To be pregnant for the first time is to be the world’s most anxious, needy, and ignorant consumer all at once. Good luck buying a pile of stuff whose uses are still hypothetical to you! What, for instance, is the best sleep sack? When I was four months pregnant and still barely aware of the existence of sleep sacks, a mom giving recommendations handed me one made of bamboo. “Feel—soooo soft,” she said. I reached out to caress, and it really was soooo soft. This was my introduction to the cult of bamboo.

Over the next several months, gifts of bamboo clothing from more experienced parent friends started to arrive, and I became indoctrinated in its superiority. Bamboo is breathable, I was told, smooth, and so stretchy that it grows with your kid. I heard of moms who exclusively dressed their babies in bamboo. One night after my baby was born, while high on hormones and low on sleep, I wanted to splurge on something nice. Add to cart: $33 for a pair of bamboo pajamas in the color “blush.” Yes, this was more than I’ve spent on my own adult pajamas. But these were bamboo.

Thirty-three dollars, I would later learn, is a relatively, uhh, reasonable price to pay for bamboo baby clothes? The Instagram brands that popularized bamboo for babies have also perfected the art of scarcity-induced demand: Every so often, they drop limited-edition prints that can sell out in minutes. So intense is the competition that moms resell them on Facebook for three, five, even 10 times the retail price; one confessed to reselling a $98 blanket for $1,000.

This all seemed a bit much to me, but let she whose baby is without bamboo cast the first stone. Imagine my surprise, though, when I committed the act of serious investigative journalism that is reading a clothing label. The “magical,” “buttery soft” bamboo fabric that so many moms have been obsessing over? It’s rayon. Yes, rayon, the material best known as what cheap blouses are made of. Rebranded as “bamboo,” rayon has taken on an improbable second life as the stuff of premium, collectible baby clothes.

There is nothing particularly special about rayon made from bamboo. “Bamboo rayon is just rayon,” Ajoy Sarkar, a textiles expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology, told me. And there is no reason this material should inspire so much hoopla. “The world is insane,” said Preeti Gopinath, a textiles expert at the Parsons School of Design, not at all suppressing a laugh when I told her about the hype over bamboo for babies.

And what exactly is rayon? It is neither natural like cotton nor synthetic like polyester. Rayon is in-between, a semisynthetic material made of the cellulose extracted from plants. A century ago, manufacturers used wood as feedstock, but these days they also use bamboo. The basic process used to make most rayon is still the same: The plant material is treated with lye and a chemical called carbon disulfide, which turns any cellulose into a viscous syrup that can be extruded into long, thin strands. Carbon disulfide is especially toxic, known to cause dizziness, vision problems, even psychosis in workers without proper protection (but it shouldn’t remain in the finished product). This entire process of turning bamboo into rayon is energy and chemical intensive, which makes sense. When I see hard stalks of bamboo, I don’t immediately think soft or silky. Bamboo might sound natural, says Maxine Bédat, the founder and director of the sustainable-fashion think tank New Standard Institute, but the fabric is highly processed. The end product is the same regardless of starting material. But no one is out there hawking expensive “wood chip” baby clothing.

These days, manufacturers can make rayon exceptionally soft by finely tuning the way the cellulose fibers are extruded. This feat of engineering turns wood or bamboo into fabric that does, in fact, feel nice enough to lay against baby skin. Some moms seek out the softness of bamboo specifically to keep their babies’ eczema at bay. (Cotton and rayon are both recommended for eczema.) The material is also absorbent and cool, particularly comfortable for warm weather. But rayon is a “weak fiber,” Sarkar told me. When rubbed together, the fibers tend to break and curl—a.k.a. pilling—which explains why bamboo baby clothes come with unrealistically fussy laundry instructions: line dry, lay flat to dry. Who has time when your newborn is pooping on three outfits a day? I tossed it all in the dryer, and sure enough, the bamboo clothing started to pill.

I did, however, continue marveling at the stretch in the bamboo—sorry, I mean rayon—pajamas. I found myself reaching for them over cotton ones because they were simply easier to stuff my baby’s ever-chunkier thighs into. But rayon isn’t inherently that stretchy, Gopinath told me. The stretch in “bamboo” baby clothes comes from the 3 to 5 percent of spandex blended into their fabric; 100 percent cotton clothes obviously contain no spandex. “Manufactured rayon is very cheap”—usually cheaper than cotton—“so you can add a little bit of spandex and it will still be cheaper than a cotton-spandex blend,” Sarkar said. This is not what I wanted to hear after spending $33 on already pilling baby pajamas.

