Eagle Pass is the front line in a showdown over migrants between Texas and the federal government.

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

I’m still rounding up your emails about the song “Fast Car” and coverage of race in journalism––they’ll run early next week and then we’ll be back on our regular newsletter schedule.

Conversations of Note

Locked Up in a Heat Wave

In a Marshall Project article that draws on work by the ACLU, Jamiles Lartey makes the case that incarcerated people, including children, are at serious risk from lack of air-conditioning:

This week, more than a third of the U.S. population was under excessive heat warnings and heat advisories. Dozens of major cities and states have set new temperature records in recent weeks, including Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which logged its hottest June ever.

Less than an hour from the city is Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola prison, where the state set up a temporary youth jail last fall, in a building that once housed adults awaiting execution.

A federal court filing this week from the Louisiana American Civil Liberties Union alleges that the youth at Angola face inhumane conditions, in large part because they are regularly kept in non-airconditioned cells for up to 72 hours. In a statement to the court, medical expert Dr. Susi U. Vassallo called the practice “foolhardy and perilous,” and said, “I would not dare to keep my dog in these conditions for fear of my dog dying.”

This June and July at the prison, the heat index has regularly exceeded 125 degrees, which the National Weather Services classifies as “extreme danger” for heat-related illness and death.

In 2021, Louisiana spent $2.8 million to study what it would cost to cool all of its prisons with air conditioning, but it is still waiting on results. In the meantime, adults at Angola — the state’s largest facility — struggle for relief. “It’s over 100 degrees in there. I lie on the floor. I barely can breathe. God, it feels like it’s suffocating!” an unidentified person told The Advocate.

Conditions in Texas are likely even worse.

How to Increase Diversity at the Top

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey highlights research on the outsize impact that 12 highly selective colleges have on shaping the American elite, and argues that even with new restrictions on race-based affirmative action, “a straightforward set of policies” exist “that would still let these schools diversify themselves—without making any sacrifice in terms of student quality or ambition.”

She outlines those policies:

The first step is to eliminate legacy admissions, as Wesleyan did last week. Most of these schools have an extremely strong preference for the children of alumni, and especially the children of wealthy alumni … Legacy kids whose parents are in the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution have a 40-percentage-point advantage in admissions compared with non-legacy kids with equivalent test scores; that advantage falls to just 15 percentage points for less wealthy students. This alumni preference acts as affirmative action for wealthy white kids.

Second is getting rid of recruitment policies for athletes. Participating in a sport—including a niche, moneyed sport such as fencing or sailing—gives kids an admissions boost equivalent to earning an additional 200 points on the SAT, one study found. At many elite schools, athletic programs function as a way to shuttle in rich kids who would not get in otherwise. “People sometimes have the intuition that student athletes might come disproportionately from lower-income or middle-income families,” Chetty told me. “That’s not true.”

Third is putting less emphasis on super-high “non-academic” ratings. Pretty much all kids who matriculate at the Ivy Plus institutions have résumés thick with leadership-cultivating, creativity-showcasing activity: volunteering, playing an instrument, making art. But kids from the country’s Eton-like secondary schools, such as Exeter and Milton, tend to have especially strong recommendations and padded résumés, ones Harvard and Yale love. “These admissions preferences tilt strongly in favor of the rich,” Chetty noted.

Getting rid of the admissions policies favoring athletes, legacies, and résumé padders would increase the share of kids from the bottom 95 percent of the parental-income distribution by nearly nine percentage points, the study finds. Yale, Harvard, and the other super-elite schools would each replace about 150 kids from rich families with kids from low- and middle-income families each year. In addition, the economists find, schools could bolster their admissions preferences for low- and middle-income kids with excellent test scores…

I would add one more policy … simply matriculating many more students. The Ivy Plus schools have a combined endowment of more than $200 billion … Surely they could enroll many more kids.

Oppenheimer-Adjacent

In the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney argues that the U.S. should not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan at the end of World War II and the associated idea that  “nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima [meant] flipping a lever, rerouting the trolley, and causing the death of fewer people.”

