For all the upheaval that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it did not dramatically change the most basic fact about abortions in America: the number. Since 2022, abortions in the United States have held steady—even increased slightly, based on the best of limited data. One major reason? The rise of abortion pills, which are now used in the majority of abortions in America. Every month, thousands of women in states where abortion is banned have been able to discreetly order the pills by mail and take them at home. Even with abortion bans in place, the availability of these pills makes these rules less absolute than the anti-abortion movement would like.

“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” according to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy playbook. They are “death by mail,” according to Students for Life; Kristan Hawkins, the organization’s president, told me that “it’s a travesty what has unfolded under the Biden-Harris FDA.” And the anti-abortion movement is formulating plans to target the pills through a number of legal and political avenues—some of which could apply regardless of who is elected president next month.

Abortion pills had accounted for a steadily growing share of abortions in the U.S. for years, but in 2021, the FDA made them significantly easier to obtain: The pills are actually two different drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, and the agency nixed a long-standing requirement to prescribe mifepristone only in person. With that, abortion pills became available by mail. The FDA cited COVID-related risks in its 2021 decision, but anti-abortion advocates immediately decried the move—and the policy has remained in place beyond the pandemic. After the overturning of Roe in 2022, 21 states passed new abortion bans or restrictions, but more than a dozen states, including New York and California, took steps to keep abortion pills available by mail, even in restricted states, by passing “shield laws.” These laws explicitly protect doctors, midwives, and nurse practitioners who use telehealth to prescribe the pills by mail across state lines.

Since then, an average of 6,000 to 7,000 people a month living in states with complete or six-week bans have been able to get abortion pills via telehealth, according to data from the Society for Family Planning, which surveys abortion providers in the United States. This number does not include people who had an abortion outside the formal health-care system, for instance by using pills ordered from overseas. And in states where abortion remains legal, the number of abortions—and the proportion involving abortion pills—also rose from 2020 to 2023, according to Guttmacher Institute data. (The number of women traveling to other states for abortions also doubled in this time, which is another reason abortions have not significantly fallen post-Roe.)

“The anti-abortion movement hasn’t quite figured out what to do with this,” says Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who helped draft the nation’s first shield law. The shield laws have not yet been directly challenged in court. And when anti-abortion groups tried to go after the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone via a lawsuit, the Supreme Court dismissed the case this year for lack of standing.

Still, last week, three states—Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho—sought to revive that case, asking courts to reinstate certain restrictions on mifepristone. And although a President Kamala Harris would be likely to stick to the current FDA policy for abortion pills, a Trump administration could change those policies directly. It could, as my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, curtail access to mifepristone simply by reinstating the in-person requirement for dispensing the drug—or just pull the FDA’s approval of mifepristone altogether. (In August, Donald Trump expressed openness to cracking down on abortion pills; his running mate, J. D. Vance, walked that position back a few days later.) Anti-abortion activists are hoping that Trump will enforce the long-dormant Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of material “intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” This could criminalize the mailing of abortion pills, even without the passage of a federal abortion ban, though anti-abortion activists have also suggested that Trump keep quiet about Comstock until he wins. (Trump, for his part, refused to share his views on the Comstock Act for months, before finally saying that he would not enforce it.)

Regardless of who becomes president, the anti-abortion movement is devising ways to restrict abortion pills through state governments too. Shield laws, for example, could be directly challenged if a red-state prosecutor goes after a doctor prescribing the pills from a shield-law state. Linda Prine, a doctor with the nonprofit Aid Access, which sends pills to states with abortion bans, told me she no longer leaves her home state of New York. Providers working under shield laws, she said, are all being “super careful.”

Anti-abortion groups could also test the limits of shield laws in more indirect ways. In Texas, says John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, pro-abortion groups have put up billboards advertising abortion pills: “You can go to people putting up the billboard. That’s aiding and abetting.” His group has also encouraged Texas lawmakers to introduce new laws that create liability for internet-service providers or credit-card-processing companies involved in abortion-pill transactions.

