Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30..

I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow.

These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?

[Jonathan Chait: Democrats show why they lost]

Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.”

Even as he disavowed the idea that solving the guy problem should involve some promotion of testosterone-laced pandering, Auchincloss suggested that the party ought to find its way to a more positive, inspirational message. “We need to embrace a culture of heroism, not a culture of victimhood. Young men need models for their ambition,” he said.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut also notes liberal squeamishness about masculine themes; he says the party is losing male voters in part because even talking about the need to improve the lives of men could run afoul of what he calls the “word police” on the left. Murphy told me, “There’s a worry that when you start talking about gender differences and masculinity, that you’re going to very quickly get in trouble.” The Democratic Party, he thinks, has not been purposeful enough in opening up a conversation with men in general and young men specifically. “There is a reluctance inside the progressive movement to squarely acknowledge gender differences, and that has really put us on the back foot.”

For Murphy, the right message might come from an earlier era—a notion that could seem antithetical to the very idea of progressivism. “We cannot and shouldn’t abandon some of the traditional ways that men find value and meaning: in providing protection, in taking high levels of risk, in taking pride in physical work,” he told me. “There’s a lot of worry that all of those traditional male characteristics are somehow illegitimate.”

So far, the GOP seems to be doing a far more effective job of engaging male voters in ways that reflect the reality of today’s popular culture. Trump has embraced UFC’s Dana White, and has made grand entrances at MMA fights. (Years before he ran for president, Trump would appear at pro-wrestling events, and he is a member of the WWE hall of fame.) “We have to go where people are consuming culture and sports and entertainment,” Auchincloss told me, “and talk about issues of the day in a way that is coded for political orientation but that is more broadly accessible and interesting.”

Last fall, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona tried this Go where the men are concept. “We should do anything to reach out to voters,” he told me. “And that means men.” Gallego argues that Democrats have been too hesitant to directly address men’s everyday reality, and that this is a grave mistake. “Black, Latino, and white men are not doing well in this country. They’re not obtaining college degrees,” Gallego said. “If we were to look at the numbers and just take out the gender, we would say, Wow, that group of Americans needs some attention. But all of a sudden, if you add the little m next to that, it’s somehow something that we shouldn’t be worried about—and I reject that.”

Gallego’s Senate-campaign stops included boxing gyms, soccer watch parties, and Mexican rodeos. Trump won the state at the presidential level by more than five percentage points, but Gallego defeated his Republican challenger, Kari Lake, in the Senate battle with a 2.4 percent margin. “I think the voters, the male voters, understood that I understood them and what they were going through,” he said.

The conundrum for Democrats that Murphy identifies is that they are ill-equipped to compete with Republicans for a jacked-up version of manhood because doing so would cut against the interests and rights of a crucial bloc of their coalition: women. “Now the right is offering a really irresponsible antidote, which is to just roll all the progress back and return to an era in which men were dominant politically and economically,” Murphy said. But as cartoonish as MAGA hypermasculinity is, it sends out a signal that “matters to a lot of men—that only the right really cares about the way in which they’re feeling pretty shitty.”

No one I spoke with suggested that the Democratic Party would (or should) ever abandon its positions on women’s rights. “I don’t think you have to move away from anything to be inclusive of other things,” Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina told me. One possible Democratic plan, so far as I could discern it, was to keep expanding the parameters of acceptable discourse and opinions, rather than box themselves in. Clyburn said he was surprised to see so many young men break for Trump in November. He believes that his party has gotten itself into a quagmire. “We’ve set ourselves up for this messaging war that we’re losing,” Clyburn told me. “In the last election,” he said, “sound bites that developed around gender inequity caused serious problems. And they’re still causing problems.”

[Read: Democrats are losing the culture wars]

Or maybe sound bites are not the problem.

Last fall, the Democratic strategist James Carville was “certain” that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump. If Carville had adhered to his own maxim—It’s the economy, stupid—he might have seen Trump’s victory coming. One lesson of 2024, some of the elected officials I spoke with said, was that Democratic power brokers were woefully oblivious of the economic struggles of working-class Americans. They also suggested that the project of winning back the working class and the project of winning back men were one and the same.

Voters, the admittedly simple theory goes, will support the candidate and party that they believe will improve their daily lives. The MAGA movement has done a keen job of tapping into the discontent and resentment that many men feel over declining job prospects. Democrats need to compete by offering a material path out of despair.  

“The young men that I’m talking to are not in love with politics, period,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia told me. “They want their lives to work. And it’s important that people feel you walking with them and hearing them.” Warnock was adamant that, contrary to certain media narratives, Trump did not triumph in a landslide victory. “He won by the margin of people’s disengagement, because they feel the ways in which the democracy is becoming increasingly undemocratic,” he said. “And my job is not for them to hear my voice; it is to give the people their voice.”

The crucial way to reengage disaffected men, multiple Democrats told me, is to champion an economy that “works like Legos, not Monopoly,” as Auchincloss put it. “An economy where we are building more technical vocational high schools, and we are celebrating the craftsmanship of the trades so that young men have a sense of autonomy and being a provider.” Murphy said that his party should aim to build the sort of middle-class prosperity that enables one breadwinner to support a family of four, allowing one parent to choose to be a homemaker.

But if Democrats believe that Lego economic policies could be popular, they also know that many voters associate the party with government handouts and top-down programs, which, on the whole, are not very popular. This is something the MAGA movement has figured out, painting all Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites.

For Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State, the party’s primary political problem is undoubtedly class—which is not something that a change of messaging from “the consultant-industrial complex” can fix, she told me. Rather, authenticity is the only way to make true connections. Voters don’t want to be humored, she believes; they want to be heard. “People who are trying to signal some kind of an alignment with the working class are just undermining themselves,” she said. “The donor class needs to pay more attention to how rooted a candidate is in their community, and less about whether or not a candidate ticks every ideological or policy box.”

She stressed the importance of people knowing that their representatives “are actually living in the same reality” as they are—and that a white-collar professional is not always the best fit. She believes that people want to see themselves in their representatives. “There are so many nonpolitical ways to communicate your values that haven’t been respected or exercised,” she told me. Gluesenkamp Perez has gained a national profile for the way she aims to speak for the sort of blue-collar America that many Democrats realize they’ve become disconnected from. She and her husband own an auto repair shop in the Pacific Northwest, and she won reelection in a Republican district that’s supported Trump in the past three elections. “Being able to make a clutch last for 500,000 miles—that’s really cool to a lot of people,” she told me.

“I think about all the ways that I’ve seen this sort of unconscious disrespect for people in the trades,” she said. “I’ll hear people say, ‘Well, you know, my dad was just a janitor, and I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ and I’m like, What does that sound like to everyone in the room who didn’t go to college? That you think you’re better than them.”

What became clear from my conversations was that Democrats want to get back to eye level with their potential voters, particularly men. But, as Clyburn and others acknowledged, the party’s progressive social agenda can be an obstacle to its moderate wing. At her town halls, Gluesenkamp Perez told me, she has found her constituents especially fired up over the rules about trans women in sports—an issue that Trump has inflamed.

“What I saw was that those people were mostly people that had been driving their girls to sports practice for 12 years, and their kids’ best shot at going to college was a scholarship,” she told me. “This was an argument about resource access, not about morality.” Gluesenkamp Perez has sometimes crossed over to side with the GOP, but she recently voted against Republican-sponsored legislation to keep transgender women and girls out of school sports.

She also told me that having a real values discussion is impossible until voters feel respected, and that a candidate is listening to them. A genuine curiosity about the lives of the people who send you to Congress is not a mere nicety but an essential quality for Democrats who seem remote to the people they represent. “A lot of my colleagues just go out there and try to explain stuff to people all the time,” Gluesenkamp Perez said. “A lot of us don’t really have confidence that the spreadsheets they’re pointing to are the full picture.”

Just being real could help Democrats appeal to voters of all stripes, but they have to hope that it will resonate with disaffected men—particularly young men—who may have turned toward Trump. Democrats may not have to bend their values completely out of shape to suit the political environment, but they can’t afford to write anyone off.

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In 1971, a British doctor was trying to puzzle out a mystery: How can a child with no signs of external trauma or injury present with bleeding between the skull and brain? That doctor, A. Norman Guthkelch was part of a wave of physicians and researchers newly concerned that an epidemic of severe child abuse had been passing, undetected, beneath doctors’ noses.

As one law-review article recounts, “Prior to the 1960s, medical schools provided little or no training on child abuse, and medical texts were largely silent on the issue.” A turning point was the publication of the 1962 article “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” which urged physicians to consider that severe child abuse may be at play when children came in with injuries such as bone fractures, subdural hematomas, or bruising.

The article goes beyond offering medical advice to prescribing an ethical framework that would take hold: “The bias should be in favor of the child’s safety; everything should be done to prevent repeated trauma, and the physician should not be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk of repetition exists.”

Armed with these new insights, Guthkelch hypothesized that the children showing up to his hospital were being abusively shaken. Although they did not show up with the usual fractures or visible forms of physical trauma, the presence of a subdural hematoma could indicate what would come to be widely known as “shaken baby syndrome.”

Decades later, Guthkelch would publicly worry that his hypothesis had been taken too far. After reviewing the trial record and medical reports from one case in Arizona, NPR reported that he was “troubled” that the conclusion was abusive shaking when there were other potential causes. “I wouldn’t hang a cat on the evidence of shaking, as presented,” Guthkelch quipped.

