For the second time in as many weeks, an American community is grieving after a mass shooting. Five shattered families in Louisville now join the six still mourning their loved ones in Nashville. As gun violence proliferates to the point that most American families have been affected by a gun-related incident, the political armor that once protected firearms might finally be cracking.

Joe Biden is the latest in a long line to visit the old country

The red-state drive to reverse the rights revolution of the past six decades continues to intensify, triggering confrontations involving every level of government.

In rapid succession, Republican-controlled states are applying unprecedented tactics to shift social policy sharply to the right, not only within their borders but across the nation. Just last Thursday, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two young Black Democratic representatives, and Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on Saturday moved to nullify the verdict of a jury in liberal Travis County. In between, last Friday, a single Republican-appointed federal judge, acting on a case brought by a conservative legal group and 23 Republican state attorneys general, issued a decision that would impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the principal drug used in medication abortions.

All of these actions are coming as red states, continuing an upsurge that began in 2021, push forward a torrent of bills restricting abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; loosening controls on gun ownership; censoring classroom discussion of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and preempting the authority of their Democratic-leaning metropolitan cities and counties.

This flood of legislation has started to erase the long-term trend of Congress and federal courts steadily nationalizing more rights and reducing the freedom of states to constrict them—what legal scholars have called the “rights revolution.” Now, across all these different arenas and more, the United States is hurtling back toward a pre-1960s world in which citizens’ basic rights and liberties vary much more depending on where they live.

[Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution]

“We are in the middle of an existential crisis for the future of our burgeoning multicultural, multiethnic democracy,” and the extreme events unfolding in Tennessee and other states “are the early manifestations of an abandonment of democratic norms,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, wrote to me in an email.

The past week’s events in Tennessee and Texas, and the federal court case on mifepristone, extend strategies that red states have employed since 2020 to influence national policy. But these latest moves show Republicans taking those strategies to new extremes. Together these developments underscore how aggressively red states are maneuvering to block the federal government and their own largest metropolitan areas from resisting their systematic attempt to carve out what I’ve called a “nation within a nation,” operating with its own constraints on civil rights and liberties.

“It shows there really is no limit, no institution that is quote-unquote ‘sacred’ enough not to try to use to their advantage,” Marissa Roy, the legal team lead for the Local Solutions Support Center, a group opposing the broad range of state preemption efforts, told me.

This multipronged offensive from red states seeks to reverse one of the most powerful currents in modern American life. Since the 1960s, on issues including the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage and the banning of discrimination on grounds of race or gender, the Supreme Court, Congress, and federal agencies have broadened the circle of rights guaranteed nationwide and reduced the ability of states to limit those rights.

Over the past decade, Republican-controlled states have stepped up their efforts to reverse that arrow and restore their freedom to impose their own restrictions on rights and liberties. Nelson sees this red-state drive as continuing the “cycle of progress and retrenchment” on racial equity through American history that stretches back to Reconstruction and the southern resistance that eventually produced Jim Crow segregation. “The current pendulum swing is occurring both in reaction to changing politics and changing demographics, making the arc of that swing that much higher toward extremism,” she told me.

The vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives, for instance, marked a new level in the long-term struggle between red states and blue cities. In most red states, Republicans control the governorship and/or state legislature primarily through their dominance of predominantly white non-urban areas. Over the past decade, those red-state Republicans have grown more aggressive about using that statewide power to preempt the authority of, and override decisions by, their largest cities and counties, which are typically more racially diverse and Democratic-leaning.

These preemption bills have removed authority from local governments over policy areas including minimum wage, COVID masking requirements, environmental rules, and even plastic-bag-recycling mandates. Legislatures have accompanied many of these bills with other measures, such as extreme gerrymanders, meant to dilute the political clout of their state’s population centers and shift influence toward exurban and rural areas where Republicans are strongest. In Tennessee, for example, the legislature voted to arbitrarily cut the size of the Nashville Metropolitan Council in half, a decision that a state court blocked this week. Many of the bills that red states have passed since 2020 making it harder to vote have specifically barred techniques used by large counties to encourage participation, such as drop boxes or mobile voting vans.

Republicans who control the Tennessee House took this attack on urban political power to a new peak with their vote to expel the two Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who represent Memphis and Nashville, respectively. Though local officials in each city quickly moved this week to reappoint the two men, the GOP majority sent an ominous signal in its initial vote to remove them. The expulsions went beyond making structural changes to diminish the power of big-city residents, to entirely erasing those voters’ decision on whom they wanted to represent them in the legislature. Conservative legislatures and governors “have become so emboldened [in believing] that they can tread on local democracy,” Roy said, “that they are going all out and perhaps destroying the institution altogether.”

One of the most aggressive areas of red-state preemption this year has been in moves to seize control of policing and prosecutorial powers in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, which typically have large minority populations. In Georgia, for instance, both chambers of the GOP-controlled state legislature have passed bills creating a new oversight board that would be directed by state officials and have the power to recommend removal of county prosecutors. In Mississippi, both GOP-controlled chambers have approved legislation to expand state authority over policing and the courts in Jackson, the state capital, a city more than 80 percent Black. The Republican governor in each state is expected to sign the bills.

Tennessee legislators passed a bill in their last session increasing state authority to override local prosecutors. This week they went further. Although it didn’t attract nearly the attention of the expulsion vote, the Tennessee House Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday approved a bill to eradicate an independent board to investigate police misconduct that Nashville residents had voted to create in a 2018 referendum.

In 2019, the GOP legislature had already stripped the Nashville Community Oversight Board of the subpoena power that was included in the local referendum establishing it. The new legislation approved this week, which is also advancing in the State Senate, would replace the board and instead require that citizen complaints about police behavior in Nashville and other cities be directed to the internal-affairs offices of their police departments. The legislation is moving forward just weeks after five former police officers were indicted in Memphis for beating a Black man named Tyre Nichols to death. “You would think that while the Tyre Nichols case is going on … that we would be really wanting more oversight, not less,” Jill Fitcheard, the executive director of the Nashville oversight board, told me. Coming so soon after the vote to expel the two Black members, the attempt to eradicate the oversight board, she said, represents “another attack on democracy in Nashville.”

Texas has joined this procession with bills backed by Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick advancing in both legislative chambers to make it easier for state officials to remove local prosecutors who resist bringing cases on priorities for the GOP majority, such as the measures banning abortion or gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

But Abbott last Saturday introduced an explosive new element into the red-state push to preempt local law-enforcement authority. In a statement, Abbott directed the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole to fast-track consideration of a pardon for a U.S. Army sergeant convicted just one day earlier of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Abbott, who had faced criticism from conservative media for not intervening in the case, promised to approve the pardon, and criticized the Democratic district attorney who brought the case and the jury that decided it in Travis County, an overwhelmingly blue county centered on Austin.

Although many Republicans are seeking ways to constrain law-enforcement officials in blue counties, Abbott’s move would invalidate a decision by a jury in such a Democratic-leaning area. And whereas the preemption legislation in Texas and elsewhere targets prosecutors because of the cases they won’t prosecute, Abbott is looking to override a local prosecutor because of a case he did prosecute.

[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]

Gerry Morris, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers now practicing in Austin, told me that Abbott’s move was especially chilling because it came before any of the normal legal appeals to a conviction had begun. Morris said he can think of no precedent for a Texas governor intervening so peremptorily to effectively overturn a jury verdict. “I guess it means if you are going to kill somebody in Texas,” Morris said, “you need to make sure it’s somebody Governor Abbott thinks ought to be killed; because if that’s the case, then he’ll pardon you.”

The past week’s third dramatic escalation came from District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump with ties to the social-conservative movement. Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the FDA’s approval in 2000 of mifepristone was in one sense unprecedented. “Never has a court actually overturned an FDA scientific decision in approving a drug on the grounds that [the] FDA got it wrong,” William Schultz, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on a press call Monday.

But in another sense, the case merely extended what’s become a routine strategy in the red states’ drive to set their own rules. Nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general joined the lawsuit in support of the effort to ban mifepristone. That continued a steady procession of cases brought by Republican-controlled states to hobble the exercise of federal authority, or to erase rights that had previously been guaranteed nationwide.

The most consequential example of this trend is the case involving a Mississippi abortion law that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority used to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. But shifting coalitions of GOP state attorneys general have also sued to block environmental regulations proposed by President Joe Biden, and to prevent him from changing Trump-administration immigration-enforcement policies or acting to protect LGBTQ people under federal antidiscrimination laws. Red states “have been very interested in opposing virtually every rule or guidance that would provide nondiscrimination protection to LGBTQ people,” says Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign.

All of these legal and political struggles raise the same underlying question: Can Democrats and their allies defend the national baseline of civil rights and liberties America has built since the 1960s?

Democrats have found themselves stymied in efforts to restore those rights through legislation: While Democrats held unified control of Congress during Biden’s first years, the House passed bills that would largely override the red-state moves and restore a set of national rules on abortion, voting, and LGBTQ rights. But in each case, they could not overcome a Republican-led Senate filibuster.