In Louisiana, where abortion is already banned, a law went into effect this month further restricting both mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled dangerous substances.” The law is named after a Louisiana woman whose husband secretly slipped misoprostol into her drinks, and anti-abortion activists have used cases like hers to argue that the pills need more regulation. “A faceless, doctorless process to obtain abortion drugs enables abusers to poison or coerce women and girls,” Emily Davis, the vice president of communications for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. But the law is also affecting routine medical care unrelated to abortion: The two drugs are commonly used in miscarriage and postpartum management, and hospitals in Louisiana have been doing timed drills to make sure staff can quickly access the locked closets where the medications now need to be kept.

Anti-abortion groups are also trying creative approaches to regulating abortion pills—such as through environmental regulations. Hawkins told me that Students for Life will be working with state legislatures next year on laws such as those requiring the disposal of fetal tissue from abortions as medical waste. These laws are designed to put the onus on the provider of abortion pills—presumably a doctor operating under a shield law—and states could then go after the provider for environmental-cleanup fees or fines, Kristi Hamrick, the organization’s vice president of media and policy, told me.

The new prevalence of abortion pills has opened up a new frontier, and the political and legal fights ahead may look quite different from those in the past. “We innovate, and we keep coming back. Our work is definitely just beginning,” Hawkins said. Seago, in Texas, told me he does not expect every attempt to restrict abortion pills to work. In the decades before Roe was overturned, he said, states introduced a number of different restrictions to limit access to abortion. Some worked. Some didn’t. With abortion pills, he told me, “we’re not expecting a silver bullet.” But activists like him are demanding that lawmakers try to stop their use nonetheless.

It is likely, but by no means certain, that in May 1938, the writers John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb met in a café near Arvin, California. Both were in town to chronicle the plight of migrants who were flooding the state to escape the decimation of the Dust Bowl. Both were writing fiction about it—Steinbeck had abandoned two novels on the subject earlier that year, while Babb had received an enthusiastic response from Random House for the opening chapters of her novel in progress, Whose Names Are Unknown. And both were connected to Tom Collins, a staffer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency providing aid to the migrants. To Steinbeck, Collins was a friend and a passkey to the migrant experience. To Babb, he was a mentor and supervisor; she had volunteered to document living conditions in the camps.

What happened next is in some ways clear as day, in others frustratingly fuzzy. The clear part is a tale of profound literary unfairness: Steinbeck received FSA field notes, compiled largely (but not entirely) from Babb’s observations and interviews, after which he began a punishing 100-day writing sprint to produce The Grapes of Wrath, the foundational American novel about the Great Depression. Babb’s book, delivered later, would be scotched. The Random House co-founder Bennett Cerf alerted Babb that she was late to the finish line in August 1939. “What rotten luck for you that ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ should not only have come out before your book was submitted but should have so swept the country!” Cerf wrote. “Obviously, another book at this time about exactly the same subject would be a sad anticlimax!”

Here’s the fuzzy part: Over time, an understandably frustrated Babb would insist that she, not Collins, had personally handed over the reports to Steinbeck—an act that would make his appropriation look more brazen and personal. “Tom asked me to give him my notes,” Babb would write 40 years after that alleged café meeting. “I did. Naïve me.” It doesn’t appear that Steinbeck ever wrote about meeting Babb, or even mentioned her by name, though it’s plausible that two diligent reporters on the same beat would want to compare notes.

Fuzzier still is the question of how much of Grapes was written on the back of the FSA notes, how much of that research was Babb’s—and how much it matters. Her observations almost certainly helped Steinbeck shape his rendering of the migrants. Babb’s entries were rich and thorough—having grown up on a failing farm in the Oklahoma panhandle, she was particularly trusted by Collins to connect with the migrants. When Babb shared her jottings, directly or indirectly, she was likely motivated by the urge to get their experience across through whatever medium might help them.

