When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Diana Greene Foster made a painful prediction: She estimated that one in four women who wanted an abortion wouldn’t be able to get one. Foster, a demographer at UC San Francisco, told me that she’d based her expectation on her knowledge of how abortion rates decline when women lose insurance coverage or have to travel long distances after clinics close.

And she was well aware of what this statistic meant. She’d spent 10 years following 1,000 women recruited from clinic waiting rooms. Some got an abortion, but others were turned away. The “turnaways” were more likely to suffer serious health consequences, live in poverty, and stay in contact with violent partners. With nearly 1 million abortions performed in America each year, Foster worried that hundreds of thousands of women would be forced to continue unwanted pregnancies. “Having a baby before they’re ready kind of knocks people off their life course,” she told me.

But now, more than a year removed from the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Foster has revised her estimate. After seeing early reports of women traveling across state lines and ordering pills online, she now estimates that about 5 percent of women who want an abortion cannot get one. Indeed, two recent reports show that although Dobbs upended abortion access in America, many women have nevertheless found ways to end their pregnancy. A study by the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, signals that national abortion rates have not meaningfully fallen since 2020. Instead, they seem to have gone up a bit. A report released this week by the Society of Family Planning, another pro-abortion-rights group, shows that an increase in abortions in states that allow the procedure more than offset the post-Dobbs drop-off in states that closed down clinics.

[Read: The abortion backup plan that no one is talking about]

Some of this increase may be a result of trends that predate Dobbs: Abortion rates in the U.S. have been going up since 2017. But the reports suggest that the increase may also be due to travel by women who live in red states and the expanded access to abortion that many blue states enacted after the ruling. Still, it is not yet clear exactly how much each of these factors is contributing to the observed increase—and how many women who want an abortion are still unable to get one.

Alison Norris, a co-chair of the Society of Family Planning study, told me that she fears that the public will “become complacent” if they see the likely increase in abortion rates and believe that everyone has access. “Feeling like the problem isn’t really that big of a deal because the numbers seem to have returned to what they were pre-Dobbs is a misunderstanding of the data,” she said.

It seems illogical that more than a dozen states would ban abortion and national rates would hardly change. But even as red states have choked off access, blue states have widened it. And the data show that women have flooded the remaining clinics and ordered abortion pills from pharmacies that ship across the country. More than half of all abortions are done using medication, a pattern that began even before the Dobbs decision.

“It just doesn’t work to make abortion illegal,” Linda Prine, a doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital, told me. “There may be some people who are having babies that they didn’t want to have, but when you shift resources all over the place, and all kinds of other avenues open up, there’s also people who are getting abortions that might not have gotten them otherwise.”

With mail-order abortion pills, “it’s this weird moment where abortion might, ironically, be more available than it’s ever been,” Rachel Rebouché, an expert in abortion law and the dean of the Temple University Beasley School of Law, told me.

The Guttmacher Institute sampled abortion clinics to estimate the change in abortion counts between the first halves of 2020 and 2023. Areas surrounding states with post-Roe bans saw their abortion numbers surge over that period of time. In Colorado, which is near South Dakota, a state with a ban, abortions increased by about 89 percent, compared with an 8 percent rise in the prior three-year period. New Mexico saw abortions climb by 220 percent. (For comparison, before Dobbs, the state recorded a 27 percent hike from 2017 to 2020.) Even states in solidly blue regions saw their abortion rates grow over the three-year interval from 2020 to 2023: Guttmacher estimates that California’s abortion clinics provided 16 percent more abortions, and New York’s about 18 percent more.

Some shifts predated the court’s intervention. After a decades-long decline, abortions began ticking upward around 2017. In 2020, they increased by 8 percent compared with 2017. The researchers I spoke with for this story told me that they couldn’t point to a decisive cause for the shift that started six years ago; they suggested rising child-care costs and Trump-era cuts to Medicaid coverage as possible factors. But the rise in abortion rates reflects a broader change: Women seem to want fewer children than they used to. Caitlin Myers, a professor at Middlebury College, told me that abortion rates might have increased even more if the Court hadn’t reversed Roe. “It looks like more people just want abortions than did a few years ago,” she said. “What we don’t know is, would they have gone up even more if there weren’t people trapped in Texas or Louisiana?”

