Somehow, in a few short days, gas stoves have gone from a thing that some people cook with to, depending on your politics, either a child-poisoning death machine or a treasured piece of national patrimony. Suddenly, everyone has an opinion. Gas stoves! Who could have predicted it?

The roots of the present controversy can be traced back to late December, when scientists published a paper arguing that gas stoves are to blame for nearly 13 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the United States. This finding was striking but not really new: The scientific literature establishing the dangers of gas stoves—and the connection to childhood asthma in particular—goes back decades. Then, on Monday, the fracas got well and truly under way when Richard Trumka Jr., a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, said in an interview with Bloomberg News that the commission would consider a full prohibition on gas stoves. “This is a hidden hazard,” he said. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”

Just like that, gas stoves became the newest front in America’s ever-expanding culture wars. Politicians proceeded to completely lose their minds. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted a cartoon of two autographed—yes autographed—gas stoves. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio declared simply, “God. Guns. Gas stoves.” Naturally, Tucker Carlson got involved. “I would counsel mass disobedience in the face of tyranny in this case,” he told a guest on his Fox News show.

No matter that Democrats are more likely to have gas stoves than Republicans, and, in fact, that the only states in which a majority of households use gas stoves—California, Nevada, Illinois, New York, New Jersey—are states that went blue in 2020. Why let a few pesky facts spoil a perfectly good opportunity to own the libs? The Biden administration, for its part, clarified yesterday that it has no intention of banning gas stoves. In the long run, though, this may prove to have been more a stay of execution than a pardon.

[Read: The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics]

Beyond the knee-jerk partisanship, the science of gas stoves is not entirely straightforward. Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, suggested in her newsletter that the underlying data establishing the connection between gas-stove use and childhood asthma may not be as clear-cut as the new study makes it out to be. And because those data are merely correlational, we can’t draw any straightforward causal conclusions. This doesn’t mean gas stoves are safe, Oster told me, but it does complicate the picture. Switching from gas to electric right this minute probably isn’t necessary, she said, but she would make the change if she happened to be redesigning her kitchen.

Whatever the shortcomings of the available data, it’s clear that gas stoves are worse for the climate and fill our homes with pollutants we’re better off not inhaling. Brady Seals, a manager at the Rocky Mountain Institute and a lead author of the new paper, told me that even assuming the maximum amount of uncertainty, her work still suggests that more than 6 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the U.S. are associated with gas stoves.

Regardless of the exact science, gas stoves might be in trouble anyway. Statistically, they’re not all that deeply entrenched to begin with: Only about 40 percent of American households have one. Plus, induction stoves—a hyperefficient option that generates heat using electromagnetism—are on the rise. “We’re not asking people to go back to janky coils,” says Leah Stokes, a political scientist at UC Santa Barbara who has provided testimony on the subject of gas stoves before the U.S. Senate, and who is currently in the process of installing an induction stove in her home.

Rachelle Boucher, a chef who has worked in restaurants, in appliance showrooms, and as a private cook for such celebrity clients as George Lucas and Metallica, swears by induction. She started using it about 15 years ago and has since become a full-time evangelist. (In the past, Boucher did promotions for electric-stove companies, though she doesn’t anymore.) Induction, she told me, tops gas in just about every way. For one thing, “the speed is remarkable.” An induction stove top can boil a pot of water in just two minutes—twice as fast as a gas burner. For another, it allows for far greater precision: When you adjust the heat, the change is nearly instantaneous. “Once you use that speed,” Boucher said, “it’s weird to go back and have everything be so much harder to control.” Induction stoves also emit virtually no excess heat, reducing air-conditioning costs and making it harder to burn yourself. And they’re easier to clean.

