so many instances, the ability to grab the attention of the consumer is more important than the actual product or service offered.
It is not just commercial life that is driven by the extraction of attention. Increasingly, social life, public life and political life are dominated by it as well. In the 19th and 20th centuries, wage labor and urbanization utterly transformed the contest for attention in politics. As democracy spread across rapidly industrializing Europe, a recognizably modern mass public took shape. Public opinion mattered more than ever, and “what the public thought” was largely determined by which issues people paid attention to and which they didn’t, which candidates they recognized and which remained strangers.
On top of that, as society grew orders of magnitude more complex, the sheer number of issues presenting themselves with a claim to a citizen’s attention exploded as well. In 1925, the critic Walter Lippmann pointed out that the duties citizens inherited in the 20th century were overwhelming even for the most educated and informed people like the author himself. “My sympathies are with (the citizen),” Lippmann wrote, “for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community.”
It was the same year Lippmann published these words in his book “The Phantom Public” that Europe watched the rise of charismatic fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who unburdened the Italian citizenry from the onerous labor they’d been tasked with by offering instead a cult of personality. “Under ... Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type
OUR DOMINION OVER OUR OWN MINDS HAS BEEN PUNCTURED. OUR INNER LIVES HAVE BEEN TRANSFORMED IN UTTERLY UNPRECEDENTED FASHION. THAT’S TRUE IN JUST ABOUT EVERY COUNTRY AND CULTURE ON EARTH.
of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions,” wrote Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset in “The Revolt of the Masses.” “Here I see the most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so.”
The experience of charismatic demagogues and genocidal world war in the 20th century left an entire generation of intellectuals to wonder how compatible mass media and mass democracy truly were. Though they didn’t necessarily conceptualize it in these terms, they were wrestling with the ability of mass media — sometimes, but not always, in the hands of tyrants — to successfully monopolize attention, and therefore control of a nation: Did the presence of mass media itself extinguish the individual conscience that made human decency possible? “It is not an exaggeration,” wrote Pope Pius XII in 1950, “to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.”
The TV age spawned dire warnings, from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman, that the broad narcotic effect of the new device was making the public stupider, duller and less capable of self-governance. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” Postman wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
But all of that was a prologue for the attention age. Attention has never been more in demand, more contested and more important than it is now.
Unlike, say, oil, a chemical compound buried in the earth, attention cannot be separated from who we are and what it
means to be alive. In fact, attention is the most fundamental human need. The newborn of our species is utterly helpless. It can survive only with attention — that is, if some other human attends to it. That attention will not itself sustain an infant, but it is the necessary precondition to all care. If you neglect a child, it will perish.
We are built and formed by attention; destroyed by neglect. This is our shared and inescapable human fate. Now our deepest neurological structures and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.
We don’t have to accept this. It does not need to be this way. There are already bills in state legislatures as well as in Congress that would create age minimums by law for social media platforms. While the details vary, as a general matter this seems obvious and sensible. We as a society and government can say that the attention of children should not be sold and commodified in the aggressive and alienating fashion that social media networks currently do it. Just as 12-year-olds can’t really consent to a wage contract, we could say they can’t really consent to expropriation of their attention in the way that, say, Instagram exploits it.
We need to use every tool and strategy imaginable to wrest back our will, to create a world where we point our attention where we, the willful, conscious “we,” want it to go. A world where we can function and flourish as full human beings, as liberated souls, unlashed from the mast, our ears unplugged and open, listening to the lapping of the waves, making our way back home to the people we love, the sound of the sirens safely in the distance.
“THE SIREN’S CALL: HOW ATTENTION BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST ENDANGERED RESOURCE” BY CHRIS HAYES, PUBLISHED BY PENGUIN PRESS, AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN PUBLISHING GROUP, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, LLC. COPYRIGHT (C) 2025 BY CHRISTOPHER HAYES.
ON THIS EARTH
PHOTOGRAPHER ANOUK MASSON KRANTZ
CAPTURES THE RARELY SEEN SIDE OF LIFE ON THE RANGE
IT WAS AS QUIET at the kitchen table as it was outside the house — which is saying something. Around this time, 4 a.m., is when all the critters and even the night itself seem to stop moving.
In the predawn darkness, with each dining chair occupied by one of four generations of West Texas ranchers, photographer Anouk Masson Krantz tried to drum up something — anything — to start the conversation. A French immigrant who had spent her career in New York working for fashion brands and magazines, Krantz had felt a pull away from the city and into the West. She wanted to know the people who called these places home.
But now that she was here, at the literal table, she wasn’t so sure.
“This one rancher was reluctant to open the door to me,” says Krantz. “I think they figured because I’m French and from the city that I wouldn’t wake up on time and show up. And while we were trying to talk, everything I said sounded like gibberish to him because I have an accent, and he’s this gruff man who speaks in a strong West Texan accent through his mustache, so I was only picking up every other word of his. It was so awkward.”
But after the dishes were cleared, he offered to take her out to check the cattle anyway.
and pretty soon we forgot that it was there above our heads. We had the best time. We realized that we actually had friends in common.”
The storm eventually broke enough for the pair to make the drive back to the house. Before he said goodbye, the once-gruff rancher told Krantz, “You’re welcome back anytime. You’re part of my family.”
Hearing that changed the course of her life. “If it wasn't for that storm, I wouldn’t be here. I think it was God saying, ‘Look, you’re going to have to go through this in order to get a chance to be a part of this culture.’”
That day marked the beginning of Krantz’s magnum opus: to document cowboy and ranching life with beauty and nuance that mirrors the community itself. To capture the balance between a rancher’s tough exterior and their devotion to always help a neighbor. To record the values of hard work, duty and a love of the land she sees transcending generations and modernity.
Since 2017, she’s traveled over 125,000 miles solo and published four photography books documenting ranches, rodeos and the West. Each has hit bestseller lists.
by LAUREN STEELE
When they finally reached the herd after driving across thousands of acres of ranchland, something like fate seemed to take hold of the sky. A classic big valley storm rolled in. Krantz found herself stuck for hours with thunder, hail, wind and a rancher.
“I could see that the storm wasn’t going anywhere, so I’d better just say something,” she recalls. “So we started a conversation
“All my work has been about this unbelievable culture, the cowboys across the Americas,” she says. “But it’s also much deeper than that. It’s about humanity. It’s about who we’ve become. My hope is for people around the world to look at the American West and then take a few steps back and reflect upon their own lives. This place has helped me reflect upon my own life, and to be a better person. I want to create something that is beautiful and can help us to be better collectively on this earth.”