The narrow claim that shaking a baby abusively can result in certain internal injuries morphed into the claim that if a set of internal injuries were present, then shaking must be the cause. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with a neuroscientist who found himself personally embroiled in this scientific and legal controversy when a caretaker was accused of shaking his child.

Cyrille Rossant is a researcher and software engineer at the International Brain Laboratory and University College London whose Ph.D. in neuroscience came in handy when he delved into the research behind shaken baby syndrome and published a textbook with Cambridge University Press on the scientific controversy that embroiled his family.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: Many forms of scientific expertise in criminal-justice proceedings have been debunked or come under scrutiny in recent years. Things like bite-mark analysis and blood-spatter analysis used to be commonly understood as rigorous empirical analysis. But these questionable theories often fall apart on closer inspection.

This is how science is supposed to work. Experts observe, they hypothesize, they test, and they revise their previous understandings of the world. And in academia and in scientific journals, that’s all well and good—but what happens when evolving science is brought into the courtroom? In a courtroom, no one is well positioned to rigorously evaluate a scientific debate: not judges, not jurors, and not even the people calling expert witnesses.

[Music]

Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper. Today’s episode is about abusive head trauma, but you probably know it by its older name: shaken baby syndrome.

Babies cannot speak for themselves. As a result, when doctors or prosecutors accuse a parent or caregiver of having violently and abusively shaken their baby, they are often relying on something that has come to be known as “the triad.”

The triad refers to three medical findings: subdural hemorrhage, or bleeding in the area between the brain and the skull; retinal hemorrhage, or bleeding in the retina; and brain swelling. If these findings are present, according to shaken-baby-syndrome adherents, that would mean a baby has been abusively shaken. Shaken baby syndrome also indicates that since these symptoms arise rather quickly, the child must have been shaken by the last person he or she was with.

It’s important to understand that for many years, the presence of all three of these medical events was not indicative of child abuse; it was dispositive. In 2015, Kentucky’s former chief medical examiner, who had personally diagnosed SBS, told The Washington Post that “doctors, myself included, have accepted as true an unproven theory about a potential cause of brain injury in children.”

My guest today is Cyrille Rossant. He’s a researcher with a Ph.D. in neuroscience who plunged into the world of SBS when a caregiver was accused of shaking his child, an allegation she denied.

This is a very serious topic, and I want to be clear—child abuse is very real, and our public and private tools for addressing and helping children at risk are distressingly insufficient. But in their zeal to help children, many doctors, prosecutors, and scientists have allowed what one New Jersey appellate court has called “junk science” to tear apart the lives of thousands.

Let’s dive in. Cyrille, welcome to the show.

Cyrille Rossant: Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So you have a very personal connection to this issue. Can you tell us about how you first learned about shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, sure. So I actually lived a situation myself. So nine years ago, I had a baby who was being cared for by a caregiver. And when my baby was, like, five months old, he was sick. He was vomiting, and his head was getting bigger and bigger. So we brought him to the hospital, and they did a CT scan. And they found so-called subdural hematoma, which is blood around the brain.

And from that, they told me that it was shaken baby syndrome. It could be nothing else. So that meant that my baby had been violently shaken. So obviously, it was a very difficult thing to hear, and I was really distressed by the health of my baby. So he was taken care of. He had surgery, and fortunately he was fine after that.

So now he’s a healthy 9-year-old boy. But at the time, it was very hard. And obviously, since it was a situation of suspicion of child abuse, the hospital had to report the case to authorities and to call the police. And that’s how it all started.

Demsas: When that determination was made about your son, they didn’t leave you any doubt. When they saw the subdural hematoma, they said, Without a doubt, this is shaken baby syndrome?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly. So at the time at the hospital, most doctors were really sure that it was shaken baby syndrome, that it could be nothing else. So the thing is that we had a nanny. And my son had symptoms when he was being cared for by the nanny. So she was, like, the prime suspect. But still, it was very hard for us to believe that it was possible at the time.

That being said, there was one doctor who was less certain about the diagnosis. It was actually the only doctor who was a specialist of child neurology. And he was telling us that it could be shaken baby syndrome, but it could also be something else, namely a medical condition where there’s an excess of fluid around the brain. He told us it could be a risk factor for subdural hematoma and that he was not really sure that my son had been violently shaken.

So it was a bit confusing for me, to have, like, most doctors who are really 100 percent sure that it was shaken baby syndrome and another one who is supposed to know more about these issues to be less certain. So I was really confused, and I couldn’t really live with this uncertainty, and I needed to know what had happened to my baby.

Demsas: And what happened with the caregiver? Did they arrest her?

Rossant: So yeah, basically, it took them maybe six months or something. But yeah, after six months, she was put in custody because, in the meantime, there was a medical expert who looked at the case and said, Well, yes. It’s a shaken baby. So it happened when my baby was being cared for by the caregiver, so it had to be her. So she was put under custody. She was interrogated by the police. And then she was being prosecuted for four years.

Demsas: Oh my God.

Rossant: And in this longer legal process, another expert looked at the case, and he did not really agree with the first one.

He said, like the child-neurology specialist at the hospital, that it could be a medical condition and that maybe it was not shaken baby syndrome. So there were two different opinions in terms of medical experts. And on this uncertainty, the judge decided to drop all charges, and the nanny was cleared after four years.

Demsas: This, I think, really underscores how serious of an issue this is. I mean, when a doctor or a scientific expert tells a court or a public-policy official or a policy maker that they’re certain about what something means, it sounds like they’re talking about a natural law or they’re talking about physics. And there’s often not the ability for public-policy makers or lawyers or judges to independently evaluate the research.

So as a result of your experience, you dove headfirst into the research here and have even written a book about the finding of SBS. I’m gonna just refer to it as shaken baby syndrome, even though there’s some controversy about whether it should be called that or abusive head trauma, just because I think most people know the term shaken baby syndrome, but I want to note for listeners that there’s some controversy over the use of that term.

But there are basically three areas of controversy I want us to explore: the mechanism of injury, the diagnostic reliability, and the evidence quality. Let’s start with the mechanism of injury. The fundamental question here is whether shaking your baby is the only way to cause the classic findings of SBS. Can you lay out the scientific debate here over that question?

Rossant: Yeah, so actually, I think you can say there are two different questions here. First is: Can shaking cause the injuries that are typically associated with SBS? And second: Are these medical findings always caused by shaking? So it’s kind of two inverse relationships—the causal link, and is it the only cause? If it’s a cause, is it the only one, right?

Demsas: Yeah. The way I’ve been thinking about it is: Can punching a wall create a hole? Versus: If we find a hole in the wall, does that prove that someone punched it?

Rossant: Yeah, exactly.

Demsas: I think we can start with, like, can punching a wall create a hole? Can shaking a baby lead to the injuries of the classic findings of SBS?

Rossant: So the short answer for this is: We don’t know. We cannot shake babies for science, right? It’s not working like that. So we don’t know today. I really looked a lot for that question in the literature, and I could not find good, reliable scientific evidence linking shaking without impact—and that’s important—to the medical findings associated with SBS: so typically, subdural hemorrhage, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling.

What’s for sure is that babies are shaken. It exists. There’s no doubt about it. We know that many babies who are shaken—they are shaken not in the most violent possible way. There’s a whole spectrum in the degree of violence you can inflict to a baby. And when it’s not so much violence, it’s still child abuse, obviously, but it might not be enough for the baby to be injured. Okay?

So we have some interesting data from a lot of countries who asked a lot of parents and caregivers, Well, do you shake your baby? Do you hit your baby? Do you slap your baby? A lot of types of child abuse. And so it’s really just, like, self-admitted abuse, right? And parents actually say yes. And a proportion of them admit doing these kinds of things to their babies, including shaking.

So it’s something that exists. And still, we can think that 2 percent is not that much, but it’s still, like, 100 times more than the number of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses. So it means that we miss most babies who are really shaken, but maybe they are not shaken that violently, because they don’t appear to be injured. They don’t go to the hospital, and they are not detected. That being said, sometimes the babies are shaken so violently that they are being injured, and it’s hard to imagine how a baby could be shaken in the most violent possible way without the brain being injured.

Now, the exact type of injury you are going to find around the brain, etcetera, we don’t really know. We don’t know. We can imagine that it’s going to harm the brain, but we don’t know how, exactly. There is some data that was obtained on animals. So there’s a whole literature on animal studies, like mice, rats, piglets, lambs, who are shaken for science—it’s horrific when you think about it, but these are things that are done by researchers. So animals are shaken, and they are injured. And we find some injuries in the brain, but they do not really look like what you find in shaken baby syndrome. It’s not exactly the same kind of findings. It doesn’t really match.

Demsas: What’s the difference?

Rossant: It’s really technical, but you will find some injuries in the brain itself, like traumatic lesions to the neurons and to the cables between the neurons. You might find some bleeding, but again, it’s not the type of bleeding you find in shaken baby syndrome, which is really specific.

Same for the retinal hemorrhage—you will find very severe retinal hemorrhaging in shaken baby syndrome. And this is not typically what you find in animals who are shaken. It doesn’t really match. So the way researchers are interpreting this typically is to say, Well, these animals are not good animal models for human babies, and human babies seem to have specificities for the kind of injuries we find. So far, we are not able to prove the causal link between violent shaking and the classic medical findings of shaken baby syndrome.