The Biden administration and civil-rights groups are pursuing lawsuits against many of the red-state rights rollbacks. But numerous legal experts remain skeptical that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority will reverse many of the red-state actions. The third tool available to Democrats is federal executive-branch action, such as the Title IX regulations the Education Department proposed last week that would invalidate the blanket bans against transgender girls participating in school sports that virtually all the red states have now approved. Yet federal regulations that attempt to counter the red-state actions may prompt resistance from that conservative Supreme Court majority.

And even as Democrats search for strategies to preserve a common baseline of rights, they face the prospect that Republicans may seek to nationalize the restrictive red-state social regime. Congressional Republicans have introduced bills to write into federal law almost all of the red-state moves, such as abortion bans and prohibitions on classroom discussion of sexual orientation or participation in school sports by transgender girls. Several 2024 GOP presidential candidates are starting to offer similar proposals.

The past week has seen Republicans reach a new extreme in their effort to build a nation within a nation across the red states. But the next time the GOP achieves unified control of Congress and the White House, even this may seem like the beginning of an attempt to impose on blue states the rollback of rights and liberties that continues to burn unabated through red America.

Last summer, I got a tip about a curious scientific finding. “I’m sorry, it cracks me up every time I think about this,” my tipster said.

Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.

Earlier, the department chair, Frank Hu, had instructed Ardisson Korat to do some further digging: Could his research have been led astray by an artifact of chance, or a hidden source of bias, or a computational error? As Ardisson Korat spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile. The ice-cream signal was robust.

It was robust, and kind of hilarious. “I do sort of remember the vibe being like, Hahaha, this ice-cream thing won’t go away; that’s pretty funny,” recalled my tipster, who’d attended the presentation. This was obviously not what a budding nutrition expert or his super-credentialed committee members were hoping to discover. “He and his committee had done, like, every type of analysis—they had thrown every possible test at this finding to try to make it go away. And there was nothing they could do to make it go away.”

Spurious effects pop up all the time in science, especially in fields like nutritional epidemiology, where the health concerns and dietary habits of hundreds of thousands of people are tracked over years and years. Still, the abject silliness of “healthy ice cream” intrigued me. As a public-health historian, I’ve studied how teams of researchers process data, mingle them with theory, and then package the results as “what the science says.” I wanted to know what happens when consensus makers are confronted with a finding that seems to contradict everything they’ve ever said before. (Harvard’s Nutrition Source website calls ice cream an “indulgent” dairy food that is considered an “every-so-often” treat.)

“There are few plausible biological explanations for these results,” Ardisson Korat wrote in the brief discussion of his “unexpected” finding in his thesis. Something else grabbed my attention, though: The dissertation explained that he’d hardly been the first to observe the shimmer of a health halo around ice cream. Several prior studies, he suggested, had come across a similar effect. Eager to learn more, I reached out to Ardisson Korat for an interview—I emailed him four times—but never heard back. When I contacted Tufts University, where he now works as a scientist, a press aide told me he was “not available for this.” Inevitably, my curiosity took on a different shade: Why wouldn’t a young scientist want to talk with me about his research? Just how much deeper could this bizarre ice-cream thing go?

“I still to this day don’t have an answer for it,” Mark A. Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told me, speaking of the association he’d stumbled upon more than 20 years earlier. “We analyzed the hell out of the data.”

Just that morning, I’d been reading one of Pereira’s early papers, on the health effects of eating dairy, because it seemed to have inspired other research that was cited in Ardisson Korat’s dissertation. But when I scrolled to the bottom of Pereira’s article, down past the headline-making conclusions, I saw in Table 5 a set of numbers that made me gasp.

Back then, Pereira was a young assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Hoping to address the newly labeled epidemics of obesity and diabetes, he initially focused his research on physical activity, but soon turned to the unsettled science of healthy eating. The status of dairy, in particular, was bogged down in simplistic and competing assumptions. “We just thought, Oh, you know, calcium and bones: It’s good for kids. But, oh, the saturated fat! Don’t eat too much dairy! ”

[From the July/August 2013 issue: How junk food can end obesity]

Pereira and his co-authors tested these old ideas using data from a study, begun in 1985, that tracked the emergence of heart-disease risk factors in more than 5,000 young adults. After seeing the results, “we knew it was going to be very high-profile and controversial,” Pereira recalled. Pretty much across the board—low-fat, high-fat, milk, cheese—dairy foods appeared to help prevent overweight people from developing insulin-resistance syndrome, a precursor to diabetes. “I’ll tell you, this study surprised the heck out of me,” said one CNN correspondent, as Pereira’s study spiraled through the press.

But the international media coverage didn’t mention what I’d seen in Table 5. According to the numbers, tucking into a “dairy-based dessert”—a category that included foods such as pudding but consisted, according to Pereira, mainly of ice cream—was associated for overweight people with dramatically reduced odds of developing insulin-resistance syndrome. It was by far the biggest effect seen in the study, 2.5 times the size of what they’d found for milk. “It was pretty astounding,” Pereira told me. “We thought a lot about it, because we thought, Could this actually be the case? ”

There were reasons to be wary: The data set wasn’t huge, in epidemiological terms, and participants hadn’t reported eating that many dairy-based desserts, so the margin of error was wide. And given that the study’s overall message was sure to attract criticism—Pereira recalled getting “skewered” by antidairy activists—he had little desire to make a fuss about ice cream.

Pretty soon, Pereira’s peers found themselves in the same predicament. Building on the 2002 study and the growing interest in dairy, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health decided to break out some of their most powerful tools. Since the 1980s, Harvard’s scientists have been collecting “food-frequency questionnaires” and medical data from many thousands of nurses, dentists, and other health-care workers. These world-famous studies have fueled a stream of influential findings, including some of the data that sparked the removal of trans fats from the food supply.

The results of Harvard’s first observational study of dairy and type 2 diabetes came out in 2005. Based on data collected from just one of their three cohorts, following men between 1986 and 1998, the authors reported that higher dairy intake, and higher low-fat-dairy intake in particular, was associated with a lower risk of diabetes. “The risk reduction was almost exclusively associated with low-fat or non-fat dairy foods,” a Harvard news bulletin explained. An article on Fox News’s website underscored the low-fat message: “There was no decrease in men who drank whole milk,” the story said.

Perhaps not whole milk, but what about butter pecan? Near the end of the Harvard paper, where the authors had arrayed the diabetes risks associated with various dairy foods, was a finding that was barely mentioned in the “almost exclusively” low-fat narrative given to reporters. Yes, according to that table, men who consumed two or more servings of skim or low-fat milk a day had a 22 percent lower risk of diabetes. But so did men who ate two or more servings of ice cream every week. Once again, the data suggested that ice cream might be the strongest diabetes prophylactic in the dairy aisle. Yet no one seemed to want to talk about it.

In the years that followed, research summaries generally agreed that high dairy intake overall was associated with a slightly reduced risk of diabetes, but called for more investigation of which specific dairy foods might have the greatest benefits. In 2014, Harvard’s nutrition team brought another dozen years of diet-tracking data to bear on this question. In this new study, total dairy consumption now seemed to have no effect, but the ice-cream signal was impossible to miss. Visible across hundreds of thousands of subjects, it all but screamed for more attention.

Following a pattern of incredulousness that was by then more than a decade old, Frank Hu, the study’s senior author and the future chair of Harvard’s nutrition department, asked the graduate student who’d led the project, Mu Chen, to double-check the data. “We were very skeptical,” Hu told me. Chen, who is no longer in academia, did not respond to interview requests, but Hu recalled that no errors in the data could be found.

The Harvard researchers didn’t like the ice-cream finding: It seemed wrong. But the same paper had given them another result that they liked much better. The team was going all in on yogurt. With a growing reputation as a boon for microbiomes, yogurt was the anti-ice-cream—the healthy person’s dairy treat.

“Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk” of type 2 diabetes, “whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not,” the 2014 paper said. “The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview. “Saying no foods were associated—ice cream was associated.”

But yogurt made so much more sense. In a way, it was confirmation of something that everyone already knew. From the start of yogurt’s entrée into the American diet, it had been perceived as an exotic food from a faraway land, quivering with vague health-giving properties. Even after being spiked with sugar in the ’70s and ’80s to better suit the U.S. market, yogurt still retained its image as an elixir.

Furthermore, a growing body of literature suggested that yogurt’s health benefits might be real. Harvard had found, a few years earlier, that eating yogurt was associated with reduced weight gain; researchers at the university were interested in its possible effects on gut bacteria as well. Other studies—including those that first revealed the ice-cream signal—had also sketched the slender outlines of a yogurt effect. When Chen and Hu pooled together findings from this research, added in their latest data, and performed a meta-analysis, they concluded that yogurt was indeed associated with a reduced risk of diabetes—a potential benefit, they wrote, that warranted further study.

