In the world of high school, every day is a battle. Recently, one of the most intimidating foes is the air. “School air,” as they call it on social media, is the latest way to explain the universal feeling of not looking your best at school. It smudges your makeup. It gives you awful hair days. It makes you look “dull” and “bad.”

But it might not be so much of a problem if you watch the right videos. Dozens or hundreds of them are on YouTube and TikTok—with titles such as “school air?? what is that?” or “school air just makes me look prettier”—and some have millions of views. Through their sound, these short clips are meant to send subliminal messages to the brain that will somehow make high schoolers look better. Each one details the “benefits” that will manifest after watching: For example, “your makeup always looks flawless” and “your skin always looks flawless” and “you look 100 times prettier at school” and “people wonder how ‘school air’ doesn’t affect you.” It’s not science. It’s magic.

These videos aren’t a joke. They are actually meant to work. “Subliminals” have been around for several years in secluded corners of YouTube, but they have recently found a whole new audience on TikTok, made up overwhelmingly of teenagers and young women. The genre has its own look and feel, with imagery that resembles a Pinterest mood board and audio that is usually a popular song or rain or campfire sounds laid over a quiet voice speaking “affirmations.” Some make funny but harmless guarantees: Listen to them and your crush will text or call “IMMEDIATELY.” Others are fantastical, promising to perfect a listener’s teeth with “virtual braces.” A smaller number are troubling: Subliminals promising to make listeners “underweight” or “scarily thin,” or claiming to change people’s race, have been taken down from YouTube.

You can probably find a subliminal for just about any personal change you can imagine. There are even a bunch for developing a permanent vanilla scent. “Smells like Vanilla in 1 Hour ✧ subliminal (listen once),” for example, is an 11-minute-11-second video of a cat sitting in a dryer while soft music plays and someone very quietly says “smells like vanilla” and “wrist smells like vanilla” and “neck smells like vanilla” and so on. The video comes with instructions: Put the volume between 20 and 60 percent while you listen. Listen once a day. And drink two cups of water before and after listening.

The one thing every subliminal diehard agrees on is that you must stay hydrated. “Drink water!” YouTube descriptions often instruct. This is because your head will hurt from listening to sounds that are meant to create such significant change. Your nose may also hurt if you listen to intense nose-shrinking subliminals, so for that you can take Tylenol. Subliminal creators and users congregate on Reddit, where they trade tips on how to best create and use subliminals. Many of them have spent several years experimenting—they arrange the clips into playlists, talk through how to remove “blocks” in their mind that prevent the messages from sinking in, and calculate the ideal number of times to listen to allow the audio to truly sink into the subconscious and start triggering change.

“I personally believe that we can achieve amazing things by tapping into our subconscious mind,” Michelle Cohen, a 20-year-old subliminal maker from Sweden, told me. One of the first videos she tried was meant to improve her skin, and she said it worked. She hadn’t changed anything about her skin-care routine, but her face was clearer within a week. This doesn’t make any sense scientifically, she acknowledged, but suggested that maybe she will learn more about this after she gets into medical school.

TikTok’s powerful recommendation algorithm seemingly has made subliminals go mainstream recently, along with the platform’s supernatural culture: Influencers talk about manifestation as if it’s natural, and girls on TikTok are guided through their daily lives by angel numbers. Subliminals are now so massive that some video creators are earning significant money off of them. @lolabunni, a 21-year-old subliminal maker from Tbilisi, Georgia, makes about $1,000 each month in YouTube ad revenue from her subliminals, which is her primary income. (I’m identifying @lolabunni by her YouTube username to protect her privacy.) She said she doesn’t understand why subliminals would work, but she truly believes that they do.

@lolabunni is not popular among other subliminal creators because she also posts her videos to TikTok, where creators think the clips are seen by far too big an audience. As the interest in subliminals has grown, those in the Reddit community have been talking about the urgent need for gatekeeping (and a “gatekeeping” subliminal, naturally); I was banned from their forum after I messaged some members about interviews for this story.