One of the most significant factors in maintaining post-Roe abortion access dates from the latter half of 2021. As the coronavirus pandemic clobbered the health-care system, the FDA suspended its requirement that women pick up abortion medications in person. A few months later, it made the switch permanent. The timing was opportune: People became accustomed to receiving all of their medical care through virtual appointments at the same time that they could get abortion pills delivered to their doorstep, Rebouché told me. People no longer have to travel to a clinic and cross anti-abortion picket lines. But access to mifepristone, one of the most commonly used drugs for medication abortions, is under threat. After an anti-abortion group challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug, a federal court instated regulations that would require women to visit a doctor three times to get the pills, making access much more difficult. The Supreme Court is weighing whether to hear an appeal, and has frozen the 2021 rules in place while it decides.

But paradoxically, several of the factors that may have contributed to the rise in abortion rates seem to have sprung directly from the Dobbs decision. In the year since the ruling, six blue states have enacted laws that allow practitioners to ship abortion pills anywhere, even to deep-red Texas. Although these laws haven’t yet been litigated to test whether they’re truly impenetrable, doctors have relied on them to mail medication across the country. Aid Access, an online service that operates outside the formal health-care system, receives requests for about 6,500 abortion pills a month. (The pills cost $150, but Aid Access sends them for free to people who can’t pay.) Demand for Aid Access pills in states that ban or restrict medication abortion has mushroomed since the Dobbs decision, rising from an average of about 82 requests per day before Dobbs to 214 after. The Guttmacher report doesn’t count abortions that take place in this legally fuzzy space, suggesting that actual abortion figures could be higher.

As the Supreme Court revoked the constitutional right to an abortion and turned the issue back to the states, it also hardened the resolve of abortion-rights supporters. In the five months after Roe fell, the National Network of Abortion Funds received four times the money from donations than it got in all of 2020. People often donate as states encroach on abortion rights. In many cases, they bankrolled people’s travel out of ban states. Community networks also gained experience in shuttling people out of state to get abortions. “There’s definitely been innovation in the face of abortion bans,” Abigail Aiken, who documents abortions that occur outside of the formal health-care system, told me.

[Katherine Turk: How financial strength weakened American feminism]

Some researchers believe that the Dobbs decision has actually convinced more women to get abortions. Abortion-rights advocacy groups have erected highway billboards that promise Abortion is ok. Public opinion has tilted in favor of abortion rights. Ushma Upadhyay, a professor at UC San Francisco, told me that California’s rising abortion rates cannot all be due to people traveling from states that ban abortion. “It’s also got to be an increase among Californians,” she said. “It’s just a lot of attention, destigmatization, and funding that has been made available. Even before Dobbs, there was a lot of unmet need for abortion in this country.”

Abortion used to be a topic that was “talked about in the shadows,” Greer Donley, an expert in abortion law and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “Dobbs kind of blew that up.” Still, she believes that it’s unlikely that people are getting significantly more abortions simply because of changes within blue states. Just as obstacles don’t seem to have stopped people from seeking abortions, efforts that moderately expand access are unlikely to lead people to get an abortion, she said.

The people I spoke with emphasized that even though overall abortion rates might be going up, not everyone who wants the procedure can get it. People who don’t speak English or Spanish, who don’t have internet access, or who are in jail still have trouble getting abortions. “What I foresee is a bunch of Black women being stuck pregnant who didn’t want to be pregnant, in a state where it’s incredibly dangerous to be Black and pregnant,” Laurie Bertram Roberts, a founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, told me.

Bertram Roberts’s fund used to provide travel stipends of up to $250. Now women need three times that. Most people travel from Mississippi to a clinic in Carbondale, Illinois. The trip takes two days—48 hours that women must take off work and find child care for. “If you are in the middle of Texas, and you have to travel to Illinois, even if funds covered all the costs, to say that abortion is more accessible for that person seems callous and wrong,” Donley told me.