He writes:

The trolley problem is a philosophical exercise meant to test the distinction between the moral weight of the actions we choose versus the consequences of inaction. Is it the better decision to take an action that kills one person versus taking an inaction that results in five deaths? It’s a fine ethical exercise, but it’s inapplicable in real life … We know where a trolley will go if we don’t flip a switch because there is a track there. We don’t know what Japan’s military and civilian population would have done had we not flipped the switch.

Defenders of the atomic bomb say that our only alternative to the deliberate slaughter of tens of thousands of noncombatants, including babies and elderly women, was a massive land invasion that would have cost millions of lives. They present this as if it was one of two sets of train tracks available.

People who were very involved at the time disagree. Again, Eisenhower said the Japanese were about to surrender. Eisenhower told his biographer that he expressed to War Secretary Harry Stimson his “grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Was Eisenhower right that the atomic bomb was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”? I don’t know! Neither do you! There’s a lot of uncertainty here.

Among the classic arguments for the course America did take is Paul Fussell’s 1981 essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” Also relevant were the lives of people still under brutal Japanese occupation. What effect would each choice have on how long their subjugation lasted?

Why Are There So Few Great Comedy Movies Today?

In conversation with Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar, the economist Tyler Cowen asks that question and puts forth a hypothesis:

Cowen: Why are there so few great comedy movies today? And TV shows, for that matter. It used to be top TV shows were comedies — not all of them — Seinfeld the clearest example. Now for a long time, HBO, dramas. What happened?

Dworman: The obvious answer that most people would say is because you can’t make those jokes anymore. Most of the classic comedies had jokes which would be considered off-limits today.

Cowen: But they’re not mostly that politically incorrect. Seinfeld is less politically incorrect than Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there’s not a Seinfeld of today, is there? In movies, you can go pretty far out. Most of the funny movies from the past, like Bringing Up Baby — it’s pretty funny. It’s not politically incorrect at all.

Dworman: [laughs] It’s coming around, that kind of comedy. I don’t know, Tyler. Do you have a thought on that?

Cowen: We seem to be getting funny bits in different ways, and they’re more condensed, and they come at a higher information density, and we can pull them off the internet or TikTok whenever we want. It seems that sates us, and we enjoy the feeling of control over comedy, which you don’t quite get when you’re watching, say, a hundred-minute film. That would be my hypothesis.

Dworman: Does that mean that there are movies that have been made which are funny and would deserve the success of a classic comedy, they’re just not getting appreciated?

Cowen: No, they don’t get made… it could also be audiences are themselves less funny. They’re more depressed, they’re more neurotic. We see some of that in the data, at least for young people. I suspect that’s not the main reason, but part of it.

Dworman: I don’t know. Sometimes there isn’t a reason. Sometimes there’s just a golden age. Let’s compare it to music. Why is music a little bit stagnant now? Maybe that’s just the ebb and flow of where it’s at, and we’re trying to correlate it to something, but it has nothing to do with that. Maybe it’s just that the great talents are doing other things now, or a lot of the jokes have been told. I don’t know, but there are definitely golden ages of every art form.

Cowen: But comedy is still in a golden age; it’s just not in movies and television.

Do you disagree with the premise and believe there are great comedy movies today?

Freddie deBoer believes that the concept of “equality of opportunity” is “a mess” and that society ought to abandon it as a lodestar. He writes:

What happens if someone reaches their potential by becoming a D+ student who just barely graduates from high school and ends up a ditch digger making $24,000 a year? What if a life spent in material deprivation and constant financial insecurity is the outcome of a genuinely equal opportunity?

What if someone’s potential is correctly fulfilled when they end up in a life that’s barren of wealth, stability, and success? If equality of opportunity means anything, then it must include such outcomes. I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance - a distribution with a bottom as well as a top.

What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market? I find that you can get people on board with that kind of outcome if the loser in question came from great privilege; people like the cosmic karma of the most privileged being severely downwardly mobile. But what if someone is born into poverty and stays there, and that static outcome genuinely reflects them operating at the peak of their potential?