Though subliminal adherents tolerate doubt, they counter with testimony about results. In a Reddit thread from November, one person claimed to have achieved dozens of changes, including bigger eyes, a flat stomach, a better temper, less body odor, nicer parents, and higher pain tolerance. Sophie Lewis, an 18-year-old subliminal maker from the United Kingdom, tries to be realistic about what she can get from subliminals. “You can see what you want to see,” she told me. “If somebody’s trying to change their eye color, they can look really intensely and see that one tiny speck of a lighter color and be like, ‘Oh, this is working.’ But I think mainly subliminals really work when they’re for things that aren’t really tangible. Things like confidence, things like money.” Still, she used to take paid requests to make videos that could do just about anything, such as give you “anime eyes” and the “ultimate big butt.”

These girls, of course, did not invent the concept of subliminal messaging. The Cold War heightened widespread fear of mind control, and advertising executives started insisting on the ability to manipulate people with subconscious cues. By the 1980s, it had turned into a huge business: Subliminal audiotapes purported to use whispered affirmations to help people overcome fears, addictions, past lives, and reluctance to do their housework. Through successive studies, research psychologists determined that audio subliminal messages couldn’t help athletes perform better or get people to lose weight. But they could kind of work through placebo effects. People who thought they’d listened to a tape with affirmations to help improve memory or self-esteem saw some results, even if they hadn’t been listening to that kind of tape at all.

If none of the subliminals popular on YouTube and TikTok today will deliver the physical results they promise, they can get young people to dwell for hours at a time in their least healthy thoughts. Sometimes a well-known subliminal maker is suddenly suspected of putting secret language in her videos that causes hallucinations or makes someone “lose their soul, and things like that,” Lewis said. These incidents are much less disconcerting than, say, the weight-loss subliminals, which have not all been removed by YouTube. I recently found clips with titles such as “smaller appetite (forced),” “0% leg fat,” “exercise addiction,” and “toothpick.” The makers of race-changing subliminals get around the takedowns by changing video titles to avoid detection (“bright p4l3 sk1n,” for example). A subset of subliminal makers appear inspired by incel communities. They focus on helping teens change their skull shapes to be more “angelic” or “warriorlike.”

But many subliminals are still compelling because of the way they externalize people’s funniest and most embarrassing fantasies. There are subliminal videos made to give a girl a Queens accent or make her a star soccer player or turn her into a cooler older sister. @lolabunni volunteered to me that she first became interested in subliminals after clicking on a video titled something like “everyone is in love with me.” The people who watch her videos are always telling her that they’re getting results. Their nose bumps are gone. Their eyes are a different color. They look more like young Angelina Jolie than they did before. “It is really hard for me to question it or deny it at this point,” she said. “It’s like, how many people can lie to you? Or to themselves? Right?” The broader internet is interested in the benefits that subliminals can provide, she said, because the broader internet is open to the possibility that they really work. Magic is everywhere. “At this point, it has become internet culture.”

There’s no way—no way—that an audio clip can make a person look more like a famous actor. Or change that person’s eye color. Or make that person loved by everyone. And yet … already, so much of online life doesn’t seem realistic. Bots can create wild pieces of art that would never have emerged from the human imagination alone. Algorithms can predict what we want and sell us on things it wouldn’t have occurred to us to want. The internet’s inner workings are mysterious and mystical; the people who love it the most sometimes talk about it like it’s God. The magic is real, on some level.

On Sunday, Spain won the FIFA Women’s World Cup. It was the end of a tournament and, for the U.S. women’s national team, the end of an era. This was the last World Cup featuring Megan Rapinoe, a player inscribed in the history of the game for both her goals and her activism. Rapinoe, who will retire later this year, has starred in so many important games for her country that it’s hard to imagine her absence on the pitch.

