For the past several decades, Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, in New Hampshire, has hosted a frequent flier with no known credentials. It comes and goes as it pleases, always bypassing security; it carries no luggage, not even a government-issued ID.

But unlike the other passengers that regularly flock to Pease, the upland sandpiper—a spindly, brown-freckled bird native to North America’s grasslands—has no destination apart from the airport itself. The fields between Pease’s runway and taxiways are now the only place in the entire state where the species is known to regularly reproduce. Each year, about seven sandpiper couples nest in the airport’s meticulously mowed grasslands, fledging roughly a dozen chicks, according to Brett Ferry, a wildlife biologist at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Should they be snuffed out, Ferry told me, “that would be it for New Hampshire’s breeding population.”

New Hampshire’s sandpipers aren’t alone in their plight. Across the United States (and, really, the world), all sorts of animals that have lost their natural homes to urban development and human-driven climate change are seeking sanctuary at airports. Vulnerable butterflies have camped out at the dunes near LAX; an endangered garter snake has found one of its last refuges at San Francisco International Airport. Terrapin turtles searching for egg-laying sites have triggered traffic jams on JFK’s runways. But perhaps no group is in greater peril than the Northeast’s grassland birds, which, in recent decades, have found themselves almost exclusively relegated to airports and airfields. It’s a responsibility that these travel hubs never asked for, and mostly do not want. Now the regional survival of many species may hinge on the hospitality of some of the country’s most bird-averse spots.

[Read: A basic premise of conservation looks shakier than ever]

By most accounts, upland sandpipers, eastern meadowlarks, grasshopper sparrows, and other grassland birds have roots in the Midwest, only arriving en masse to the Northeast during the 19th century as European settlers converted massive tracts of land into agricultural fields. The birds found grass short enough to forage for insects in and tall enough to cloak their burrow-esque nests, and their population boomed. But just a century or so later, as America’s farming prospects shifted west, East Coasters began to abandon their fields. Some land regressed into forest; some was developed for other use. Almost as quickly as grassland-bird numbers had surged in the area, they plummeted.

In many northeastern states, grasshopper sparrows and eastern meadowlarks are now listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern. Upland sandpipers, once abundant throughout the region, appear to have entirely vanished from Rhode Island, according to Charles Clarkson, the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island; they may soon be gone from Vermont too. The birds have several holdouts scattered throughout the region—among them, private farmlands, Maine’s blueberry barrens, even a few of New York’s landfills. But as reliable grasslands continue to grow scarcer, airports in particular “have become disproportionately important,” says Pamela Hunt, New Hampshire Audubon’s senior biologist for avian conservation.

Airports, of course, were never designed to be conservation sites—if anything, their core dictate is antithetical to that. “Our mission at the FAA is safe air travel; that is it,” says Amy Anderson, a wildlife biologist with the Federal Aviation Administration. That mission is very often synonymous with making the country’s travel hubs “less attractive for wildlife.” Airport lawns, which primarily serve as an aesthetically appealing buffer for water runoff and planes that skid off runways, are regularly mowed with blades that can destroy nests; they’re treated with chemicals that kill off the insects that many birds and small mammals eat. Creatures that mosey onto runways, where they can damage hardware or compromise landings and takeoffs, can expect to be shooed away with all manner of noise cannons, lasers, pyrotechnics, or even trained peregrine falcons. During emergencies, animals that can’t otherwise be dealt with may even be shot. When animals end up on these properties, it’s generally not because they’re pristine or safe. It’s “because they have no other option,” Clarkson told me.

For certain animals, these odd real-estate choices have paid dividends. The San Francisco garter snake and its primary prey, the California red-legged frog—federally listed as endangered and threatened, respectively—have found a stable home on SFO property, according to Natalie Reeder, the airport’s former wildlife biologist. Of the half dozen or so populations of garter snakes still found in California, SFO’s is the only one that is not in “really big trouble,” Reeder told me.

[Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals]

But SFO’s haven is more an exception than the norm. After many years of sustaining a “very nicely growing population” of burrowing owls—a state-listed species of special concern—the airport in San Jose, California, stopped maintaining the birds’ artificial burrows, and their numbers plunged, says Sandra Menzel, a senior biologist at the natural-resource-management company Albion, who has studied the birds. A survey conducted last year found just one breeding pair at the airport, down from a 2002 peak of around 40. (An SJC spokesperson told me that “the reasons for the decline in owl numbers at the Airport are not fully known,” and pointed out that the birds have been declining in general “throughout the South Bay.”) In the Northeast, too, there’s been “all sorts of conflict,” says Patrick Comins, the executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. In his state, he told me, grassland birds staked out territory at Meriden-Markham Municipal Airport—only to later be crowded out by an intensive mowing regimen and space-hogging solar panels. (MMK didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

From the airports’ perspective, having vulnerable species on site is usually more trouble than it’s worth—especially when their winged tenants start to endanger humans attempting flight. Since the late 1980s or so, when the FAA started keeping track, birds and planes have collided more than 220,000 times—incidents that have, at times, downed entire aircrafts. The most serious concerns are usually big, flocking species, such as gulls or geese. But “even a 10-gram songbird, if it hits right, could take out an airplane,” Scott Rush, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University, told me.

The tactics that airports deploy to avoid bird strikes don’t always work. Oregon’s Portland International Airport has, for many years, been aggressively stripping its grounds of vegetation, to the point of exposing the underlying soil, to deter grass-loving geese. “It looks like the moon,” says Nick Atwell, the senior natural-resources and wildlife manager at the Port of Portland. But the anti-goose strategy inadvertently transformed the airport’s landscape into perfect, barren bait for a threatened bird called the streaked horned lark. Despite PDX’s best efforts to keep the larks off runways, they’re now posing a strike risk. Atwell worries that the airport could become, or already is, an ecological sink: a habitat that lures in animals, only to accelerate their decline.