The cost of fabric is, of course, only a small fraction of the price of any garment. When we’re paying for bamboo, we’re not just paying for the bamboo. We’re paying for exclusivity. We’re paying for the feeling that we’ve made the right choice for our helpless little babies. We’re paying for the softness of fabric against sensitive baby skin, even if that means clothing so delicate, it can’t go through standard wash and dry cycles. We’re paying for breathability that keeps babies warm but not too warm, which is a risk factor for the terrifying prospect of SIDS. The stakes can feel very high, and we’re trying our best. Is our best really rayon? Hmm, sounds better to call it bamboo.

The bamboo brands aren’t exactly keeping their use of rayon a deep secret. It’s right there on the clothing labels and on websites touting the superiority of bamboo. But you also wouldn’t necessarily know from a casual perusal of their marketing copy, especially when they use the more obscure name of “viscose.” (Viscose is technically just one kind of rayon, but it’s by far the most common, so the terms are used more or less interchangeably.) You would think bamboo is luxe, exclusive, and so natural. Outside of the world of baby clothes, the Federal Trade Commission last year fined Kohl’s and Walmart $2.5 million and $3 million, respectively, over their “bogus marketing” of so-called bamboo sheets, towels, and rugs. It’s just rayon, the FTC contended, and they had to call it such.  

So, if you’re looking, I have some used rayon baby clothes to sell you.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is a position that you hold––or a question that you have––about any issue related to gender identity, transgender rights, gender medicine, or any of the associated cultural debates? Also welcome: reflections on relevant personal experiences, especially from trans readers.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

I’ll go first. Trans people have rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equality under the law, same as anyone else, and ought to be treated with respect and dignity––and although those baseline convictions would preclude the passage of various laws that some anti-trans bigots favor, they don’t resolve most issues Americans are debating, a debate that is more extreme than it would be if liberal discourse norms prevailed.

Even in the best circumstances, it would be challenging to join in as passionate partisans contest questions like “How ought we to understand sex, gender, and gender identity?”; “What, if anything, should the curricula at public schools say on these subjects?”; “What’s the best way to help a child who is experiencing gender dysphoria?”; “How should sports leagues be organized with respect to sex and gender?” (a subject that is now being taken up in Congress at the behest of Republicans).  

But our circumstances are not the best.

Observing the country’s major divides on gender and transgenderism, I see an issue that is as disorienting for participants and observers as any that our society confronts. Antagonists who inhabit different epistemic universes do battle each week on the internet, and merely understanding the most common perspectives can be burdensome. (If you set aside enough time to listen to this seven-episode podcast series from The Free Press and this nearly two-hour review of it on the ContraPoints YouTube channel, you’ll come away decently informed––not on all trans issues, but on the competing perspectives about how to understand the place of one author, J. K. Rowling, in the larger debate.)

Many Americans who observe the overall tenor of these online conversations are reluctant or even terrified to participate––to ask honest questions, to hazard tentative opinions, to try out arguments––because culture warriors on all sides of the issue police ever-changing taboos. Some are difficult for even the very-online to understand. For example, if a person were to say, “Sex is determined by one’s biology, while gender is a social construct,” would that be consistent with conventional wisdom, or seen as fighting words, or offensive to the left or the right, or somehow, all of the above? To merely ask others to clarify their views is to risk being castigated for “just asking questions”––internet vernacular for accusing others of bad faith that manages to stigmatize curiosity-driven dialogue––if not to be labeled as transphobic from one faction and “a groomer” from another. Little wonder that many decline to talk about the subject at all.

In theory, academic institutions are supposed to excel at truth-seeking by virtue of values and practices that prioritize it, even when the public square is full of venom or passionate intensity. But advocating for the widely held, if controversial, view that biological sex matters in gender-segregated sports recently got a woman mobbed on one California campus. To perform drag is to risk having one’s First Amendment rights violated, as happened at a Texas university last month.