That would have to constitute a successful implementation of a system of equal opportunity. And yet most people would likely still feel sympathy for that person and demand a better life for them. If that sympathy is systemic rather than individual, it would seem to suggest that equal opportunity is not in fact what people see as the correct system. Rather, equal opportunity functions as a moral backstop for the system that they’re already in - and provided the story of equal opportunity is always told in terms of the dedicated and smart person who rises above hardscrabble beginnings, it remains emotionally satisfying. But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.

It seems to me that in a wealthy society, equality of opportunity is most defensible when paired with a social safety net that creates a minimum standard of living available to everyone. Of course, what that “floor” ought to be is contested. Is it enough for a just society to meet basic survival needs? Is John Rawls right that we ought to maximize the status of the least well-off? Should everyone be guaranteed a job and a living wage? One could pose as many questions as there are visions of how we ought to be. But once nutritious food, comfortable shelter, and health care are available to those unable to get them, it seems to me that equality of opportunity to excel becomes a quite defensible way to organize a society. If realized in the U.S., it would certainly improve on the status quo.

“DEMOCRACY INTERCEPTED,” reads the headline of a new special package in the journal Science. “Did platform feeds sow the seeds of deep divisions during the 2020 US presidential election?” Big question. (Scary question!) The surprising answer, according to a group of studies out today in Science and Nature, two of the world’s most prestigious research journals, turns out to be something like: “Probably not, or not in any short-term way, but one can never really know for sure.”

There’s no question that the American political landscape is polarized, and that it has become much more so in the past few decades. It seems both logical and obvious that the internet has played some role in this—conspiracy theories and bad information spread far more easily today than they did before social media, and we’re not yet three years out from an insurrection that was partly planned using Facebook-created tools. The anecdotal evidence speaks volumes. But the best science that we have right now conveys a somewhat different message.

Three new papers in Science and one in Nature are the first products of a rare, intense collaboration between Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, and academic scientists. As part of a 2020-election research project, led by Talia Stroud, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Joshua Tucker, a professor at NYU, teams of investigators were given substantial access to Facebook and Instagram user data, and allowed to perform experiments that required direct manipulation of the feeds of tens of thousands of consenting users. Meta did not compensate its academic partners, nor did it have final say over the studies’ methods, analysis, or conclusions. The company did, however, set certain boundaries on partners’ data access in order to maintain user privacy. It also paid for the research itself, and has given research funding to some of the academics (including lead authors) in the past. Meta employees are among the papers’ co-authors.

This dynamic is, by nature, fraught: Meta, an immensely powerful company that has long been criticized for pulling at the seams of American democracy—and for shutting out external researchers—is now backing research that suggests, Hey, maybe social media’s effects are not so bad. At the same time, the project has provided a unique window into actual behavior on two of the biggest social platforms, and it appears to come with legitimate vetting. The University of Wisconsin at Madison journalism professor Michael Wagner served as an independent observer of the collaboration, and his assessment is included in the special issue of Science: “I conclude that the team conducted rigorous, carefully checked, transparent, ethical, and path-breaking studies,” he wrote, but added that this independence had been achieved only via corporate dispensation.

[Read: Nobody can see into Facebook]

The newly published studies are interesting individually, but make the most sense when read together. First, a study led by Sandra González-Bailón, a communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, establishes the existence of echo chambers on social media. Though previous studies using web-browsing data found that most people have fairly balanced information diets overall, that appears not to be the case for every online milieu. “Facebook, as a social and informational setting, is substantially segregated ideologically,” González-Bailón’s team concludes, and news items that are rated “false” by fact-checkers tend to cluster in the network’s “homogeneously conservative corner.” So the platform’s echo chambers may be real, with misinformation weighing more heavily on one side of the political spectrum. But what effects does that have on users’ politics?