“I REALLY BELIEVE IN PEOPLE STILL WANTING THE BEST OUT OF EACH OTHER. AND THAT’S WHAT I’VE SEEN OVER AND OVER AGAIN. • I STILL DO TRUST THAT PEOPLE ARE GOOD.” ,
“ OUR DIFFERENCES MAKE THIS WORLD SO INTERESTING.
I DON’T ASPIRE TO BE A COWGIRL ON THE RANCH. BUT I LOVE WHAT THEY DO AND WHAT THEY STAND FOR.”
“THE MAINSTREAM CULTURE HAS LOST A LOT OF THE VERY SIMPLE VALUES THAT ARE STILL STRONG AND KEEP THE AMERICAN WEST SO TIGHT AND TOGETHER. IT MAKES YOUR LIFE SO MUCH BIGGER TO BE PART OF A CULTURE WHERE EVERYONE IS UNITED BECAUSE YOU FEEL CONNECTED TO SOMETHING BIG.”
,
“THIS WORK HAS TAUGHT ME THAT EVEN IF YOU THINK THAT YOU HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON AND YOU HAVE NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT, JUST GIVE IT A LITTLE TRY BECAUSE I THINK AT THE END • YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING YOU HAVE IN COMMON.”
KNOWLEDGE UNDER SIEGE
CONSPIRACY THEORIES HAVE UNRAVELED SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY. IS THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY TO BLAME?
ABY TALMAGE D. EGAN
N EXPERIENCE D ANGLER knows the best fishing starts early in the morning. Every weekday at daybreak, as I sift through a fresh batch of email, a figurative fishing expedition begins. And I’m the catch. The trawlers are predatory scientific journals casting a wide net, trying to reel me in. As an academic physician and clinical scientist, who also sees patients, these publishers know I’m encouraged to advance the scientific frontiers of my field. And they are aware that a primary metric of success is how often my research is published. So, the lure of predatory publishers, whose sole motive in getting researchers’ work distributed is financial profit, can be tempting bait
for some seeking prominence in the scientific community. But the consequences can be harmful and widespread beyond the science professions.
Science plays an essential role in finding solutions to humankind’s problems. While science has its limitations, the public looks to it as the primary wellspring of solutions to the problems posed by nature (i.e., securing food, clothing, shelter and health).
Throughout history, the triumphs of science, particularly the ways in which scientific advances take shape in the forms of technology, have been stunning. Consider the new anti-obesity medications that are frequently advertised directly to consumers on television. This new class of medicines, a form of hormonal manipulation, has revolutionized the treatment of obesity. The potential of science seems almost limitless.
But serious trouble lurks in the hallowed halls of science. The work of contemporary scientists is sometimes blemished by irreproducible studies, financially conflicted research and outright fraud. Scandalous instances of bad science — often spread through the proliferation of predatory journals — are surprisingly common.
When corrupt or sloppily executed science comes to light, public confidence in the scientific community wanes, or worse, a skepticism emerges within certain segments of the population that threatens to undermine the advances we’ve made. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans’ trust in science has recovered slightly after a steady decline since the pandemic in 2020. Nonetheless, nearly one-quarter of U.S. adults express “not too much” confidence or “none at all” in scientists.
Some alarmists worry that without substantial reform, a tipping point could eventually come wherein “bad science”
becomes so pervasive and politically polarized that the public loss of trust in the scientific enterprise leads to a “new dark age” of sorts. That the term “post-truth,” a neologism referring to concerns over public truth claims, was ignominiously introduced into the Oxford English Dictionary as the 2016 word of the year may be a harbinger of the danger.
Addressing the problem of bad science and its potential harm to global health and well-being will require change on both sides of the scientific-public divide. The scientific community must better identify and root out fraudulent and poorly done science and clearly communicate their findings to the public. That will better equip the public to identify, understand and digest the scientific concepts embodied in technological advances. Building such understanding and trust will necessitate dialogue between scientists and the public, marked by humility and transparency from the scientific community. At the ground level, scientists like me will need to resist the lure of predatory publishers and similar shameful practices. Without reform, fake science could wreak as much societal havoc down the road as fake news does now.
THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES of corrupt or careless science are immense and incalculable. Like an automotive junkyard on the outskirts of town, the wreckage of bad science just keeps piling up.
A survey of the destruction suggests the most harmful outcome of bad science is the public’s loss of confidence. When suspicion emerges in the minds of everyday citizens that the country’s scientific apparatus and processes can’t always be trusted, scientifically-based policy proves more difficult to promote. Moreover, an environment of distrust provides fertile ground for conspiracy theorists to exploit the uncertainty in the public mind to achieve their political aims. A notorious example of this phenomenon is popularly known as Climategate. The 2009 controversy involved hacked emails from a prominent
climate research group at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom that seemed to suggest that the scientists had colluded to exaggerate the potential effects of climate change and suppress dissenting views when they engaged in peer review of others’ work. Despite several formal investigations that concluded there was no scientific misconduct, the controversy spawned anti-climate change conspiracy theories that still have an impact today.
The story of vaccination’s purported link to autism is perhaps the most widely known example of how bad science can have a severe adverse societal impact over time. The saga began in 1998 when an in-
WHEN CORRUPT OR SLOPPILY EXECUTED SCIENCE COMES TO LIGHT, PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY WANES, OR WORSE, A SKEPTICISM EMERGES THAT THREATENS TO UNDERMINE THE ADVANCES WE’VE MADE.
fluential study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield published in The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals, suggested that the measles-mumps-rubella ( MMR ) vaccine may cause autism. The study appeared just before the World Health Organization began declaring that measles had been eradicated in many countries because of high levels of vaccination. The Wakefield study attracted a great deal of attention in both the medical and lay press and fueled a global anti-vaccine movement. Concerns among parents over the rising incidence of autism diagnoses presumably drove the intense interest in the study.
Upon further review, critics identified
serious problems with Wakefield’s study, including a very small sample size (just 12 patients) and other major methodological concerns such as lack of a proper control group and selective reporting of data. Earthshaking implications like those stemming from Wakefield’s work should be supported with stronger evidence that would typically come in the form of a randomized, blinded, controlled study with hundreds more patients. Investigators also found that Wakefield had a serious financial conflict: He was a paid consultant to lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers. The consulting began before the controversial study was published and Wakefield reportedly received over 400,000 pounds (more than $500,000) that was not disclosed.