Many women spend weeks waiting for an abortion. “It is excruciating to be carrying a pregnancy that one knows they’re planning to end,” Upadhyay said. And although studies show that abortion pills are safe, women who take them can bleed for up to three weeks, and they may worry that they’ll be prosecuted if they seek help at a hospital. Only two states—Nevada and South Carolina—explicitly criminalize women who give themselves an abortion (and few women have been charged under the laws), but the legislation contributes to a climate of fear.

More than a year out from the Dobbs decision, the grainy picture of abortion access is coming into focus. With the benefit of distance, the story seems not to be solely one of diminished access, widespread surveillance, and forced births, as the ruling’s opponents had warned. For most Americans, abortion might be more accessible than it’s ever been. But for another, more vulnerable group, abortion is a far-off privilege. “If I lived in my birth state—I was born in Minnesota—my work would be one hundred times easier,” Bertram Roberts told me, later adding, “I think about that a lot, about how the two states that bookend my life are so different.”

I met Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine on a sunny afternoon at a park in Garden City, New York. The two dogs—both creamy-colored shih tzu mutts with spots on their backs—were lying next to each other on the grass, front legs extended, tongues hanging out. Every so often, they’d both look off to the side at the same moment—then turn their heads back again simultaneously. When two excited little girls came over to pet them, the dogs’ owner—John Mendola, a retired police officer—made pleasant small talk with the girls’ parents. Eventually, though, he shared something that made them raise their eyebrows in surprise: The dogs were not only twins but twin clones, spawned from the DNA of his late dog, Princess.

In 2016, right before Princess died, Mendola had ordered a genetic-preservation kit from ViaGen—a pet-cloning facility based in Cedar Park, Texas—and sent off a sample of her skin to its lab. The company, which opened in 2015, clones dogs and cats for $50,000 and horses for $85,000. Mendola spent several years saving (and sold his car) to afford it, but now here he is with two new versions of his beloved pup.

At least, that’s one way to think of it. A cloned pet is easy enough to define physically: It’s a genetically identical animal, like a twin born on a different date. But its meaning is harder to pinpoint. Is it a continuation of the original pet? An homage to the old one, like a living gravestone? A unique animal that might share some of its predecessor’s best qualities? I talked with several pet-clone owners to find out what they’d wanted—and whether they’d gotten it. For many people, it seems, a clone is essentially an attempt to cheat death, to somehow mitigate the pain of losing a companion. But grief isn’t easily evaded.

[Read: How much would you pay to save your cat’s life?]

The first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was born in 1996—but cloning technology has become publicly available to pet owners only more recently. ViaGen, the U.S.’s most popular facility, started cloning livestock and horses in 2002, then expanded to dogs and cats in 2015; since then, it’s cloned close to 1,000 pets, and its customer count is rising. The process (formally known as “somatic cell nuclear transfer”), requires a pet’s tissue sample to be cultured to produce millions of cells, the nucleus of a donor egg to be removed and replaced with one of those cells, and the embryo to be implanted into a surrogate animal, which will give birth to an identical twin of the original pet. Because surrogates are implanted with several embryos, there’s about a 30 percent chance that multiple clones—like Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine—will be born (though owners can take them all home for the same price).

Pet cloning is ethically fraught. Surrogate animals, for example, have to endure surgery when the embryo is implanted, and sometimes need a cesarean section or experience stillbirths as well. Snuppy, the first cloned dog, born in 2005, was the result of more than 1,000 embryos implanted into 123 surrogate dogs, resulting in three pregnancies that ultimately yielded just one healthy puppy. In 2008, 20 dogs had to be implanted to create one clone of a toy poodle. Surrogates are leased from a breeder; Melain Rodriguez, ViaGen’s client-service manager, told me that all of the company’s customers used to have the option of adopting their clone’s surrogate, but after too many clients complained that their cloned dogs were bonded more tightly with their surrogate than with them, ViaGen stopped offering canine clients the option. Ethicists and animal-welfare activists have argued, too, that cloning is particularly pernicious when millions of animals are languishing in shelters.