Regarding ice cream’s potential benefits, they had much less to say. I asked other experts to compare the 2014 yogurt and ice-cream findings. Kevin Klatt, a nutrition scientist at UC Berkeley, said the ice-cream effect was “more consistent” than yogurt’s across the studied cohorts. Deirdre Tobias, an epidemiologist at Harvard, the academic editor of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and a member of the advisory committee for the 2025 update to the U.S. dietary guidelines, agreed with that assessment. Even Dagfinn Aune, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and a peer reviewer of the Chen and Hu paper, said that the ice-cream effect was “similar” in magnitude to, or “slightly stronger” than, the one for yogurt.

So how did the Harvard team explain away the ice-cream finding? The theory went like this: Maybe some of the people in the study had developed health problems, such as high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol, and began avoiding ice cream on doctors’ orders (or of their own volition). Meanwhile, people who didn’t have those health problems would have had less reason to give up their cookies and cream. In that scenario, it wouldn’t be that ice cream prevented diabetes, but that being at risk of developing diabetes caused people to not eat ice cream. Epidemiologists call that “reverse causation.”

To test this idea, Hu and his co-authors set aside dietary data collected after people received these sorts of diagnoses, and then redid their calculations. The ice-cream effect shrank by half, though it was still statistically significant, and still bigger than the low-fat-dairy effect that Harvard had publicized in 2005. In any event, if people who received adverse diagnoses cut back on their ice cream, you might expect that they’d also cut back on, say, cake and doughnuts. So shouldn’t there be mysterious protective “effects” for cake and doughnuts too? “There should be,” Mozaffarian said. “That’s why the finding for ice cream is intriguing.”

[Read: How ice cream helped America at war]

The new analysis was hardly a slam dunk. On paper, the yogurt and ice-cream effects still looked pretty similar. “Within the realm of statistical uncertainty, they’re identical,” Mozaffarian told me. But in the 2014 paper, he and the other authors had argued that “reverse causation may explain the findings” for ice cream. And as academia’s public-relations machinery came to life, nuance went out the window.

“Does a yogurt a day keep diabetes away?” asked the press release that went out on publication day. “Other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy did not show this association,” said Hu, the senior author, in an ice-cream-free appraisal included in the release and echoed in Harvard’s own press bulletin. “Yogurt has approached wonder-food status in recent years,” a Forbes article on the paper noted. “In the new study, other forms of dairy like milk and cheese, did not offer the same kind of protection as yogurt.”

Hu says today that the Harvard researchers felt confident in their conclusions about yogurt largely on account of their meta-analysis, and the fact that prior clinical studies and basic science research supported the idea that probiotics improve metabolic outcomes. “For ice cream, of course, there is no prior literature,” he said. Given that the ice-cream effect was diminished when they tested their reverse-causation theory, he called it “much more plausible” that yogurt would help prevent diabetes than ice cream.

Kenji Toma / Trunk Archive

After his paper was published, it didn’t take long for the Harvard group’s good news about yogurt to take hold as a dominant scientific narrative. Two years later, when a team of researchers based in the Netherlands and at Harvard analyzed all the evidence it could find on dairy and diabetes, the yogurt effect popped out. A featured graph from the team’s 2016 paper in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition summarizes data from about a dozen studies: As someone’s yogurt intake mounts to roughly one-third of a cup a day, their risk of getting diabetes shrinks by 14 percent.

The authors also found the ice-cream effect: Consuming as little as a half a cup per week was associated with a 19 percent reduced diabetes risk. But that finding’s epitaph was already written. The researchers concluded that consuming “dairy foods, particularly yogurt,” might help curb the diabetes epidemic, and noted that the benefits of ice cream had elsewhere been written off as a product of reverse causation. The evidence in yogurt’s favor was much better established, Sabita Soedamah-Muthu, an epidemiologist at Tilburg University and the paper’s senior author, told me. The ice-cream effect had fewer studies in its corner. “We didn’t believe in it,” she said.

There’s a thing that happens when you start writing a story about how maybe, possibly, believe it or not, ice cream might be sort of good for you, and how some of the world’s top nutritionists gathered evidence supporting that hypothesis but found reasons to look past it. You begin to ask yourself: Am I high on my own ice-cream supply? I asked the experts for a gut check. Pereira, the first to hit upon the ice-cream effect, told me that it just wasn’t the kind of result that goes down well in the “closed-minded” world of elite nutrition. “They don’t want to see it. They might ponder it for a second and kind of chuckle and not believe it,” he said. “I think that’s related to how much the field of nutritional epidemiology in the modern era is steeped in dogma.” Tobias, the journal editor and member of the 2025 U.S. dietary-guidelines advisory committee, called it “totally fair criticism” to ask why yogurt was played up while ice cream was played down. She expressed support for the Harvard team’s handling of the data, while acknowledging the tensions involved: “You don’t want to overstate stuff that you know probably has a high likelihood of bias, but you also don’t want to do the opposite and seem to be burying it, either.”

Hu, the Harvard nutritionist, said that deciding what a study means requires looking beyond the numbers to what is already known about dietary science: “You need to interpret the data in the context of the rest of the literature.” Mozaffarian, Hu’s co-author, echoed this view. Still, he noted, “you’re raising a really, really important point, which is that when, as scientists, we find things that don’t fit our hypotheses, we shouldn’t just dismiss them. We should step back and say, ‘You know, could this actually be true?’ ”

Could the idea that ice cream is metabolically protective be true? It would be pretty bonkers. Still, there are at least a few points in its favor. For one, ice cream’s glycemic index, a measure of how rapidly a food boosts blood sugar, is lower than that of brown rice. “There’s this perception that ice cream is unhealthy, but it’s got fat, it’s got protein, it’s got vitamins. It’s better for you than bread,” Mozaffarian said. “Given how horrible the American diet is, it’s very possible that if somebody eats ice cream and eats less starch … it could actually protect against diabetes.” The “Got Milk?” crowd also loves to talk about the “milk-fat-globule membrane,” a triple-layered biological envelope that encases the fat in mammalian milk. Some evidence suggests that dairy products in which the membrane is intact, such as ice cream, are more metabolically neutral than foods like butter, where it’s lost during the churn. (That said, regular cream has an intact membrane, and it hasn’t been consistently associated with a reduced diabetes risk.)

Then there is what might charitably be termed the “real-world evidence.” In 2017, the YouTuber Anthony Howard-Crow launched what Men’s Health called “a diet that would make the American Dietetic Association shit bricks”: 2,000 calories a day of ice cream plus 500 calories of protein supplements plus booze. After 100 days on the ice-cream diet, he’d lost 32 pounds and had better blood work than before he’d started pounding Irish-whiskey milkshakes. Still, the method is unlikely to take the slimming world by storm: Howard-Crow called his ice-cream bender “the most miserable dieting adventure I have ever embarked upon.”

But overall, I found more receptiveness to the ice-cream signal than I was expecting. “It’s been more or less replicated,” Pereira noted. “Whether it’s causal or not still remains an open question.” Mozaffarian agreed: “I think probably the ice cream is still reverse causation,” he said. “But I’m not sure, and I’m kind of annoyed by that.” If this had been a patented drug, he continued, “you can bet that the company would have done a $30 million randomized controlled trial to see if ice cream prevents diabetes.”

To be clear, none of the experts interviewed for this article is inclined to believe that the ice-cream effect is real, although sometimes for reasons that differ from Hu’s. Pereira, for example, pointed out that people aren’t always truthful when they’re quizzed on what they eat. His 2002 study found that overweight and obese people reported eating fewer dairy-based desserts than other people. “I don’t believe that the heavier people consume less desserts,” he said. “I believe they underreport more.” If that’s true, then admitting to eating ice cream might correlate with metabolic health—and the ice-cream effect would be, in its way, a marker of fat stigma in America.

[From the June 2000 issue: Ice-cream making for beginners]

The problem with this line of thinking is that once you start contemplating all the ways that cultural biases can seep into the science, it doesn’t stop at dairy-based desserts. If the ice-cream effect can be set aside, how should we think about other signals produced by the same research tools? “I don’t know what I believe about yogurt,” Tobias told me. It’s widely known that yogurt eaters on average are healthier, leaner, wealthier, better educated, more physically active, more likely to read labels, more likely to be female, and less likely to smoke or drink or eat Big Macs than never-yogurters. “You can’t confidently adjust away all of that kind of stuff,” said Klatt, the UC Berkeley nutritionist.

In 2004, the English epidemiologist Michael Marmot wrote, “Scientific findings do not fall on blank minds that get made up as a result. Science engages with busy minds that have strong views about how things are and ought to be.” Marmot was writing about how politicians deal with scientific evidence—always concluding that the latest data supported their existing views—but he acknowledged that scientists weren’t so different.

The ice-cream saga shows how this plays out in practice. Many stories can be told about any given scientific inquiry, and choosing one is a messy, value-laden process. A scientist may worry over how their story fits with common sense, and whether they have sufficient evidence to back it up. They may also worry that it poses a threat to public health, or to their credibility. If there’s a lesson to be drawn from the parable of the diet world’s most inconvenient truth, it’s that scientific knowledge is itself a packaged good. The data, whatever they show, are just ingredients.