In the other three papers, researchers were able to study—via randomized experiments conducted in real time, during a truculent election season—the extent to which that information environment made divisions worse. They also tested whether some prominent theories of how to fix social media—by cutting down on viral content, for example—would make any difference. The study published in Nature, led by Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth, tried another approach: For their experiment, Nyhan and his team dramatically reduced the amount of content from “like-minded sources” that people saw on Facebook over three months during and just after the 2020 election cycle. From late September through December, the researchers “downranked” content on the feeds of roughly 7,000 consenting users if it came from any source—friend, group, or page—that was predicted to share a user’s political beliefs. The intervention didn’t work. The echo chambers did become somewhat less intense, but affected users’ politics remained unchanged, as measured in follow-up surveys. Participants in the experiment ended up no less extreme in their ideological beliefs, and no less polarized in their attitudes toward Democrats and Republicans, than those in a control group.

The two other experimental studies, published in Science, reached similar conclusions. Both were led by Andrew Guess, an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, and both were also based on data gathered from that three-month stretch running from late September into December 2020. In one experiment, Guess’s team attempted to remove all posts that had been reshared by friends, groups, or pages from a large set of Facebook users’ feeds, to test the idea that doing so might mitigate the harmful effects of virality. (Due to some technical limitations, a small number of reshared posts remained.) The intervention succeeded in reducing people’s exposure to political news, and it lowered their engagement on the site overall—but once again, the news-feed tweak did nothing to reduce users’ level of political polarization or change their political attitudes.

The second experiment from Guess and colleagues was equally blunt: It selectively turned off the ranking algorithm for the feeds of certain Facebook and Instagram users and instead presented posts in chronological order. That change led users to spend less time on the platforms overall, and to engage less frequently with posts. Still, the chronological users ended up being no different from controls in terms of political polarization. Turning off the platforms’ algorithms for a three-month stretch did nothing to temper their beliefs.

In other words, all three interventions failed, on average, to pull users back from ideological extremes. Meanwhile, they had a host of other effects. “These on-platform experiments, arguably what they show is that prominent, relatively straightforward fixes that have been proposed—they come with unintended consequences,” Guess told me. Some of those are counterintuitive. Guess pointed to the experiment in removing reshared posts as one example. This reduced the number of news posts that people saw from untrustworthy sources—and also the number of news posts they saw from trustworthy ones. In fact, the researchers found that affected users experienced a 62 percent decrease in exposure to mainstream news outlets, and showed signs of worse performance on a quiz about recent news events.

So that was novel. But the gist of the four-study narrative—that online echo chambers are significant, but may not be sufficient to explain offline political strife—should not be unfamiliar. “From my perspective as a researcher in the field, there were probably fewer surprising findings than there will be for the general public,” Josh Pasek, an associate professor at the University of Michigan who wasn’t involved in the studies, told me. “The echo-chamber story is an incredible media narrative and it makes cognitive sense,” but it isn’t likely to explain much of the variation in what people actually believe. That position once seemed more contrarian than it does today. “Our results are consistent with a lot of research in political science,” Guess said. “You don’t find large effects of people’s information environments on things like attitudes or opinions or self-reported political participation.”

Algorithms are powerful, but people are too. In the experiment by Nyhan’s group, which reduced the amount of like-minded content that showed up in users’ feeds, subjects still sought out content that they agreed with. In fact, they ended up being even more likely to engage with preaching-to-the-choir posts they did see than those in the control group. “It’s important to remember that people aren’t only passive recipients of the information that algorithms provide to them,” Nyhan, who also co-authored a literature review titled “Avoiding the Echo Chamber About Echo Chambers” in 2018, told me. We all make choices about whom and what to follow, he added. Those choices may be influenced by recommendations from the platforms, but they’re still ours.