Demsas: So models have failed to show that shaking can generate enough force to cause those injuries, and studies that are on animals haven’t been able to reproduce the classic findings through shaking alone. But there’s still a lot of uncertainty, right? So it’s still possible that shaking your baby could result in the classic presentation of shaken baby syndrome. But it’s also possible that it might be something else.

So we’ve talked about, can punching a wall create a hole? Now I want to ask you about, if you find a hole in the wall, does that prove someone punched it? Because I think one of the core parts of this controversy is that it’s not just that when a baby presents with these injuries that doctors will say, It’s possible this baby was abused. There’s been a training of doctors to indicate certainty, that if you find this—it’s often called “the triad”—if you find this triad of injuries, then you should presume that the baby was shaken and that the baby was shaken abusively by the last person who was with the child when it began presenting with those symptoms. So why was that the medical consensus? Why did that training happen?

Rossant: Yeah. I think you’re right to say that it’s not just a cause; it’s the only cause. That’s the theory, right? Shaking is a possible explanation for the findings. It’s the only possible explanation, and it occurred just before the baby showed symptoms. So it’s a really, really strong theory that has been taught to doctors. Now, why has that been the case? I don’t know.

What I know is that historically, and you really need to dig down into the history of shaken baby syndrome to understand how it was born—it was born in the ’70s with this hypothesis that maybe shaking was one of the possible causes of subdural hematoma, but at the time it was just a hypothesis. And today it’s still a hypothesis. And that was in the beginning of the ’70s. And a few years later, doctors in the U.S. started to presume abuse whenever they found subdural and retinal hemorrhage in infants. Why that has been the case, why this mere hypothesis, Maybe it’s shaking, was transformed into, It is shaking, and we need to call the police, that I don’t know. But by the ’80s, you start to see prosecutions based on this theory.

So somehow—I don’t know—some doctors in the U.S. started to do this. It’s important, also, to say that there was the context of reporting any suspicion of child abuse to authorities. That started in the ’60s. There was a big subject here in pediatrics at the time, because before the ’60s, it was not really obvious for doctors to think about abuse. They didn’t really think about it. And it suddenly changed in the ’60s. And they really realized that it was important for the medical community, and especially pediatricians, who see children all the time, to think about abuse whenever they find suspicious findings, like fractures, bruises, and subdural hematoma. That came in the ’70s.

So there was this big push for doctors to really report as many children as possible to the authorities whenever they have the slightest doubt on abuse. And since there was this hypothesis that maybe subdural hematoma is one of the signs that should make doctors suspicious of abuse, well, they started to call the police and to report these cases to authorities.

That being said, I think there’s a difference between being just aware that maybe children are abused and calling the police, and going to court and saying, This is abuse, and this is nothing else, and this is certain. This is a big difference to me. And this is really what I don’t understand, because, to me, doctors should treat patients and report possible child-abuse cases to authorities. But going beyond that and saying to the courts, I’m a doctor, and I know that this child was abused, even though there’s no other piece of evidence apart from the medical findings, this is the thing that is going too far for me.

Demsas: What other things can happen that can cause these symptoms to present in babies? Are there other potential explanations that you found when researching this?

Rossant: Yeah. So actually, now we know a lot of possible causes of subdural and retinal hemorrhage. First, there’s everything involving accidental trauma, like short falls and domestic accidents. Whenever there’s an impact to the head, even what appears to be a small impact, it can really cause severe injuries, including what we see in shaken baby syndrome. There’s also biomechanical data about this. Impact is really dangerous for the skull and for the brain in a child.

Then you have many rare diseases, like a genetic, metabolic, neurological conditions that can all cause subdural hematoma or be a risk factor for the development of subdural hematoma after a minor impact, which really happens in most babies. Once they start to sit down, they can fall, and when they try to get up, to stand up, they can also fall. So it’s really, really common for babies to hit their head. Most of the time, it’s not going to cause anything, but if there is a medical condition, if there is a risk factor, then it might cause the findings of shaken baby syndrome.

There are infections that can cause blood-clotting disorders. There’s really a lot of things. It’s really complicated. It’s really not possible to say that only shaking is the only cause of the SBS findings. There are also risk factors—again, it can be medical conditions.

But it can be just a prematurity. It’s a big risk factor. These babies are much more fragile. Babies who have a low birth weight, babies who have a large head—there are many little things like this that can increase the risk of a subdural retinal hemorrhage after minor impact. So yeah, it’s really complicated.

Demsas: I want to talk about some of the pushback that people like you have received from other scientists who stand by the shaken-baby-syndrome diagnosis and say that it is perfectly reasonable for doctors to presume, and for the courts to presume, that when these injuries present in babies, that we should assume a caregiver has shaken the child. What they often point to is the fact that numerous perpetrators have confessed and admitted to shaking their babies, and that the confessions often will provide detailed accounts that match the medical findings of shaken baby syndromes, and that they have these consistent patterns.

Why is that not convincing to you that, perhaps, maybe it’s the case that science hasn’t figured out exactly how shaking will cause these symptoms, but if people are admitting to having shaken their baby and then their baby is presenting with these symptoms, that’s a reasonable cause and effect to presume?

Rossant: Yeah, it’s true that confessions—today, it’s the main piece of evidence for shaken baby syndrome. The question is not whether confessions exist or not; it’s how reliable they are, and what you can learn from the confessions. So confessions do exist. And I also want to stress that, obviously, some of these confessions are true, and that some parents do abuse the babies, and they end up confessing when they are being interrogated by the police.

So yeah, you cannot possibly say that all confessions are false. It’s not working like this. That being said, I’ve studied this question a lot in the scientific literature, and it’s true to say that they are really unreliable scientifically. They are not scientific evidence. And it’s not obvious to realize that, because when you don’t know the subject, you think, Well, if the person admits something that horrible, it must be true. There’s no reason for an innocent person to say they did it if they did not.

But it’s much more complicated than that. The topic of false confessions in general—not just for a shaken baby, but for any type of crime—has been known for decades. You know the Innocence Project that was able to exonerate a lot of people based on DNA evidence? Well, it turns out that between 25 and 30 percent of all the DNA exonerations had falsely confessed, and they were factually innocent, because that was proved by DNA, which could point to someone else. So it’s something that exists.

Now, you wonder why innocent people confess. So there are many reasons. There’s even a classification that was done by a psychologist and scientist. There’s a psychologist called Saul Kassin, who is an expert of this, and he has devised a classification of false confessions.

So for example, one of the reasons is just plea deals. So they plead guilty, and they might not go to jail, and they can walk free, but they have to say they did it. But even without that, even in the police interrogation room, innocent people can be led to confess what they did not do, in this context.

For example, the police can say, Well, if you confess, the child, who is in foster care, can go back to you. You can get back your child if you confess. Or maybe, If you confess, your child can go back to the other parent. There are many incentives that are given by the police to the persons to confess. And the reason for that is that the police are being taught, like medical doctors, that shaking is the only possible cause and that it has to be that last person with the baby at the time of the collapse, right?

There’s also the whole thing of internalized false confessions. It’s really mysterious. It’s really a psychological effect that can lead innocent people who deny having harmed their child while being interrogated to slowly, in the course of hours or even days of interrogation in a very stressful context, to believe that maybe they did something that they did not think was harmful but was actually harmful, or at least that’s what they are led to believe. And it really happens a lot in this particular type of case. The police can make a lot of scenarios: Okay, maybe you didn’t want to harm your child, but you took the child from the bed a bit quickly, or maybe the head hit something, or you were not careful enough.

There’s a lot of scenarios that are being fed to the suspect. And in this specific stressful context, innocent parents who are really—they have this guilt of maybe they think they did not do everything they could to save their children. Maybe they tried to resuscitate their child with cardiac massage or something, or maybe they tried to slowly shake the baby, but it’s a very mild type of shaking. It’s really not a violent shaking. So you can always find something.

And this really happens, and I’ve seen it a lot, and it’s been documented on videotaped police interrogation. You can see it in some transcripts. So when you really dig into the details of what has been confessed exactly and how it has been confessed, and when you look at all the context of the interrogation, you realize that it’s really not, Okay. Well, okay. I admit it. I just lost my nerves and violently shook my baby. This is very rare. This is not the type of confession you see in shaken baby syndrome. It’s: Oh my God. Okay. Maybe I did it. I didn’t realize my baby was collapsing. And yeah, I tried to revive my child. And maybe in the process, I harmed my child, and I—oh my God.

It’s a really complex phenomenon. But it’s been documented, and I think it happens a lot. So you cannot just say, Okay, confessions exist, so it must be true, right? That being said, most confessions are obtained after the diagnosis—so typically, after the police have been called, and it’s most often in the police interrogation room, right?

So there’s this big contamination, and it’s more than that. It’s really a pressure, because the police think they know that the baby was shaken and that this person is guilty, so there’s a whole bias, right? What would be interesting would be to see if confessions can be obtained before—before the police interrogation and even before the medical exam that will show the medical findings that are associated with SBS. Because if it’s obtained before, then there’s no way the diagnosis could influence the confession. Obviously, this kind of confession is very rare, but there is at least one study that was able to find something like 36 cases where the confessions were obtained before any kind of medical exam.