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Ice-Cream Conspiracy.”

It is often difficult, if not impossible, to tell what the Supreme Court is thinking about a case from the questions the justices ask counsel. But the argument in Moore v. Harper, heard by the Court in early December, was different. By the end, it was clear the Supreme Court has no appetite for the independent state legislature theory—and that offers hope for the future of America’s democracy.

The theory—that state legislatures have the unreviewable power to set the rules of their state’s federal elections—is a dangerous one. The case began when the North Carolina legislature redrew the congressional-districts map that would apply in federal congressional elections and the North Carolina Supreme Court invalidated that map under the state constitution. The state legislators appealed that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming, under the independent state legislature theory, that the legislature has exclusive power to regulate federal congressional elections, without oversight from the state supreme court under the state’s constitution.

[J. Michael Luttig: There is absolutely nothing to support the ‘independent state legislature’ theory]

If the U.S. Supreme Court were to adopt this theory, it would foreclose state-supreme-court review of congressional-redistricting maps and other federal-election regulations enacted by the state legislatures, causing mayhem in the state-administered federal elections. Before the argument in Moore, I wrote in The Atlantic that the independent state legislature theory has literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding. And it is antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution. This was painfully evident for the proponents of the theory during the three-hour argument before the justices.

The Court seems poised to reject the misnamed independent state legislature theory and hold that redistricting maps are reviewable by the state courts for compliance with their state constitutions, as they have been since the nation’s founding. If the Court attempts to constrain the state supreme courts at all, which it ought not, it will do so by setting a standard of review for those courts to follow when reviewing state election laws. That standard will almost certainly be highly permissive of the state supreme courts, in recognition of the Court’s exceedingly limited role in reviewing state-supreme-court interpretations of their constitutions in the context of elections-clause challenges to state-enacted federal-elections laws.

(A small chance exists that the Supreme Court will not rule in the case at all, because the North Carolina Supreme Court’s grant of rehearing in Moore v. Harper could deprive the U.S. Supreme Court of “final judgment” jurisdiction or eventually could cause the Court to declare the case moot. Presumably worried by the oral argument at the Court in December, the North Carolina legislators have asked the newly reconstituted North Carolina Supreme Court to overrule its own decision in Moore. The state supreme court that originally decided Moore was 4–3 Democrat, but the Republicans picked up two seats in the state election last November and now have a 5–2 majority. In response to the state supreme court’s grant of rehearing, the U.S. Supreme Court asked the parties to brief whether there is still a “final judgment” for the Supreme Court to review. There is, and both the petitioners and respondents have so advised the Supreme Court, so the Court seems more than likely to still rule.)

In advance of the oral argument, the extensive briefing by the parties and the 60 amici curiae was exceptional, and the justices arrived well prepared. The lawyers for the parties were four of the most respected Supreme Court lawyers of this generation. Two were former solicitors general of the United States—Don Verrilli, who argued for the State of North Carolina respondents, and Neal Katyal, who argued for the non-state respondent Common Cause. The third lawyer, Elizabeth Prelogar, is the current solicitor general of the United States, who argued in support of the respondents. The fourth lawyer, David Thompson, who argued for the petitioners, North Carolina state legislators, is a highly respected appellate attorney well known to the Court. The arguments of all four counsel were excellent. Katyal’s performance was virtuosic, as if a great maestro were conducting the world’s finest symphony orchestra.

I was co-counsel for the respondent Common Cause, though I neither argued the case nor was seated at counsel’s table. I watched the argument from my seat in the relatively few rows in the courtroom reserved for the public—the best vantage point in the chamber. I was there because of my interest in the so-called independent state legislature theory, which I testified to the January 6 Select Committee was the centerpiece of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by the former president, and because, as I have explained publicly, Moore v. Harper is the single most important case for American democracy since the founding of the nation.

The extraordinarily long argument in this landmark case for our democracy was bound to be illuminating‚ and it was.

From the moment David Thompson stepped to the lectern, he received a withering fusillade of skeptical questions from the justices about each of his arguments, as well as about the sweeping implications of the independent state legislature theory for America’s democracy. The questioning of Thompson was initially led by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s three liberals—Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But Justices Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh soon joined in with their own piercing questions, and these seven were eventually joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, thought to be the Court’s members most sympathetic to the theory.

[William Baude and Michael W. McConnell: The Supreme Court has a perfectly good option in its most divisive case]

Kagan seemed to reject the independent state legislature theory out of hand, explaining that under the theory “legislators could enact all manner of restrictions on voting [and] get rid of all kinds of voter protections that the state constitution in fact prohibits … In all these ways, I think what might strike a person is that this is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country.” In an evident reference to the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, she added, “You might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most.”  

Thompson responded to Kagan that the checks and balances on the state legislatures “come from the federal Constitution and the panoply of federal laws like the Voting Rights Act”—urging that oversight of the state legislatures be left exclusively to the federal courts. But his response seemed unpersuasive to a Court apparently convinced that, as originally understood at the time of the Constitution’s framing, the state legislatures’ regulations of federal elections would be subject to state-supreme-court review under the state constitutions.

Jackson expressed her concern about the theory this way: “I guess what I’m a little worried about is the suggestion that when the legislature … is exercising legislative authority in this context, it does not have to adhere to any state-constitutional constraints on its power, when it’s the state constitution that gives it its power and tells us when it is appropriately acting as the legislature not just with respect to the issue of elections.” Jackson appeared to agree with respondents that because the legislatures are creatures of the state constitutions, the Framers of the Constitution would have understood and assumed that the election laws the legislatures passed would be reviewable by the state courts for compliance with the state constitutions, and if the Framers intended that those election laws would not be reviewable, they would have so provided in the Constitution or indicated as much in the constitutional debates at the time of the framing.

Even Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh, each of whom previously expressed interest in the much less extreme formulation of the independent state legislature theory articulated by then–Chief Justice William Rehnquist in Bush v. Gore, appeared skeptical of the legislators’ argument that the state supreme courts are entirely foreclosed by the elections clause of the Constitution from reviewing a legislature’s redistricting plan under a state constitution.

Alito, for example, observed that it’s “inevitable” that state courts will have to interpret state election laws in at least some instances. And Kavanaugh pointed out that the North Carolina legislators’ argument that the state constitutions do not apply to the legislature’s redistricting decisions “seem[ed] to go further” than Rehnquist’s concurrence in Bush v. Gore, which acknowledged that “state courts have a role interpreting state law.”

Early in the argument, Thomas asked Thompson potentially the most significant question of the day: “What is the [Supreme Court’s] jurisdiction for this case?” Thomas elaborated that the U.S. Supreme Court does not typically review state-supreme-court interpretations of state constitutions. His question is best understood as asking whether a federal constitutional issue is ever presented by a state supreme court’s interpretation and application of its state constitution to its state legislature’s redistricting decisions and other federal election laws. Barrett later suggested in a colloquy with Verrilli that she, too, questioned whether the Court had the jurisdiction to hear Moore.  

To Thomas and Barrett’s point, the Constitution doesn’t contemplate that the federal judiciary will constrain the state supreme courts in the interpretation of their own state constitutions. The Constitution’s checks on the state legislatures are either federal judicial review under the U.S. Constitution or Congress’s power under the elections clause to prescribe the rules for holding congressional elections or to alter the rules enacted by the state legislatures. Under the most plausible interpretation of the elections clause, a federal question would never be presented by a state supreme court’s interpretation of its state constitution, as I wrote previously.     

Throughout the entire argument, none of the justices expressed anything approaching agreement, let alone unreserved agreement, with petitioners’ arguments for the independent state legislature theory. The Court’s reservations drew from the Constitution’s text, from history, and from the Court’s precedents, all three of which emerged as dominant lines of questioning by the justices and unmistakably point away from the dangerous independent legislature theory.      

The North Carolina Republican legislators’ argument for the theory from the Constitution’s text was that the elections clause empowers the “state legislatures” to prescribe the regulations for congressional elections and that the term legislature refers only to the state’s representative legislative body, which passes the state’s laws. The North Carolina legislators argued from the fact that the elections clause empowers the representative legislative body to prescribe the regulations for congressional elections that the legislative power cannot be constrained by the state courts through the state constitutions.

Significantly, there was little discussion at argument about whether the term legislature in the elections clause means only the representative legislative body or instead means the whole of the lawmaking process, including judicial review and gubernatorial action, as the respondents contended. And only a couple of questions were related to the definition of the term legislature, both from Jackson, who read the elections clause as “not taking a position as to who the legislature is.”  

[Quinta Jurecic: A case that even this Supreme Court seems torn over]

The little discussion around this threshold and central argument of the parties could be explained by the fact that the Court seemed to come into the day of argument satisfied by the historical evidence that the state constitutions in fact do apply to the legislatures’ redistricting decisions, regardless of how the term legislature in the clause is understood.