And yet, cloning—essentially a very expensive bereavement-coping tool—can be tempting for owners who don’t feel ready to let go of their pet. In a promotional video on ViaGen’s site, Rodriguez claims that clients “don’t ever have to know what it’s like to have them gone.” And plenty of customers take that promise quite seriously: They don’t just want a new pet that reminds them of their previous one. Rodriguez told me that “a lot of our clients will go into it hoping that it’s the same pet all over again.”

There’s no guarantee, though, that a cloned pet’s personality will be the same as the original’s. As with human identical twins, the two virtually always look similar. But the clone will also experience its own unique conditions—maybe a new home, or different family members or other pets around, or even just a different diet. Those factors can shape the individual it becomes. In fact, Brock Bastian, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, who studies ethical decision making, told me he wonders whether people might be better off saving $50,000 and just buying the same breed again. Rodriguez said that clients are warned not to expect a reincarnation. Still, they’re likely to keep comparing their new and old pets, forever on the lookout for similarities and departures.  

[Read: Too many people own dogs]

Unsurprisingly for some owners, the attachment they’d had to their initial pet is impossible to re-create. Kelly Anderson, a dog trainer in Austin, Texas, told me that her late ragdoll cat, Chai, first came home with a lot of diseases, so Anderson spent months nursing her back to health, which she felt strengthened their tie. Chai was not a particularly affectionate cat, but in moments when Anderson was depressed, she said Chai would snuggle up to her, somehow seeming to sense her turmoil. She believes that Chai saved her life on numerous occasions. When Chai died unexpectedly at 5 years old, Anderson decided to clone her and named the new kitten Belle.

Belle looks just like Chai—long-haired white fur and bright-blue eyes—but her demeanor is entirely different. Though Chai was always reserved, Belle is outgoing; whereas Anderson nurtured Chai through near-fatal illness, Belle has always been perfectly healthy. Anderson loves Belle enormously and doesn’t regret her choice to clone. But she’d forged a bond with Chai based on very specific experiences: coaxing her out from under the bed when she was scared, gently getting her to swallow her medicine, gaining her trust. With Belle, Anderson told me, she doesn’t feel the same connection. She doesn’t just miss the combination of DNA that was Chai; she misses their relationship, which was built on unreplicable memories and experiences.

Other owners feel like their clone is so similar to their original pet that they hardly need to start over at all. West Westmoreland, who owns a construction company in Jacksonville, Florida, told me that Peanut II, his cloned miniature dachshund, is essentially a perfect continuation of his predecessor, Peanut. Peanut I had been deeply attached to Westmoreland, who’s quadriplegic and uses a wheelchair, and had quickly become his service dog—spending most of her time in his lap and accompanying him to his doctor appointments. When she died after 13 years, Westmoreland was devastated. Several months later, when he brought Peanut II home, the clone took on the same caregiving role as her predecessor. As soon as she could reach his foot pedals and clamber up his legs, she started spending most of her time in his wheelchair, not wanting to let him out of her sight. “It’s like having the same dog,” he told me. “It’s unreal.”   

[Read: Which pet will make you happiest?]

One possible explanation for this perceived similarity, Rodriguez told me, is “cellular memory,” a theory that memories from the brain can actually be stored at a cellular level, and that those memories are heritable. But it’s also likely that genetically identical animals who are raised by the same owner, in the same environment, could end up displaying familiar behaviors—or at least that owners would interpret their behaviors as similar. Pets are, after all, the perfect object for this kind of projection: They can’t challenge their owners’ assumptions about who they are, what they remember, or how connected they feel to their two-legged family.

However familiar a clone might seem, though, a pet owner’s initial loss isn’t so neatly resolved. Mendola told me he feels that Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine are like the original Princess “in a new shell.” But still, he misses Princess terribly. Since she died, he hasn’t been able to sleep in the bed he shared with her; he, Ariel, and Jasmine use a different room.

Westmoreland does feel like he has his treasured Peanut—or “P1” as he now refers to her—back in the form of Peanut II. But he also has two new dachshunds, Cleo and Zoe; he adopted them right after Peanut died, but they were nothing like her and, he felt, didn’t fill the void she’d left.