So what would you call the ensuing fame of one novel and the preemptive burial of another? Appropriation? Theft? Bad timing? Sexism? Perhaps, in the end, it was simply evidence of a cruel flaw of publishing: Sometimes its decision makers conclude—not always for good reasons—that there isn’t room for many stories about one major event. That a short-term judgment about what the market will bear can choke off a literary legacy and, to some extent, impoverish a culture.

Sanora Babb (seated in the center) at an FSA migrant camp in 1938. (Courtesy of Sanora Babb Papers / Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. © Joanne Dearcopp.)

One virtue of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, is that it keeps Steinbeck off the stage for as long as possible. Despite Babb’s rotten luck, as Cerf put it, the editor’s snub wasn’t the defining element of her life and career. A dedicated leftist, she’d published fiction and reportage in little magazines and journals such as New Masses, befriending working-class writers including William Saroyan and Nelson Algren. She had a long marriage to the Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe that sometimes bent but didn’t break under the pressure of his work. And though Grapes derailed her career, Babb never stopped mining her childhood for material. In Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas, she’d experienced poverty, crop failures, and an absent dad; her mother struggled to keep a bakery running while her father chased illusory dreams as a gambler and semipro baseball player. Wind highlights Babb’s determination to chronicle such deprivation while writing her way out of it.

This personal history, according to Dunkle, goes some way toward explaining why Babb might have made the career-crippling decision to open-source her notes. “You have to understand that Sanora Babb came from a communist, liberal background—she was a community-based writer,” Dunkle told me over Zoom from UC Davis, where she is a lecturer in the English department. “She was part of a writers’ group for 40 years with Ray Bradbury,” and professional collaboration was baked into her ethos. “I don’t think she thought that Steinbeck would appropriate things from her notes and that it would make it impossible for her to publish her book.”

[Read: Plagiarism is the next “fake news”]

Riding Like the Wind doesn’t argue that Steinbeck plagiarized Babb, but rather asserts that he appropriated her writing without credit; it also suggests that the scope and perspective of The Grapes of Wrath didn’t become clear to Steinbeck until he had those notes in hand. Dunkle quotes Steinbeck himself to show that the field reports commissioned by Collins (one of the people to whom Grapes was dedicated) were essential to an authentic portrayal of his milieu: “Letter from Tom with vital information to be used later. He is good,” the author wrote in his diary while toiling over his novel. “I need this stuff. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong.”

Although Dunkle’s framing is backed by fresh evidence, some fuzziness persists. In his 2020 biography of Steinbeck, Mad at the World, William Souder expresses skepticism about whether Babb actually met Steinbeck—or would have willingly handed over notes she was using for her own novel. Speaking to me on the phone from his home in Minnesota, he deferred to Dunkle’s research (and Babb’s statements) on that point, but said it is difficult to discern what material of Babb’s was used, and how.

Souder and other scholars have detected echoes of Babb’s notes in Grapes. Her observations about the migrants’ “mortgage-lost farms, bank-claimed machinery and animals, dust-ruined acres” have the same biblical cadence that Steinbeck mastered in his novel. Their descriptions of stillborn babies are similar; both use creatures like insects and turtles as metaphors for the migrants’ plight.

Without direct evidence, however, a definitive link can’t be proved; both authors were, after all, in the same place at the same time. “It’s really hard to disentangle things and say, ‘Well, this idea comes from Steinbeck; this idea comes from Babb,’” Souder said. “I think that’s borderline impossible.”

And Steinbeck had at least as much right to the subject. He had been writing about Dust Bowl migrants well before meeting Babb; in 1936, he wrote dispatches on them for the San Francisco News; that same year, he published In Dubious Battle, about a California fruit-worker strike. “He’s a native of California,” Peter Van Coutren, an archivist at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, told me. “He is a keen observer of what’s … happening here in California, and he’s looking for a way to promote his ideals of fairness, human rights, and human equality.”

Babb in front of a window display featuring her first published book, The Lost Traveler, at Pickwick Books in Los Angeles in 1958. (Courtesy of Sanora Babb Papers / Harry Ransom Center / University of Texas at Austin. © Joanne Dearcopp.)