The researchers will surely get some pushback on this point and others, particularly given their close working relationship with Facebook and a slate of findings that could be read as letting the social-media giant off the hook. (Even if social-media echo chambers do not distort the political landscape as much as people have suspected, Meta has still struggled to control misinformation on its platforms. It’s concerning that, as González-Bailón’s paper points out, the news story viewed the most times on Facebook during the study period was titled “Military Ballots Found in the Trash in Pennsylvania—Most Were Trump Votes.”) In a blog post about the studies, also published today, Facebook’s head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, strikes a triumphant tone, celebrating the “growing body of research showing there is little evidence that social media causes harmful ‘affective’ polarization or has any meaningful impact on key political attitudes, beliefs or behaviors.” Though the researchers have acknowledged this uncomfortable situation, there’s no getting around the fact that their studies could have been in jeopardy had Meta decided to rescind its cooperation.

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, who was not involved in the studies, acknowledges that the setup isn’t “ideal for truly independent research,” but he told me that he is “fully convinced that this is a great effort. I’m sure those studies are the best we currently have in what we can say about the U.S. population on social media during the U.S. election.”

That’s big, but it’s also, all things considered, quite small. The studies cover just three months of a very specific time in the recent history of American politics. Three months is a substantial window for this kind of experiment—Lorenz-Speen called it “impressively long”—but it seems insignificant in the context of swirling historical forces. If social-media algorithms didn’t do that much to polarize voters during that one specific interval at the end of 2020, they may still have deepened the rift in American politics in the run-up to the 2016 election, and in the years before and after that.

David Garcia, a data-science professor at the University of Konstanz, in Germany, also contributed an essay in Nature; he concludes that the experiments, as significant as they are, “do not rule out the possibility that news-feed algorithms contributed to rising polarization.” The experiments were performed on individuals, while polarization is, as Garcia put it to me in an email, “a collective phenomenon.” To fully acquit algorithms of any role in the increase in polarization in the United States and other countries would be a much harder task, he said—“if even possible.”

The commercial success of the country star Jason Aldean’s ode to small-town vigilantism helps explain the persistence of Donald Trump’s grip on red America.  

Aldean’s combative new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” offers a musical riff on the same core message that Trump has articulated since his entry into politics: that America as conservatives understand it is under such extraordinary assault from the multicultural, urbanized modern left that any means necessary is justified to repel the threat.

In Aldean’s lyrics and the video he made of his song, those extraordinary means revolve around threats of vigilante force to hold the line against what he portrays as crime and chaos overrunning big cities. In Trump’s political message, those means are his systematic shattering of national norms and potentially laws in order to “make America great again.”

[Read: Trump’s rhetoric of white nostalgia]

Like Trump, Aldean draws on the pervasive anxiety among Republican base voters that their values are being marginalized in a changing America of multiplying cultural and racial diversity. Each man sends the message that extreme measures, even extending to violence, are required to prevent that displacement.

“Even for down-home mainstream conservative voters … this idea that we have to have a cultural counterrevolution has taken hold,” Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “The fact that country music is a channel for that isn’t at all surprising.”

Aldean’s belligerent ballad, whose downloads increased more than tenfold after critics denounced it, follows a tradition of country songs pushing back against challenges to America’s status quo. That resistance was expressed in such earlier landmarks as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.,” a staple at Republican rallies since its 1984 release. Aldean even more directly channels Merle Haggard’s 1970 country smash, which warned that those opposing the Vietnam War and “runnin’ down my country” would see, as the title proclaimed, “the fightin’ side of me.” (Earlier, Haggard expressed similar ideas in his 1969 hit, Okie From Muskogee, which celebrated small-town America, where “we don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street.”)

Haggard’s songs (to his later ambivalence) became anthems for conservatives during Richard Nixon’s presidency, as did Greenwood’s during Ronald Reagan’s. That timing was no coincidence: In both periods, those leaders defined the GOP largely in opposition to social changes roiling the country. This is another such moment: Trump is centering his appeal on portraying himself as the last line of defense between his supporters and an array of shadowy forces—including “globalist elites,” the “deep state,” and violent urban minorities and undocumented immigrants—that allegedly threaten them.

Aldean, though a staunch Trump supporter, is a performer, not a politician; his song expresses an attitude, not a program. Yet both Aldean and Trump are tapping the widespread belief among conservative white Christians, especially those in the small towns Aldean mythologizes, that they are the real victims of bias in a society inexorably growing more diverse, secular, and urban.