Alex Byrne, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, laments obstacles to publishing scholarship on gender, recounting his own experience probing and positing precise definitions of women; rather than seeing the importance of viewpoint diversity for truth-seeking, he argues, some in the field aggressively chill free inquiry. Underscoring his point about ascendant taboos, a Quillette article—an attempt to set forth competing gender paradigms—was published pseudonymously by the professor who authored it. And Jesse Singal––whose work I’ve found to be consistently humane, rigorous, and unjustly maligned, even after carefully reviewing the complaints of critics who lambast him and his journalism, and who may dismiss my viewpoint merely because of our divergent evaluations of his work––ably documents troubling flaws in youth gender-medicine research. It is hard to make sense of the world when our centers of sensemaking are compromised.

Red-State Gender Politics

In a recent segment, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized recent legislative pushes this way:

In March of 2023, in the last few weeks, Kentucky, Idaho, Georgia, Utah, Tennessee, Wyoming, have all passed, signed and enacted laws that outlaw drag performance, that restrict bathroom access, that restrict youth participation in athletics for trans folks, trans health care.

I mean, this has been the number one priority, I think it’s fair to say. Republican state legislators around the country, keep in mind these Republican legislators, you know, their sessions started let’s say in January. So the first thing they did more or less in a lot of these states, we’re three months in, is go after trans youth sports participation; the bathrooms that trans folks can and can’t use; drag performance; and, most crucially, trans health care.

This is a four-alarm fire. It is a complete crisis. And I think it’s an outrage, and it’s despicable. And it’s an insult to the full dignity that equal citizens in our great nation are entitled to. Whatever their lives are; whatever their gender status is … it’s an offense against the basic pluralistic values that I hold dear, and I hope we all hold dear.

He spoke with Chase Strangio, the deputy director for transgender justice with ACLU's LGBT and HIV Project, who added:

I litigate cases on behalf of trans litigants. I lobby in-state legislatures over the anti-trans bills that we’re seeing around the country. And then I live as a trans person with communities of trans people. So on every level, I feel like I’m sort of taking in the realities of what’s happening to trans communities at this moment.

I would say that in the legislative context, we are at a catastrophic point in terms [of] what we’re seeing: the volume of bills attacking the community, the subject of the bills attacking the community, and the pace at which [they’re] moving through state legislatures and being enacted into law.

A New York Times article about the same legislative push characterized it as follows: “Defeated on same-sex marriage, the religious right went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors. The campaign that followed has stunned political leaders across the spectrum.” In National Review, Madeleine Kearns counters that progressives initiated this front in the culture war, while The Economist editorializes that “the evidence to support medicalised gender transitions in adolescents is worryingly weak.” Citing that article, Judson Berger argues in National Review that conservatives can justly claim to be protecting trans kids by restricting such care, even as many LGBTQ activists insist that this same course will lead to harms including trans suicides. Like I said: the debate unfolds among participants who inhabit different epistemic universes.

Much Ado About Beer Cans

Then there’s a catastrophizing impulse among people who seem to have lost all sense of perspective. Did you hear Kid Rock was shooting his gun at Bud Light cans? At Vox, Emily Stewart explains how that improbably relates to the culture war over transgenderism:

In early April, Bud Light sent an influencer named Dylan Mulvaney a handful of beers. Mulvaney, in turn, posted a video of herself dressed like Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, using said beers to celebrate both March Madness and her first year of womanhood. One of the cans featured her image. It was part of a paid sponsorship deal and promotion for some sort of sweepstakes challenge where people can win $15,000 from Bud Light by sending in videos of themselves carrying a lot of beers.

This made some people very mad, and not because Holly Golightly wasn’t really a beer gal (her preference was the White Angel, a boozy mix of vodka and gin, which, whew). Instead, they were upset because Mulvaney is transgender.

Trans issues are currently front and center in America’s culture war. Anti-trans sentiment is sweeping many corners of the right, targeting children, drag shows, driver’s licenses, and health care, among other areas. It’s showing up in conservative media and conservative legislation and even working itself into the mainstream.

Now, Bud Light has found itself in the eye of the anti-trans storm. Kid Rock is shooting cans of the beer, and Travis Tritt says he’s banning the brand from his tour. Many on the right are calling for a boycott of the bestselling beer in the country. If this all sounds ludicrous, it’s because it kind of is.