[Read: Kill your gas stove]

Induction stoves do have minor drawbacks. Because they are flat and use electromagnetism, they aren’t compatible with all cookware, meaning that if you make the switch, you may also have to buy yourself a new wok or kettle. Flambéing and charring will also take a little longer, Boucher told me, but few home cooks are deploying those techniques on a regular basis. In recent years, induction has received the endorsement of some of the world’s top chefs, who have tended to be ardent gas-stove users. Eric Ripert, whose restaurant Le Bernardin has three Michelin stars, switched his home kitchens from gas to induction. “After two days, I was in love,” he told The New York Times last year. At his San Francisco restaurant, Claude Le Tohic, a James Beard Award–winning chef, has made the switch to induction. The celebrity chef and food writer Alison Roman is also a convert: “I have an induction stove by choice AMA,” she tweeted yesterday.

If it’s good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for us. At the moment, induction stoves are more expensive than the alternatives, although their efficiency and the fact that they don’t heat up the kitchen help offset the disparity. So, too, do the rebates included in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, which should kick in later this year and can amount to as much as $840. The price has been falling in recent years, and as it continues to come down, Stokes told me, she expects induction to overtake gas. A 2022 Consumer Reports survey found that although 3 percent of Americans have induction stoves, nearly 70 might consider going induction the next time they buy new appliances. “I think the same thing’s going to happen for induction stoves” as happened with electric vehicles, Stokes told me. In the end, culture-war considerations will lose out to questions of cost and quality. The better product will win the day, plain and simple.

Still, gas stoves’ foray into the culture wars likely means that at least some Republicans will probably scorn electric stoves now in the same way they have masks over the past few years. And this whole episode does have a distinctly post-pandemic feel to it: the concern about the air we’re breathing, the discussion of what precautions we ought to take, the panic and outrage in response. The new gas-stove controversy feels as though it has been jammed into a partisan framework established—or at least refined—during the pandemic. “I don’t know if this discourse that we’re seeing now could have happened five years ago,” Brady Seals told me. Whatever happens to gas stoves, the public-health culture wars don’t seem to be going anywhere.

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Much has been said about the salacious revelations in Prince Harry’s new memoir, Spare. But as London-based Atlantic staff writer Helen Lewis writes, the book also makes a powerful—if perhaps futile—case against the monarchy. I emailed Helen to learn more.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Despite everything you think you know, America is on the right track. You don’t know how bad the pizza box is. The case for “Kraken”

The Panda Problem

Kelli María Korducki: How does Spare threaten the idea of the monarchy? And how might British and American readers read this differently?

Helen Lewis: Americans don’t feel the same instinctive defensiveness about the monarchy—after all, your country was founded in opposition to the hereditary power and privilege of Harry’s ancestors. Spare depicts the monarchy like The Hunger Games: No one chooses to be a part of it, each individual’s success depends on the failure of others, and the ultimate “prize” is worthless. Harry even references [the late author] Hilary Mantel’s famous comparison of the royal family to pandas—two threatened species, both ill-suited for the modern world and kept in airy enclosures that are really cages.

Kelli: What does Spare reveal about the strange codependence between the press—and, by extension, the public upon whose support the monarchy depends—and the Royal Family?

Helen: The most shocking allegation in Spare, the one which seems to have driven Harry into exile, is that his own family colluded with the press to plant negative stories about him to distract from their own foibles and missteps. He feels very strongly that the paparazzi chasing his mother’s car into that tunnel in Paris were complicit in her death, and yet nothing was done to hold them accountable. Skip forward 20 years, and he also feels that his father and the institution more broadly did not issue statements condemning the press coverage of Meghan Markle, which he feels was both intrusive and racist. The Royal Family’s attitude is different from Harry’s: They believe that complaining (or suing) doesn’t help, so instead, they try to use access and leaks as leverage to control the flow of information.

Kelli: You note in your essay that you grew up around the same time as Harry, and remember the toxic dynamics of ’90s and ’00s British tabloid culture. Could you describe that culture for an American audience? How has the media changed?