The Court’s questions were highly critical of the North Carolina legislators’ historical arguments. By notable contrast, the Court was clearly more receptive to the historical arguments made by Katyal, Verrilli, and Prelogar.

The respondents’ primary argument in Moore was that the Framers wrote the elections clause against the backdrop that most state constitutions at the time did constrain their respective legislatures in the regulation of both state and federal elections, and immediately following the federal Constitution’s ratification, state constitutions continued to constrain the power of state legislatures in their prescription of the manner for holding elections. Consequently, the respondents argued, the Framers understood and assumed that the state constitutions would apply to the state legislatures’ federal-elections regulations.

Thus, Katyal argued, the independent state legislature theory is refuted by 233 years of American constitutional history, rejected by the Articles of Confederation, rejected by the early state constitutions, rejected by the founding practice, and repudiated by the Supreme Court’s precedents. To accept the theory, he told the Court, it “would have to ignore the text, history, and structure of our federal Constitution as well as nearly every state constitution today.”

Thompson disputed this indisputable history, contending that the early state constitutions regulated only the elections for state “offices that were created by [those] constitutions,” not federal congressional elections. At first, Justice Sotomayor tutored Thompson that “at the founding of the Constitution, decades after, and even to today, state constitutions have regulated times, places, and manner of federal elections.” When Thompson continued to recite historical evidence that he mistakenly argued supported his claim, Sotomayor eventually ended the exchange by noting, “Yes. If you rewrite history, it’s very easy” to say that history supports the independent state legislature theory.

Finally, Justice Kavanaugh tellingly asked Thompson directly, “What do we do with [the] historical practice? Nearly all state constitutions regulate federal elections in some way, and some of the early constitutions did that.” Thompson did not have a satisfying answer.

Thompson was also repeatedly asked how the independent state legislature theory could be reconciled with the Court’s precedents, in particular Smiley v. Holm, which held that a governor could veto a state legislature’s redistricting plan using a veto provided for in the state constitution, but also Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, which upheld independent redistricting commissions, and Rucho v. Common Cause, which, despite rejecting federal remedy for unconstitutional redistricting by the state legislatures, said that state judicial process is available to remedy unconstitutional gerrymandering. Although the Supreme Court has never considered the independent state legislature theory as such, the theory is in tension with these and other precedents.

As Kagan put it, “I would think that our precedent gives you a lot of problems. In all recent cases, we’ve said … state courts applying state constitutions typically constrain state legislatures when they redistrict, when they enact election laws.” Referencing Arizona State Legislature, Kagan noted that “nothing in the elections clause instructs, and this Court has never held, that a state legislature may prescribe regulations on the times, places, and manner of holding federal elections in defiance of the state’s constitution.”

Attempting to reconcile the independent legislature theory with the Supreme Court’s precedents, Thompson argued that, though a state constitution may prescribe the procedure or method by which a state legislature enacts a federal-election regulation—such as by requiring a bicameral vote or that legislation be subject to a gubernatorial veto—it may not impose substantive limits on the election laws that a state legislature enacts pursuant to its elections-clause authority. Thompson argued, “It is federal law alone that places substantive restrictions on states’ legislatures performing the task assigned to them by the federal constitution.”

The Court—in particular Roberts, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Barrett—appeared deeply skeptical of Thompson’s distinction between substantive limitations on the legislatures, which Thompson argued were impermissible, and procedural limitations, which, because the Supreme Court previously so held, he had to concede were permissible.  

The justices also asked Thompson about Rucho, for which Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. In Rucho, though the Court held that federal courts could not review state legislative redistricting plans, it said in nonbinding but crucial dictum that “provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in reviewing state redistricting plans.

When Roberts asked about Rucho, suggesting that the independent legislature theory is irreconcilable with what the Court said in that case, Thompson contended that Rucho does not contradict the independent state legislature theory, but that the North Carolina Supreme Court simply failed to employ the “manageable and discoverable standards” that Rucho requires the state courts to employ when reviewing the legislatures’ redistricting decisions under the state constitutions. Consequently, the state supreme court unconstitutionally “took legislative power” away from the North Carolina legislature—a response that itself accepted the application of Rucho’s consequential dictum.

The Court eventually turned to the standard of review, if any at all, for determining whether a state supreme court exceeds its power under the elections clause. Thompson argued that the elections clause forbids all state-court review of the legislatures’ redistricting and other federal-elections regulations. Both Katyal and Verrilli acknowledged that there could be “extreme circumstances” in which a state supreme court’s interpretation and application of its state constitution in a redistricting case could run afoul of the Constitution’s elections clause. But, they argued, given the deference federal courts are required to accord state-court interpretations of state law, the standard for determining such an instance would have to be “incredibly high,” “sky high”—with “such little legal reasoning that it can only be understood as seizing the policy-making apparatus” of the state legislature.

There was also significant discussion about how the Bush v. Gore standard for statutes would apply to state-court interpretations of state constitutions. In that case, in the context of an electors-clause challenge to a state statutory provision, Rehnquist, joined by Justices Scalia and Thomas, wrote that “a significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.” Katyal told Kagan that the Bush v. Gore standard was not applicable at all, because state constitutions are entitled to even greater deference from the federal courts than state statutes. Katyal explained in response to a question from Kavanaugh that a different standard is required because “state constitutions are at the apex of [the states’] sovereignty.”

Disagreeing with Katyal on whether a different standard should apply in the context of statutory review than constitutional review, Verrilli argued that the standard should be the same for both constitutional and statutory provisions.  Prelogar agreed with Verrilli that the same standard should apply for both but offered that greater deference should be afforded the state courts when they are interpreting and applying a state constitutional provision, which is tantamount to saying that different standards should apply. State and federal constitutional provisions are often more broadly worded and capacious than statutes, necessitating resort to different methods and sources for interpretation, Prelogar noted, adding, “I think that federal courts should not be in the business of saying that the state courts aren’t giving [constitutional provisions] a fair reading.”

Prelogar argued that only in the rare circumstances “where the [state court] can’t properly be understood to be conducting judicial review in the first place” should the federal courts not defer to the state supreme courts’ interpretations of their state constitutions. When Sotomayor asked Prelogar, “At what point has a court acted not as in judicial review, but rather as in legislating?” Prelogar responded, “We think the closest analogue to try to track this problem I’ve described—of when a [state] court is not faithfully engaged in judicial review—is to borrow from the adequate and independent-state-grounds context and specifically the civil-rights cases, where the Court has said that if the state-court decision is so lacking in any basis, and has no fair or substantial support, and can only be understood as an effort to frustrate federal rights, then the Court can look past that [state-court] decision.”

When Roberts asked Thompson about a possible standard that could serve as a narrower basis for deciding the case than what his side was arguing for, Thompson replied that, if the state constitutional provision were sufficiently specific, in contrast to a broadly worded and open-ended provision like North Carolina’s free-elections clause, such a specific provision would be permissible under the U.S. Constitution, a reply that undermined his twin arguments that state constitutions should never be allowed to constrain state legislatures, and certainly not substantively. To Thompson’s credit, he was prepared to follow his own argument to its final, principled end, acknowledging to the Court that a state constitutional ban on partisan gerrymandering would be an example of a permissible provision under the U.S. Constitution and allowed as contemplated by the Court in Rucho.

At this, Sotomayor parried with Thompson, pointing out that many state constitutional provisions lack such specific standards and so she took Thompson’s answer “to mean that there are no judicially enforceable standards to interpret the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and equal protection clauses of the [U.S.] Constitution, because they, on their face, would appear to be as unmanageable or broad, and yet we routinely let federal and state courts review those acts.” She chided Thompson: “It seems that every answer you give is to get you what you want.”     

Throughout the entire argument, the justices were so critical of Thompson’s historical arguments and attempted legal argument, and yet so evidently perplexed as to any appropriate standard that could constrain state supreme courts in the interpretations of their state constitutions, that I was left wondering in the end whether the Court will attempt to constrain state supreme courts at all—and that is as I would hope:  The Court ought not attempt to constrain the state supreme courts in any way.

As Katyal argued, federal-court review of the state supreme courts’ decisions under the U.S. Constitution or Congress’s exercise of its power under the clause to prescribe the times, places, and manner of holding congressional elections or to alter such regulations as the state legislatures prescribe are the Constitution’s checks on state legislatures’ constitutionally conferred power to prescribe the regulations for congressional elections. The federal courts do not sit to adjudge the validity of state-supreme-court interpretations of their own state constitutions and the Constitution does not contemplate such, certainly not in the elections-clause context.

If the Court does interpret the elections clause in Moore to require circumscription of the state supreme courts’ review of their legislatures’ redistricting decisions, that circumscription ought to be exceedingly limited, given the substantial deference that the Constitution requires be accorded the state supreme courts in their interpretations of their own state constitutions.