One can find more sympathetic appraisals of the anti-Budweiser backlash. In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that when brands like Bud Light say they’re aiming to be more inclusive, as a marketing VP did in an interview that went viral during the backlash to the Mulvaney can, they aren’t using that word as most people understand it. In his telling, they’re actually using it in a way that includes only groups that are coded as culturally progressive, never groups that are coded as culturally conservative.

He writes:

I am not a habitual drinker of Bud Light, but, from my limited experience with the product, I can tell you that “uninclusive” is among the last terms that I would have used to describe it. Bud Light is the Amazon Basics of bad beer. I have drunk it on hunting trips with friends who have Second Amendment tattoos, and on the beach with friends who are gay. I’ve drunk it with Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Hindus. I’ve drunk it at football games, at baseball games, at NASCAR, and at concerts. I’ve drunk it with black friends, with Hispanic friends, and with white friends of both sexes. When Heinerscheid says that she wants Bud Light to be more “inclusive,” I must ask what that actually means? Putting the pope on Bud Light cans would be “inclusive.” Putting homeschooling parents on the cans would be “inclusive.” Putting feminists who find Dylan Mulvaney’s act infuriating on the cans would be “inclusive.” Hell, putting Old Order Amish people on the cans would be “inclusive.”

To me, regardless of the merits, getting excited or upset by the Bud Light marketing department is a fool’s errand, but in 2023 public discourse, there’s even a backlash to the backlash.

In The Advocate, John Casey writes:

Rather than come to the defense of a transgender woman, rather than defend a noble campaign that sought to reflect acceptance, and rather than let the campaign with Mulvaney speak for itself, Budweiser poured alcohol all over an extremist’s fire, and that will continue to singe our community.

Maybe the worst thing Budweiser did was leave Mulvaney all alone, twisting in the wind, abandoning any kind of defense of her. That is an utterly repugnant reflection of the brand.

Anheuser-Busch, weakly, did not stand up against hate. And while boycotts don’t work, they do make a statement. It’s not Kid Rock and Ted Nugent that should be boycotting Budweiser—it should be us.

Unless Bud has changed its formula, even pouring it over a fire would be of no great consequence.  

Plastics

In The Nation, Nanjala Nyabola inveighs against the material and the economic system that produced it:

Plastics are some of the most useful materials ever invented, and they are killing the planet.

Plastic is everywhere, and it perfectly encapsulates the notion that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Whether you are reading this on your phone or on your computer, you are handling the material. If you brushed your teeth this morning, odds are both your toothbrush and toothpaste contained plastic. Almost all artificial fabrics are made from plastic or its derivatives, including those presented as ethical alternatives like many kinds of vegan leather. If you are a person who menstruates, it is probably in the materials that you are using to manage that. That durability and malleability at relatively low prices is precisely what makes it dangerous to the natural environment. We consume it unthinkingly and in absurd volumes because the cost of accessing it is so low—yet it can last in the environment for hundreds of years.

The problem of plastic encapsulates everything that is wrong with whatever international order exists today. We miscalculate its balance sheet of utility because we don’t account properly for harms that cannot be easily measured in money. Decisions that look cheap on the surface look a lot different if we used a longer time horizon or stopped assuming that the planet has an infinite capacity to absorb human excess. Regions that are the most responsible for causing the problem are working hard to reallocate its consequences to other parts of the world. There would perhaps be greater cooperation if there weren’t deliberate choices taken to keep people oblivious to the scale of the problem. Companies happily brand materials like single-use water bottles as recyclable, knowing that even the most efficient recycling system cannot keep up with the rate at which they are consumed.

Although I share the author’s concerns about plastic in particular, and our general ability to consider all the negative externalities of our actions, I do not believe those problems are unique to capitalism––a point most persuasively illustrated by reading up on similar problems in noncapitalist systems.

Art, Morality, and Beauty

At The Atlantic, Judith Shulevitz argues that it’s okay to like complicated art by problematic artists:

We’re at the point when we could use a little more of the art-for-art’s-sake spirit; could let ourselves luxuriate in sensuality, beauty, and form; should offer more resistance to the pressure to find and deliver socially useful messages. I look back with a certain chagrin at how, as a young critic, I delighted in bucking my high-minded education by hunting down traces of a writer’s mixed motives, bad faith, petty and not so petty obfuscations in his writing. I took hubristic pride in my gotcha criticism and my eagle eye. But what used to feel subversive now feels like an imperative: Either scan the text for signs of immorality or be suspected of reactionary tendencies. You were hoping for aesthetic transport? Back to the consciousness-raising session with you!