I first met Rapinoe when my wife produced a documentary about the U.S. women’s team and its struggle for equal pay. Yesterday, I spoke with Rapinoe on the phone about the World Cup, which finished disappointingly for the U.S.—Rapinoe missed in the penalty shootout that ended the team’s Round of 16 match against Sweden. I also asked her about her critics, as well as the inequities that continue to plague the global women’s game.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Franklin Foer: You watched yesterday’s game?

Megan Rapinoe: Not live, but I watched it in the morning and did not know the score.

Foer: Well done, avoiding social media.

Rapinoe: It was tough. Sue [Bird, Rapinoe’s fiancée] actually knew and didn’t tell me.

Foer: Why is Spain such an exceptional team?

Rapinoe: So many of these players play together all of the time. Most of them play in Spain, most of them play for Barcelona, and they play the same style. So there’s a deep philosophy.

Foer: One of the cringiest moments I’ve ever watched in all of sports was when the head of the Spanish football federation kissed a player on the mouth while congratulating her.

Rapinoe: It made me think about how much we are required to endure. Think how much that Spanish team had to shoulder: Some of the players who stood up way back last year [to protest poor treatment by their coach and federation] still aren’t on the team. Maybe that was something that galvanized them, but you shouldn’t have to have that.

There was another picture that signals such a deep level of misogyny and sexism in that federation and in that man [Luis Rubiales, the president of the Spanish soccer federation] at the final whistle, just grabbing his crotch. What kind of upside-down world are we in? On the biggest stage, where you should be celebrating, Jenni [Hermoso, the Spanish midfielder who was kissed by Rubiales] has to be physically assaulted by this guy. [Editor’s Note: Rubiales has since publicly apologized for the kiss.]

Foer: Along these lines … your team was constantly forced to fight political battles, even when you’re not picking them. I’m thinking of Donald Trump’s post after you were knocked out by Sweden. He said, “The shocking and totally unexpected loss by the US Women’s Soccer Team to Sweden is fully emblematic of what is happening to our once great nation under crooked Joe Biden.” That’s hard to parse.

Rapinoe: It always is, because what he’s saying is fake. It’s a compilation of hit words and hot-button words that don’t actually make any sort of sense or square with reality at all … I think, just in general, the way that our team was spoken about over the course of the tournament, it was fake. And it didn’t make sense to me: In 2019, we were ultra-confident, ultra-swaggy—and won everything. And even though we won, we did it in bad taste, according to our critics. This time, we weren’t confident enough, and we don’t have the right “mentality.” And so we lost. It’s just so disingenuous. There’s no way for us to win, and there’s no way for us to lose.

Foer: You’d expect Donald Trump to posture in this way. But more troubling is watching the Fox coverage, because Fox is making a ton of money off the U.S. women’s team by broadcasting its matches, but then also recycling a lot of the tropes that you’re describing. The commentator and former U.S. men’s-national-soccer-team player Alexi Lalas called the team “unlikeable,” and your former teammate Carli Lloyd complained about the team celebrating and dancing after the draw with Portugal.

Rapinoe: Yeah, it was really disappointing—and the speed with which those comments got into the atmosphere. Everybody on the right—and everybody who was using hateful language and these tropes—it’s like they have just been waiting since, I don’t know, 2016? 2019? They’ve been waiting for this team to stumble. But when we are perfect, then we are accused of thinking that we’re perfect.

Really, what’s happening is that the right wing wants this to be true: They want women to believe that you can’t fight for things and be excellent; you can’t ask for what you deserve and be successful. But the reality is, we’re doing that. Beyoncé is doing that. Taylor Swift is doing that. Coco Gauff is doing that. We are still great on the field, and we’re fighting for equality, and it’s better for our bottom line and the sport’s.

[Read: Megan Rapinoe makes resistance look effortless]

One thing that America does really well is backlash. I think there’s a huge backlash against women happening right now.

I think we see that with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing that with the trans argument in sports. Does Alexi know exactly what he’s saying? If I was saying stuff that anchors on Fox News are also saying … I would be worried about the cosign.