More than a decade after the original article appeared, The Lancet officially issued a mea culpa from the editors, stating “we fully withdraw this paper from the published record.” The U.K. medical authorities also formally disciplined Wakefield, revoking his medical license, among other sanctions. But the wreckage from this single instance of misconduct had already piled up. Even though the Wakefield study has been thoroughly debunked and officially retracted, the conspiratorial thinking about vaccines and the link to autism still lingers worldwide. Governments and universities have spent tens of millions of dollars on studies to counter the prevailing conventional anti-vaccination wisdom that circulated widely. For example, in one landmark study involving 650,000 kids, Danish investigators studied the incidence of an autism diagnosis in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children; they found no difference. More tragically, presumably in part because of the relentless media coverage, MMR vaccination rates dropped below rates necessary to achieve herd immunity in many countries. An outbreak in Texas that spread to other states beginning this year has so far affected more than 500 children. Two children have died from the disease. Tragically, in 2023 (the last year with complete reporting), over 100,000 measles-related deaths occurred
around the world — all of them likely preventable with vaccination. As one academic physician bluntly summarized in the aftermath of the decades-long controversy: “Measles does not cause autism in children. But it kills them.”
In retrospect, the changing media landscape certainly has some culpability in this vaccination fiasco. Some pundits noted that the Wakefield study resulted in “science by press conference” because of the way the traditional press at the time sensationalized the story. In today’s digital environment, studies analyzing social media content regarding vaccines confirm that a substantial proportion of the online information promotes what has come to be called a “vaccination hesitancy” stance, particularly on websites focused on alternative medicine. Social media platforms that enable anyone, including the misinformed or the politically motivated, to become an independent publisher with worldwide reach can be especially damaging. Cleverly crafted TikTok spots, Instagram videos and podcasts reaching millions of people can effectively snuff out the voices of legitimate experts delivered through less popular means, such as seldom publicized medical journals or professional conferences. With the recent confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, Americans might reasonably wonder what information (or misinformation) influenced his uncertain stance on vaccination.
THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY has not yet reached a consensus on categorizing unscrupulous or substandard science like Wakefield’s work, but many professional organizations have called attention to specific kinds of trouble. No official taxonomy exists, but it’s clear that bad science appears in many forms.
Overtly fraudulent science is perhaps the most egregious offender because it involves works that are sometimes pulled entirely out of thin air and even offered up for sale in order to advance a researcher’s career. A variation on this theme is the publication
of studies in which the data are “massaged” to create a more impressive result. This approach can include, for example, the deceitful statistical manipulation of the data or the dishonest enhancement of study images and charts.
The taxonomy of bad science also includes “conflicted science,” where a scientist has a financial interest in the results of their research or in the content of their presentations made at medical conferences; that is, their bank account balance can get a boost if their research or presentations support favorable claims about certain drugs or medical devices. Consider the case of Dr. Charles Nemer-
companies to disclose these business relationships. Scientists and company executives are presumably more reluctant to get involved in these dubious financial arrangements when they know their mothers might read about them in the papers. By rule, I disclose my financial conflicts before every professional presentation so that the audience can judge for themselves.
AS ONE ACADEMIC PHYSICIAN BLUNTLY SUMMARIZED IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE DECADESLONG CONTROVERSY:
“MEASLES DOES NOT CAUSE AUTISM IN CHILDREN. BUT IT KILLS THEM.”
off of Emory University, an internationally prominent psychiatrist. Over the course of about seven years, Nemeroff’s consulting fees from drugmakers totaled nearly $3 million; at the same time, he conducted federally funded research related to some of the same pharmaceutical companies’ products. Nemeroff apparently failed to disclose a substantial portion of this income to Emory or the National Institutes of Health, the research funding agency.
Concern over physicians from leading institutions engaging in similar conduct prompted a congressional investigation and eventually culminated in passage of the “Sunshine Act” in 2010, which requires
Second only to overtly fraudulent research, irreproducible science is perhaps the category of bad science that is most concerning to scientists themselves. One of the cornerstones in the philosophy of science is that for scientific results to be reliable, they must be reproducible. But a perusal of the scientific literature reveals a great deal of discussion about a “reproducibility crisis,” a recognition that much of what is published, perhaps 50 percent or more, cannot be replicated by other investigators. Dr. John Ioannidis, a Stanford epidemiologist who is among the world’s foremost authorities on the reproducibility crisis, calls it, in a frightening string of alliteration, the Medical Misinformation Mess. The title of his classic article on the topic is sobering: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
LEARNING OF THE prevalence of science gone bad, a concerned public might reasonably ask how this happens. What combinations of unethical or slothful machinations could possibly give rise to such a predicament? Predatory publishers, the fishermen I referred to earlier, are one of the main culprits in the process of disseminating bad results. These publishers prey on scientists, particularly in the academic world, who desperately need evidence of research productivity to be promoted up the academic ladder. Operating under the aphorisms “publish or perish” and “funding or famine,” academics are not incentivized to be correct, but rather to be productive. Anonymous surveys of academics indicate that the temptation to engage in deceptive practices, presumably as a means of increasing one’s scholarly productivity, is powerful. On
A TIPPING POINT COULD EVENTUALLY COME WHEREIN “BAD SCIENCE” BECOMES SO PERVASIVE AND POLITICALLY POLARIZED THAT THE PUBLIC LOSS OF TRUST IN THE SCIENTIFIC ENTERPRISE LEADS TO A “NEW DARK AGE” OF SORTS.
average, about 2 percent of research scientists anonymously admit to having fraudulently altered study results; substantially more (about one-third) fess up to observing unethical behavior in a colleague.
Predatory publishing is typically defined as an abusive “open access” model that charges fees for getting an article published, usually in an “online only” journal, under the pretense of providing genuine editorial services. Many of these publishers are a complete sham (e.g., publicize a fake address, etc.); others are more akin to incompetent amateurs for whom profit is likely the main goal, even though they may occasionally publish decent work. Astonishingly, there are cases of “hijacked journals” where the fraudsters clone a counterfeit version of a reputable journal’s website in order to con the authors out of publication fees. These “pay to publish” scams typically charge as much as $1,000 to publish an article. In my field of anesthesiology, intensive care and pain medicine, a recent study revealed over 200 different journals associated with over 80 different predatory publishers that have published almost 13,000 articles since 2008. Considering that anesthesiology is just a small part of medicine, this 13,000 is likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Another form of predatory publishing are so-called “paper mills,” which are a whole new level of scientific fraud. These outfits work in the shadows to produce fake research, often with the aid of artificial intelligence programs, and sell authorship to academics desperate to get something published that passes for real research. Because many of these mills operate in China, they have had a particularly damaging effect on the reputations of Chinese scholars. The shocking scale of the problem far surpasses what could be simply written off as a few bad apples.