That may have already happened at New Jersey’s Atlantic City International Airport. In the early 2000s, the airport set aside 300 acres of its property as a sanctuary for upland sandpipers and other grassland birds, even modifying its regular mowing schedule in the summer to spare their nests. But within months of the intervention, “things went a little haywire,” says Chris Boggs, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who’s been working with the airport since the early 1990s. Boggs estimates that total recorded bird strikes skyrocketed by 60 to 70 percent. He remembers scraping broken sandpiper bodies off the pavement, unable to stop himself from tallying up who was left. “We had three,” he would say to himself. “Now we have two.” By 2019, the airport had resumed its regular mowing protocol. It had wanted to help the birds, Boggs told me. Instead, “we were killing them off.”

[Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America]

At a few northeastern sites, humans and grassland birds have negotiated a truce. Pease, in New Hampshire, is one; another is Massachusetts’ Westover Air Reserve Base, one of the largest sanctuaries for grassland birds in the entire Northeast. Sandpipers, grasshopper sparrows, and eastern meadowlarks can all be found breeding on its 1,300-plus acres of viable habitat, which are far quieter and less traveled than commercial airports, says Andrew Vitz, the state ornithologist. Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife has aided in several of the site’s conservation efforts, including the planting of bird-friendly grasses.

Replicating those efforts could, in theory, turn more of the Northeast into hospitable grassland. Airports could, for instance, swap out some of their turf grass for hardier native species that require less summertime mowing, as Westover has. But many such proposals still feel like Band-Aids at best, says José Ramírez-Garofalo, a biologist at Rutgers University who is studying grassland birds at landfills. The birds are mostly confined to fragmented, artificial plots of land where people’s needs will almost always trump animals’.

In an ideal world, airports would just be layovers for grassland birds on their way to roomy tracts of protected land that they could call their own. But those habitats no longer exist. “If we truly want grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers to be a significant part of the community, it’s going to take a heck of an effort” to create space for them, says Brian Washburn, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture—efforts that people may not be willing to make. Which leaves animals still turning to airports as places of last resort. Creatures’ options are now so limited that even the ones repeatedly booted off the premises will often try to run, slither, or dig themselves back on, says Guiming Wang, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University.

These strange, human-made habitats are now some of the last places in the Northeast where birders can glimpse grassland species and hear their whirring calls. “People from all around the region will come and see them,” Ramírez-Garofalo told me. But with the world’s appetite for travel increasing, experts such as Hunt, of New Hampshire Audubon, worry that even these few stable bird populations won’t be around for long. “It’s perfectly reasonable to think that despite everything we’re doing, they’ll still blink out,” she told me. As airports’ human clientele grows, their tolerance for their wild and rare residents may only further shrink.

Which players impressed our football pundit Garth Crooks enough to make his latest Team of the Season?

Three and a half years since the start of a pandemic that has killed millions of people and debilitated countless more, the world is still stuck at the start of the COVID-19 crisis in one maddening way: No one can say with any certainty how, exactly, the outbreak began. Many scientists think the new virus spilled over directly from a wild animal, perhaps at a Chinese wet market; some posit that the pathogen leaked accidentally from a local laboratory in Wuhan, China, the pandemic’s likely epicenter. All of them lack the slam-dunk evidence to prove one hypothesis and rule out the rest.

That’s not to say nothing has changed. Those embroiled in the origins fracas now have much more data to scrutinize, debate, and re-debate. In March, I reported that the case for a zoonotic origin had acquired a consequential new piece of support: An international team of scientists had uncovered genetic data, collected from a wet market in Wuhan in the weeks after the venue was closed on January 1, 2020, that linked the coronavirus to wild animals. This evidence, they said, indicated that one of those creatures could have been shedding SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19; one of the most intriguing bits of data pointed to raccoon dogs, a foxlike creature that was already known to be vulnerable to the virus. The finding wasn’t direct evidence of an animal infection, but, stacked alongside other clues, ​​“this really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research, told me at the time.

Not everyone agreed that the finding counted as a substantial new insight. When the researchers who originally collected the samples, many of them from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, published their own analysis of the data in April—a revision of an earlier report—they emphasized that there was no clear evidence that the virus had been introduced to the market by a wild animal. Then, this month, Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, in Seattle, posted a third analysis of the market data, inspired in part, he told me, by his concern that the public discussion of the initial findings, and their connection to raccoon dogs, had overinflated their worth. The international team’s report, he argued, hardly moved the needle on the origins debate at all—certainly not “much beyond where it was before,” he told me.

Bloom’s analysis, too, set off a wave of fervor—including a fresh spate of claims that he told me were “exaggerated,” or even outright wrong; some even asserted, for instance, that his preprint proves that raccoon dogs “weren’t infected, which is not an accurate summary,” he said. All the while, researchers have been squabbling on social media over the minutiae of statistical methodology, and what constitutes a meaningful amount of viral RNA; some have even come to loggerheads publicly at conferences.

At the crux of this particular fight is a difference of interpretation, with one camp of researchers contending that the recent data matter a lot, and another asserting that they matter much less, or perhaps not even a little bit at all. Under most other circumstances, a scientific scuffle this deep in the weeds might hold the attention of a few dozen people for a few months at best. Here, though, the central topic is one of the most consequential in recent memory—a virus that’s left its mark on the world’s entire population, and will continue to do so. Which has made it easy for pitched battles over differences in scientific opinion to become a public spectacle—and difficult, maybe even impossible, for the debate to ever end, no matter what evidence might emerge next.

The genetic sequences analyzed in the March report contained evidence of a zoonotic origin that is more circumstantial than direct. Researchers extracted them from swabs taken from surfaces in and around Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from January to March of 2020, weeks after the first known COVID cases were documented in Wuhan. That makes these environmental samples “a useful part of the story,” Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong, told me. Though, by themselves, “they are limited in what they are able to tell us.”