In various national polls since Trump’s first election, in 2016, nine in 10 Republicans have said that Christianity in the U.S. is under assault; as many as three-fourths have agreed that bias against white people is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities; and about seven in 10 have agreed that society punishes men just for acting like men and that white men are now the group most discriminated against in American society.

The belief that Trump shares those concerns, and is committed to addressing them, has always keyed his connection to the Republican electorate. It has led GOP voters to rally around him each time he has done or said something seemingly indefensible—a process that now appears to be repeating even with the January 6 insurrection.

In a national survey released yesterday by Bright Line Watch—a collaborative of political scientists studying threats to American democracy—60 percent of Republicans (compared with only one-third of independents and one-sixth of Democrats) described the January 6 riot as legitimate political protest. Only a little more than one in 10 Republicans said that Trump committed a crime in his actions on January 6 or during his broader campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.

The revisionist whitewashing of January 6 among conservatives helps explain why Aldean, without any apparent sense of contradiction or irony, can center his song on violent fantasies of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” delivering punishment to people who “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag.” Trump supporters, many of whom would likely fit Aldean’s description of “good ol’ boys,” did precisely those things when they stormed the Capitol in 2021. (A January 6 rioter from Arkansas, for instance, was sentenced this week to 52 months in prison for assaulting a cop with a flag.) Yet Aldean pairs those lyrics with images not of the insurrection but of shadowy protesters rampaging through city streets.

By ignoring the January 6 attack while stressing the left-wing violence that sometimes erupted alongside the massive racial-justice protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Aldean, like Trump, is making a clear statement about whom he believes the law is meant to protect and whom it is designed to suppress. The video visually underscores that message because it was filmed outside a Tennessee courthouse where a young Black man was lynched in 1927. Aldean has said he was unaware of the connection, and he's denied any racist intent in the song. But as the Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote for CNN.com last week, “Whether he admits it or not, both Aldean’s song and the courthouse where a teen boy was murdered serve as a reminder that historically, appeals to so-called law and order often rely just as much on White vigilantism as they do on formal legal procedures.”

Aldean’s song, above all, captures the sense of siege solidifying on the right. It reflects in popular culture the same militancy in the GOP base that has encouraged Republican leaders across the country to adopt more aggressive tactics against Democrats and liberal interests on virtually every front since Trump’s defeat in 2020.

A Republican legislative majority in Tennessee, for instance, expelled two young Black Democratic state representatives, and a GOP majority in Montana censured a transgender Democratic state representative and barred her from the floor. Republican-controlled states are advancing incendiary policies that might have been considered unimaginable even a few years ago, like the program by the Texas state government to deter migrants by installing razor wire along the border and floating buoys in the Rio Grande. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy raised the possibility of impeaching Joe Biden. The boycott of Bud Light for simply partnering on a promotional project with a transgender influencer represents another front in this broad counterrevolution on the right. In his campaign, Trump is promising a further escalation: He says if reelected, he will mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways to deliver what he has called “retribution” for conservatives against blue targets, for instance, by sending the National Guard into Democratic-run cities to fight crime, pursuing a massive deportation program of undocumented immigrants, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political opponents.

Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out that even as Republicans at both the state and national levels push this bristling agenda, they view themselves not as launching a culture war but as responding to one waged against them by liberals in the media, academia, big corporations, and advocacy groups. The dominant view among Republicans, he said, is that “we’re trying to run a defensive action here. We are not aggressing; we are being aggressed upon.”

That fear of being displaced in an evolving America has become the most powerful force energizing the GOP electorate—what I’ve called “the coalition of restoration.” From the start of his political career, Trump has targeted that feeling with his promise to “make America great again.” Aldean likewise looks back to find his vision of America’s future, defending his song at one concert as an expression of his desire to see America “restored to what it once was, before all this bullshit started happening to us.”