A surprising feature of these academic marauders is their astonishingly effective marketing. These fishermen are skilled in crafting their lures. Over the course of a single year, a physician or scientist might
receive nearly 1,000 unsolicited emails, many from suspect journals, inviting them to submit a scientific report of some kind. I typically receive two or three of these each weekday morning, usually beginning with an odd-sounding salutation, like “Dear Professor, greetings for the day!” I have even received unsolicited invitations to become an editor-in-chief of an obscure journal, always one I have never heard of (or may not yet exist). Using a truckload of flattery, the conspirators presumably seek to leverage an unsuspecting scientist’s reputation for their profit. For academics trying to bolster their reputations, the flattery can be persuasive. This scheme works sometimes because many scientists don’t know they are targets of these unscrupulous entities that could do more harm than help to the reputation of an unsuspecting researcher.
AS THE PILE of bad science is mounting, the scientific community is mobilizing impressively to clean it up. A brief survey of the effort illustrates the sophistication of the techniques employed.
Various organizations are developing tools, including software and data sharing channels, to help detect fake science. For example, the Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM) group, an international association of publishers representing many of the largest in operation, have pooled their resources to combat the bad science problem. Their software can spot plagiarism, AI -generated text and mendaciously manipulated images. STM also offers “Master Classes” in scientific integrity where they share their expertise with publishers large and small, promoting reform by running an open access shop to share best practices.
One of the oldest and best-known scientific integrity operations is Retraction Watch (RetractionWatch.com), founded in 2010. This blog catalogs official scientific article retractions and curates them in helpful ways. The creators of the site point out that peer review of science extends well beyond the publication date; the discovery
of serious problems in some works is often delayed until scientific integrity gumshoes uncover it years later. A visit to the RetractionWatch.com webpage reveals the scale of the problem; more than 50,000 retracted studies are in their database! These retractions sometimes involve papers in the most prestigious journals and even papers authored by Nobel Prize winners. Appallingly, about two-thirds of retractions are thought to result from scientific misconduct, not honest mistakes.
Reputable journals can assist the reform efforts by focusing on the reproducibility crisis, insisting that scientists provide sufficient detail in their publications so that other scientists can reproduce their results if need be. Many journals now require that authors engage with a “reproducibility checklist” that requires the submission of raw data, programming code and experimental protocols when requested. Similarly, publishers and funding agencies should willingly support replication attempts of certain critical studies even though the results are already published once.
AI will certainly play an indispensable role in the reform effort. AI -augmented analysis is already being used with great success, in part because the overwhelming volume of scientific literature mandates that techniques to identify fraudulent activity must be at least partially automated.
AI can identify fraudulent images, a daunting task that even highly trained human eyes cannot perform reliably. Ironically, AI-boosted software is also employed to detect AI -generated text in fraudulent manuscripts, often by spotting what are sometimes called “tortured phrases.” An AI-concocted manuscript might produce the term “bosom disease” for breast disease, or “lactose bigotry” for lactose intolerance, published in predatory journals that might not undergo any real review to catch those odd phrases.
Academic institutions can also join in the reform effort by lowering the pressure on professors to publish so often. As a young academic, I learned the conventional
wisdom that one’s productivity can be enhanced by identifying the “least publishable unit” (i.e., chopping up a study into smaller pieces), thereby increasing the overall number of papers. Academia can address this problem by changing the way they evaluate a faculty member’s work. A promising development in this arena is the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a document that encourages universities to focus on the quality rather than the quantity of a professor’s work when considering the granting of promotions and tenure; worldwide, more than 2,500 institutions have signed onto DORA
Even the average person on the street has some responsibility to improve the work of science. A 2016 comprehensive report by
OPERATING
UNDER THE APHORISMS “PUBLISH OR PERISH” AND “FUNDING OR FAMINE,” ACADEMICS ARE NOT INCENTIVIZED TO BE CORRECT, BUT RATHER TO BE PRODUCTIVE.
the National Academy of Sciences provided strong evidence that increased individual scientific literacy benefits society as a whole by improving the public’s ability to evaluate and understand scientific advances and the corresponding policy implications.
Along these lines, we need more articulate spokespeople who can explain the advances of science to the common person. As some experts have opined, for scientific facts to be robust and accepted by the masses, they must be supported by trusted institutions and a reliable media apparatus. Accordingly, institutions and media outlets must seek out people with the talent to vet and articulate complex scientific concepts to everyday people. Gifted communicators
like Malcolm Gladwell and Carl Sagan are two famous examples, but many high school science teachers exhibit similar talents in their pedagogy. The popularity of books by people like Gladwell suggests a strong market for science to be explained in simple, straightforward language. Ernest Rutherford, a pioneer in nuclear physics, famously quipped: “A theory that you can’t explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.” We need more capable spokespeople who can explain science to bartenders and the rest of us.
Finally, humility will play a key role in such reform efforts. Most levelheaded people understand that science is imperfect, that scientists make mistakes. I’ve certainly made and corrected mistakes in my studies along the way. Where scientists are concerned, what infuriates the public is an elitist, “we-are-the-smart-ones” posture. As the scientific community’s failings amply illustrate, science needs enough humility to admit when it doesn’t know things; engaging honestly with the public works best. Similarly, the public ought to show the scientific establishment the respect it deserves, exhibiting patience and understanding as science works to clarify, sometimes in fits and starts, what is demonstrably true.
There is reason for hope. Science is self-correcting and inexorably marches toward the truth. I esteem the overwhelming majority of my fellow scientists as truth seekers who are dedicated to applying science for the good of humanity. Increasingly aware of the threat, the scientific community is mounting an organized, credible response to the onslaught of bad science. And society, recognizing the importance of science in the world, is certainly rooting for the scientific community to succeed.
DR. TALMAGE EGAN IS A STAFF PHYSICIAN, PROFESSOR AND CHAIR AT THE DEPARTMENT OF ANESTHESIOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER. HE HAS SERVED ON THE ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL BOARDS OF THE BRITISH JOURNAL OF ANAESTHESIA AND FOR THE JOURNAL ANESTHESIOLOGY. THIS ESSAY REPRESENTS HIS OWN VIEWS, NOT THOSE OF HIS EMPLOYER.