Foer: We’ve seen players taking action against unfair workplace conditions that they’ve been subjected to; protests have spread across the world. How do you view your own role and the role of the U.S. women in the global story?

Rapinoe: What I’ve realized for a long time is that we’re playing two games at the same time. One, we’re playing all against each other. And then the other one, we’re all playing together to win equality and progress and what we deserve.

We want these other teams to be paid equally, and to have the resources that they deserve, and to not be subjected to misogyny and racism and sexism. If that comes at the expense of our own dominance, yeah, we want that.

Maybe that’s a novel concept for some people, but it’s not for us. And I think we’ve understood for a long time that being one of the best teams, and being one of the teams that [has] been invested in the most—[although] not enough—it is our responsibility to continue to push the game forward. And I take a lot of pride in the World Cup being what it is today versus even four years or eight years ago. I take a lot of pride when I see teams speaking up for themselves.

Foer: Before I let you go, because I’m going to be cruel, I wanted to talk about the Sweden game. It felt like the U.S. had struggled to click, but in that game, you guys started to play.

Rapinoe: It felt a lot more fluid. I think we set up more to our strengths and what was going to make us hard to beat. I wish we’d done that earlier, because we would’ve had more time with it. But obviously, hindsight is 20/20.

Was there a little bit more in the tournament for us? Yes, I think so. But in the end, I think we played as good as we could, and we tried as hard as we could, and sometimes you lose. It’s hard to win everything. That’s part of life, and that’s a beautiful part of sport to me. I don’t look at it as this devastating thing and a verdict on who we are as players or as a team.

[Read: The end of the U.S. women’s soccer dominance]

Foer: What went through your mind when you stepped up to take that kick against Sweden that you missed?

Rapinoe: I’m going to score. Honestly, something that has made me so successful in penalty kicks for so long is the acceptance and the realization that I will miss them. I miss them in training regularly. I’ve been lucky not to miss a lot in actual competition, but eventually, that can happen. But I love taking them. I would take them all the time. I would take that one again. I would pick me to take them.

For a long time, I have thought about missing one in a really big moment. What are you going to do? The only other thing you could do is to not take one. I’m not going to do that. I would rather step up and be in that moment. And I think that’s something that made the criticism after that loss particularly fake and disingenuous and absurd and outrageous to me. It’s like, you’re going to bash on me for getting out there and trying my best?

Foer: So where does U.S. soccer go from here? Do we resign ourselves to the fact that it’s just going to be a more competitive world than in the past?

Rapinoe: That’s part of it. It is incredibly competitive, and it’s getting more competitive, and we’re still right there in the mix. It’s almost like people see the rest of the world “catching up” as somehow the U.S. racing backwards, and that is not the case at all.

Other federations have a lot more low-hanging fruit, whether it’s the quality of travel or having more medical people on staff. That stuff affects performance a ton. And we’ve had that for a long time. And yet, all these other federations haven’t even had that.

But we can still get better in so many ways. From an overall federation perspective, it is worth at least a deep-dive look at our structure. We haven’t done that well in the youth tournaments. I think a more consistent style and a more consistent philosophy from the younger teams all the way up through the senior teams is necessary. It’s a lot more difficult in America, because we don’t have the academy system that they have in Europe. They’re honestly better set up for a more holistic approach. It’s going to be more difficult here.

[Read: The two players who tell the story of U.S. women’s soccer]

Foer: What will you miss most about the World Cup?

Rapinoe: Oh, man, the buzz around it—walking into these stadiums, the feeling that, on any given day, anything can happen. There’s just something that brings out the best in players, in teams. And if you catch that little piece of fire, it’s just special.

And I’ll miss being able to represent our country. I think, a lot of times, that gets lost, when people talk about me in particular: Oh, you guys don’t sing the anthem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don’t love America. But we do love America. It’s just more in a James Baldwin kind of way, not in a bald-eagle-on-your-shoulder kind of way.