She concludes with a warning from Oscar Wilde about the consequences of a world where morality somehow triumphs over art: “Art will become sterile, and Beauty will pass away from the land.”

Provocation of the Week

Gerard Baker, editor at large of The Wall Street Journal, praises anti-discrimination while denouncing a new aristocracy of elite progressive manners that he perceives as newly ascendant:

The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality. But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.

Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”

Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront. As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.

But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.

If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

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In early 2021, long before ChatGPT became a household name, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman self-published a manifesto of sorts, titled “Moore’s Law for Everything.” The original Moore’s Law, formulated in 1965, describes the development of microchips, the tiny silicon wafers that power your computer. More specifically, it predicted that the number of transistors that engineers could cram onto a chip would roughly double every year. As Altman sees it, something like that astonishing rate of progress will soon apply to housing, food, medicine, education—everything. The vision is nothing short of utopian. We ride the exponential curve all the way to paradise.

In late February, Altman invoked Moore again, this time proposing “a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months.” This claim did not go unchallenged: “Oh dear god what nonsense,” replied Grady Booch, the chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research. But whether astute or just absurd, Altman’s comment is not unique: Technologists have been invoking and adjusting Moore’s Law to suit their own ends for decades. Indeed, when Gordon Moore himself died last month at the age of 94, the legendary engineer and executive, who in his lifetime built one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies and made computers accessible to hundreds of millions of people, was remembered most of all for his prediction—and also, perhaps, for the optimism it inspired.

Which makes sense: Moore’s Law defined at least half a century of technological progress and, in so doing, helped shape the world as we know it. It’s no wonder that all manner of technologists have latched on to it. They want desperately to believe—and for others to believe—that their technology will take off in the same way microchips did. In this impulse, there is something telling. To understand the appeal of Moore’s Law is to understand how a certain type of Silicon Valley technologist sees the world.

The first thing to know about Moore’s Law is that it isn’t a law at all—not in a legalistic sense, not in a scientific sense, not in any sense, really. It’s more of an observation. In an article for Electronics magazine published 58 years ago this week, Moore noted that the number of transistors on each chip had been doubling every year. This remarkable progress (and associated drop in costs), he predicted, would continue for at least the next decade. And it did—for much longer, in fact. Depending on whom you ask and how they choose to interpret the claim, it may have held until 2005, or the present day, or some point in between.

Carver Mead, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology, was the first to call Moore’s observation a “law.” By the early 1980s, that phrase—Moore’s Law—had become the slogan for a nascent industry, says Cyrus Mody, a science historian at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, and the author of The Long Arm of Moore’s Law. With the U.S. economy having spent the better part of the past decade in the dumps, he told me, a message of relentless progress had PR appeal. Companies could say, “‘Look, our industry is so consistently innovative that we have a law.’”

[Read: AI is like … nuclear weapons?]

This wasn’t just spin. Microchip technology really had developed according to Moore’s predicted schedule. As the tech got more and more intricate, Moore’s Law became a sort of metronome by which the industry kept time. That rhythm was a major asset. Silicon Valley executives were making business-strategy decisions on its basis, David C. Brock, a science historian who co-wrote a biography of Gordon Moore, told me.

For a while, the annual doubling of transistors on a chip seemed like magic: It happened year after year, even though no one was shooting for that specific target. At a certain point, though, when the industry realized the value of consistency, Moore’s Law morphed into a benchmark to be reached through investment and planning, and not simply a phenomenon to be taken for granted, like gravity or the tides. “It became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Paul Ceruzzi, a science historian and a curator emeritus at the National Air and Space museum, told me.

Still, for almost as long as Moore’s Law has existed, people have foretold its imminent demise. If they were wrong, that’s in part because Moore’s original prediction has been repeatedly tweaked (or outright misconstrued), whether by extending his predicted doubling time, or by stretching his meaning of a single chip, or by focusing on computer power or performance instead of the raw number of transistors. Once Moore’s Law had been fudged in all these ways, the floodgates opened to more extravagant and brazen reinterpretations. Why not apply the law to pixels, to drugs, to razor blades?