THE HAND THAT FEEDS
ARE THERE UNSEEN COSTS TO DISMANTLING FOREIGN AID?
ABY JOSHUA FOUST
ROUND 15 YEARS ago, I was in the Tagab Valley of Afghanistan, about two hours’ drive north of Kabul. I was there as an adviser for the U.S. Army, helping them build better relationships with local communities in the hopes of reducing insurgent violence directed at troops and the national government. It was a tense period in a tense region, as the valley had recently been the staging ground for a series of violent assaults by terrorist group Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, known by the acronym HIG. I was attached to a Provincial Reconstruction Team, an innovative hybrid of military, civil affairs, police advisers, State Department diplomats and representatives from the U.S. Department
of Agriculture and U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID
At our first meeting with community elders from the area, they expressed a familiar set of needs: less disruptive behavior by the troops, more security, more money, less corruption, more opportunity. The first need was relatively straightforward to address: Our adviser team learned that male troops were invading female spaces, so we asked the unit to use female troops to search those spaces instead. It eased tensions and reduced the rate of car bombs targeted at international troops. It was the other complaints, about corruption, food, infrastructure and money, where we had less success. One of the elders, an old man with a big fluffy white beard, was upset that his family could not leave their village in the winter due to impassable mud roads. “We can build a working road,” he insisted, according to my notes of the meeting, “if we are given the money and equipment.”
When I brought this concern to the USAID representative, he shrugged and said they already had a road construction partner, a local businessman with ties to an Indian subcontractor who was paid to build a highway nearby. I relayed this news to the elder. “But we hate this man,” he told me. “This man steals from us. He is a HIG .”
I never found any evidence that the subcontractor was actually tied to the terrorist group, but I believed the villagers that he did steal from them. USAID contractors doing reconstruction work in Afghanistan hired networks of subcontractors to do work, each layer of the industry extracting fees along the way. The corruption that resulted was a depressingly common story in that part of Afghanistan. USAID had a reputation for building computer labs without
CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES IS LOSING AT LEAST HALF OF ITS FUNDING THIS YEAR DUE TO THE USAID CUTS, WHICH MEANS MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE AT RISK OF AN AGONIZING, PREVENTABLE DEATH.
electricity, power plants that cost more to run than to refuel, and roads meant to improve commerce that instead became superhighways for terrorists.
On top of the corruption and poorly conceived construction projects, USAID was also painfully slow to act. When the nearby Forward Operating Base, Morales-Frazier, developed a flooded entrance gate, the agency told us it would take six months of paperwork and thousands of dollars for a subcontractor to clear. It just wasn’t a priority for them, despite the malaria risk and impediment to responding to security threats. In frustration, a colleague and I spent $40 of our own money to buy a shovel and a small pipe. We dug a hole under the fence line and drained the gate area in less than an hour.
Despite all the frustrating examples of inefficiency, however, USAID also helped untold numbers of people in Afghanistan. Many of the villagers I met were only able to eat because of USAID-provided food aid. The roads, though repurposed for terrorism by the Taliban and other militias, really did help reconnect cities, improve commerce and lessen suffering across the country. The expensive power plants really did provide electricity and many of the schools where young people studied only existed because of USAID funding.
I AM RECOUNTING this story to make a point: USAID is hardly a perfect agency, but it is also life-saving for millions of people in ways that protect American lives and national security interests. Before we dismantle it entirely, we should remember that without USAID programs and money, far more soldiers and contractors would have died in Afghanistan, as poverty and isolation led many bereft young people to join the Taliban. Without USAID resources, an entire generation of children would likely have grown up with only sporadic, mediated access to the West, leaving them more vulnerable for recruitment by extremists. These programs may have waste, but they also matter. They help us.
Take for example Catholic Relief Services — founded 82 years ago to help World War II survivors in Europe — which assists more than 200 million people in 134 countries access education, microfinance, food and medicine and other relief. The organization is losing at least half of its funding this year due to the USAID cuts, which means millions of people, relying on a U.S. government-funded Christian relief organization, are at greater risk of an agonizing, preventable death.
I saw USAID ’s utility and importance after I left Afghanistan, too. I wound up in Washington, D.C., where I worked for the Eurasia Foundation, which operated in the 1990s and early 2000s as a grants manager for USAID and the State Department. These grants materially contributed to establishing the fledgling democracies we have seen emerge from the wreckage of the former Soviet Union: Countries like the Republic of Georgia hold elections today, however troubled, because of the work USAID did to support civil society, democracy and the rule of law 25 years ago. Small programs of barely $1 million paid back decades of direct benefit for American interests. As the Eurasia Foundation shifted in the 2010s to direct services, it secured USAID money to work with women in the Middle East to build small businesses; civil society groups in the Caucasus to support democracy; and governments in Central Asia to reduce corruption and improve services for citizens. The foundation even operated a small program doing civic exchanges with scientists and activists in Russia as an effort to build bridges and lower tensions. The program remained open even after Russia evicted other civil society groups following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda. The Russian government hates voices it cannot control, and USAID supported independent media
USAID IS HARDLY A PERFECT AGENCY, BUT IT IS ALSO LIFE-SAVING FOR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE IN WAYS THAT PROTECT AMERICAN LIVES AND NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS.
there that documented corruption and abuse (that support has ended, and their staff are at risk of imprisonment, torture and murder). USAID was also instrumental in supporting the democratic development of Ukraine, which helped it break free of Russian domination. Russian leaders have never forgiven the agency for it. Misinformation researchers can trace how Russian state media produces messages spuriously attacking the agency, which then end up in American media, creating a false impression of wasteful or illegal conduct. These falsehoods have fueled the current crusade to disband the agency and distract the public from understanding how central USAID is for saving lives.
EARLIER THIS YEAR, when the Department of Government Efficiency came to USAID, disconnecting phones and computers, forcing people out of work and misappropriating funds in the name of saving money, it felt like a stab in the heart — not just because of the disruption and contested legality (a lawsuit claiming President Donald Trump overstepped his constitutional authority in shuttering the agency is wending its way through the federal courts), but because it is an effort to end USAID ’s lifesaving work abroad. In less than a month, horror stories emerged as death, misery, financial ruin and starvation accompanied the sudden cut of funding.
Government employees were abandoned, defenseless and without resources in dangerous conflict zones. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported in early February that within a week of USAID’s funding being cut off, a woman died because she could no longer access oxygen from a USAID-funded hospital. In late March, staff at the agency’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance received letters of termination the day an earthquake struck in Myanmar, killing 2,700 people. Instead of hundreds of U.S. disaster rescue and relief workers being among the first on the scene of the disaster, the State Department dispatched a team of advisers and donated $2 million to affected communities.