By the time the swabs were collected by China CDC researchers, Chinese officials had hastily closed Huanan; many vendors had likely disappeared with their animals, or culled them en masse. The swabs could show only where the virus had once been, or which animals the venue had sold—more akin to dusting a crime scene for fingerprints than catching a vagrant in the act. And although they could show where animal and viral genetic material had mixed, they couldn’t guarantee that those two types of genetic material had been deposited at the same time. Nor could they distinguish between, say, a sick creature sneezing on the bars of its cage and an infected human coughing on an enclosure housing healthy wildlife. Those answers could have come from swabs taken directly from the noses or mouths of live animals for sale at Huanan in late November or early December of 2019. But as far as researchers know, those swabs don’t exist—or at least, the public has no record of them.

The sequences from these environmental samples, then, are “what we have,” says Katherine Xue, a computational virologist at Stanford who previously worked with Jesse Bloom, the author of the May preprint, but was not involved in any of the new reports. And “we want to do what we can with what we have.” When the international team behind the March analysis found that several market samples contained genetic material from both the virus and a wild animal known to be susceptible to it—including the common raccoon dog—they said that the best explanation for this commingling was an infection.

As I reported at the time, the data don’t constitute direct evidence of an infected raccoon dog at the market. “But this is exactly what we would observe if infected raccoon dogs were in fact present in this location,” says Kristian Andersen, a computational biologist and virologist at the Scripps Research Institute and one of the authors of the March analysis. Which, they wrote in their analysis, “identifies these species, particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019.”

Other researchers, though, think that calling the evidence even supportive of an animal origin for the outbreak is a stretch. The samples were taken too long after the outbreak’s start to be meaningful, some said; the data were too shaky to even hint at the idea of an infected raccoon dog, others insisted, much less one that might have passed the virus to us.

Bloom, too, was unswayed. The swabs contained genetic material from many creatures at the market—some of them alive, some dead; some that we now know can host the virus, others that almost certainly do not. In Bloom’s analysis, he explains that the species repeatedly highlighted as potential hosts weren’t the animals that were most frequently and notably commingled with the virus in the market swabs. “If you’re trying to figure out if there is a meaningful association between raccoon dog and viral genetic material,” he told me, there should be a lot of raccoon-dog genetic material in the places where the virus was found, and far less where the virus was not.

But that wasn’t the case for raccoon dogs—or “any of the animals that could conceivably have been infected,” Bloom told me. Instead, in his analysis he saw the virus most closely linked to several kinds of fish, which aren’t known to be viable hosts for it. People, Bloom told me, were the probable source of SARS-CoV-2 in those spots. All of that “probably just suggests that it had been spread around the market by humans by the time” the swabs were taken, diminishing the samples’ usefulness.

Several other scientists not involved in Bloom’s preprint were quick to point out the limits and flaws in his approach. To draw meaningful conclusions from this type of analysis, researchers would need samples amassed at about the same time, with the same collection goals in mind. That wasn’t the case for these samples, Zach Hensel, a biophysicist who has been publicly critical of Bloom’s report, told me. Researchers took them over the course of many weeks after Huanan’s closure, altering their tactics as more intel came to light. A first foray into the market, for instance, targeted the parts of the venue where COVID cases had been identified, a strategy that would, by design, turn up more virus-positive samples; another, conducted days later, focused on stalls that had been discovered to have housed wildlife, regardless of their proximity to sick people. Many samples in the latter set, then, would be expected to be virus-negative—and were. Sloshing them together with the first set of swabs and trying to pull patterns out could end up masking actual associations between the virus and any wild animal hosts.

Bloom also points out that many of the swabs that turned up mammalian DNA, including one containing raccoon-dog genetic sequences that some members of the international team initially emphasized, had relatively little material from the virus on them. But genetic material, especially RNA—the basis of SARS-CoV-2’s genome—degrades fast; a difference of even a few days could artificially deflate how important a particular swab looked. Alice Hughes also pointed out that certain market locales highlighted in Bloom’s preprint, including surfaces around duck or fish tanks, might have better preserved viral RNA simply because they were cold or damp. When I brought up these concerns with Bloom, he admitted “there are certainly a lot of confounders” that could have skewed his results. His main goal, he said, was just to show that “the samples are not sufficient to answer whether or not there were infected animals.”

Bloom’s re-analysis doesn’t mark a major shift in thinking for Hughes, who told me she thinks “there is reasonable support for a zoonotic origin.” Felicia Goodrum, a virologist and an immunologist at the University of Arizona who has written repeatedly on the origins debate but was not involved in the team’s analysis, agrees. The Huanan market is “most likely where the spillover occurred,” she told me. “I really, truly believe that, based on the accumulation of the evidence.”

Data never sit alone in a vacuum: They’re amassed, interpreted, and reinterpreted alongside the totality of evidence that precedes them. By themselves, the sequences from the Huanan market couldn’t say much. But they fit a broader, more detailed scenario that researchers on the team behind the March analysis had been exploring for years.

History has always supported a zoonotic scenario: A wet-market spillover is what researchers are fairly certain started the SARS outbreak in China in 2002, potentially via infected masked palm civets. In this latest outbreak, the Huanan Market was one of only four wet markets in all of Wuhan that has consistently been documented selling an array of live, coronavirus-susceptible wildlife; the earliest known COVID cases were detected near the venue, centering “on it like a bull’s-eye,” says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and one of the authors of the March report. Scientists analyzing genetic sequences collected from the venue have also detected two distinct coronavirus lineages from the outbreak’s earliest days—a likely indication, some researchers have argued, that the pathogen spilled over from animals into humans twice.

The missing clincher for them is which creature might have initially carried the virus into the market. The raccoon-dog swab was particularly compelling to the team not only because it contained gobs of animal genetic sequences, and very few human ones—but also because it had been plucked from a stall where Eddie Holmes, one of the report’s authors, had snapped a photo of a raccoon dog in a cage years before. The clues to a possible animal host, Worobey told me, were “right in the very stall we said they would be.”