I asked Westmoreland if it was possible that he might have bonded with Cleo and Zoe more had he not been so focused on re-creating a specific relationship with Peanut II. Perhaps, he told me, he would have connected especially with Cleo, hoping she could eventually turn into a good service dog—but now he’ll never know, because he decided Peanut II was right for the position. In fact, Westmoreland is so pleased that he’d consider getting a Peanut III. But if he keeps replacing Peanut with clones, I wonder whether he might be postponing his grief, rather than coping with it.

For some pet owners, having the option of that postponement—of going around their loss, rather than through it—is a comfort in itself, even if they never actually buy a clone. Rodriguez told me that the bulk of ViaGen’s customers have a genetic-preservation sample stored in the freezer (for a fee of $1,600) but haven’t gone through with cloning yet, and may choose never to do so. Rodriguez even has cells from two of her deceased dogs preserved in case she decides to clone them in the future. And the company has cloned animals from cells that were nearly 20 years old—so owners might keep the possibility in the back of their mind for a long, long time.

When I met Mendola, he showed me a video from the day he received Ariel and Jasmine. He’s sitting at a restaurant in LaGuardia Airport—visibly nervous, his hands clasped in prayer—anticipating the arrival of Princess’s clones. They’re brought to him in a carrying case, and as he’s handed the two tiny wriggling puppies, he holds them close while they start burrowing their faces into his chest; he beams down at them, sniffling tears of joy. Mendola remembers asking them, “Do you remember me?” He interpreted their kisses and wagging tails to mean they did.

Even before Bob Menendez was charged earlier this month with conspiring to act as a foreign agent, dozens of his fellow Democrats were calling on him to resign. Prosecutors say Menendez used his political office to influence American policy at the behest of the Egyptian government. He remains a senator—for now—but the latest indictment, coming after corruption charges last month, further complicates his fate. Last week, Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty to all counts, missed an all-senators classified hearing on Israel—no small indignity for a former chair of the Foreign Relations Committee.

According to the indictment, the senator from New Jersey passed along sensitive information to Egypt, acted as a ghostwriter for its officials, and accepted “hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes.” While researching my next book, a history of the foreign-lobbying industry in the United States, I didn’t come across anything quite like these allegations. They appear to be the first time that an elected federal official has been formally accused of acting as an agent of a foreign government.

Menendez has repeatedly professed his innocence and his loyalty to America. After his arraignment earlier this week, he released a statement calling the foreign-agent charge “as outrageous as it is absurd.” His trial is set for May, when Menendez says he’ll be shown to have done nothing wrong.

[Read: Why this time is different for Bob Menendez]

Even if the allegations are disproved, however, they could reshape how America prosecutes and punishes the kind of misconduct that Menendez is charged with. Until recently, the U.S. has largely ignored its best tool for deterring covert foreign agents. The case against Menendez signals an overdue willingness to use it.

Menendez’s alleged behavior might be novel, but we were warned of its possibility centuries ago. The Founding Fathers recognized that, in some ways, America is particularly vulnerable to foreign influence. “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers. The danger may be greater today: Underpaid and overworked, U.S. officials are ripe for targeting by foreign powers eager to sway decisions in Washington. History, Hamilton noted, “furnishes us with so many mortifying examples of the prevalence of foreign corruption in republican governments.” Why would the U.S. be any different?

For years, these concerns appeared overblown. (Though not entirely: James Wilkinson, who served as the highest-ranking officer of the U.S. Army under each of the first four presidents, was revealed after his death to be an agent of the Spanish monarchy.) Then came the 19th century’s greatest foreign-corruption scandal.

In the late 1860s, Russia’s czarist regime was broke and desperate to sell Alaska, its easternmost province. So the Russian ambassador, Edouard de Stoeckl, secretly hired former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Walker to persuade Washington to buy it. Walker quickly obliged, publicly endorsing the purchase, planting articles in influential newspapers, and allegedly—no hard proof ever emerged—bribing legislators. Within a matter of months, Congress voted to back the purchase. When the details of Stoeckl’s gambit later spilled out, one critic described it as the “biggest lobby swindle ever put up in Washington.”

Walker’s offenses were shocking, but at least he had the decency to leave office before committing them. This sets him apart from the precedent that Menendez has now allegedly established. A more recent case, however, comes close.