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

As Brown noted, the 2024 GOP presidential race has become a competition over who is most committed to fighting the left to excavate that lost America. Aldean’s song and video help explain why. He has written a battle march for the deepening cold war between the nation’s diverging red and blue blocs. In his telling, like Trump’s, traditionally conservative white Americans are being menaced by social forces that would erase their way of life. For blue America, the process Aldean is describing represents a long-overdue renegotiation as previously marginalized groups such as racial minorities and the LGBTQ community demand more influence and inclusion. In red America, he’s describing an existential threat that demands unconditional resistance.

Most Republicans, polls show, are responding to that threat by uniting again behind Trump in the 2024 nomination race, despite the credible criminal charges accumulating against him. But the real message of “Try That in a Small Town” is that whatever happens to Trump personally, most voters in the Republican coalition are virtually certain to continue demanding leaders who are, like Aldean’s “good ol’ boys raised up right,” itching for a fight against all that they believe endangers their world.

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Gas prices in the US have shot up this week, and the heatwave that’s plaguing large parts of the country has something to do with it. Refinery outages become more frequent as the temperatures touch triple-digit Fahrenheit, crimping production at oil refineries in the US. Texas, where most US refineries are located, is…

Read more...

Video captured the moment a child was rescued after being accidentally locked inside a hot car during a heatwave.

Texas has faced criticism after installing a string of large buoys to block irregular crossings along the Rio Grande.

Texas governor faces mounting criticism after escalating measures aimed at restricting asylum seekers from entering US.

In the three-plus decades I've been alive, I have never been bitten by a tick. Actually, that may be a lie, and I have no way of knowing for sure. Because even though ticks have harpoonlike mouthparts, even though certain species can latch on for up to two weeks, even though some guzzle enough blood to swell 100 times in weight, their bites are disturbingly discreet. “As a kid, I would have hundreds of ticks on me,” at least several of which would bite, says Adela Oliva Chavez, a tick researcher at Texas A&M University. And yet she would never notice until her aunt would pick them off her skin.

The secret behind tick stealth is tick saliva—a strange, slippery, and multifaceted fluid with no biological peer. It keeps the pests’ bites bizarrely itch- and pain-free, and allows them to feed unimpeded by their hosts’ immunity. As climate change remodels the world, spit is also what’s helping ticks enter new habitats and hosts—bringing with them the many deadly viruses, bacteria, and parasites they so often import.

For all their dependency on blood, ticks almost never eat. In their sometimes-multiyear life span, they may feed only once in each stage: larva, nymph, and adult. Which means, as my colleague Sarah Zhang once wrote, each meal must count for an awful lot. Unlike mosquitoes and other bloodsucking bugs that can get away with a dine and dash, ticks must linger on flesh for days or even weeks—an extended feast that requires them to essentially graft onto the host’s body like a temporary limb.

For the entirety of that process, saliva is key. When a tick first bites, its spit lines the wound with a gluelike substance that cements its mouth in place. Once secure, the tick deploys a fleet of spit-borne compounds that dilate its host’s vessels, while simultaneously battling the bodily compounds that would normally prompt the injury to clot, heal, or tingle with pain or itch. Under most circumstances, such an onslaught of foreign molecules would instantly marshal the body’s immune cavalry. But ticks have workarounds for that too. Their saliva is an anti-inflammatory and an analgesic; it can disable the alarms that cells send to one another, preventing them from coordinating an attack. Spit can even reprogram immune cells so that they never complete their development or receive the cues they need to gather at the scene.

[Read: Climate change enters its blood-sucking phase]

All of these strategies can also ease the way for bacteria, viruses, and parasites that the tick swallows from one host, then deposits into the next. With tick saliva breaching the skin barrier and keeping the immune system in check, all the pathogens have to do is come along for the ride. “Tick saliva is like a luxury vehicle that delivers them to the site of infection and rolls out the red carpet,” says Seemay Chou, the CEO of the biotech start-up Arcadia Science. Studies have shown that multiple pathogens get an infectious boost when chauffeured by spit, spilling more efficiently into the skin of newly bitten hosts. Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, will even slather parts of tick saliva onto itself like a cloak, essentially rendering itself invisible to bodily defense. Ticks’ infectious cargo may even egg each other on: Saravanan Thangamani, at Upstate Medical University, in New York, has found evidence that ticks simultaneously carrying Borrelia and Powassan virus may end up injecting more of the latter into fresh wounds.