So there’s a lot of reason to believe that these kinds of confessions are genuine, true, right? And what’s interesting is that, in those cases, you are not going to find the medical findings of SBS. So yeah, there are many reasons to be skeptical of this theory.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Shaken baby syndrome goes by a different name now, but the same problems persist.

[Break]

Demsas: I’m hoping you can explain why the term shaken baby syndrome has fallen out of use. Now we’re more likely to hear the term abusive head trauma, and I’d assumed that was due to the criticisms levied by folks like you who’ve become skeptical of the SBS diagnosis. But in a policy statement about the diagnosis, the American Academy of Pediatrics said that the name change to abusive head trauma “was misinterpreted by some in the legal and medical communities as an indication of some doubt in or invalidation of the diagnosis and the mechanism of shaking as a cause of injury.” And then they say that the AAP, “continues to embrace the ‘shaken baby syndrome’ diagnosis as a valid subset of the AHT diagnosis.”

So what’s your interpretation of what’s going on there?

Rossant: Yeah, so it’s true that in 2009, the AAP published a position paper stating that from now on, “abusive head trauma” should be used instead of “shaken baby syndrome.” And the way they justify this was because it was to encompass a broader source of abuse inflicted to babies—not just shaking, but also impact to the head. That’s the justification.

And there was one big study in ’87 by [A. C.] Duhaime and a few biomechanicians who really showed, first, that there were very often signs of impact, which was not really compatible with the idea that these babies were just shaken, right? And also, they did a biomechanical study to show that the forces involved with shaking are much lower than when there’s any kind of impact to the head. So impact to the head is really, really severe and implies very big forces to the head and big deformation and big energy. So it’s much more dangerous.

And there was some controversy in scientific articles about this that partly led to, I think, this decision to change the name from shaken baby syndrome to abusive head trauma, because it was not just shaking very frequently; there’s also impact.

Now, it’s true that before 2009, especially since the Louise Woodward trial in Boston in 1997, there was a lot of controversy in the media and the scientific articles on specifically shaken baby syndrome, the hypothesis that you could infer abuse just with the triad, without any sign of impact. And yeah, some people believe that this change of name is a consequence of this controversy. Obviously, the AAP, the medical institutions do not really acknowledge this, because their position has always been to say that there is no controversy at all, right?

So here we are. I mean, we have this change of name that has been more or less accepted by everyone, even though the term shaken baby syndrome is still quite widely known in the public.

There’s something else that should be pointed out. It’s that the term shaken baby syndrome was criticized—the very term—in particular by Norman Guthkelch, who first identified shaken baby syndrome, or at least the link between shaking and subdural hematoma, in 1971. He criticized the fact that the same term is used to describe both an act—shaking—and a set of injuries. So it conflates a unique hypothetical cause to objective findings. And it’s a real problem because you can’t talk about what you see without accepting that there might be other causes than shaking.

So that’s why he recommended to use another term, which was, I think, retinal-dural hemorrhage of infancy. That really just describes the fact that you find subdural and retinal hemorrhage in an infant without presuming anything about the cause. Unfortunately, that was not the choice that was made, and now we have abusive head trauma, which is also problematic because it also implies that, well, it’s abuse. So it’s a medical diagnosis that comes after you discover specific medical findings in an infant, and you give the term abusive head trauma, which implies that it was caused by abuse.

So there’s this whole thing of intent that is really not the job of medicine. It’s for the police and the justice to determine what happened and what the intent was. So the previous term was a problem with this respect, and the new one is still problematic in this respect.

Demsas: Yeah. It was really interesting when I was reading about the controversy with Norman Guthkelch, who you just mentioned. I mean, he’s called, like, the father of shaken baby syndrome because of his 1971 paper. NPR reported that he reviewed a case in Arizona, and they wrote that “he was troubled to see that the medical examiner’s autopsy had concluded that the baby died of shaken baby syndrome while discounting other possible causes.”

So, you know, given that, why do you think it’s been difficult for the medical community to become more agnostic about whether these injuries that show up in children are necessarily the result of abuse or of some other thing going on? Like, why is the AAP still saying this? I mean, I know you can’t speak about them specifically, but why do you think there’s just been such reticence from the medical community?

Rossant: Oh, that’s a very good question, and I am wondering this. I mean, it’s been almost 10 years that I ask myself this very question, and I don’t really know.

I think there’s—I mean, it’s more general than that. It’s, you know, in the human psychology, the fact that it’s very hard to recognize that you were wrong before. It’s very hard to change one’s own mind, especially when doctors have made a lot of diagnoses with very severe consequences: with removal, going into foster care, and, you know, criminal prosecutions, etcetera.

It’s very hard to accept that, as a doctor, you were wrong and you maybe did some misanalysis and you were responsible for, you know, miscarriages of justice, etcetera. I think it’s really the No. 1 thing that is blocking everything, this psychological aspects of doctors, who are humans, like everyone else.

Some doctors do change their minds with the new science, the new articles, new data, their new experience, new cases. They realize that maybe it was not as easy as we thought before, and they start to change their minds. They start to work for the defense, and then they are being targeted and bullied, attacked, especially by the establishments, and it’s always the same. So yeah, it’s really in human nature.

I think it’s also the scale. I think it’s not just a few errors here and there. It’s really, really massive. I think there are many, many cases which are misdiagnosed and that the so-called shaken babies were not really shaken. I mean, obviously, it exists, and there are many cases where the diagnosis was true, but many where it was not the case. So that’s also why it’s so hard to accept one’s own mistakes, because it's a really massive mistake that was done.

Demsas: Something you just said about how much they react to public censure here: There was a quote from this Milwaukee prosecutor. I believe this is from a ProPublica article, but he’s a deputy district attorney in Milwaukee, and he said it was, “providing reasonable doubt for sale.”

Essentially, there’s some criticisms of people who will provide reasonable doubt or arguments that provide reasonable doubt to accused criminals, whether it’s forensic evidence, like fingerprint analysis or DNA analysis or things like the SBS. But there’s been a real backlash from within the law-enforcement community to scientific evidence being muddled in courtrooms. And I wonder: Have you come across people who react to your work and believe you’re giving cover to child abusers? What do you say to them?

Rossant: Yeah, I think I kind of understand because there’s always this tension between, you know, being too safe on the safe side—I mean, is it better to put an innocent person in jail, or to let a guilty person walk free and potentially harm children, right?

And personally as someone who believes in democracy and, you know, les lumières, which is a really French thing. I think it’s really important not to harm innocent people. So it’s really kind of philosophical attitude, I think. But yeah, I can understand why some people believe that it’s not possible to take this risk of letting potentially dangerous people walk free.

But you know, in the end, I think we should all try to do our best and try to be as accurate and scientific as possible. Try to look at all the evidence on the one side or the other side, and then let the criminal-justice system do its work. And that’s why we have this notion of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” you know, the burden of proof, all of these things. They were designed precisely to avoid, as much as possible, putting innocents behind bars, which is a very terrible thing to do as a democracy, I think.

Demsas: Do you have thoughts on how you would’ve preferred to have things play out in your case? When a doctor is concerned about SBS with your child, what do you wish had happened?

Rossant: I think most parents, most families would accept something, some kind of measure that is not removing the child. So, you know, a follow-up with the psychologists, social workers, people that go to your place and that look at the room, how you handle your child, that follow you from a few months, maybe one year, I don’t know. It depends on the situation, but that is fine.

And we actually had that. Even though the nanny was being prosecuted after the first month, we did have a follow-up with a psychologist and social workers for, like, two years, I think. It was very light. It could have been, you know, more intrusive, and it would’ve been fine. I mean, there’s no problem as long as you have the freedom to have your child with you, right?

It’s really the fact that to remove a child from its environment, it’s a really big cost, so that should really be done in the most extreme cases. And typically, some judges do say that it only happens in the most extreme cases, and that they tried to do their best not to go that far and to find all possible solutions before resorting, as a last solution, to foster care.

But in practice, in the cases I know—and especially in the abusive-head-trauma cases—for very, very small children, babies who don’t speak, it’s very often removal into a foster family in a nursery. And that’s really, really hard for the child, and for the parents to know that the child is suffering from being suddenly put into a different place and without parents, without siblings, without the teddy bears and, you know.

Demsas: Yeah, I guess it depends on where you are and how the authorities function. But, you know, I could imagine that most parents would be okay with having an interview with Child Protective Services if, you know, it was respectful and there’s a clear protocol for what was being followed.

And I think there are a lot of civil servants who take their jobs seriously and want to make families better. But I think it’s very variable, especially in the United States, where this is not a federalized system. There’s very many different administrations of child protective services. And where you are can vary very differently, how you’re treated and how you interact with and how the state interacts with you.

And so, I agree—we would want to create a system where parents felt fine and open and welcome to that kind of surveillance and interaction, but I worry that we don’t actually have that in the entire world.

Rossant: Yeah. And it’s actually the same in France. Today there’s no centralized child-protection system. It’s each department, each region of France that has its own system. So there are great disparities between the different regions, and we do see very, very different treatments of similar situations, depending on where you are in the same country. So yeah, it’s a very difficult problem, and some families do not understand why it’s worse in their own case compared to other families.

Demsas: This was obviously a very serious episode, but I always like to end on a question that draws people to think about and reflect on a time when they themselves have believed something that didn’t turn out to be true. So in your life, is there a time where you believed something that ended up being only good on paper?