Even so, if the Court takes that path it will struggle (one has to believe, ultimately in vain) to fashion a constitutionally defensible standard to constrain the state supreme courts in their interpretations of their constitutions. The language of constitutions is significantly different from the language of statutes. Constitutional provisions, such as the free-elections provision in the North Carolina state constitution under which the North Carolina state supreme court held the redistricting plan unconstitutional in Moore, are purposely written in broader, more capacious and indeterminate language than statutes, in expectation of judicial interpretation. The interpretive sources the state supreme courts consult and the interpretive canons and methodologies they use to interpret their constitutions vary from state to state and constitution to constitution. The 50 state constitutions, and therefore the constitutional provisions that might apply to the state legislatures’ redistricting decisions and elections laws, vary widely in language and substance across the states and are in many cases no less capacious and indeterminate than the provisions of the U.S. Constitution that would apply were Congress to prescribe the rules for holding congressional elections and the Supreme Court to review those laws under the U.S. Constitution. As a result, it will be, as it should be, all but impossible to fashion an appropriate standard and thereafter to determine, under any standard that would be imposed by the Court, whether a state supreme court faithfully interpreted and applied the state’s constitution to a legislature’s elections-law enactments.

Regardless of any standard it might fashion, the Court appears likely to affirm the decision of the North Carolina Supreme Court in Moore. The North Carolina legislature itself legislated judicial review of its redistricting decisions by the state courts, a determinative point that the Court barely touched upon during argument. What is more, the advocate for North Carolina legislators repeatedly conceded at argument that the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the state legislature’s redistricting map “fairly reflect[ed] North Carolina law.” And as Justice Gorsuch stated, “nobody here thinks the North Carolina Supreme Court is exercising a legislative function.”      

On that day last December, the Court itself debunked root and branch the constitutionally radical independent state legislature theory that was the centerpiece of former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and that would upend federal presidential and congressional elections from the way they have been conducted for more than two centuries. I left the Court that day feeling hopeful for a nation weary from the last presidential election and worried that the next presidential election could be a repeat of it. I pray that my hope is not misplaced.

For more than a half century, researchers at UCLA have conducted a massive annual survey of incoming college students titled “The American Freshman: National Norms.” One part of the survey asks students to rank 20 life goals on a scale from “not important” to “essential.” Most are lofty aspirations such as becoming a community leader, contributing to scientific progress, creating artistic works, and launching a suc­cessful business. Surveyed in 1969, freshmen entering four-year colleges were most interested in “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” (85 percent considered it “essential” or “very important”); “raising a family” (73 percent); and “helping others who are in difficulty” (69 percent). Ten years later, freshmen opted for “being an authority in my field” (74 percent), followed by “helping others” and “raising a family.”

But something shifted amid the Reagan Revolution, which deregulated Wall Street, revamped the tax code, and set the nation hurtling toward levels of wealth and income inequality unseen since before the Great Depression. By 1989, a new priority had taken over the survey’s top position, and has appeared there on and off ever since: money. Indeed, the No. 1 goal of the Class of 2023, deemed “essential” or “very important” by more than four in five students, was “being very well off financially.”

Grown-ups can relate. Recent polling from The Wall Street Journal and the University of Chicago points to a steep decline over the past quarter century in the percentage of American adults who view patriotism, religion, parenting, and community involvement as “very important.” The only priority tested whose perceived importance grew during that period, the pollsters reported, was money.

Consumer culture encourages us to dream about the happiness that a new Land Cruiser or Club Med holiday might bring. Yet the ability of most families to keep up with basic needs—food, housing, health care, and child care—has diminished steadily over the decades. We’ve all been warned that money can’t buy happiness, but the siphoning off of middle-class security has left us too willing to embrace evidence to the contrary.

Consider a paper on money and happiness published by the psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Matthew Killingsworth, and Barbara Mellers last month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mainstream news outlets largely treated the conclusions as confirmation that money could buy happiness after all. But buyer beware: A more careful reading suggests otherwise.

More than a decade earlier, in 2010, Kahneman and another colleague, Angus Deaton, had published a study in which, on average, the more money people earned, the higher they scored on self-reported measures of well-being—but only up to a point. The happiness effect hit a plateau, or “satiation point,” at incomes of $60,000 to $90,000. Jackpot, my 2021 book on American wealth and its discontents, cited a similar 2018 study led by the psychologist Andrew Jebb that crunched global survey data for more than 1.7 million people. Among the U.S. and Canadian subjects, positive emotions improved with higher earnings up to about $65,000 a year. Negative emotions (stress, worry) declined as earnings increased, reaching an inverse satiation point at $95,000. Life-evaluation scores, which measure how well we believe we are doing in our life, maxed out at $105,000. The upshot, I surmised, is that “we hit peak satisfaction when all of our basic needs are met and we no longer live in fear of our credit card bills.”

But in 2021, Killingsworth published a new paper contradicting Jebb’s and Kahneman’s results. He didn’t observe the satiation points others had noted. Refreshingly, instead of retreating into their academic trenches, Kahneman and Killingsworth teamed up and, with Mellers as arbiter, probed more deeply. In their new study, the one PNAS published last month, well-being indeed hit a ceiling as income rose, but only among the 15 percent of subjects who were least happy to begin with. The happier ones kept getting happier, the authors found; in fact, among the happiest 30 percent, the effect accelerated: More money meant even more happiness.

This intriguing result was widely reported. But the paper includes caveats that were largely ignored. The authors note that the association of income and happiness “is weak, even if statistically robust.” Kahneman and Deaton, they point out, had determined that the quadrupling of a person’s income had an effect on well-being roughly equal to the mood boost of a weekend “and less than a third as large as the [negative] effect of a headache.” The authors also explain that “the difference between the medians of happiness at household incomes of $15,000 and $250,000 is about five points on a 100-point scale.”

That’s “almost nothing,” Jebb told me in an email. With such a small difference, in fact, one could argue that “there is no practical effect of income at all!”

Jebb also noted that the new paper includes a chart of the income-happiness correlation that relies on z-scores, statistical devices that “can make the effect look large when it is not.” And even if no satiation point was observed among the happier subjects, “its existence seems to be a logical necessity,” he said. Income can theoretically increase indefinitely, but happiness as we understand it cannot.

Jebb is no longer interested in the questions these income studies ask, in any case, because when we ponder money and happiness, “we imagine ourselves with more money relative to our current state.” But nobody has done a before-and-after analysis to determine whether—and how—changes in income and wealth affect any given person’s well-being. “It’s possible that we have enough data to do those analyses, but it would be a big undertaking,” Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which spans generations, told me in an email. In the meantime, comparing group averages “might tell us which group is happier,” Jebb said, “but not why.”

Killingsworth actually did consider, for his 2021 paper, why higher incomes seem to correlate with more happiness. He estimates that three-quarters of the effect might be due to the fact that higher earners have “more control over their lives.” Most of the rest had to do with relief from financial insecurity. For most people, once we finish school and enter a particular career track, “the range of plausible incomes is fairly narrow,” Killingsworth told me. “Raising one’s income by some modest percentage would make at best a tiny difference in happiness. But deciding whether to be a surgeon or a social worker could certainly matter to a meaningful extent.”

He acknowledges that “people already tend to overestimate the importance of money to happiness, so they should probably care less” about these associations. “I wouldn’t want people to read this work and conclude that the pursuit of happiness can be reduced to the pursuit of money,” Killingsworth said. “That would be totally wrong.”

This brought to mind a conversation in my book with the Boston-area psychologist Bob Kenny, a founding partner of North Bridge Ad­visory Group. Kenny spends much of his time assuaging the wealth-related anxieties of his extremely well-heeled clients and their offspring. Comprehensive data on the emotional well-being of America’s richest 0.1 percent are nonexistent. Anecdotally, though, Kenny thinks his clients may be at a slight disadvantage on the happiness front. “I’m not comparing them to people who don’t have enough money to put food on the table,” he told me. “But most people believe that, even if life isn’t very good right now, ‘I’m going to make a whole lot more money and then life’s going to be better. Wouldn’t it make things better if I had that house on the ocean; if I just had something?’”

His clients have more money than they know what to do with, so they can no longer cling to that fallacy. “I say to people all the time, ‘Look, retail therapy works, but so does cocaine,’” Kenny said. “The problem is, it wears off. When you go out to buy something and it’s new and it’s pretty, the latest iPhone or the Tesla—God, this is great!—it just isn’t sustainable. Not that you don’t have enough money, but that it’ll lose its kick, so you buy an­other one. I know a guy who bought three.”

“iPhones?” I asked.

“Teslas,” Kenny said. “And you wouldn’t meet him and think, God, that is one happy guy.”

The cosmonaut-turned-artist is raising money for war-torn Ukraine. He has donated proceeds from the sale of his first art project to ambulances and generators for Ukrainians and is also an ambassador for the United24 fundraising platform.

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Several months ago, while walking through my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I noticed an impressive number of front-lawn placards celebrating and welcoming refugees. The signs made me proud. I like living in a place where people openly celebrate tolerance and diversity.