I look back and feel so lucky and so grateful to have had the career that I have had, for as long as I have had it.  It’ll be something that I will miss forever. I don’t think I’ll ever not want to play in the biggest games, but I’ll be the biggest fan. I’ll be a fan at the next World Cup for sure.

The latest developments from the war in Ukraine.

When the wildfire came ripping down into the town of Lahaina, Maui’s state-of-the-art emergency sirens did not sound. That much is sure.

In the immediate aftermath of the fire, officially the deadliest in modern U.S. history, the decision not to sound these alarms has been one of the more baffling ones. Sirens are supposed to warn people, and shouldn’t more people have been warned by any means necessary? The official in charge of making the call, Herman Andaya, resigned Thursday, citing health reasons. And yet, under pressure, officials have also defended their decision not to sound the island’s sirens.

Whether they should have is a more complicated question than it might seem—even wildfire-evacuation experts I talked with were divided on it. Communication with the public is one of the most important parts of a wildfire evacuation, but sirens? Sirens are tricky.  

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

Tom Cova, who has been studying fire evacuation since the early 1990s, told me that he understood the argument in favor of using the sirens, and against. Such alerts, he explained, wake people up and can get them talking, seeking information—maybe even seeing fire or smoke for themselves. But a big, loud noise doesn’t answer questions such as what the best route out is or which roads are closed. In a case like the Maui fires, where little information was available and key routes seem to have been blocked, he wondered whether sirens might’ve simply created the same traffic jam survivors have reported being stuck in earlier.

Officials worried that people would confuse the sirens for a tsunami warning and run uphill—which in this case, would have been toward the fire. Erica Kuligowski, a professor who has been studying disaster-warning sirens for years, told me that such sirens are best used when the local population is trained to know exactly what they mean—and they’re accompanied by further messaging, such as an emergency text. Even if residents could be taught what sirens mean, Lahaina needs to think about its tourist population: You can’t train a tourist to know how to behave when a siren goes off. “They may be from Tornado Alley, and they’re visiting Maui,” Kuligowski told me over Zoom, from Australia. “And that siren means to take shelter in their home.”

The sirens were not the only tool officials had; they are a single flash point in the much larger conversation about how the Maui government handled evacuations from the deadly fire. Many survivors have reported getting no form of notification whatsoever. What happened there? Why were parts of a key escape route reportedly blocked? What happened in the nine hours between the fire’s ignition and its expansion? The fire was first reported at 6:30 a.m., and later that morning, officials sent out an alert saying that it was 100 percent contained. Flames didn’t sweep across the town of Lahaina until late afternoon. What unfolded in the interim? Why didn’t emergency officials partially evacuate—even if such evacuations would’ve been preemptive—given how disturbing the wind was that day?

Disaster response is a series of choices made by officials with very little time and under pressure. Preparation matters. So does experience. Already, as the facts come into view, they show that this was far from a perfect wildfire evacuation, if such a thing exists. And yet experts I talked to stressed that they are waiting for more information to fully assess what happened—and that Maui’s emergency managers were struggling with a bad fire, in a place that might have dealt with wildfire before, but never like this. A week ago, no one in the fire community would have predicted that the deadliest fire in modern American history would take place in Hawaii. It’s as if the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit the West Coast and not the Gulf. “Another thought experiment might be like, What if Reno had a tsunami?” Cova suggested.

[Photos: Lahaina, after the fire]

This fire was unprecedented. And yet unprecedented is the new normal. As Enrico Ronchi, an associate professor in evacuation modeling at Lund University, in Sweden, put it, “We are continuously crossing the bar of what we have seen until now.” Any community would have likely struggled with a fire like this, evacuation experts told me. In 2018, the Camp Fire—also a fast-moving fire on a dangerously gusty day—torched the town of Paradise, California, killing at least 85 people. Until last week, it was the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Paradise was located in a fire-prone area of California. The town had a plan—and a good one at that. Cova would’ve given Paradise’s plan an A-plus. “Even the best-prepared communities can be overwhelmed,” he said. “Since Paradise, no one has been dealt a hand as bad as the Maui emergency managers and firefighters.”