Rossant: Wow. Good question. I really never thought about this. But maybe I can say that initially—and sorry; it’s still about shaken baby syndrome, but initially—I believed that shaken baby syndrome was a thing.

Why? Because my own father was a pediatrician and an expert in court, and he told me many times about shaken baby syndrome, and he did testify for the prosecution in shaken-baby cases. So I knew it.

Demsas: Wow.

Rossant: Yeah, it’s really a crazy coincidence, right? Sadly, he passed away one month before the symptoms of my child. So just before that. He could have been very helpful, obviously. But that’s why I had this bias at the beginning, when I was starting to look into the literature. I was sure that shaken baby syndrome was entirely legitimate, and I thought there was no controversy.

So when I started looking into it, I really didn’t think that I would change my mind, but I actually changed my mind. It was really hard for me to do it, because I was so convinced that the scientific consensus was right. And even my own father was testifying in court that this theory was correct. So it was not easy for me to change my mind, but I had to, because that’s what the evidence was telling me.

Demsas: Well, that’s a model for what we’re trying to do on this show. Cyrille, thank you so much for coming on.

Rossant: Thank you. Thank you a lot.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Erica Huang and Rob Smierciak engineered this episode. Rob Smierciak also composed our theme music. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

On January 29, American Airlines Flight 5342 collided with a U.S. Army helicopter near Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people, in the deadliest U.S. air disaster in recent history. That alone would have been a crisis for the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency charged with ensuring the safety of air passengers.

But the next day, President Donald Trump deepened the FAA’s problems by blaming the disaster on diversity programs, a pronouncement that baffled many in the agency’s workforce. At least one senior executive decided to quit in disgust, I was told.

Rescue teams were still pulling bodies from the Potomac River.

That same day, FAA employees including air-traffic controllers, safety inspectors, and mechanical engineers received an email advising them to leave their job under a buyout program announced just two days before. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” urged the email, sent to all federal workers.

Many FAA employees were prepared to follow that advice, agreeing to leave their government job and get paid through September, according to internal government records I obtained as well as interviews with current and former U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. More than 1,300 FAA employees replied to the email, out of a workforce of about 45,000. Most of those who responded selected “Yes, I confirm that I am resigning/retiring.”

Initially, that included about 100 air-traffic controllers who replied to the email, threatening a crucial and already understaffed component of the workforce. Interest in the offer among air-traffic controllers was alarming, agency officials told me, because an internal FAA safety report had found that staffing at the air-traffic-control tower at Reagan airport was “not normal” at the time of January’s deadly crash. It took the agency, which is housed within the Department of Transportation, about a week to clarify that certain job categories were exempt from early retirement, including air-traffic controllers, according to a February 5 email I reviewed. That guidance arrived in agency inboxes only after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had announced it on cable television, saying on February 2, “We’re going to keep all our safety positions in place.”

[Read: The near misses at airports have been telling us something]

But agency officials told me that many jobs with critical safety functions are indeed being sacrificed, with any possible replacements uncertain because of the government-wide hiring freeze. And records I reviewed show that employees classified as eligible for early retirement—and therefore allowed to walk off the job—include aviation-safety technicians and assistants, quality-assurance specialists, and engineers. Meanwhile, the buyouts reach far beyond air-traffic safety, affecting other core elements of the agency. Top officials in the finance, acquisitions, and compliance divisions have left or are expected to go.

As hundreds of career officials depart, the FAA has a fresh face in its midst: Ted Malaska, a SpaceX engineer who arrived at the agency last month with instructions from SpaceX’s owner, Elon Musk, to deploy equipment from the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink across the FAA’s communications network. The directive promises to make the nation’s air-traffic-control system dependent on the billionaire Trump ally, using equipment that experts say has not gone through strict U.S.-government security and risk-management review.

Starlink is an internet service that works by installing terminals, or dishes, that communicate with the company’s overhead satellites. Already, terminals are being tested at two sites, in Alaska and New Jersey, the FAA has confirmed. Musk, meanwhile, took to X, the social-media platform he owns, to warn last month that the FAA’s existing communications system “is breaking down very rapidly” and “putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

The FAA’s turn to Starlink as a solution for its aging communications network poses a challenge to a $2.4 billion contract awarded to Verizon in 2023 to upgrade the agency’s network. FAA lawyers have been working 80-hour weeks to figure out what to do—whether they need to cancel or amend parts of the contract or else find the funds to supplement Verizon’s work with Starlink equipment.

The cumulative result is a depleted and demoralized FAA workforce at a time of declining public confidence in aviation safety. A poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month shows that 64 percent of American adults say air travel is “very safe” or “somewhat safe,” down from 71 percent last year. In addition to the collision near Reagan airport, several other recent incidents have rattled the public, including the crash of a medical jet in Philadelphia, killing seven, and the midair collision of two small planes at a regional airport in southern Arizona, killing two.

Inside the FAA, morale is at an all-time low, two agency officials told me. A former senior executive told me that recent events—beginning with the crash and the pressure to take early retirement—have sunk the agency into “complete chaos.” The consequences, the former executive said, could be far-reaching. The FAA oversees an industry that supports $1.8 trillion in economic activity and about 4 percent of American GDP. It keeps millions of people safe.

“This isn’t Twitter, where the worst that happens is people losing access to their accounts,” the former senior executive said. “People die when FAA workers are distracted and processes are broken.”

Disruptions to U.S. airspace can have many different triggers, including severe weather, military operations, and accident investigations. Last week, disruptions occurred at airports from Florida to Pennsylvania because of the explosion of SpaceX’s Starship—the rocket that Musk wants to use to take people to Mars—on its latest test flight, which rained down debris and snarled air traffic.

[Read: Fear of flying is different now]

When these disturbances occur, sometimes suddenly, it falls to aeronautical-information specialists to update charts, maps, and flight procedures that each day guide more than 45,000 flights and 2.9 million passengers across more than 29 million square miles of airspace.

Trump’s drive to downsize the federal government, as directed by Musk’s DOGE initiative, is drastically reducing the number of aeronautical-information specialists and other workers in critical safety roles. Interviews and internal FAA records show that as many as 12 percent of the country’s aeronautical-information specialists have been fired or are exiting the agency as part of the government-wide buyout program.

At least 28 of the specialists signed up for the buyout, including several supervisors, according to a list I obtained. That’s on top of 13 probationary employees working in these roles who were terminated last month, says David Spero, the president of the union representing them, the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists. The agency had only 351 of these technical experts on hand, Spero told me, so the reductions are significant.

“Their work product is used by aviators and air-traffic controllers to navigate safely through U.S. airspace,” Spero said. “Aeronautical-information specialists have helped make this country’s aviation safety the world’s gold standard, and firing them summarily or letting them walk out the door is unacceptable.”

The offer of early retirement and the dismissal of probationary employees are the two main ways the FAA is trimming its workforce. Both are blunt instruments that threaten to sacrifice key talent, current and former officials told me.

All told, at least 124 engineers, 51 IT specialists, and 26 program managers signed up for early retirement.  The vice president for mission-support services, who started as an air-traffic controller in the 1990s, expressed interest in leaving. So did the agency’s acting vice president for air-traffic services.

Some agency personnel opted into the buyout because they feared they would be fired if they didn’t, several officials told me. The FAA fired fewer than 400 probationary employees, Duffy, the transportation secretary, wrote on X last month. Probationary employees who were fired were told that “you have not demonstrated that your employment at DOT FAA would be in the public interest,” according to emails I reviewed.

[Read: Purging the government could backfire spectacularly]

Some have been rehired, agency officials told me, contributing to an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty. Duffy, in a White House meeting last week, expressed frustration about sweeping changes to his workforce and blamed DOGE for threatening the jobs of the FAA’s air-traffic controllers, according to a New York Times report.

“What I’m seeing is an FAA workforce that is completely distracted and off its game,” a longtime FAA contractor told me. “Almost all interactions I have with federal staff begin with catching up on the amount of time they’re spending on personnel issues instead of their normal jobs.”

The contractor added, “To say they’re not focused on the mission at the moment would be an understatement.”

The uncertainty is compounded by a lack of communication from agency leadership, officials told me. The acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, is a longtime agency official brought back after a three-year stint at a lobbying group. The acting deputy administrator, Liam McKenna, was previously general counsel to Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, on the Senate Commerce Committee. He’s serving double duty as the agency’s chief counsel. The position of associate administrator for airports is vacant. So is that of assistant administrator for communications.

In response to questions about workforce reductions, the FAA said in a statement, “The agency has retained employees who perform safety critical functions.”

When Musk and his allies turned their attention to the FAA last month, they identified a problem: The communications infrastructure used by the agency to manage air-traffic control and aviation safety dates to 2002. It still relies on copper-based wiring and traditional radio. It’s showing its age.

So Malaska, the SpaceX employee leading an engineering unit inside the FAA, unveiled a solution that he said came directly from Musk: The FAA would set up thousands of Starlink satellite terminals to improve communication and connectivity within the national airspace system. And they would do it within 18 months.

Agency officials were well aware of the problem identified by Malaska, and they had already found a solution. In 2023, they awarded Verizon a 15-year, $2.4 billion contract to modernize the network. But that award is now in jeopardy, as agency officials race to determine whether aspects of the work can be allocated to SpaceX instead—and how much extra money they would need to come up with to make that happen. Musk, in a series of posts on X last month, initially blamed Verizon for the FAA’s aging communications system, later clarifying that the “ancient system that is rapidly declining” was made not by Verizon but by a different technology company. “The new system that is not yet operational is from Verizon,” Musk wrote.