Helen: When Diana died in 1997, there was immediate revulsion at the harassment she had endured from paparazzi, and some papers even promised not to use “pap” shots anymore. (It didn’t last.) Around the same time, some reporters discovered that it was trivially easy to listen to someone’s voicemails if you knew their phone number; many people didn’t bother to change the default code, usually “1111.”

Those years really were the Wild West of tabloid culture, and things are different now for a few of reasons:

[The British journalist] Nick Davies broke a series of stories in The Guardian exposing the extent of phone hacking, which eventually led to prosecutions [and] payouts to those affected, and the Leveson Inquiry into the press. Celebrities won legal actions under European laws that guaranteed a right to privacy, which made newspapers more cautious. Technology changed. Who leaves a voicemail now? People just text one another. The rise of reality TV and influencer culture, which meant that papers could fill their pages with people who wanted the attention.

Kelli: Going back to the book, you write, “The tiny violin is played heavily in this symphony.” Yet you note that “Harry’s memoir makes it impossible to ignore the broken people inside the institution.” How so?

Helen: One of the tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy is that you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control your reactions. As a result of Harry’s hang-up about being the “spare,” he is primed to be sensitive to slights. Many of his complaints (for example, that his rent-free apartment was on the lower-ground floor, and so poorly lit) do sound quite petty. But that’s relatable! Even many normal, nonroyal families have a dynamic where one kid is designated as the “golden child” and the other is the “troublemaker.” The book conveys how much that dynamic might be magnified when your brother is destined from birth to be the head of a millennium-old institution, and must therefore be protected from scandal and blame.

Kelli: What happens now for the monarchy?

Helen: Probably nothing. Buckingham Palace has so far been totally silent on the allegations, and oddly, the sheer volume of revelations helps them, because it prevents a single narrative from emerging. The newspapers are very happy to write about Harry’s frostbitten penis and ’shroom trips rather than his criticisms of their own historic practices.

Related:

Prince Harry’s book undermines the very idea of the monarchy. The petulant king

Today’s News

A New York judge fined the Trump Organization the maximum possible penalty of $1.6 million for tax fraud and other felonies. President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan met today to discuss strengthening the two countries’ alliance. At least nine people have been killed after a major storm system spawned tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia this week.

Dispatches

The Third Rail: David French offers guidance on how to think about Biden’s classified-information mess. The Books Briefing: Stories about idyllic worlds that have disappeared can be the best reminders of the beauty that is still in our reach, Nicole Acheampong writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Jan Richard Heinicke / laif / Redu​x

Cities Really Can Be Both Denser and Greener

By Emma Marris

When I moved from small-town Oregon to Paris’s 11th arrondissement last summer, the city seemed like a poem in gray: cobblestones, seven-story buildings, the steely waters of the Seine. But soon I started noticing the green woven in with the gray. Some of it was almost hidden, tucked inside the city’s large blocks, behind the apartment buildings lining the streets. I even discovered a sizable public park right across the street from my building, with big trees, Ping-Pong tables, citizen-tended gardens, and “wild” areas of vegetation dedicated to urban biodiversity. To enter it, you have to go through the gate of a private apartment building. Very Parisian.

Dense cities like Paris are busy and buzzy, a mille-feuille of human experience. They’re also good for the climate. Shorter travel distances and public transit reduce car usage, while dense multifamily residential architecture takes less energy to heat and cool. But when it comes to adapting to climate change, suddenly everyone wants green space and shade trees, which can cool and clean the air—the classic urban trade-off between density and green space.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Helen’s monarchy-media diet also includes a fanciful drama about royal succession in 14th-century France. “I enjoyed the first few episodes of The Serpent Queen, with Samantha Morton as Catherine de’ Medici,” she told me. “But I had to bail out when Mary, Queen of Scots, announced she was going to try to seize the French throne for herself, as the king’s widow.” Why? “France didn’t even let men inherit through the female line, never mind [allow] a queen in her own right! A couple of years ago, I wrote about how The Crown needed to twist history into mythology to work as a drama, but come on. There are limits.”

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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