But data are also amassed, interpreted, and reinterpreted by humans, who have their own biases. The experts now quarreling over the importance of the recent data approached the new evidence having already drawn tentative conclusions and made their opinions known. Kristian Andersen was an early proponent of a zoonotic origin, and has repeatedly denounced the notion of a lab leak; Worobey was later to voice his support for the zoonotic hypothesis, but is now no less enthusiastic. And long before they and their colleagues stumbled across the data that yielded their March analysis, which didn’t become publicly available until recently, the researchers had been hoping that such sequences would appear—noting in a 2022 paper that this sort of intel could constitute an essential and still missing puzzle piece. Now that the evidence has emerged, and fits with their established thinking, it feels validating, Worobey told me.

Bloom, by contrast, has long positioned himself as an agnostic moderate, and isn’t yet budging from his neutral territory. Others who have come out vocally in favor of a lab-leak scenario have cast their own doubts on the international team’s analysis. In a landscape so sparsely populated by data, it gets all too easy for people to fill in the gaps with speculation; “what starts off as a weak preference,” Hughes told me, “becomes almost like a religion.” I’ve been reporting now for three years on many controversial COVID stories, along the way interviewing hundreds of opinionated scientists about dozens of thorny questions. Through it all, this debate has stood out for being so ignitable. Individual data points have become catalysts; single statements have been endlessly scrutinized. And experts have staked out territory and stuck to it almost dogmatically—many of them to the point of avoiding admitting past mistakes. COVID’s origins are now shrouded in combustible gas, with matches scattered everywhere: Lighting up a single point, normally harmless enough, inevitably sets off a conflagration.

All of this leaves the world trying to peer through the smoke. “All hypotheses are on the table,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s technical lead on COVID-19, told me. “We can’t take any off.” To her mind, though, “there’s much more evidence to support a zoonotic origin.”

More evidence could still emerge. The international team isn’t yet done analyzing the Chinese researchers’ original data set, which was recently released in fuller form. They’re eager to mine the sequences to tease out the subspecies of some of the market’s potential SARS-CoV-2 hosts, which could inform searches for the virus out in nature or on animal farms; other experiments, analyzing how degraded certain genetic samples are, could hint at how much time passed between the moment the biological material was dropped and the moment it was picked up. Van Kerkhove has also separately been pressing the Chinese researchers for more information on how these and other samples might have been collected, and any intel on where the market’s animals might have been sourced from—which could guide searches for evidence of the virus or its relatives on farms or in the wild. These bits of data, too, would all be incremental,with no single shred of evidence acting as total proof or disproof. But each could constitute a clue, Van Kerkhove told me, to continue nudging the conversation along.

In the grand scheme of things, though, the world probably won’t ever get data that will conclusively end the debate. Even if scientists were to turn up virus-positive samples from a live creature from the market—direct evidence of an infected animal—it would remain technically possible that a human caught the virus first, then passed it on to the venue’s wildlife. But data that aren’t debate-ending can still be notable. And the recent sequences from the market swabs could easily, and frustratingly, end up being one of the best clues to the pandemic’s roots that the world is likely to get.

Which players impressed our football pundit Garth Crooks enough to make his latest Team of the Week?

This story contains spoilers for the ninth episode of HBO’s Succession.

One of the (intentional) frustrations of this season of Succession has been how little information we viewers are allowed regarding the show’s world. The Roys are so reliably insulated in their penthouse panic rooms, and so exclusively fixated on their own obsessions, that, stuck with them, we get only fleeting glimpses of anything non-Roy. This episode, I found myself compulsively scanning chyrons and squinting at the text of the fake New York Times story about ATN’s preemptive Election Night call, trying to glean how bad things really were out there. (For what it’s worth, I learned that Ron Petkus—played by Stephen Root in the fake-CPAC episode of Season 3—is one of Jeryd Mencken’s first appointments, and that Roman Roy is well known in media circles for his “incendiary communication style.”)

With Mencken in particular, it’s impossible not to be queasily curious about his nature. Is he a fascist-fascist, or just a performer who name-drops “H”—as in Hitler—for attention? What exactly has he campaigned on that would make Rava so alarmed for the safety of her daughter? Without access to anything tangible, we’re left with nonspecific anxiety about what his ambient authoritarianism might mean. And this is because, for a family supposedly engaged in the news business, the Roys are strikingly uninterested in current affairs. They’ve always existed at a cosseted remove from the real world. Postelection, though, and without Logan, they’re more exposed than they’ve ever been to something new, something that could be called consequences.

[Read: It’s just a fascist president, Kendall; how bad could it be?]

“Church and State,” the middle of three final Succession episodes written by Jesse Armstrong, depicts Logan’s long-anticipated funeral, appropriately set on the same day that protesters are marching with gasoline cans in Manhattan. (Roman smiling at the words “violence and intimidation” on an ATN newscast while cockily practicing his eulogy is a nice touch.) Kendall, watching a restaurant board up its windows, learns that Rava will be taking her kids out of town rather than attending their grandfather’s service. He doesn’t take the news well. “You’re too online, okay?” he spits at Rava, while his kids watch from the car. “You’ve lost context. Everything is fine.” He bangs on the windows. He threatens to get “an emergency court order” to stop Rava from leaving the city. He says he’ll physically block the car from leaving, a posture that lasts not one second before he gives up and lets them pass.