An endless run of spin-offs ensued. Moore’s Law of cryptocurrency. Moore’s Law of solar panels. Moore’s Law of intelligence. Moore’s Law for everything. Moore himself used to quip that his law had come to stand for just about any supposedly exponential technological growth. That’s another law, I guess: At every turn of the technological-hype cycle, Moore’s Law will be invoked.

The reformulation of Moore’s observation as a law, and then its application to a new technology, creates an air of Newtonian precision—as if that new technology could only grow in scale. It transforms something you want to happen into something that will happen—technology as destiny.

For decades, that shift has held a seemingly irresistible appeal. More than 20 years ago, the computer scientist Ray Kurzweil fit Moore’s Law into a broad argument for the uninterrupted exponential progress of technology over the past century—a trajectory that he still believes is drawing us toward “the Singularity.” In 2011, Elon Musk professed to be searching for a “Moore’s Law of Space.” A year later, Mark Zuckerberg posited a “social-networking version of Moore’s Law,” whereby the rate at which users share content on Facebook would double every year. (Look how that turned out.) More recently, in 2021, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, cited Moore’s Law as evidence that “blockchain performance should at least double every year.” But no tech titan has been quite as explicit in their assertions as Sam Altman. “This technological revolution,” he says in his essay, “is unstoppable.” No one can resist it. And no one can be held responsible.

Moore himself did not think that technological progress was inevitable. “His whole life was a counterexample to that idea,” Brock told me. “Quietly measuring what was actually happening, what was actually going on with the technology, what was actually going on with the economics, and acting accordingly”—that was what Moore was about. He constantly checked and rechecked his analysis, making sure everything still held up. You don’t do that if you believe you have hit upon an ironclad law of nature. You don’t do that if you believe in the unstoppable march of technological progress.

Moore recognized that his law would eventually run up against a brick wall, some brute fact of physics that would halt it in its tracks—the size of an atom, the speed of light. Or worse, it would cause catastrophe before it did. “The nature of exponentials is that you push them out,” he said in a 2005 interview with Techworld magazine, “and eventually disaster happens.”

Exactly what sort of disaster Moore envisioned is unclear. Brock, his biographer, suspects that it might have been ecological ruin; Moore was, after all, a passionate conservationist. Perhaps he viewed microchips as a sort of invasive species, multiplying and multiplying at the expense of the broader human ecosystem. Whatever the particulars, he was an optimist, not a utopian. And yet, the law bearing his name is now cited in support of a worldview that was not his own. That is the tragedy of Moore’s Law.

Scientists from Georgia Institute of Technology have been studying the Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter, a bug that flings pee droplets at super fast speeds from its anal stylus. Engineers are investigating real world applications from this bug's rare ability. Discovery's Curiosity Daily podcast helps you get smarter about the world around you. Find Curiosity Daily today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Listen now.

Dear President Biden,

Something remarkable happened on the morning of February 25, the day of the Nigerian presidential election. Many Nigerians went out to vote holding in their hearts a new sense of trust. Cautious trust, but still trust. Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigerians have had little confidence in elections. To vote in a presidential election was to brace yourself for the inevitable aftermath: fraud.

Elections would be rigged because elections were always rigged; the question was how badly. Sometimes voting felt like an inconsequential gesture as predetermined “winners” were announced.

A law passed last year, the 2022 Electoral Act, changed everything. It gave legal backing to the electronic accreditation of voters and the electronic transmission of results, in a process determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The chair of the commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, assured Nigerians that votes would be counted in the presence of voters and recorded in a result sheet, and that a photo of the signed sheet would immediately be uploaded to a secure server. When rumors circulated about the commission not keeping its word, Yakubu firmly rebutted them. In a speech at Chatham House in London (a favorite influence-burnishing haunt of Nigerian politicians), he reiterated that the public would be able to view “polling-unit results as soon as they are finalized on election day.”

Nigerians applauded him. If results were uploaded right after voting was concluded, then the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which has been in power since 2015, would have no opportunity for manipulation. Technology would redeem Nigerian democracy. Results would no longer feature more votes than voters. Nigerians would no longer have their leaders chosen for them. Elections would, finally, capture the true voice of the people. And so trust and hope were born.