Already, ticks spread more pathogens to humans and their livestock than any other insect or arachnid. And the risks ticks pose may only be growing, as warming temperatures and human meddling with wildlife allow them to expand their geographic range and infiltrate new hosts. In North America, lone-star ticks and black-legged ticks have been orchestrating a concerted march north into Canada. At the same time, the percentage of ticks carrying infections is also increasing, Thangamani told me, and for decades now, case counts of Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis in several parts of the world have been on a steady rise. As cold seasons shrink, the periods of the year when ticks bite—usually, the warmest months—are expanding too. “Many, many places are getting filled up with ticks,” says Jean Tsao, an entomologist at Michigan State University. “And they’re going to get more.”

It helps that many ticks aren’t picky about whom they carry or bite. Some species, as they push into new places, have picked up new pathogens in the past few years—Bourbon virus, heartland virus—that pose additional threats to us. Many tick species are also relatively indiscriminate about their hosts: Within its lifetime, a single deer tick may “feed very happily on reptiles, avians, and birds,” says Pat Nuttall, a virologist and tick researcher at the University of Oxford. Their spit is intricate enough that it can be tailored to counteract the defenses of each species in turn. Transfer a tick from a rabbit to a human or a dog, Oliva Chavez told me, and it will take notice—and adjust its saliva, quite literally to taste.

Vaccines to combat Lyme and other tick-borne diseases have long been in development. But many researchers think the more efficient tactic is going after the tick itself—a strategy that could, at best, “stop the transmission of several pathogens at once,” says Girish Neelakanta, a tick biologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Anti-tick immunity is possible: Studies have documented guinea pigs, cattle, rabbits, goats, and dogs developing sustained defenses against the arachnids after they’ve been bitten over and over again—even reactions that can help the animals detect a bite immediately, and sweep the pest away.

But spit is a slippery target for bodily defenses to hit. The substance doesn’t just shut down immune responses. It also reformulates itself constantly so that it can keep evading the host’s defenses—as often as every few hours, faster than most of the immune system can keep track. By the time the body has prepped an assault on one salivary ingredient, the tick has almost certainly swapped it out for the next. “It’s a game that the tick is playing, a catch-me-if-you-can kind of thing,” says Sukanya Narasimhan, a tick researcher at Yale. To outcompete the tick’s tricks, Narasimhan thinks it will be key to develop a vaccine that triggers the body to respond to tick bites fast, “as soon as a tick attaches,” she said, ideally by targeting the saliva’s first ingredients.

As ticks continue their takeover, it’s hard not to develop at least some grudging respect for their pluck. Some scientists even think that studying, or perhaps mimicking, their saliva could lead to other breakthroughs. Copycatting the spit’s immunosuppressive tendencies could be useful for the treatment of asthma, or for drugs that assist in organ transplants; imitating its anticoagulant properties could help keep life-threatening clots at bay. Some tick-saliva ingredients have even prompted investigations into their potential as cancer therapy. Ticks, after all, have been studying mammalian bodies for millions of years, all in hopes of subterfuge; under their tutelage, Chou, the Arcadia Science CEO, hopes to learn more about the molecular pathways that drive the urge to itch.

Ticks aren’t invincible, though, and some of the same global changes now easing their entry into new habitats could eventually hinder their progress. Already, they are fleeing parts of the planet that have grown too hot, too humid, too flooded, too razed with wildfires for them or their preferred hosts to survive, including certain inhospitable pockets of the American South. A tick decline could be good for us. But it would also be a symptom of a planetary scourge that has grown worse. Ticks, undoubtedly, “will continue to adapt,” Thangamani told me. And yet they, too, have their limits—further, but not that much further, beyond our own.

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