It is hard to recount these stories of preventable death without feeling rage. There are reports of food crops being abandoned, which will place hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people at risk of starvation. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program to treat HIV that President George W. Bush started, widely credited with saving tens of millions of lives, was shut off without warning — placing hundreds of thousands of people at immediate risk. Children are dying of preventable disease because they suddenly, overnight, cannot access USAID -funded medicines. In the same way that USAID has saved untold lives through its work, the sudden stop to such activities is putting untold
numbers of people at risk, too. The cruelty is nearly unimaginable.
Even religious agencies aren’t immune from this disruption. World Vision, the Christian aid agency, receives hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID to distribute food grown by American farmers to starving children. It is now cut off, and while these groups scramble to secure bridge funding and exemptions from government officials, people are dying daily from starvation and preventable disease. The Associated Press reported that World Relief, another Christian USAID contractor, was unable to distribute seeds in Haiti, leaving them to languish in a warehouse during the growing season instead of yielding much-needed food. World Relief also operates in war-torn South Sudan to feed malnourished children under 5. It is unknown how long those children can survive without USAID support. In March, eight people, including five children, died while walking through the desert to a clinic in South Sudan. They were seeking treatment for cholera after USAID cuts forced their local hospital to close. A State Department spokesperson said without evidence that while many U.S. government programs remain in South Sudan, those providing medical services had enriched the country's leaders instead of helping those in need.
That same month, Pete Marocco, Trump’s deputy director-designate for USAID at that time, held a closed-door meeting with the
IN HIS FAREWELL ADDRESS, PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON BEGGED THE FLEDGLING UNITED STATES TO “OBSERVE GOOD FAITH AND JUSTICE TOWARDS ALL NATIONS” SO THAT WE MAY “CULTIVATE PEACE AND HARMONY WITH ALL.”
representatives of World Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, Christian Aid, Food for the Hungry, Compassion International and the National Association of Evangelicals — all Christian relief organizations that rely on USAID money to save lives. As The Washington Post recounted, these leaders explained, in excruciating detail, how the cuts will cost lives every day that they aren’t reversed. Marocco insisted that the cuts were a “success,” which was met with disbelief by leaders of the faith-based charities. At meetings with congressional leaders, he reportedly repeated the false claim that USAID was a “money laundering scheme.” As of this writing, the funding remains inaccessible.
It is important to note that even temporary “pauses” on funding are not costless. In the near term, suddenly stopping medicine and food aid has already killed people and the death will continue until it is restored. But the longer these cuts remain in place, the harder such aid efforts will be to restart. Both Catholic Relief and World Vision have said that they will need to terminate employees and permanently lose capacity as a result of the money disruptions, even if they do eventually negotiate exemptions to continue their lifesaving work. The damage being done, not just to human lives but to our capacity to ever safeguard them again, is willful and permanent.
SO, WHY HAS the new administration pursued a path that will result in the deaths of thousands of people who cannot survive without aid? The stated motivations — addressing waste and fraud, being responsible
with money — do not fit any fact on the ground. USAID may have its share of waste, but it is minuscule compared to other government agencies that have been untouched: In 2016, for example, The Washington Post found that the Pentagon had “buried” around $125 billion in bureaucratic waste, which is money that could be saved without sudden program cuts, mass layoffs or other forms of disruption. The Defense budget last year was nearly $900 billion. In contrast, last year USAID’s total budget was $44 billion, or around one-third of just the identifiable waste in the DOD’s budget. It raises an obvious question: Why target aid, and why now? While conservative media places the blame for foreign aid waste on USAID, vastly larger amounts of waste and inefficiency in the military go largely untouched, facing none of the disruptions, layoffs or mass death that is accompanying USAID’s sudden cutoff. It is hard to find an innocent explanation for it.
The interesting thing about USAID is that its lifesaving work overseas directly helps Americans, too. The food aid that I watched save lives in Afghanistan comes from American farms, which stand to lose billions of dollars of business as the agency is dismantled. The medicines it distributes are made by American companies whose workers’ livelihoods could be threatened because of the sudden stoppage. Foreign aid gets a bad rap in the media, but it is also domestic aid, as well: We benefit from these programs as much as the overseas beneficiaries. They support American industry, businesses and lives. That’s largely all gone now.
During a meeting of the Continental Congress, after the British had occupied Philadelphia and chased the founding fathers to York, Pennsylvania, Samuel Adams said, “We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.” It is a value that liberals and conservatives have agreed on for over a century: American virtue is one of our great strengths and abandoning that virtue one of our great weaknesses. The rapid shuttering of USAID threatens that virtue: It has harmed American businesses and interests, already killed people and placed millions more at risk, and has directly burdened religious relief organizations with mass layoffs, broken promises and preventable death. Yet, we have the opportunity to speak up for the helpless, to demand we fulfill our promises to save and to stop assaulting Christian charity in the false name of efficiency.
In his farewell address, President George Washington begged the fledgling United States to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” so that we may “cultivate peace and harmony with all.” The public credit of America, as he described it, was our “important source of strength and security.” Whatever fiscal decisions the government decides to make, it must live up to that credit: We cannot simply abandon the poorest and most vulnerable we have promised to help.
JOSHUA FOUST IS AN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT THE S.I. NEWHOUSE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY AND A FORMER ADVISER FOR THE U.S.
Failed, failed, failed. And then...
PER SISTENCE
THE NEW BIRDERS
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE TAKING UP THE OLD BINOCULARS
BY NATALIA GALICZA
The cottonwood trees around me seemed to shimmy with life. Maybe it was just a late spring breeze nudging its way through the overstory, but there was also a chance that some winged tenant was fidgeting in its nest on a nearby branch and causing the stir. I wasn’t sure. Still, I was curious enough to pick up a borrowed set of binoculars, fumble for the focus wheel, and take a closer look. Gazing skyward, I made out a faint feathered outline. What a thrill!
As much as I enjoyed the idea of exploring the outdoors and encountering wildlife, I hadn’t made much effort to do so before that Saturday morning in May, when I found my way to the shores of Jordanelle Reservoir east of Salt Lake City. I’d recently moved here from the East Coast, and wanted to familiarize myself with the people, places and experiences my new home had to offer. So, with no prior avian knowledge, I joined a free birdwatching event I saw
advertised on social media. That’s how I learned that birding (or birdwatching, as it was once called) has become America’s sweetheart of pastimes.