By the evening of February 25, 2023, that trust had dissipated. Election workers had arrived hours late, or without basic election materials. There were reports of violence, of a shooting at a polling unit, and of political operatives stealing or destroying ballot boxes. Some law-enforcement officers seemed to have colluded in voter intimidation; in Lagos, a policeman stood idly by as an APC spokesperson threatened members of a particular ethnic group who he believed would vote for the opposition.

Most egregious of all, the electoral commission reneged on its assurance to Nigerians. The presidential results were not uploaded in real time. Voters, understandably suspicious, reacted; videos from polling stations show voters shouting that results be uploaded right away. Many took cellphone photos of the result sheets. Curiously, many polling units were able to upload the results of the House and Senate elections, but not the presidential election. A relative who voted in Lagos told me, “We refused to leave the polling unit until the INEC staff uploaded the presidential result. The poor guy kept trying and kept getting an ‘error’ message. There was no network problem. I had internet on my phone. My bank app was working. The Senate and House results were easily uploaded. So why couldn’t the presidential results be uploaded on the same system?” Some electoral workers in polling units claimed that they could not upload results because they didn’t have a password, an excuse that voters understood to be subterfuge. By the end of the day, it had become obvious that something was terribly amiss.  

No one was surprised when, by the morning of the 26th, social media became flooded with evidence of irregularities. Result sheets were now slowly being uploaded on the INEC portal, and could be viewed by the public. Voters compared their cellphone photos with the uploaded photos and saw alterations: numbers crossed out and rewritten; some originally written in black ink had been rewritten in blue, some blunderingly whited-out with Tipp-Ex. The election had been not only rigged, but done in such a shoddy, shabby manner that it insulted the intelligence of Nigerians.

Nigerian democracy had long been a two-party structure—power alternating between the APC and the Peoples Democratic Party—until this year, when the Labour Party, led by Peter Obi, became a third force. Obi was different; he seemed honest and accessible, and his vision of anti-corruption and self-sufficiency gave rise to a movement of supporters who called themselves “Obi-dients.” Unusually large, enthusiastic crowds turned up for his rallies. The APC considered him an upstart who could not win, because his small party lacked traditional structures. It is ironic that many images of altered result sheets showed votes overwhelmingly being transferred from the Labour Party to the APC.

As vote counting began at INEC, representatives of different political parties—except for the APC—protested. The results being counted, they said, did not reflect what they had documented at the polling units. There were too many discrepancies.

“There is no point progressing in error, Mr. Chairman. We are racing to nowhere,” one party spokesperson said to Yakubu. “Let us get it right before we proceed with the collation.” But the INEC chair, opaque-faced and lordly, refused. The counting continued swiftly until, at 4:10 a.m. on March 1, the ruling party’s candidate, Bola Tinubu, was announced as president-elect.

A subterranean silence reigned across the country. Few people celebrated. Many Nigerians were in shock. “Why,” my young cousin asked me, “did INEC not do what it said it would do?”

It seemed truly perplexing that, in the context of a closely contested election in a low-trust society, the electoral commission would ignore so many glaring red flags in its rush to announce a winner. (It had the power to pause vote counting, to investigate irregularities—as it would do in the governorship elections two weeks later.)

Rage is brewing, especially among young people. The discontent, the despair, the tension in the air have not been this palpable in years.

How surprising then to see the U.S. State Department congratulate Tinubu on March 1. “We understand that many Nigerians and some of the parties have expressed frustration about the manner in which the process was conducted and the shortcomings of technical elements that were used for the first time in a presidential election cycle,” the spokesperson said. And yet the process was described as a “competitive election” that “represents a new period for Nigerian politics and democracy.”

American intelligence surely cannot be so inept. A little homework and they would know what is manifestly obvious to me and so many others: The process was imperiled not by technical shortcomings but by deliberate manipulation.

An editorial in The Washington Post echoed the State Department in intent if not in affect. In an oddly infantilizing tone, as though intended to mollify the simpleminded, we are told that “officials have asserted that technical glitches, not sabotage, were the issue,” that “much good” came from the Nigerian elections, which are worth celebrating because, among other things, “no one has blocked highways, as happened in Brazil after Jair Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid.” We are also told that “it is encouraging, first, that the losing candidates are pursuing their claims through the courts,” though any casual observer of Nigerian politics would know that courts are the usual recourse after any election.