Kendall has been pitiable in the past, and he’s even been pathetic. There’s something about Jeremy Strong’s hangdog face that makes Ken’s attempts at grandiosity always seem nakedly insecure and totally unconvincing. He’s preposterous when he’s fantasizing that he can steal custody of his kids from Rava, or trying to strong-arm the potential president-elect into carrying out his orders. He’s a child. Which is what makes his improvised eulogy for Logan—a soaring, Shakespearean soliloquy that somehow honors capitalism itself as much as any man—so improbable. We’re supposed to believe that Kendall, lamentable nepo-baby lemon that he is, could summon this kind of rhetorical power? “Corpuscles of life gushing around this nation”? “This wonderful civilization that we have built from the mud”? I love Kenny despite my better instincts—his attempts at humanity, his awkward efforts to be loved, even his deluded creative imagination. But it requires so much suspension of disbelief to consider him an orator of this kind of power.

This isn’t to say the funeral scene isn’t thrilling. Succession is never better than when it’s being tense and terrible at the same time, and the combination of Ewan’s extremely unfiltered disquisition and Roman’s most public breakdown is agonizing. So often, watching this show feels like a trap, a warning against our gullible impulses. See how broken these children are! See their warped, malformed psyches laid bare! Pity their frail and flailing souls! And no sooner than you do, someone bullies a survivor of sexual violence, or casually destabilizes democracy for jokes. There’s nothing to be gained from sympathizing with any of the Roys at this point, and yet Roman’s smallness in this episode, his diminishment in front of everyone’s eyes from a political power broker to a “Grim Weeper” punch line, still feels brutal.

With Kendall also reduced in clout by the end of the episode, and Roman so smashed up that he can’t even enter his father’s ludicrously capacious crypt, the lead horse heading into the finale seems to be Shiv. With Matsson by her side, she has persuaded Mencken that the cultural power of GoJo—and its insight into the dark arts of hooking the youth audience—might be worth more than the geriatric voters of ATN. That’s not to say Shiv didn’t have to make some sacrifices to get here. Her now-obvious pregnancy has made her more vulnerable than ever to the misogynist culture she’s fishing around in: Sexually harassed by her own brother, and sneered at by Matsson when she blithely declares herself “one of those hard bitches, right, who’s gonna do, what, 36 hours of maternity leave, emailing through her vanity Cesarean,” she then has to swallow Mencken’s Third Reich–invoking derision of her as “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” in order to make a deal.

With just one episode left, and every character abasing themselves in ever more desperate ways (forget Darth Greg; I’m Team Dark Kendall), can anyone come out on top? Will we get a Kerry-Marcia odd-couple spin-off? Will Manhattan (and Baltimore, and Portland, and Seattle) burn? Given that the Roys can’t avoid the firecrackers set off outside the St. Regis, or the protesters banging on the windows of their limousine like Kendall contesting the conditions of his parental agreement, I’m inclined to think they might all well burn too.

Chris van Tulleken refuses to tell me what to have for breakfast. “Everyone thinks that I have a strong opinion about what they should eat,” he tells me, as I hesitate between the eggs benedict and the full English. “And I have almost no opinion.”

Now, this isn’t quite true. When I tell him later that I’ve decided that the occasional full-sugar cola is probably better than multiple diet sodas every day, he replies: “Enjoy the phosphoric acid leaching the minerals out of your bones.” Which sounds a little judgmental, if I’m honest. (Soft drinks have been linked to bone fractures, but their manufacturers dispute that there is a causal relationship.) There’s a very good reason that van Tulleken refuses to dictate my breakfast order: He has just published a book identifying ultra-processed food, or UPF, as a great evil in our diets, and has therefore signed up for a lifetime of being portrayed as a joyless, middle-class puritan who wants us to live on mung beans and kombucha. As part of the research for Ultra-processed People, he ate a UPF-heavy diet for a month—a stunt reminiscent of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, and one open to the same criticism about replacing science with showmanship. “By the fourth week, it had started to have very noticeable physical effects, forcing me to loosen my belt by two notches,” he writes. “In just a few weeks, I felt like I’d aged ten years. I was aching, exhausted, miserable and angry.”

Public-health campaigns against “junk food”—a shorthand for foods with high fat, sugar, and salt content—are well established and formed one of Michelle Obama’s priorities as first lady. Van Tulleken’s case against UPF is different. The problem isn’t the food’s nutritional profile, per se, but the industrial processes to which it has been subjected, and the artificial chemicals used to improve its flavor and shelf life. He argues that we should be more wary of a diet soda than a cookie baked from scratch at home, because UPF is stuffed full of chemicals that disrupt our body’s ability to regulate appetite and digestion. He cites a 2019 research study, led by Kevin D. Hall, which gave participants either an ultra-processed or unprocessed diet and found that the former group ate more calories. Rather than “food,” van Tulleken thinks UPF is better described as an “addictive edible substance.” If that’s true, it’s bad news for most Americans: UPF makes up 57 percent of the U.S. diet.

Van Tulleken is an infectious-diseases doctor. He is also a twin, and until last year his brother Xand was more than 30 pounds heavier than he was (the pair had the biggest weight discrepancy in the King’s College twin study). Then the brothers made a podcast about ultra-processed food, which Chris already believed was bad, but to which Xand was still addicted. Chris discovered during that process that Xand’s other problem was him. “For Xand to set about losing weight on his own would have been to lose a decade-long argument with me,” Chris told me when I interviewed the twins two years ago.

[Helen Lewis: ‘The revelation was that I was the problem’]

So he won’t tell me what to have for breakfast. But he will tell me that the English muffin in front of me—pillowy soft, when it arrives, and pure white—looks ultra-processed. UPF is typically defined as anything with one or more ingredients that you wouldn’t tend to find in a home kitchen: stabilizers, modified starches, industrial sweeteners, glycerine, xanthan gum. (A more comprehensive classification system, the NOVA scale, has been developed by Brazilian researchers.) These industrial additives keep food fresh for longer, making supply chains work, and tend to be cheaper than the natural ingredients they replace. They allow food companies to make a profit, and consumers to spend less of their disposable income on food: In the U.S., that figure was 10.3 percent in 2021, down from 16 percent in the 1960s. Ultra-processed People begins with a scene in which van Tulleken gives his 3-year-old daughter, Lyra, a tub of ice cream in a park. When she runs off to play, he realizes that the snack isn’t melting into liquid; it has instead become “tepid gelatinous foam.” The culprit is xanthan gum, a substance made from the slime that bacteria excrete to cling to surfaces.