For all the parallels, a reader would be unlikely to mistake one novel for the other. Their plots rhyme, especially in the latter chapters, which concern migrant families trapped and exploited by low-paying conglomerate farms. But where Grapes is relentlessly symphonic and often melodramatic, Unknown—which was finally edited and released 20 years ago—is intimate and restrained, focusing acutely on the slow-motion erosion of the agrarian American dream in a pattern of exploitation that the Dust Bowl only intensified. Its portrait of an Oklahoma-panhandle community undone by dust storms, depicting miscarriage and suicide along with economic devastation, is visceral and honed, more in line with Algren than Steinbeck.

Babb had a gift for weaving together individual desperation and systemic failure. In a fine section in the first half of Unknown, a family patriarch, Milt, contemplates the coming weather and practically wills it to save his family:

He looked at the edges of the sky, hoping for clouds or the steely haze that might mean early snow. Off to the northwest a bank of clouds lay just darker than the sky, still like a great animal waiting to spring, showing the sleepy fire of its eyes when the faint autumn lightning winked. It was far away and would spend its strength on other land. His wheat and that of every other prairie farm was waiting in the ground for rain.

In his “rotten luck” letter, Cerf wrote to Babb that “the last third of your book is so completely like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ that the families and characters might basically be interchanged in the two.” This is exactly right but also completely misses the point: Collective experiences are, by their nature, shared, but Babb’s characterization of them was wholly her own. And while Grapes chronicles the injustices that migrants faced in California, Unknown shows how farmers struggled with them in Oklahoma, bringing their dread and suspicions of authority westward.

Two writers with divergent styles, both capturing a cataclysmic American event: It’s difficult to believe the marketplace didn’t have room for them both. “The excuse given by Cerf that the field was too crowded to hold another novel of the same seems flimsy at best,” Van Coutren, of the Steinbeck Center, told me. “So I imagine there was some other push for him to come up with a reason to dismiss her, and I see that dismissal … as, most likely, because she was a young woman writer who was just getting started.”

[Read: The hazards of writing while female]

This is Dunkle’s conclusion as well, and it’s a reasonable one. The publishing industry could accommodate contemporaneous World War II novels about the Pacific Theater, including From Here to Eternity and The Caine Mutiny; Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep opened the door for Jewish American immigrant literature, rather than slamming it shut.

The closest parallels to Babb’s predicament might be the fate of innovators such as Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the concept of natural selection around the same time as Charles Darwin, or Gottfried Liebniz, who developed a variant of calculus just as Isaac Newton did. But fiction isn’t science. It’s a study in emotion and perspective, and Grapes and Unknown are distinct books. Dunkle said that Grapes of Wrath makes her think of her grandmother, who grew up in Oklahoma. When Dunkle told her that she was reading Grapes in class, her grandmother snapped: Don’t ever talk to me about Steinbeck again. “She hated the book,” Dunkle recalled, “and I couldn’t understand why.” But the more closely she read the influential novel, the more she noticed Steinbeck’s tendency to depict his characters as victims with little agency of their own.

Dunkle’s book may help elevate Babb’s status, not simply because it so thoroughly explores the Steinbeck affair but because it succeeds at doing what all good literary biographies do: It makes a case for reading old writing in new ways. Steinbeck thrived in an era when sweep and melodrama and heft—not to mention manliness—signified quality literature. Babb, arguably, speaks more directly to this moment, which rewards clear portraits of marginalization and a grasp of how sociopolitical forces shape everyday relationships. Babb didn’t get the chance she deserved, but she knew as well as anyone how much the world was suffused with unfairness alongside hope and ambition. It’s right there in the final line of Unknown: “They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again.”

For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.

I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: “The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.”) PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood.

This essay has been excerpted from Adair’s new book.