Sadly, my first find didn’t exactly hold up. Upon closer examination, the subject looked like an ordinary barn swallow —
SINCE THE EARLIEST DAWN OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, BIRDS HAVE BEEN IMPORTANT FOR US SPIRITUALLY AND EMOTIONALLY.
about the most anticlimactic species an aspiring birder could possibly spot. These tiny, black and blue creatures are the most common type of swallow, spotted from my perch near the Uinta Mountains of
northeastern Utah to the farthest recesses of the globe — even, on occasion, Antarctica. But I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t know much of anything about birds. So I celebrated the discovery like any other. Because after all, it was a discovery, at least for me.
Birding is the mere act of looking at birds, whether through pricey binoculars or an eager set of eyes. It’s long been associated with older hobbyists — the stereotypical retiree in a khaki vest, with plenty of free time and disposable income. But each of the eight strangers who showed up to stare at birds that morning were in their 20s and 30s, including myself. We called out to each other when we spotted the circling silhouette of a red-tailed hawk and logged our sightings in physical or digital field diaries. We oohed and aahed at the majestic hover of an osprey as it stalked its meal over the Provo River, whipping out our iPhones to take photos.
CARLOS ARROJO
RECOGNIZING COMMON BIRDS I SEE AROUND MY HOME MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I’M IN ON A BIG COSMIC SECRET — OR AT LEAST LIKE I KNOW MY NEIGHBORS.
Technology has made it easier than ever to get into birding, which has attracted millennials and zoomers alike. Hashtags like #birdwatching and #birding have garnered hundreds of thousands of posts and billions of views on TikTok. The rate of young adults who watch any kind of wildlife has tripled within the last decade, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Now about a third of all Americans over 16 watch birds. “They’re accessible and interesting to us intellectually,” says John Fitzpatrick, director emeritus of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We love to count them. We love to keep lists about them. Since the earliest dawn of human civilization, they’ve been very important for us spiritually and emotionally as well.”
EDMUND SELOUS CROUCHED in hiding and stared at the object in front of him. The British ornithologist knew, to some degree, that the brown blob that had captured his interest was a pair of incubating birds — yet it took him more than an hour to distinguish them from a lump of tree bark. He could have killed the specimens to study them at closer range, as was customary for bird enthusiasts before the 20th century. Instead, on that fateful night in 1898, he chose to watch under the cover of night.
The camouflaged creatures were European nightjars, nocturnal birds with mottled plumage, large dark eyes and wide, almost reptilian mouths. Selous excitedly jotted notes in his field journal, describing their behaviors in detail. He found that the act of watching birds felt more rewarding than hunting them, and offered more opportunities for intelligent analysis. He made that case later in his book “Bird Watching,” published in 1901. “The pleasure that belongs to observation and inference is, really, far greater than that which attends any kind of skill or dexterity,” he wrote, “even when death and pain add their zest to the latter.”
Selous’ approach changed how scientists approached birdwatching, and shaped how the general public chose to interact with
birds when binoculars became widely available in the 20th century. But the instinct to bear witness to these animals has existed for much longer. Red ochre paintings at Tajo de Las Figuras, a cave in southern Spain, depict hundreds of birds dating to the neolithic period. In ancient Egypt, the ibis was the sacred bird of Thoth, god of wisdom, and 10,000 birds were sacrificed and mummified each year beginning around 600 B.C. with the intention of procuring health, long life or romance.
As of 2022, 96 million Americans were birding — more than the populations of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain or Canada. In 2022, they spent $107.6 billion on equipment and birdwatching trips, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are at least 150 chapters of Audubon clubs on college campuses, while groups like Feminist Bird Club and Flock Together focus on supporting people from marginalized communities who want to get outdoors. “You could make a pretty strong argument that birding is the most accessible form of outdoor recreation,” says Alli Smith, project coordinator at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “because birds are everywhere.”
TWO YEARS AFTER my first attempt at birding, I still don’t own my own binoculars or a single field guide, but I do borrow some lessons from the experience. I’ve learned to identify black-billed magpies by the squawk they make when looking for trouble in my backyard. I’ve learned to spot American robins from afar; they’re friendly and curious, and even seem to draw closer when I call out to them. These are common birds I see around my home, yet they make me feel like I’m in on some big cosmic secret of the natural world — or, at the very least, like I know my neighbors.
Outdoor recreation often presents large barriers to entry. Mountain biking requires daunting levels of technical skill; skiing calls for years of practice and decent health insurance; and don’t get me started on horseback riding. Sports like these can be
costly and physically demanding, specific to certain regions and reliant on specialized gear. Birds, on the other hand, exist everywhere, from rural towns to major cities, year-round and all day. There are an estimated 50 billion wild birds worldwide — about six for every human being. And the advent of technology has made it easier than ever to find them.
“BirdNote Daily,” a two-minute radio show that broadcasts bird sounds and stories, is one of the country’s most popular programs. It reaches more than 8 million people each week via hundreds of stations and the sponsoring organization’s website, birdnote.org, helping birders learn more about different species and familiarize themselves with calls. Apps like Merlin Bird ID let users record sounds, snap photos or log traits to identify birds in real time. This app boasts 25 million downloads in its 11 years, but most took place within the last four years.
One catalyst was the Covid-19 lockdown, which led bored adults and children to find ways to spend time outdoors, where they could interact with less risk of contagion. An early example was Pokémon Go, a phone-based game that overlaid a virtual hunt for digital creatures onto real landscapes, which drew groups — and sometimes mobs — of players to parks and plazas where exotic targets tended to appear. Maybe that search for fantasy beings in their towns and cities inspired young people to seek out real-life animals in the state of nature.
Gen Z generally wants to spend more time outdoors, experiences higher rates of anxiety about the effects of climate change, and reports concern for the environment and animals. Birding not only mirrors those concerns and interests, it helps alleviate any associated stress. “It’s really important, because it gives you a firsthand knowledge of what’s going on in the world,” says Geoffrey Hill, professor of ornithology and curator of birds at Auburn University’s Hill Lab. “If you get out a lot, you have a pretty good impression of the world. You see, is it ruined?
Is it untouched? It’s neither ruined nor untouched, it’s somewhere in between.”