Before reading van Tulleken’s work, I felt pretty confident that junk food was bad. That didn’t stop me from eating it, however. Learning about UPF is a different experience—you begin to realize that some of this stuff is barely food at all. I had a revelation at a railway-station snack shop the day before meeting van Tulleken, when I looked at shelves of candy bars that filled my entire field of vision. Suddenly, I thought: Hang on, this chocolate can survive at room temperature. For a year. He told me he had previously experienced a similar moment of unease, which led him to think: “How would a normal human try and figure out what they should eat in this station?”

Van Tulleken argues that the food industry has been engaged in a long-term campaign to sell us more of its products, with well-funded laboratories taking branded snacks and ready meals and fine-tuning them like a Formula 1 engine. It’s not a coincidence that you open a packet of Pringles and find out that, in the words of the brand’s former slogan, “once you pop you can’t stop.” Each chip has been engineered into an identical saddle shape the size of a child’s fist. (On the podcast, Chris made Xand add water to the crisps and eat spoonfuls of the resulting slop, which forced his twin to confront the real product underneath the magic.) Even when it appears to be low-calorie, UPF drives overeating, he argues, because it interacts with our body in a different way than, say, a whole apple does. The recommended serving size of Pringles is 13 chips. Yeah, right.

At some point, my eggs benedict arrive, and I start eating—noting that, as someone with braces, I’m quite grateful that most bread is gummably squishy. “The reason you need braces is, of course, the same reason I did,” van Tulleken says. “Our jaws and our facial bones didn’t develop, because we just ate mushy food.” Wait, I say—the incels were right about “mewing”? (A brief pause as I explain the popular internet practice of building jaw strength to appear more masculine.) Van Tulleken looks concerned, as if I am already mentally bracketing him with sweaty, alarming people who make YouTube videos about GigaChads. “I’m not a clean-eating freak,” he says. “And I don’t want to give everyone a neurosis. It’s not all about the additives; I don’t want to ban stuff. I think that transnational food corporations are predatory, but they’re not evil by design. They’re just hemmed in by late capitalism.”

Because of his work as a doctor, van Tulleken has a horror of becoming known as a “posh white guy” handing out diet advice to people who can afford to drop $8 on a sourdough loaf. One of his clinics is for migrants, many of whom live in hostels, and, he says, “they’re all constipated; it’s quite often one of the main problems that they have.” He advised one man to eat an apple whenever he could, for the fiber, and was reminded that the British government gives asylum seekers in full-board accommodation only £8 ($10) a week for any extra food or other essential items. Further up the income scale, many people still struggle to find nearby shops that sell fresh fruit and vegetables. Van Tulleken says that whereas Britain has food swamps—“There is real food in the swamp; you just have to wade through it and get it,” he tells me—some parts of America have true food deserts, where the only thing available is UPF.

[Read: Food swamps are the new food deserts]

Van Tulleken won’t be drawn on his own political beliefs. But he is aware that he needs to speak the language of the right to make his case, because the libertarian emphasis on personal responsibility has ended up providing cover for the food industry. “What I would like is people to have freedom of choice,” he says. “At the moment, we have a nanny state governed by unelected corporations the size of Venezuela”—the handful of confectionary giants responsible for the candy bars filling the shop on the railway platform I visited. “Why can’t you buy a banana on that platform?” he asks. And there’s another reason not to lay down commands about good and bad foods: “People hate it.” He hopes that reading his book is a little like the experience of mainlining cigarettes through Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking. By the end, you’ve disgusted yourself. You want to quit.

His nemesis on that front is Christopher Snowdon, the head of lifestyle economics at the Institute for Economic Affairs, a London-based free-market think tank, who has had great fun mocking van Tulleken’s experiment—in which he ate UPF for a month, and then cut it out completely for the next. How addictive can UPF be if you can give it up like that? Snowdon asks, calling UPF “the latest bogeyman in diet quackery.” He argues that “the answer is obviously to not consume too many calories regardless of what kind of food you eat.”

Some nutrition experts also caution against demonizing UPF. “I think it’s unlikely it’s addictive,” Clare Thornton-Wood, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the British Dietetic Association, told me. “But the behaviors might be addictive—if a family always has chicken nuggets for dinner, children are conditioned to eat the food they grow up with.” In an ideal world, we would all eat less UPF, but “in the world we live in, it will form part of your diet.” She had packed a cereal bar in her bag that morning, she told me, knowing that she would be out all day.

Come on, then, I say to van Tulleken. How are you going to deal with the accusation that you’re a smug do-gooder trying to crush people’s enjoyment of their breakfast? “You have to not care,” he says. “Second, I’m not calling for a ban. I don’t accept [that] this food brings joy, but that’s up to you.” He has personally gone cold (unprocessed, presumably free-range) turkey on UPF, as has Xand. Their mother is delighted, as the kind of person who makes her own baked beans from scratch. He notes the bemused face I make at the idea of anyone doing this.

However, he does have some practical proposals. First, that every doctor should be obliged to declare outside income from food companies to their professional regulator—and the same norm should be enforced on academics writing research papers on nutrition. Second, the traffic-light labeling system that some countries use to identify junk food could be revised to make UPF more obvious to consumers. Marketing UPF to children could be restricted, as it is in Chile. No more cute cartoon characters on cereal boxes and adverts on teatime television. In the United States, such efforts would likely have to be either voluntary, enacted at the state level, or enforced by platforms such as YouTube Kids or Disney. (The Federal Trade Commission proposed nationwide voluntary restrictions on advertising junk food to children under 17 in 2011 but weakened these following industry pressure.)