The editorial has the imaginative poverty so characteristic of international coverage of African issues—no reading of the country’s mood, no nuance or texture. But its intellectual laziness, unusual in such a rigorous newspaper, is astonishing. Since when does a respected paper unequivocally ascribe to benign malfunction something that may very well be malignant—just because government officials say so? There is a kind of cordial condescension in both the State Department’s and The Washington Post’s responses to the election. That the bar for what is acceptable has been so lowered can only be read as contempt.

I hope, President Biden, that you do not personally share this cordial condescension. You have spoken of the importance of a “global community for democracy,” and the need to stand up for “justice and the rule of law.” A global community for democracy cannot thrive in the face of apathy from its most powerful member. Why would the United States, which prioritizes the rule of law, endorse a president-elect who has emerged from an unlawful process?

Compromised is a ubiquitous word in Nigeria’s political landscape—it is used to mean “bribed” but also “corrupted,” more generally. “They have been compromised,” Nigerians will say, to explain so much that is wrong, from infrastructure failures to unpaid pensions. Many believe that the INEC chair has been “compromised,” but there is no evidence of the astronomical U.S.-dollar amounts he is rumored to have received from the president-elect. The extremely wealthy Tinubu is himself known to be an enthusiastic participant in the art of “compromising”; some Nigerians call him a “drug baron” because, in 1993, he forfeited to the United States government $460,000 of his income that a Chicago court determined to be proceeds from heroin trafficking. Tinubu has strongly denied all charges of corruption.

I hope it will not surprise you, President Biden, if I argue that the American response to the Nigerian election also bears the faint taint of that word, compromised, because it is so removed from the actual situation in Nigeria as to be disingenuous. Has the United States once again decided that what matters in Africa is not democracy but stability? (Perhaps you could tell British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who quickly congratulated Tinubu, that an illegitimate government in a country full of frustrated young people does not portend stability.) Or is it about that ever-effulgent nemesis China, as so much of U.S. foreign policy now invariably seems to be? The battle for influence in Africa will not be won by supporting the same undemocratic processes for which China is criticized.

This Nigerian election was supposed to be different, and the U.S. response cannot—must not—be business as usual. The Nigerian youth, long politically quiescent, have awoken. About 70 percent of Nigerians are under 30 and many voted for the first time in this election. Nigerian politicians exhibit a stupefying ability to tell barefaced lies, so to participate in political life has long required a suspension of conscience. But young people have had enough. They want transparency and truth; they want basic necessities, minimal corruption, competent political leaders, and an environment that can foster their generation’s potential.

This election is also about the continent. Nigeria is a symbolic crucible of Africa’s future, and a transparent election will rouse millions of other young Africans who are watching, and who long, too, for the substance and not the hollow form of democracy. If people have confidence in the democratic process, it engenders hope, and nothing is more essential to the human spirit than hope.

Today, election results are still being uploaded on the INEC server. Bizarrely, many contradict the results announced by INEC. The opposition parties are challenging the election in court. But there is reason to worry about whether they will get a fair ruling. INEC has not fully complied with court orders to release election materials. The credibility of the Nigerian Supreme Court has been strained by its recent judgments in political cases, or so-called judicial coronations, such as one in which the court declared the winner of the election for governor of Imo State a candidate who had come in fourth place.

Lawlessness has consequences. Every day Nigerians are coming out into the streets to protest the election. APC, uneasy about its soiled “victory,” is sounding shrill and desperate, as though still in campaign mode. It has accused the opposition party of treason, an unintelligent smear easily disproved but disquieting nonetheless, because false accusations are often used to justify malicious state actions.

I supported Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, and hoped he would win, as polls predicted, but I was prepared to accept any result, because we had been assured that technology would guard the sanctity of votes. The smoldering disillusionment felt by many Nigerians is not so much because their candidate did not win as because the election they had dared to trust was, in the end, so unacceptably and unforgivably flawed.

Congratulating its outcome, President Biden, tarnishes America’s self-proclaimed commitment to democracy. Please do not give the sheen of legitimacy to an illegitimate process. The United States should be what it says it is.

Sincerely,

Chimamanda Adichie