[Read: Donald Trump is just watching this crisis unfold]

The agency’s career contracts and acquisitions personnel are trying to sort out the details. The highly sensitive work is being conducted by a diminished legal staff; more than a dozen agency attorneys have signed up for early retirement. That includes supervisors and several attorney-advisers working specifically on contracts.

Malaska’s instructions are not easily ignored: He has an agency email address, according to internal FAA directories shared with me, and he claims to speak directly for Musk, at one point telling U.S. officials that they could be dismissed if they thwarted his objectives. Malaska did not respond to a request for comment. But he defended his work in a post on X last month: “I challenge anyone to question the honesty and my technical integrity on this matter. I am working without biases for the safety of people that fly.”

SpaceX did not respond to detailed questions, but in a post on X last week, the company disputed that it was seeking to take over the Verizon contract, maintaining instead that it was working with the FAA and the contractor behind the 2002 upgrade to provide Starlink equipment “free of charge” for an initial testing period. The company also said it was helping the agency “identify instances where Starlink could serve as a long-term infrastructure upgrade for aviation safety.”

In a statement, the FAA said that no decisions about the Verizon contract had been made but confirmed that the agency was testing Starlink equipment at its facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and at “non-safety critical sites” in Alaska. Verizon did not address questions about the status of its contract, but a spokesperson told me, “Our teams have been working with the FAA’s technology teams and our solution stands ready to be deployed. We continue to partner with the FAA on achieving its modernization objectives.”

When the FAA selected Verizon after a competitive bid process in 2023, several factors recommended the telecommunications giant, among them that the company’s cloud and IT services had been approved for federal agencies based on a rigorous security review known as FedRAMP. SpaceX’s services have not. That’s one of the reasons that plugging Starlink terminals into FAA infrastructure concerns several members of a confidential task force convened by the FAA last year, called Vector, to review cybersecurity protocols.

“Starlink presents many risks,” one expert member of the task force, who declined to be named to avoid reprisal from Musk, told me.

Part of the risk, the expert said, is that Musk could simply choose to switch the devices off, as he did during a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet in 2022. Musk later wrote on X that he took that action to prevent his company from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” The use of Starlink devices also presents a “risk of an insider threat,” the expert told me, because SpaceX has not gone through the kind of vetting to which Verizon and other government contractors have been subjected. This means the government has less information about SpaceX’s security protocols and threat prevention. “Could someone go in and steal U.S. secrets simply by getting a job at SpaceX?” the expert said. “The problem is, we don’t know.”

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

The turn to Starlink is also noteworthy, current and former FAA and DOT officials told me, because Musk stands to benefit financially from its government contracts and because the company has other significant interests before the agency. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation decides whether to license SpaceX’s commercial rocket launches—and whether to penalize the company for failing to comply with its license requirements. When the agency last fined the company, in September, Musk erupted, saying the FAA was engaged in “lawfare,” employing a term used by Trump and his allies to decry his various criminal indictments.

“One deals with a certain amount of that pushback all the time,” John Putnam, a former Department of Transportation general counsel, told me. “Musk’s anger certainly rose to a higher level.”

Now the billionaire is trying a different tack, one that could leave the agency even more beholden to Musk’s whims. As an agency official told me, “Mr. Musk has been very generous … He offered to supply as many Starlink terminals as we need.”

Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don’t believe in overly idealizing partnership or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called “Love and Heartbreak,” responds that of course relationships aren’t all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we’re surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, “whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,” she told me, or “in a remote area with no media whatsoever.” The sensation is big, she tells her students; it’s overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They’re skeptical.

Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that’s less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they’d been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a “steady” partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same.

As I’ve written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they’re looking for. What’s lost if that rite of passage disappears?

You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they’ve never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that’s changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She’s found that lots of high schoolers report having “dated” before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they’d been in a “situationship,” or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an “existential” benefit—the “sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.”  

Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn’t really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of America romance]

Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn’t always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked.

Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they’re 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that’s made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won’t know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person’s interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they’ll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn’t related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.)

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who’d started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany’s Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you’ll have. Research has even shown that people’s satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners.         

Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip.

Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren’t even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. “You have a long period of we’re talking,” Phillips told me. “You’re kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.” For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don’t know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they “got caught” (as if red-handed), “caught feelings” (like an illness), or succumbed to “dumb-bitch hour” (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). “Young people would be hard on themselves,” Phillips told me, “because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn’t going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.”

The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust—so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they’d refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would “be a turn-off.” Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm’s length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. “Why would I want to go any further in this world,” she said many wonder, “when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?”

[Read: The people who quit dating]

I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, “there’s a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.” That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he’s found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. “Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it’s really difficult,” he said, “when you’re constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.”

Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they’re not trusted. Perhaps it’s not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free.

Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren’t as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date.   

[Read: The golden age of dating doesn’t exist]

A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn’t better or more important than platonic love, but it’s different—and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato’s Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn’t like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they’d be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point.

And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn’t seem to understand that “relationships are an interpersonal exchange,” she said: that “they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.” You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that’s what the symbiosis of love requires. It’s scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it’s good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn’t stay good. You might want to find out for yourself.  

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If the Trump administration’s goal was to sow chaos among America’s colleges, it has definitely succeeded. Last month, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to universities explaining the agency’s view that, because of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, any consideration of race—not just in admissions, but in hiring, scholarships, support, “and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life”—is now illegal. Even race-neutral policies intended to increase racial diversity are not allowed, the department stated. It gave schools two weeks to comply with the new guidance or risk losing their federal funding.

The reaction from universities could best be described as “panicked bewilderment,” Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University, in Florida, told me. “There’s a sense of, Should we run, hide, or counterattack?” The first challenge was figuring out what changes the department had in mind. Because the letter partly targeted “DEI,” which has no legal definition, university administrations said they weren’t sure what it applied to. Many will likely get rid of the most overt and controversial forms of DEI, such as required diversity statements for faculty, but beyond that lies an immense gray area.

Then there was the question of whether universities had to comply at all. This type of document—called a “Dear Colleague” letter—states an agency’s interpretation of the law, not the law itself. Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, told me that the letter’s definition of what the Supreme Court has outlawed goes far beyond what the Court actually ruled. “The Court is not saying that you can’t pursue diversity, but that’s what the letter says,” he said. Already, education groups have sued to block the letter’s enforcement. The American Council on Education, a nonprofit trade group that represents universities, has told institutions that if they were following the law before Donald Trump took office, they’re still in compliance now.

Still, no school wants to be the first to find out the hard way whether that’s true. This, combined with the amorphousness of the term DEI, and the fact that so much of it was performative to begin with, has led to a flurry of nomenclature modifications—a kind of anti-woke theater. The University of Alaska system instructed departments to replace the words DEI and affirmative action with terms that communicate the “values of equal access and equal opportunity for all.” Carnegie Mellon University’s old DEI page is now titled “Inclusive Excellence.” Northwestern University has scrubbed almost all mentions of diversity from its websites. The University of Pennsylvania edited its Diversity and Inclusion website, removing most of its content and renaming it “Belonging at Penn.” The school’s former vice dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion is now the vice dean for academic excellence and engagement. The University of Southern California merged its Office of Inclusion and Diversity into its Culture Team. The University of Arizona deleted the words diversity and inclusion—from its land acknowledgment. (These schools did not directly answer when I asked whether they had made changes beyond nomenclature, other than the University of Alaska, which confirmed that it had not.)

[Graeme Wood: ‘Land acknowledgments’ are just moral exhibitionism]

These universities seem to be betting that changing job titles and editing websites will be enough to keep the Trump administration off their back. Meanwhile, they’ll continue the work of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion—the actual things—just without using that terminology. In their view, the programs they are retaining were legal all along, because they don’t involve race-based discrimination. Services such as guiding low-income students through the financial-aid process and providing support groups for those whose parents didn’t attend college help universities recruit and retain students. “The first-order reaction is just to try to get out of the target zone,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, told me. “When the investigators seem to be using word searches to identify potential investigations, it makes all the sense in the world that you’d want to get ahead of that.” Universities are also emphasizing that identity-focused programs are open to students of all races, or expanding them so that they are, he said.

For any individual school, the odds of the federal government peering under the hood to figure out the precise difference between, say, the Office of Belonging and the Office of DEI are low. The Education Department’s civil-rights section has always been small. And Trump has repeatedly signaled that he wants to shut down the Education Department in its entirety. Even if the inquisitors are spared, investigating more than a few schools will be difficult. Many universities might conclude that as long as they don’t stand out, they'll be able to get by.

The cost of getting that bet wrong, however, could be severe. On Friday, the administration announced that it was canceling $400 million of Columbia University’s federal grants and contracts as punishment for allegedly insufficient efforts to combat anti-Semitism. The legality of the move is unclear, in part because the administration’s announcement alternately refers to “canceling” and “freezing” the funds. Black, the law professor, told me that Title VI requires a number of procedural steps before the government can revoke a university’s funding, steps that don’t appear to have been taken in Columbia’s case. Notably, however, Columbia did not announce that it would fight the decision. Rather, in a statement, it pledged “to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding.” (According to The Wall Street Journal, Columbia will have 30 days to prove that it’s doing enough to have the grants reinstated.) “Most universities are not interested in getting into legal squabbles with the Department of Education,” Black said. “It’s like, do they like diversity? Yes. Do they like it more than not being investigated? No.”  