[Read: More than half of what Americans eat is ‘ultra-processed’]

Finally, those who can cook food from scratch, and spend more of their disposable income on high-quality ingredients, should do so. I tell him this last one sounds about as appealing as the antidotes to climate change that involve … well, flying less, quitting fast fashion, and having a colder home. He reluctantly agrees, noting that he is also braced to be called a misogynist by critics claiming that “I hate women because I want to make food less convenient.”

The example that gives him hope is the tobacco industry. After the links between smoking and lung cancer were discovered and publicized, health authorities in the U.S. and Europe curtailed tobacco sponsorship of sports events, instituted warnings on cigarette packs, and took a harder line on sales to minors. But that also came with a cultural shift, as more public spaces became “smoke free,” making tobacco easier to avoid. Twenty years ago, the restaurant in which van Tulleken and I ate our eggs benedict would have been full of other people’s smoke.

Looking back, I say, I don’t know why I put up with being forced into an unhealthy environment. Perhaps one day that’s how we will feel about convenience stores and supermarkets filled with food that isn’t really food.

Talking to my three elementary-school-age daughters about beauty can be hard. No matter how much I insist that their looks don’t matter, that their character is what truly counts in life, they don’t believe me. About a year ago, I was tiptoeing down the hallway after tucking my 9- and 6-year-olds into their bunk bed when I overheard the younger one. “Momma says it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful; it matters if you’re clever,” she said to her sister. The eldest replied, “She only says that because she’s already pretty.”

As I recount in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, that moment stopped me cold. But my children were right to be skeptical of my advice. Study after study confirms that prettiness can be a privilege. Attractive men make more money over the course of their career. Better-looking economics scholars are cited more often in academic papers. Good-looking people are perceived as healthier, smarter, and more sociable, as research has shown for decades. I cannot erase these advantages by ignoring them. In fact, Rebecca Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at Bates College, told me that trying to convince my children that appearance isn’t important is “a really complicated form of gaslighting.” I wanted my kids to resist the tyranny of vanity: the way it excludes people, makes them anxious, and encourages them to labor constantly. I also didn’t want to misrepresent how society operates. I wasn’t sure of the third way.

My daughters, in particular, are influenced by South Korea, where we lived for nearly four years during my time as NPR’s Seoul-bureau chief. I quickly learned that in Korean culture, people often make judgments about others’ looks out loud, to their face, because the link between appearance and worth is frequently accepted as the norm. In Korean, this attitude is called oemo jisang juui, which translates into “looks are supreme.” Passport-photo businesses retouch images by default. Parents reward high-school graduates with cosmetic surgery. I thought my children were way too young for beauty treatments, but in Seoul, moms asked me whether my then-3-year-old’s lashes were extensions. The Korean phrases most seared into my girls’ memories are the ones that were repeated to them the most—“hello,” “thank you,” and “so pretty.”

In the U.S., where my family and I now live, popular culture sometimes tries to ignore the benefits of physical beauty, perhaps refuting it in platitudes about body positivity. But lookism—discrimination based on appearance—is woven into American life too. Although it might differ in practice, beauty culture is enforced on both sides of the Pacific where I’ve lived. Meanwhile, the algorithmic optimization of faces that we commonly see on our screens—through Instagram filters or even Zoom’s subtle “touch up my appearance” function—transcends borders. Which leads me back to my dilemma in the hallway: How, as a parent, can I possibly raise my daughters to not overvalue attractiveness?

[Read: Jameela Jamil and the trouble with #NoFilter feminism]

My reporting dug up various strategies. For example, compliment young people for their curiosity or imagination, not their looks. Help them understand the social-media photo filters and AI effects they encounter online. Show them art and other media with a diversity of bodies. But most experts came back to one overarching piece of parenting advice: Care less about your own appearance.

This hit home for me. From my earliest memories, men and women alike called my mother mei nü, Mandarin for “beautiful woman.” She never encouraged me to diet, but she kept a bathroom scale in the kitchen—ostensibly for convenience, but with the effect that I spotted her weighing herself daily. I absorbed, without her ever having to tell me, that she thought thinness was beautiful. Lindsay Kite, who is a co-director of the nonprofit Beauty Redefined, which promotes body-image resilience, remembers her mother being constantly on a diet yet insisting that Kite and her twin sister were beautiful at any size.

Confronting my own subconscious beliefs about beauty meant questioning how and why I might judge the looks of others and myself, what my biases are about what’s “hot,” and why I might want to change my appearance. The mere act of identifying my insecurities helped me curb them. These days, I rarely linger in front of mirrors, I reject the lure of injectables such as Botox, and I am trying my best to embrace my body’s evolution into middle age. I’m trying to teach with the choices I make.

[Read: Raising a daughter with a body like mine]

To attempt to break the seemingly intractable link between appearance and worth, I also strive to model two things for my children. One is body neutrality, which emphasizes what the body can do rather than what it looks like. The other is sensualism, as conceived of by Céline Leboeuf, an associate professor of philosophy at Florida International University, which focuses on what the body feels. Now when my girls and I try on clothes, instead of immediately jumping to how they look, I have retrained myself to ask them whether they can move easily, if the fit is comfortable for their daily activities, how the fabrics brush against their skin. The baby of the family embodied these values on her own when I asked her why she’d stopped wearing a romper that looked so cute on her. “I don’t wanna take off all my clothes to go pee,” she said.

My eldest is now 10 and haranguing me about wanting to shave her legs. She sees her friends growing breasts and covets them. She is obsessed with using the skin-care and makeup line from the young actor Millie Bobby Brown. I have finally learned to respond to her anxieties by telling her that I also worried about my legs (and other body parts) and sharing how I mostly got over it—but, crucially, how I am still working on it. I’m continually trying to teach with the choices I make. Children should know that adults, like kids, are able to change and grow too.