Several days later, my pride curdled into bitterness. As part of some reporting on housing policy, I found a State Department page offering advice to Afghans and Iraqis resettling in the U.S. The upshot: Stay away from D.C. “The Washington, D.C., metro area including northern Virginia and some cities in California are very expensive places to live, and it can be difficult to find reasonable housing,” the website warns. “Any resettlement benefits you receive may not comfortably cover the cost of living in these areas.”

My city’s prohibitive housing costs flow, in part, from the district’s infamous war against new construction. Much of D.C. is off-limits for new development, thanks to widespread single-family zoning, berserk historical-preservation rules, and a long-standing aversion to taller buildings, which stems from both federal law and local rules. If the city’s housing policies are so broken that the federal government has to explicitly tell immigrants to find somewhere else to live, then signage welcoming refugees is both futile and hypocritical. The same neighborhoods saying yes to refugees in their front yard are supporting policies in their backyard that say no to refugees.

This dynamic—front-yard proclamations contradicted by backyard policies—extends well beyond refugee policy, and helps explain American 21st-century dysfunction.

The front yard is the realm of language. It is the space for messaging and talking to be seen. Social media and the internet are a kind of global front lawn, where we get to know a thousand strangers by their signage, even when we don’t know a thing about their private lives and virtues. The backyard is the seat of private behavior. This is where the real action lives, where the values of the family—and by extension, the nation—make contact with the real world.

Let’s stick with housing for a moment to see the front yard/backyard divide play out. The 2020 Democratic Party platform called housing a “right and not a privilege” and a “basic need … at the center of the American Dream.” Right on. But the U.S. has a severe housing-affordability crisis that is worst in blue states, where lawmakers have erected obstacle courses of zoning rules and regulations to block construction. In an interview with Slate, Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, took aim at his own side, saying progressives are “living in the contradiction that they are nominally liberal [but they] do not want other people to live next to them” if their neighbors are low-income workers. The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington; all are run by Democrats. Something very strange is going on when the zip codes with the best housing signs have some of the worst housing outcomes.

Housing scarcity pinches other Democratic priorities. Some people convincingly argue that it constricts all of them. High housing costs pervert “just about every facet of American life,” as The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey has written, including what we eat, how many friends we keep, how many children we bear. “In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black lives matter, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal,” the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote. But in part because those signs sit in front yards “zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes,” the city has built just one home for every eight new jobs in the past decade.

We find a similar discrepancy between stated virtues and outcomes in the realm of green energy. As I wrote last year, liberals own all the backpack buttons denouncing the oil-and-gas industry. But Texas produces more renewable energy than deep-blue California, and Oklahoma and Iowa produce more renewable energy than New York. Yes, wind is abundant in the Midwest, and the Great Plains have lots of space that’s sunny and empty. But the biosphere counts carbon, not excuses. Progressives betray their goals by supporting onerous rules that delay the construction of solar farms and transmission lines that would reduce our dependence on oil and gas.

Granted, although the hypocrisy of NIMBY environmentalists is an irresistibly delicious subject for some writers, it is hardly the only obstacle to building an abundance of clean electricity. Many of the country’s most powerful energy providers play their own word games by loudly advertising their commitment to decarbonization even as they quietly use their political power to block the transition to new energy sources. Here, as in housing, it’s easy to playact as a public crusader, screaming “Everything has to change!” to the world while remaining a private reactionary who whispers, within the back rooms of true power, “But let’s not change anything that matters.”

More broadly, a super-emphasis on language has distracted some Americans from focusing on actual outcomes and working toward material progress.

In the past few years, many employees have encouraged their companies to launch diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. These programs address a real problem: the stubborn gaps in pay and responsibility between white men and their nonwhite and non-male colleagues, which are sometimes borne from prejudice in hiring or promotion processes.

But after an initial burst of enthusiasm, follow-up analyses of DEI programs have found that many of them are worse than useless. First, they sometimes rely on pseudoscience, such as unconscious-bias training, which rarely reduces racism and may accidentally reify existing biases. Second, corporations that hold DEI workshops may use them as an excuse not to pursue real corporate change. In the past few years, as corporate diversity programs have proliferated, the share of Black and Asian workers who “trust their employer to do what is right in response to racism” has actually declined. According to one Bloomberg survey, the person with the least credibility on racism within the company is the person in charge of DEI.

All of the appropriate terms for this state of affairs—whitewashing, window dressing, a facade—capture the essence of front-yardism. The problem with these diversity programs isn’t that they’re “woke,” as in “doing too much to help nonwhite Americans.” The problem is that, keeping with this common if dubious definition, they aren’t nearly woke enough. Full of sound and fury signifying nothing, many DEI initiatives are conservative in nature, preserving the status quo and the power of white-male leadership while advertising a politics of radical change. They are the equivalent of a thousand REFUGEES ARE WELCOME signs in a neighborhood where the residents’ policy preferences make local refugee resettlement impossible.

San Francisco public schools offer another lesson in how an obsession with language can cloud a rightful focus on material outcomes. In 2021, the city’s board of education voted to rename more than 40 schools to scrub out racism. Their dragnet caught such not-quite-famous racists as Abraham Lincoln and Senator Dianne Feinstein. (Paul Revere was added to the list, because one committee member misread a History.com article about his role in the Revolutionary War.) At the same time that the district was putting together its list of names, its schools suffered declines in enrollment, attendance, and learning. Math scores fell sharply and, by 2022, only 9 percent of the district’s Black students met or exceeded math standards.

The renaming committee was obviously not exclusively responsible for pandemic-era learning loss. Learning loss was a national trend, and San Francisco didn’t even experience the worst of it. But if, like the San Francisco Unified School District, you’re a school district with a big math-proficiency problem and your policies include discouraging eighth-grade algebra and holding meetings about nomenclature, you might end up with failing students in well-named schools.

Even the American Medical Association has descended into front-yardism. The AMA recently published a 54-page guide on how doctors should talk with patients, called “Advancing Health Equity,” which urges medical professionals to make their language more inclusive. One particularly silly example: It advises doctors to replace the simple phrase low-income people with new terminology that acknowledges “root causes,” such as people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real-estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements.

I celebrate any emphasis on “root causes.” So let’s talk about the real root causes of dysfunction in America’s expensive and inequitable health-care system. Why is the U.S. one of the only countries in the developed world without universal insurance? A complete analysis might include the AMA’s “explicit, long-standing opposition to single-payer health care.”  Why does the U.S. health system struggle to provide access in rural and low-income areas? One causal factor is the AMA’s steadfast resistance to expanding nurse practitioners’ scope of care. Why does the U.S. have fewer general practitioners per capita than almost any other rich country? It might have something to do with the AMA’s refusal to expand medical-residency slots and other efforts to constrain the number of doctors in America.

Even in science, where empiricism ought to reign, I’ve seen troubling signs of word worship. In 2020, the prestigious journal Nature published its first-ever presidential endorsement, on behalf of Joe Biden. When a group of researchers studied the effect of that endorsement, they found it did nothing to persuade moderate voters and actually made conservatives less trusting of scientific institutions. “The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters,” the paper concluded. “This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature.”

The journal’s article had all the effectiveness of a half-hearted DEI program: a bunch of pretty words doing less than nothing. Nonetheless, in March, the editors of Nature wrote a follow-up essay declaring victory. While they acknowledged that the Biden endorsement had failed to meet every measurable benchmark, they defended their decision on the grounds that “silence was not an option.” “When individuals seeking office” blast science and threaten scientists, they said, “it becomes important to speak up.”

I personally despair of the polarization of science and wish the Nature editorial had, through some magical incantation, depoliticized the vaccine debates. But it didn’t. And that holds an important lesson about the limited ability of words alone to bring about the world that progressives want to live in. The Nature editorial was an experiment, and an independent group of scientists determined that the experiment failed. That’s how science works. For the editors of a science journal to wave it away suggests that the final cause of their politics is to utter the right words, even when those words push them further away from the world they want to build.

Companies hiring DEI consultants to quote Malcolm X in a meeting to cover up a pitiful diversity record; school officials watching math scores plummet for Black kids while they debate whether Lincoln was racist; AMA employees playing word games while limiting the number of physicians; environmentalists buying BEYOND COAL pins while challenging the construction of any clean-energy project that might help the electric grid move beyond coal—what ties these examples together is front-yard theater.

You may have noticed that I’ve mostly focused on progressive causes and left-leaning institutions. This is as deliberate as it is unfair.

It’s deliberate because, to paraphrase Noah Smith, I deeply want progressives to love progress itself, not just the sound of it. When it comes to the virtues of housing affordability, clean-energy abundance, high-quality education, and trustworthy science, I want my political side to turn its signage into signatures, its placards into policies. But my emphasis so far on liberalism is also unfair, because to prattle on about progressive hypocrisy without a similar analysis of the right would profoundly misrepresent the distribution of phoniness in American politics.