Lying is ubiquitous, yet politicians are rarely asked why they do it. Maybe journalists think the reason is obvious; many are reluctant to even use the word lie, because it invites confrontation and demands proof. But the answer could help us address the problem. So I spent the past four years asking members of Congress, political operatives, local officials, congressional staffers, White House aides, and campaign consultants this simple question: Why do politicians lie?

In a way, these conversations made me hopeful that officials from both parties might curtail their lying if we find ways to change their incentives. The decision to lie can be reduced to something like a point system: If I tell this lie, will I score enough support and attention from my voters, my party leaders, and my corner of the media to outweigh any negative consequences? “There is a base to play to, a narrative to uphold or reinforce,” said Cal Cunningham, a Democrat who lost a Senate race in North Carolina in 2020 after acknowledging that he had been in an extramarital relationship. “There is an advantage that comes from willfully misstating the truth that is judged to be greater than the disadvantage that may come from telling the truth. I think there’s a lot of calculus in it.” Jim Kolbe, a former Republican member of Congress from Arizona who has since left the party, described the advantage more vividly: A lie “arouses and stimulates their base.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: Fact-checking is not a political strategy]

Politicians have always played to their base, but polarization has encouraged them to do little else. Now that many politicians speak primarily to their supporters, lying has become both less dangerous and more rewarding. “They gain political favor or, ultimately, they gain election,” said Mike McCurry, who served as White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton. As former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey told me, “It’s human nature to want to get a standing ovation.” Lies also provide easy ammunition for attacking opponents—no opposition research required. They “take points off the board for other candidates,” said Damon Circosta, a Democrat who recently served as the chair of North Carolina’s Board of Elections.

Anthony Fauci was often caught in the crossfire. Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kansas, once suggested that the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases would not give people access to his financial statements when, in fact, they were available to anyone who requested them. Republican politicians repeatedly—and falsely—accused Fauci of lying and even used his face in fundraising appeals. He brought one of the mailings to a congressional hearing: “It said ‘Fire Fauci,’” he told me, “and then, on the bottom, ‘Donate even $10, $20, $50, $100, $200.’ So there wasn’t any ambiguity.”

In the old days, “if someone would say something outlandish, they would be shamed,” Fauci said. That deterrent has disappeared. “There is no shame in lying now.”

For my study of political lying, I took a particular interest in Mike Pence. We had been friends and neighbors when he was a member of Congress, and I saw him as a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth. When he won the race for governor in Indiana, I watched his lies grow. By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.

Olivia Troye, who worked as a homeland-security adviser in Pence’s office from 2018 to 2020, saw two versions of him. “It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde sometimes,” she told me. As a boss, he was concerned about details and wanted the facts. But he would compromise all of that when he was asked to recite the Trump administration’s talking points.

“At the beginning of the COVID pandemic was probably the most honest I saw Mike Pence ever be,” she said. He addressed the nation frankly and more responsibly than Trump. But Troye cited an op-ed that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal as a turning point. Under the headline “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” he claimed, in June 2020, that “we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy.” Critics rightly accused him of cherry-picking stats and ignoring reality.

But appeals to “reality” have lost their potency. Several people I interviewed described how partisan media, especially on the right, has fostered lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic representative from Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that outlets expect politicians to repeat falsehoods as the price of admission. “If you’re not willing to treat certain lies as fact, then you simply won’t be invited to address the echo chamber.” Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so “most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio … and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.”

[Listen: When fact-checks backfire]

The hollowing-out of local news outlets has also made lying easier. “There’s no local reporters following these races,” Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told me. “All of these local bureaus have been just wiped out, and so there’s nobody following this shit on a day-to-day basis and keeping people accountable.”

Experimental studies have found that fact-checking really can convince people. Often, however, the academic findings don’t reflect the real world. Voters rarely seek out fact-checking aimed at their party, and conservatives in particular hear constant criticism of the enterprise, which makes them doubt its validity. (According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans believe that fact-checkers favor one side, while only 29 percent of Democrats do.)

If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.

But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit.

This essay has been excerpted from Bill Adair’s new book, Beyond the Big Lie.