Perhaps they’re also finding that birding helps them to feel better. Younger Americans’ struggles with mental health are well documented. One study published in Nature in 2022 found that participants who saw or heard birds had improved mental well-being that lingered for hours. Another Nature study that year found that listening to short audio clips of birdsong decreased feelings of anxiety, depression and paranoia. And last year, the Journal of Environmental Psychology published a study where university-aged participants found that nature walks with birdwatching were more effective at reducing stress than nature walks without birds.
then shrub to shrub, ripping off little black chokeberries before buzzing off to some other undisclosed location. Now that I recognize their general shape, I can’t help but think back to the swallow I saw at Jordanelle State Park. The tiny body backed by a forked tail. I’d seen this bird probably hundreds of times before in my life, but I’d never had a name for it. I guess I’d never really seen it at all.
It’s easy to take birds for granted. I’ve spent the majority of my life glancing past swallows, and every one of their avian relatives. Birding broke through that blur for me. But, more importantly, it shattered my assumption that birds are a given — that there will always be plenty around. Three billion birds have disappeared from the United States and Canada since 1970 — one-third of their population. Imagine losing 2.7 billion people in one lifetime.
THE NEW BIRDERS ARE ALSO THE FIRST AMERICANS WHO CAN’T TAKE THE FUTURE OF BIRDS, NATURE OR THE REST OF THEIR ENVIRONMENT FOR GRANTED.
“When we take the time to slow down and notice what’s around us, we become more mindful,” says Holly Merker, co-author of “Ornitherapy: For Your Mind, Body, and Soul,” a book that advocates birding as a path to wellness. “The stress in our lives starts to fade away. It starts to blur in the background.”
EVERY AFTERNOON, WHEN the traffic quiets down a bit, I go sit on my porch for a breath of fresh air. That’s usually when the trees in my front yard fill with swallows. They zip by in packs, bouncing from tree to tree
Many birds are indicator species, which means that studying birds can tip off humans to environmental issues — the canary in the coal mine, writ large. Birds are essential to our ecosystems. They scatter seeds, build habitat, contribute to pollination, perform pest and weed control, and even remove dead carcasses from the landscape. No wonder one study found that birders are four or five times more likely to engage in conservation efforts. “It doesn’t take much experience out there in the wild to realize that the nature of the environment matters a ton as to how many and which kinds of birds you see. So that starts to get us thinking about the environment as a place that’s pretty important for these things,” Fitzpatrick says. “This connection between birding and environmental protection is enormously important.”
That certainly appeals to my generation. The new birders who seem to be turning this age-old hobby on its head are also the first Americans who can’t take the future of birds, nature or the rest of their environment for granted. Now, when I see another swallow or otherwise ordinary bird, I make sure to hold my gaze a bit longer. I take in the sight for as long as it’ll last.
AGED LEATHER
AN ODE TO THREE BASEBALL GLOVES
BY ETHAN BAUER
As an only child whose friends lived far away, I spent many afternoons in the backyard playing catch alone. I’d throw a tennis ball, a racquetball or one of those dense rubber balls from the grocery store against the cinder block wall of our home — away from the windows — and imagine entire baseball games or specific scenarios. The ball always found a home in my trusty mitt: a brown Wilson with a basket pocket, black trim, a finger hole and a velcro wrist strap. I loved those games, almost as much as the real thing.
My first baseball team was the Astros, in a local rec league. Later I played for the Giants, then the Cardinals. That brown Wilson stayed with me, often fielding tosses from my friend Henrique. We met in third grade and he became my “cousin” on the paperwork so we could always be teammates. We had a similar skill level — which was, sadly, not very high. By eighth grade, neither of us was talented enough to keep playing. Around that time, the strands holding my glove’s fingers together snapped. The dream was over.
My parents found it strange when I insisted on a new glove, but insist I did. A baseball glove belongs to you not because you own it, but because you make it your own. With each grab, each drop of sweat, the leather molds to your hand until it fits you — and you alone. They bought me a maroon Rawlings with a “trapeze”
weave-patterned pocket, a finger rest and tan trim. I used it to play catch with Henrique and field balls off the wall in my parents’ backyard. Later, I wore it through three seasons of college intramurals, where our team went from winless to the championship game. A few years ago, my dog tore it to bits. I was heartbroken, but my wife knows me. For my next birthday, she gifted me a cream-colored Marucci infielder mitt with an I-patterned pocket and a padded wrist. She’s a former softball player herself, so we spent many afternoons tossing a ball around Memorial Park in Provo, Utah, even after our son was born. It wasn’t competitive play, but I considered that glove well broken in.
Then my car was burglarized. It made me think of the 74-year-old Texas man whose wife posted on social media looking for someone to play catch with him a few years back. A dozen strangers showed up, from high school players to fellow retirees. He said baseball was a work of art. That’s how my Marucci looked to me, laying among the other left-behinds on the back seat of my car. The thief even took my son’s diaper bag, but left my glove behind. Maybe a mitt just wasn’t worth anything to him. Or maybe he knew that a baseball glove isn’t a commodity you can trade. It’s a project you do for the love of the art, and it can never belong to anyone but you.
JASON HOLLEY
Wrap Them In Comfort
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FISHING, HIS BIRTHDAY
BY MICHAEL SOWDER
With adams, caddis, tricos, light cahills, blue-wing olives, royal coachmen, chartreuse trudes, green drakes, blue duns, black gnats, Nancy quills, Joe’s hoppers, yellow humpies, purple chutes, prince nymphs, pheasant tails, Eileen’s hare’s ears, telicos, flashbacks, Jennifer’s muddlers, Frank bugs, sow bugs, zug bugs, autumn splendors, woolly worms, black buggers, Kay’s gold zuddlers, clippers, tippet, floatant, spools of leader, tin shot, lead shot, hemostats, needle nose, rod, reel, vest, net, boots, cap, shades and waders, gortex shell and one bent Macanudo — I wade in a swirl of May-colored water, cast a fine gray quill, the last tie of my father.
MICHAEL SOWDER HAS PUBLISHED THREE COLLECTIONS OF POEMS, “A CALENDAR OF CROWS,” “AN EMPTY BOAT” AND “HOUSE UNDER THE MOON.” RAISED IN ALABAMA, HE IS NOW A PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY.
ANCIENT TREES AT YASAKA SHRINE IN KYOTO, JAPAN. | PHOTOGRAPHY BY DONNA BASSIN
Marseli has never been more relieved, with his eyesight restored he can once again provide for his young family of six
R E S T O R I N G L I V E S
T H O U G H S I G H T
A t C h a r i t y V i s i o n w e l e a d t h e w o r l d i n h e l p i n g