When Republicans swept into unified control of the federal government in 2017, Donald Trump promised in his inaugural address to return power to the people, unwind the “American carnage” of previous generations, and restore the manufacturing and coal industries that had been desiccated by decades of neoliberal policies. But once in office, Republicans governed more like plutocrats than populists, trying to slash federal health-insurance coverage (which failed) and to reduce taxes for large corporations by several trillion dollars (which succeeded). On economic and social policy, the Republican Party is a pretzel. The GOP officially opposes “Defund the police” and wants more law enforcement, but Trump is on the record with calls to defund the entire FBI and Department of Justice. Republicans officially seek to “lower the price of housing,” but their pledge to cut appropriated nondefense programs would likely reduce housing assistance, immediately raising the cost of living for millions of low-income renters.

No party claims a monopoly on language theater, either. Many of today’s most influential conservatives are more likely to marinate in indignation over the gender politics of candy, beer, and sneaker commercials than utter anything that might accidentally make contact with poverty, housing, energy, or health-care policy. The most significant GOP leaders, such as Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, hardly talk about economic policy at all, preferring to direct their furious attention at culture-war issues, including elementary-school curricula, drag-queen story hours, and the scourge of managerial wokeness in our corporations and schools. This postmaterial posturing might serve a strategic purpose. Behind all that fulminating about Disney and DEI, DeSantis’s views on Social Security, Medicare, and the welfare state are deeply unpopular.

While language wars escalate on the right, the phenomenon of front-yard politics may be peaking on the left. San Francisco ultimately abandoned its plan to scrub Lincoln and Feinstein from its buildings. California has voted to begin the long process of dismantling its NIMBY housing laws. Last year, President Biden signed historic laws to expand green-energy production in the U.S., even though the translation of historic spending into historic construction remains uncertain. These are small steps in the right direction.

Words matter. It would be absurd—and deeply self-defeating—for any writer to suggest otherwise. My aim is not to uproot kind-hearted yard signs, or reverse efforts to remove racist surnames from government buildings, or to discourage doctors from speaking respectfully to patients. But these linguistic efforts are only as successful as the difference they make in the world. When a politics of progressive language becomes disconnected from progressive outcomes, the movement loses. Front-yard radicalism multiplied by backyard stasis does not equal progress. It equals nothing at all.

A 2022 Supreme Court ruling changed the boundaries of America’s fight over guns. The latest mass-shooting tragedies raise the question: Where does gun reform go next?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friend is no Nazi. Elon Musk’s free-speech charade is over. An institution that’s been broken for 200 years

Far More Permissive

The public-radio editor Erika Mahoney, whose father was killed in a mass shooting at a grocery store two years ago, wrote yesterday that every mass shooting is its own metastasizing loss, weaving a “web of pain” that extends far beyond its victims.

Mass shootings are also “a national disgrace,” the Stanford Law School professor John J. Donohue argues in a new Atlantic essay. Each compounding tragedy—most recently, Monday’s mass shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, and the March 27 shooting at a Nashville elementary school—highlights “the inability of the American political system to adopt numerous popular public-policy strategies that together could substantially reduce the prevalence and destructiveness of these events.”

Donohue, who has been studying the links between guns and crime for 25 years, notes that though a federal assault-weapons ban was in place for a decade, it lapsed in 2004. Now “the gun lobby is challenging every valuable gun-safety law throughout the United States, with the belief that Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will protect the right to sell lethal weaponry to as many Americans as possible,” he writes.

So far, that belief seems to hold some truth. Ryan Busse, a senior policy adviser to the gun-safety advocacy group Giffords, argued late last year that the Supreme Court’s June decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen is a dangerous destruction of precedent. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, changed the framework that courts use when determining the constitutionality of firearm regulations:

The Court’s conservative majority would judge all firearms regulations by a new originalist standard: If there is no historical proof of a gun law linked to 1791 or 1868—the years when the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, respectively, were ratified—then any modern law restricting firearms is liable to be ruled unconstitutional. Never mind that any teenager with a modern AR-15 rifle can fire several times every second, whereas a well-trained 18th-century soldier could fire a musket, at best, three or four times a minute.

The ruling, in other words, broadened interpretations of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to protect an individual’s right to legally carry a handgun in public. That decision has transformed the fight over guns in America, the legal scholar Timothy Zick and the council member Diana Palmer explained last year. The question is no longer “who can buy guns or what guns can be bought but where these firearms can be carried, every day, by the millions and millions of Americans who own them.”

Donohue, the Stanford Law School professor, concedes that many Americans support expansive rights to gun ownership. “But,” he adds, “it’s still the case that the political system is producing an outcome far more permissive than what the population wants.” He points out the disparity that exists even between National Rifle Association leaders and the organization’s own members:

Repeated surveys show that while the NRA membership consistently supports reasonable measures such as universal background checks, NRA leaders stake out a much more extreme position. Following the February 2018 high-school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead, then-President Donald Trump announced that we needed more gun control and that he was not afraid of the NRA. But when the NRA head, Wayne LaPierre, told Trump to stop the push for universal background checks—then supported by 90 percent of people who voted Republican in the 2018 midterm election—Trump stopped.

Polls from the past decade suggest that an overwhelming majority of Americans support universal background checks for gun purchases. So what can Congress and the U.S. government do to better align the nation’s gun regulations with the views of its citizens? Donohue argues that any approach short of a federal assault-weapons ban, with restrictions on high-capacity magazines, will not be enough to prevent future mass shootings. He also recommends removing loopholes that allow some gun buyers to skirt protocols in the federal background-check system, and improving public education on the dangers of allowing disturbed individuals access to guns. But he’s not optimistic that these interventions are possible, given the “corrosively powerful” domestic gun industry that stands against them.

In light of the immense influence of this industry, my colleague David Frum made the case in 2021 for a gun-reform strategy that focuses on changing the minds and behaviors of individual people:

It would be good to reverse the permissive trends in gun law. It would be good to ban the preferred weapons of mass shooters. It would be good to have a stronger system of background checks. It would be good to stop so many Americans from carrying guns in public … But even if none of those things happens—and there is little sign of them happening anytime soon—progress can be made against gun violence, as progress was once made against other social evils: by persuading Americans to stop, one by one by one.

Frum offers the example of drunk driving as a potential blueprint: The action has been illegal in the United States since cars became ubiquitous, but those laws weren’t consistently enforced until the 1980s, with the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving by a woman who had lost her daughter to a repeat hit-and-run driver.

“MADD convinced American drivers that they were not weak or unmanly if they surrendered the car keys after drinking too much,” Frum writes. “That kind of cultural change beckons now.”

Related:

The problem America cannot fix How to persuade Americans to give up their guns

Today’s News

NPR announced that it will no longer post new content to its 52 official Twitter feeds following the platform’s decision to label the network “state-affiliated media,” a term it uses for propaganda outlets in autocratic countries (the company later changed the label to “government-funded media”). The broadcaster is the first major news organization to go silent on the social-media platform. Approximately 2,000 eastern Indiana residents have been ordered to evacuate due to toxic smoke emissions from a massive recycling-plant fire in the city of Richmond. The blaze, which began yesterday, could continue burning for several days. The e-cigarette company Juul reached a $462 million settlement with New York, California, and several other states, resolving multiple lawsuits over the company’s purported marketing to young people.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Conservationists pride themselves on protecting all of Earth’s life, but, Emma Marris argues, their field often overlooks the most common type of life. Up for Debate: Broader news coverage—and less political reporting—could lead to a better-informed population, Conor Friedersdorf writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Apple TV+.

The Real Hero of Ted Lasso

By Megan Garber

Ted Lasso, like an athlete meeting the moment, peaked at the right time. The show premiered during the waning months of Donald Trump’s presidency; against that backdrop, its positivity felt like catharsis, its soft morals a rebuke. Soon, Ted Lasso was winning fans and Emmys. Articles were heralding it as an answer to our ills. The accolades recognized the brilliance of a show that weaves Dickensian plots with postmodern wit. But they were also concessions. Kindness should not be radical. Empathy should not be an argument. Here we were, though, as so much was falling apart, turning a wacky comedy about British soccer into a plea for American politics.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The U.S. 2024 presidential race: A cheat sheet Everything about the Ukraine leak is incredibly weird. The film that understands what a creative life really looks like

Culture Brea

Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Samir Hussein / WireImage / Getty; Alfred Ellis & Walery / Getty.

Read. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, by Claire Dederer, explains why it’s okay to like good art by bad people.

Watch. Our critic argues that Air, in theaters, delivers more substance than you’d expect from a film about a mega-company’s best-known win.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Although I didn’t spend much time talking about Erika Mahoney’s essay above, I recommend sitting with it when you’re ready to step away from the policy side of the firearm conversation and reflect on the emotional toll of this violence. The essay is an honest portrayal of losing a parent to a mass shooting, and of revisiting that pain with every news alert of another such tragedy.

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.