Since the earliest days of the war in Ukraine, much of the Western world has become squeamish about Russian art. Tchaikovsky would not be played. Russian literature was kept high on the shelf. Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Ballet was disinvited from touring abroad.

Such boycotts have only increased in intensity, and in ways that demonstrate how wartime assaults on freedom can ripple far outside the conflict zone—where the sound of war is not that of bombs detonating but of piercing silence. Now the impulse to censor anyone Russian has arrived in the United States, at a venue that is designed to—of all things—champion and promote freedom of speech and expression: PEN America’s annual World Voices festival. It has also led, quite precipitously, to the writer Masha Gessen’s decision to resign as the vice president of PEN’s board of directors.

This past Saturday, as part of the festival, Gessen was set to moderate a panel showcasing writers in exile, two of them, like Gessen, Russian-born authors who had left their country in disgust. But a day before the event, ticket holders received an email saying that because of “unforeseen circumstances” the panel had been canceled. Their money would be refunded. No other explanation was offered and any trace of the event disappeared from PEN’s program online.

A small delegation of Ukrainian writers, who participated in a panel planned for the same day as the canceled Gessen event, had declared they could not attend a festival that included Russians. Because two of the writers, Artem Chapeye and Artem Chekh, are active-duty soldiers in the Ukrainian army, they argued that there were legal and ethical restrictions against their participation. Chapeye, a writer whose short story “The Ukraine” was recently published in The New Yorker, texted with me from a bus on his way back to Ukraine. He didn’t see himself as having boycotted the Russians. It was simply that their presence was incompatible with his. “The Russian participants decided to cancel their event themselves because we as active soldiers were not able to participate under the same umbrella,” he wrote.

Chapeye said he didn’t make distinctions between “good” Russians and “bad” Russians. “Until the war ends,” he wrote to me, “a soldier can not be seen with the ‘good Russians.’”

I spoke with Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN, who described the events of recent days as a “tough situation,” in which the Ukrainians presented themselves as being “imperiled” if they took part. Nossel told me she’d offered to have Gessen’s event take place under different auspices, not the World Voices festival, though at the same venue and at the same time. But in the end, as she put it, “that was not an option.”

To Gessen, it was abundantly clear that PEN had been “blackmailed” by the Ukrainians. And while Gessen empathized with the Ukrainians’ position and their cause, the proposed “rebranding” of the event seemed absurd. “I felt like I was being asked to tell these people that because they’re Russians they can’t sit at the big table; they have to sit at the little table off to the side,” Gessen told me. “Which felt distasteful.”

The organization, Gessen said, had already tried to anticipate certain sensitivities. The notion, for example, of doing any kind of Russian-Ukrainian dialogue was out of the question. Gessen understood that this would be akin to implying moral equivalency when one side is clearly the aggressor. For this reason, the two events were kept separate. For Ukrainians, who point out that Russia has been trying to extinguish their national identity for centuries, the war has been a chance to assert on an international stage that their voices need to be heard. Gessen was aware of how this urge had been expressed elsewhere in the literary world. Just a few days before, at a literary festival in Estonia, a Ukrainian writer, Olena Huseinova, had conveyed her distress at the presence of a Russian-born poet, writing an open letter suggesting what she would do in her place: “I find myself compelled to confess that were I to embody a Russian poet, my tongue and my language would sink into a weighty stillness, as if lifeless and bereft of motion deep within me. Probably, nowhere else would I belong, except within this silence and void.” The Russian poet was put on a plane and sent home from the festival.

Gessen, who uses they/them pronouns, said they could understand Ukrainians acting in this way. After all, the Ukrainians’ country had been invaded, hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens brutally murdered—the desire to be cruel to Russians was perfectly comprehensible. But Gessen expected a different response from PEN.

“It’s up to people whose country hasn’t been invaded, whose relatives haven’t been disappeared, whose houses are not being bombed, to say there are certain things we don’t do—we don’t silence people,” Gessen said. “We’re a freedom-of-expression organization. I’m not blaming the Ukrainians for this.”

“I can’t look my Russian colleagues in the eye,” they added. “I can’t serve on the board when I feel like this organization did something that it shouldn’t do.”

It’s not the first time that PEN has struggled with the question of how to balance a commitment to freedom of speech with other political pressures. The incident brings to mind a protest in 2015 from a couple dozen writers, including Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose, who took issue with PEN’s decision to give a free-speech award to Charlie Hebdo. The satirical French magazine had been the target of a terrorist attack that left 12 people dead and 11 more injured. But the dissenting writers didn’t think it was right to award a publication that had caricatured Muslims. “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression,” read the writers’ letter. The suggestion was that free speech should be supported—including Charlie Hebdo’s “anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion”—just not always so loudly. In the end, PEN stood by its award, presenting it to the surviving Charlie Hebdo editors, who were protected by armed guards.

Gessen said there is a lot of debate internally at PEN about the boundaries of free speech, and does not personally identify as a free-speech absolutist. “We regulate speech in this country all the time,” Gessen said. “We could have a much more meaningful discussion if we accepted that we regulate speech and talked about why and how we do it.”

The problem in this instance was that the decision to sideline the Russian participants came not as the result of deliberation, but rather in response to an ultimatum delivered by the Ukrainians, one that left no room for debate. In the end the Russian presence appeared as if it were a stain that had to be quickly covered up. “Even if the panel remained on the website with a canceled stamp on it or something, even that would be less tragic than what happened,” Gessen said. “But to just have it vanish? It’s almost a literal silencing.”

For PEN leadership, the entire situation felt “untenable,” Ayad Akhtar, the president of PEN’s board, told me. “The decision was made on the basis of certain human considerations,” he said. “Had we made the decision on the basis of principle, it would have meant a human cost that we certainly didn’t want to pay at this particular moment given what’s going on in Ukraine.”

But when asked about Gessen’s resignation, Akhtar simply sighed. “It’s a big loss for us,” he said. “A big loss.”

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