If some private universities are betting on lying low, public universities in red states, where state legislatures and university regents might share the Trump administration’s hostility to DEI, may have little choice but to go beyond cosmetic changes. Ohio State University shut down its Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the end of February. Ohio University postponed its Black Alumni Reunion, technically open to everyone, while it reviewed the event for compliance. When Texas banned DEI policies at the state level, the University of Texas at Austin first changed the name of its DEI office to the Division of Campus and Community Engagement. After state lawmakers said the effort was insufficient, however, the university closed the office and laid off 60 employees. Jackie Wernz, an education civil-rights lawyer and former Office of Civil Rights staffer, says that few people will mourn the name changes or the end of some diversity trainings. “It’s this other type of support that I think could have a really important impact on students,” Wernz told me. “Creating spaces on primarily white campuses for minority students to connect and to find support from staff who look like them and who come from their backgrounds.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: DEI has lost all meaning]

“DEI” is clearly dead. But it’s too soon to say what will happen to the underlying principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. On February 28, the Department of Education published an FAQ document walking back some of the most extreme implications of the Dear Colleague letter. It acknowledged, for example, that it had no power over university curricula, and that observances such as Black History Month are fine “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination.” Language changes and the elimination of the most overtly progressive DEI efforts might allow the Trump administration to declare its mission accomplished. “The word belonging is being used a lot,” Lake, the Stetson professor, told me. “And I think what everybody’s trying to figure out is, Is the B-word a target?” Universities are also talking about “thriving,” “retention,” and “outcomes.” They might be able to continue working toward some of the same goals they have been for decades. Just don’t call it DEI.

An off-duty firefighter and a police officer rescued a woman from a burning car after a crash near Phoenix, Arizona, with help from passersby.

Officer Brian Larison recounts the events that led to the rescue of a woman from a burning car involved in a crash in Chandler, Arizona.

Today The Atlantic is announcing the hires of Nick Miroff and Isaac Stanley-Becker as staff writers, and Alex Hoyt as a senior editor. Nick and Isaac both join The Atlantic from The Washington Post: Nick covering immigration and the Department of Homeland Security, and Isaac reporting on politics, migration, and national security.

Below is the full announcement about these hires from The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m writing today to share the excellent news that Nick Miroff, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Alex Hoyt are joining The Atlantic—Nick and Isaac as staff writers; Alex as a senior editor. All three are immensely talented journalists operating at the top of their game.

First, Nick: Nick is one of America’s foremost reporters on immigration and knows more about the innermost workings of the Department of Homeland Security than, quite possibly, the department itself. Nick comes to us from The Washington Post, where he spent 18 years as a reporter covering Latin America, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and DHS. He spent seven years as the paper’s Latin America correspondent, based in Havana and Mexico City. He was also part of the Post team whose coverage of the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech won a Pulitzer Prize. I am very happy that he has agreed to join us, and to cover immigration, at so crucial a moment in American history.

Next, Isaac: Isaac is a fantastically talented reporter and a natural magazine writer. He also comes to us from The Washington Post, where he has covered an impressive range of stories across politics, immigration, and national security with a focus on holding powerful people and institutions to account. His reporting has taken him to German border towns, where he tracked the international spread of conspiracy theories, as well as to the Arizona desert, where he revealed how a Saudi-owned company pumped unlimited supplies of the state’s groundwater to grow alfalfa as feed for dairy cows in Riyadh. He was twice part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize—in 2022 for coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and in 2024 for documenting the role of the AR-15 in American life. Isaac holds a Ph.D. in history from Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. His first book, Europe Without Borders: A History, was published last month.

Finally, Alex: Alex is an extremely skilled editor who brings great literary expertise, a genuine love of magazines, and a keen eye for what makes a distinctive feature. He was most recently an editor at GQ, where he worked on profiles, essays, and reported features. Previously he was the editor in chief of Amtrak’s The National magazine, where he brought the writing of contributors including Jacqueline Woodson, Lois Lowry, and Leslie Jamison to millions of train passengers across America. Alex is actually returning to us; he started his career as an Atlantic fellow in 2010. We’re very glad to welcome him back to the team after his journalistic peregrinations.

Please join me in welcoming them to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,

Jeff

The Atlantic announced a number of new hires at the start of the year, including managing editor Griff Witte; staff writers Caity Weaver, Ashley Parker, and Michael Scherer; and contributing writers Jonathan Lemire and Alex Reisner. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

On June 30, 1908, Akulina, a reindeer herder in Siberia, left her tent to greet the day. It was about 7 a.m., and all she could see for miles around her was the vast forest, standing tall against the clear blue sky. A heartbeat later, that forest vanished. A preternatural screech issued from above, and the world flushed crimson. “All around, we saw a miracle, a terrible miracle,” Akulina later recalled. An estimated 80 million trees across an 800-square-mile patch of forest—larger than the city of Houston—had been felled instantaneously.

This devastation, known as the Tunguska event, resulted from the force of a 10-to-20-megaton blast. It was so tremendous that its glow lit up the dark, moonless night sky in Northern Ireland, 3,500 miles away. And it was caused by the midair explosion of a space rock just 180 feet long.

As best as anyone can tell, if any hazardously sized asteroid were to hit Earth in the relatively near future, it would most likely be 2024 YR4, a 130-to-300-foot rock that’s essentially the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia. Not long after it was discovered, just two days after it zipped right past Earth, NASA and the European Space Agency’s sky watchers calculated that 2024 YR4 has a nonzero chance of hitting Earth on December 22, 2032. Right now, the asteroid is 68 million kilometers away from the planet, but it’ll come back around. The odds of an impact in December 2032 have been fluctuating, but—based on the latest telescopic observations—they stand at just over 2 percent.

These odds will likely drop close to zero when more observations come in. But the current odds are still higher than anyone would prefer. A strike in a remote part of the world wouldn’t be a problem. But if the asteroid directly hits a city, millions could die.

However apocalyptic that might sound, the fact that we can imagine 2024 YR4’s impact is by design: Space agencies—particularly NASA—have become rather good at spotting asteroids. And two revolutionary observatories coming online in the next few years will only continue to strengthen those skills, so that the planet will have an even better shot at blocking any real threats. That people are effectively taking bets on Earth’s chance of being hit is a reason to be genuinely optimistic about the future of the world: Asteroid strikes are a rare but very real type of natural disaster, and we have never been safer from them.

Right now, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program funds several observatories whose only directive is to spot and track near-Earth asteroids and comets, just in case one of them may be bound for Earth. 2024 YR4, a relatively small asteroid by space standards, was spotted by one of those groups, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, which has found almost 1,200 near-Earth asteroids to date. Another group of telescopes, the Catalina Sky Survey, in Arizona, has found 16,500 near-Earth asteroids since 1995. In total, the program’s observatories have collectively found close to 40,000.

Earth can’t defend itself against an asteroid if no one sees it coming. 2024 YR4 was spotted eight years in advance of its potential impact, which means that space agencies can decide to do something about it—whether that’s trying to ram into it with an uncrewed spacecraft, using a nuclear weapon to deflect or vaporize it, or evacuating the future impact site. The best chance to act may be in 2028, the asteroid’s next Earth flyby. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to plan an anti-asteroid defense mission, but the planet is certainly in a better position than it would be not knowing 2024 YR4 existed.

Asteroid spotters were still somewhat fortunate to have noticed it though. Near-Earth objects are found when they reflect starlight, and huge asteroids, the sort that could end civilization, are essentially giant spherical mirrors floating about in space—very easy to spot. As they get smaller and smaller, though, asteroids look like specks of light. An asteroid the size of 2024 YR4 is stealthy enough that astronomers may not have seen it until 2028, or even just prior to its possible impact in 2032.

This will soon be an uncommon problem. The U.S. has invested heavily in two next-generation observatories that will be able to spot alarming asteroids with ruthless efficiency. One of them is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a nearly complete facility atop a Chilean mountain, which was funded by both the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Rubin has an ambitious goal: to document everything that shimmers, explodes, or zips by in the night sky. It is a multipurpose, polymathic telescope that will look for exploding stars and distant galaxies. But it will also find an abundance of asteroids. After the Italian priest and astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi first discovered an asteroid in 1801, astronomers needed two centuries to tally 1 million of them. Thanks to an extremely wide-angle lens and a colossal nest of light-collecting mirrors, Rubin will likely double this number just a few months after it starts its survey—and plenty of the asteroids it finds may be those that linger disquietingly close to Earth’s orbit.

But Rubin, for all its strengths, will still rely on reflected starlight, which can be deceptive. If an asteroid has a dusty coating, it reflects less light than one with a shiny shell. That means that a tiny, shiny asteroid looks the same as a large, dusty space rock—and astronomers cannot tell how large it is. (This is the case with 2024 YR4, hence the size range given.)

The Near-Earth Object Surveyor, funded by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, works differently. After surviving a painful gantlet of funding cuts, the observatory is scheduled to launch into space before the decade’s end and make its way to a lonely spot far from Earth. Because of its sunshade and its very dark paint job, it will be an extremely cold object—which will allow its infrared, heat-seeking eyes to operate with unparalleled precision. And when viewed in infrared, a large asteroid glows brighter than a smaller one, with no exceptions.