What if the community had been more like one in California, where emergency managers and residents both have more firsthand experience with fire? “It’s hard to say… ,” Ronchi told me, hesitating. “It probably would not be the same story.” That doesn’t mean it would’ve been “a happy ending necessarily,” he said, but preparation does matter.

Researchers told me that every community might want to start thinking about a wildfire-evacuation plan, but especially those at high risk of fire. The U.S. Forest Service and the USDA offer a website that maps the wildfire risk across the United States. When I input Maui County, it glowed red—at higher risk than 80 percent of counties in the U.S.

[Read: Hawaii is a warning]

Just because something is “unprecedented” doesn’t mean it is unpredictable. “We keep hearing from certain elected officials and other people being quoted in the media, ‘we had no idea, this is unprecedented,’” Elizabeth Pickett, a co–executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, told the Honolulu Civil Beat last week. “But actually, those of us in the wildfire community, meaning our fire agencies, our forestry natural resource management community, we have long been working to increase our risk reduction efforts.”

Pickett has been at this for 15 years. She’s well aware that Hawaii is a fire-prone state, and has been pushing for better education. (One Hawaii-based researcher called her “the backbone of the wildfire community” there.) She told me that, in the past, she’s knocked on the doors of elected officials and handed them fire-risk maps for their district. “Maui is like the canary in the coal mine for our state,” she said over the phone on Friday. “It’s not a one off.” The goal cannot be just about getting communities in Hawaii up to speed with best practices elsewhere; fast-moving fires are requiring us all to plan differently. “We need to have a whole new conversation about evacuation,” she said. “Let’s acknowledge the reality of how fast this went.”

And what else can we do but prepare, with all the time and effort that takes? A good evacuation plan includes a full communication plan, with predrafted alerts and plenty of contingency plans. Early warning is key. Multiple evacuation routes should be thought through, roads and intersections perhaps optimized for a quick escape. Temporary refuge areas—extra-hardened school gymnasiums, for example—can be created as last-resort shelters. Experts stressed in particular the importance of planning for the most vulnerable: people without cars, children and older people, people with limited mobility, people who don’t speak the local language, people with disabilities. Tourists are also considered vulnerable. Many of those who died during the Camp Fire fell into one or more of these categories.

Nowadays, sophisticated evacuation-simulation programs allow planners to better draw up and evaluate their plans. Researchers can input information about a town (the type of vegetation, the type of homes, the traffic layout) and its residents (population, age, other demographics), and model how different fires might sweep through a community. Emergency planners can run these simulations over and over again, and see how traffic builds up under different scenarios, and who survives. They can leverage this technology to test if their plan actually gets everyone out.  

We don’t even know how many people died on Maui yet, much less who or how or whose fault it was. But their stories are starting to trickle out. Sixty-eight-year-old Franklin Trejos was trapped in the backseat of his vehicle, on top of a beloved golden retriever, whom he died trying to protect; a friend of his found his bones. Seven-year-old Tony Takafua was found with his mother and his grandparents in a car near their home.

This is what’s at stake. This is wildfire.

The Swedes proved once again they're tough to beat after a semifinal loss, extending their perfect record in third-place matches to four with the victory in Brisbane.

Watch highlights as Kosovare Asllani's stunning second-half strike seals victory for Sweden as they beat Australia to finish third at the Women's World Cup 2023.

Sweden's Kosovare Asllani scores a "brilliant" goal to double her side's lead as they face co-hosts Australia in the third-place play-off at the 2023 Women's World Cup.

Kosovare Asllani's stunning second-half strike seals victory for Sweden as they beat Australia to finish third at the Women's World Cup at Brisbane Stadium.

Fridolina Rolfo and Kosovare Asllani score to seal 2-0 third-place playoff win over tournament co-hosts Australia.

Quran-burnings have sparked angry protests in Muslim countries, attacks on Swedish diplomatic missions and threats.