NEO Surveyor will also be unimpeded by Earth’s obfuscating atmosphere and will even be able to spot small asteroids hidden by the bright, thermonuclear glare of the sun, where several near-Earth objects are thought to be hiding. As the name suggests, this observatory will be solely dedicated to looking for near-Earth objects, and within a decade of its operations, it should find at least 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids that are at least 460 feet long.

Such asteroids are called “city killers” because if one hits a city, it’s virtually guaranteed to destroy it. There are estimated to be 25,000 city-killer-size asteroids in near-Earth orbits, and just under half have been found. 2024 YR4–size asteroids are far more plentiful. There are 230,000 of them in near-Earth orbits, and only about 7 percent of them have been found. Some of them will have a greater than 2 percent chance of hitting us, but humanity has never been less reliant on luck to dodge this kind of space-borne catastrophe.

Achieving the next level of certainty, though, requires both Rubin and NEO Surveyor to go forward as planned. Planetary defense is an international-security issue, and NASA’s partners, particularly the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, are developing their own asteroid-studying space missions and expanding their Earth-based telescopic coverage. The U.S., though, is clearly leading the way. Anti-asteroid research efforts are celebrated by the American public, and have garnered support in Congress from both Democrats and Republicans for decades.

Still, the second Trump administration has not yet outlined its space priorities, and deep funding cuts are expected for a variety of scientific programs. NASA declined to comment on the future of planetary-defense programs; a spokesperson noted in an email that they are “looking forward to hearing more about the Trump Administration’s plans for the agency.” And planetary defense could remain a priority: Elon Musk, who has so far been central to Trump’s drive to shrink the federal government, has well-documented interests in space and existential risk (albeit with more of a focus on getting humans to Mars than defending Earth). But if the cuts at the level experts fear go through, “we would face severe program disruptions at NASA, even for widely supported activities like planetary defense,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at The Planetary Society, told me.

The odds of this impact happening are arguably higher than 2024 YR4’s chances of hitting Earth, but Patrick Michel, the principal investigator of Europe’s asteroid-chasing Hera mission, told me that, “at least for now, NASA keeps very active in planetary defense. And I don’t have any indication that it would change.” Even so, he notes, developing more redundancy in technology that can spot, examine, or deflect asteroids would keep Earth safer in the long run. 2024 YR4 will probably turn out to be harmless. But if it is heading Earth’s way—or the next asteroid is—the world will look to America to prevent a potentially catastrophic impact.

The most important intervention in the United States labor market is not unionization or the minimum wage. It is professional licensing—government-required permission to work in a particular profession, earned after significant education and testing—that covers twice as many workers as unionization and federal wage laws combined. And the system that oversees it is broken.

Researchers have known for decades that professional licensing is a bad deal for consumers and workers. High-profile critiques of licensing go back to at least 1945, when Milton Friedman’s Ph.D. thesis presented some of the earliest evidence that licensing costs consumers dearly. In the decades since, economists and journalists have developed a body of evidence supporting these critics’ views. The idea that licensing raises barriers to professions that are far higher than necessary to protect the public has remained a focus of “libertarian” and “liberaltarian” causes alike, giving rise to a bipartisan reform movement that aimed at reducing barriers to work for people with criminal records, lowering the price for health care, and making starting a new business easier.

But despite these efforts—and despite the clarity of the problem—very little has been done to meaningfully roll back licensing. In fact, the institution of professional licensing has only grown in its reach and outlandishness. More and more new professions are becoming licensed, such as art therapists and, most recently and most absurdly, fortune tellers.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Permission-slip culture is hurting America]

Reform efforts haven’t worked because none of them addresses the center of the problem: the regulatory boards that control professional licensing. When a state makes a licensing law—a rule that only practitioners who have jumped through certain hoops can practice—it usually also creates a board to interpret and implement the law. Each state has dozens of these boards; almost 1,800 have been established nationwide. They are powerful engines of professional regulation, deciding who is in and who is out, setting the terms of what you can do as a provider and, ostensibly, disciplining professionals for misbehavior.

Importantly, most statutes require that most board seats go to part-time volunteers working in the very profession they are supposed to regulate. The seats on these boards can be hard to fill, because serving can be a big time commitment and offers no pay; often, only those already involved in advocacy through professional associations are willing to sign up.

For anyone interested in licensing reform, ignoring boards is akin to someone interested in criminal-justice reform ignoring the role of courts and judges. And in this case, the boards have all the wrong incentives for public protection. Licensing works to protect consumers only if it doesn’t go too far. If getting into a profession is too hard, or the rules are too strict about what professionals can and can’t do, professional service will be expensive and scarce. But for those already licensed, more is more. The harder that entering and practicing are, the less competition those professionals face, which can mean better pay, a better lifestyle, and more prestige.

As an antitrust professor who has studied how companies act when they have control over who competes with them and how, I had a guess about how boards stacked with advocates for their profession would behave when given control over licensing. They would act like a cartel—keeping competition down and profits high. I thought board members would struggle to “change hats” from professional to regulator. When I decided to write a book about professional licensing, I started attending licensing-board meetings in my home state to see whether I was right.

[Read: The onerous, arbitrary, unaccountable world of occupational licensing]

Some of what I saw confirmed this hypothesis. For example, I watched the Tennessee Board of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselors nix a proposed reform that would relax a requirement that applicants need to have majored in a behavior-health field, a rule that all but foreclosed the profession to anyone who hadn’t decided to be a counselor when they were a teenager. The reasons they gave had nothing to do with the sort of public protection licensing ostensibly serves. Rather, they wanted “to protect what we’ve got.” Another said anything less than a “fully robust” license would mean less pay and prestige for counselors. One put it simply: “It’s our responsibility to make sure we are looking out for this profession.”

That has it exactly backwards. A licensing board’s responsibility is to look out for the public and to implement decisions made by legislatures, including efforts to dial down licensing. But time and again, I saw licensing reform initiated by a state government die in these board meetings. For example, in 2019, Arizona passed a “universal recognition” law that purportedly allowed anyone licensed in any state in most professions to practice in Arizona. The law was touted as promoting interstate mobility and cutting the red tape of a state-by-state licensing system. But a member of Arizona’s psychology board later told me her board had functionally killed it, at least with respect to psychologists, by interpreting it narrowly. Similarly, in Tennessee, the legislature responded to the crisis of too few physicians by streamlining the licensure process for applicants from foreign medical schools. The licensing board flat-out refused to implement it.

Boards not only resist efforts to reduce licensing barriers; they actively work to increase them. They do this by lobbying the very legislatures that are supposed to oversee them, even using their licensing fees to fund their efforts. In these efforts, licensing restrictions are often portrayed as a win-win for the profession that lobbies for them and for the consumers who get more public protection.

But this ratchet isn’t always good for consumers, because professional services can become scarce and expensive as a result. Returning to the example of alcohol- and drug-abuse counselors, one used to need 1,500 hours of practical experience to be a counselor; then that doubled to 3,000. Today one needs 6,000 hours—as much as a medical residency—to qualify for a license in Tennessee. That and the college-major requirement have made this an exceedingly difficult profession to enter. Only about 400 counselors practice in Tennessee, a state where about 70,000 people deal with opioid addiction.

Some of what I saw, however, seemed to refute my theory that what amounted to industry self-regulation at the licensing boards would work to keep down the number of professionals.

An example: The medical-board disciplinary case of an ob-gyn who had lost his license the year before. He had had sexual relationships with a number of his patients. He had written some of them (and others) off-book prescriptions for controlled substances, in at least one case prescribing a quantity so large that he later said he had come to believe the patient was selling it on the street. He also admitted to occasionally having done drugs at work with his patients. Only six months after his license was revoked, he asked the board for it back, as a changed man with a new commitment to be a better physician. The board voted to grant him a new license the day of his hearing, a fresh start for a physician who sees mostly Medicaid patients in inner-city Memphis. Much of the board discussion focused on whether a chaperone requirement could be imposed on the newly relicensed physician without raising an alarm among his patients.

[Read: The disappearing right to earn a living]

My theory that boards would keep out unwanted competitors could not explain why the board didn’t bar this doctor from the profession for good. There seemed to be more to the story of self-regulation than cartel-like behavior. When it came to dealing out disciplinary measures, board members’ professional identity and years of advocacy created blind spots where they could not see the worst of their profession. Their professional associations, too, encouraged board members to give their peers the benefit of every doubt and to believe a fellow professional who promised to do better next time. This generosity of spirit was particularly notable in the healing professions, where doctors and nurses were dispositionally inclined to see practically every provider before them as capable of redemption. The effects of this dynamic have been devastating: For example, these impulses contributed to the opioid crisis, as prescribing practices went unchecked by professional licensing boards until too late.

The diagnosis is old: Professional licensing needs to be rolled back, to be used only where necessary to protect the public and where lighter regulatory touches—that don’t so severely impact consumers and workers—aren’t effective. And where we need professional licensing, such as in many health-care professions and in law, a lighter regulatory touch will keep professional services affordable and accessible.

But the prescription is new: States need to overhaul their licensing-board systems to eliminate the self-regulation that has made licensing a lose-lose for workers and consumers alike.