In 1999, nearly 50 years after his death, Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York was revealed to have been a Soviet agent. KGB archives showed that Dickstein used his office to grant Soviets access to U.S. passports and, in one instance, to pass information about a Soviet defector who was later found dead in a hotel room.

Unlike other Americans recruited by the Soviet Union, Dickstein did not appear to have communist sympathies. Rather, Dickstein—whom Soviet officials nicknamed “Crook”—seemed interested only in money. “‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name,” Soviet officials wrote. “This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money … a very cunning swindler.” The Soviets eventually cut him loose, complaining that he wasn’t worth the price he demanded. Dickstein was never found out and spent the rest of his life in public office.

[Read: How the Manafort indictment gave bite to a toothless law]

The revelations were all the more surprising because Dickstein played an instrumental role in passing the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, America’s best safeguard against people like himself.

In the 1930s, he led a committee that found that Ivy Lee—sometimes called the “father of public relations,” whose clients included the Rockefellers, Woodrow Wilson, and Charles Schwab—covertly advised the Nazis, helping them launder their image in America. At one point, Lee encouraged Joseph Goebbels to cultivate foreign reporters; he told other Nazis to publicly insist that Hitler’s storm troopers were “not armed, not prepared for war.” (One unsigned memo I found in Lee’s archive described Hitler as “an industrious, honest and sincere hard-working individual.”)

Thanks to these and other revelations, Dickstein and the committee played a key role in persuading legislators to pass FARA in 1938, which required anyone representing foreign governments, especially lobbyists, to disclose what they were doing on behalf of their clients. Dickstein is the only known member of Congress to violate the law he helped enshrine.

According to prosecutors, Menendez largely followed Dickstein’s playbook—passing along sensitive information, steering American policy for the benefit of foreign patrons, and accepting staggering amounts of money for his efforts, including in the form of gold bars.

The fact that prosecutors employed FARA to charge Menendez is a welcome development. The legislation was underused for decades, as foreign-lobbying networks—including those targeting sitting officials—flourished. To cite one statistic: Only three FARA-related convictions were secured from 1966 to 2015.

That wasn’t for lack of rule-breaking. A decade ago, Azerbaijan’s dictatorship and its proxies recruited American lobbyists, scholars, nonprofits, and others to promote Azeri interests without disclosing any of their campaigns. Other dictatorships and budding autocracies followed suit. As one 1990 government report found, barely half of registered foreign agents disclosed all of their activities.

When Donald Trump emerged as a political force, FARA experienced something of a renaissance. Although the former president was never accused in court of acting as a foreign agent, some of his closest allies—including his campaign manager Paul Manafort and National Security Adviser Mike Flynn—were convicted on related charges. (Trump later pardoned them both.) But those prosecutions never targeted a sitting official. That honor belongs to Menendez alone.

The renewed interest in FARA has highlighted the ways in which the legislation can be improved. The legal definition of foreign lobbying needs clarifying, and the Department of Justice should be empowered to use civil fines (rather than just criminal penalties) to target covert networks. Effective reforms have been proposed, but they’ve stalled in Congress. As Bloomberg Law reported, one legislator in particular was responsible for thwarting them: Menendez.

If proven guilty, Menendez will come to represent the culmination of the Founders’ fears—perhaps the most “mortifying example” of foreign corruption in U.S. history. But whether or not he’s convicted, Congress could use the attention his case has drawn to strengthen FARA, keep foreign lobbying in check, and give would-be offenders more reason to fear concealing their activities. If the charges against Menendez are a black mark, they can be a turning point too.

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In recent weeks, statements about the Israel-Hamas war have emerged from corporations of all kinds. Predictably, they have not all gone over well.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

​​A speaker without enemies—for now “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba.” The junk is winning.

The Logic of Speaking Out

Since October 7, more than 150 companies have made statements condemning Hamas’s attacks on Israel. A tracker compiled by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a business professor at Yale, shows the wide-ranging nature of the industries represented. Palantir, which works with governments on data and defense projects and has an office in Israel, took out a full-page ad in the The New York Times that said “Palantir stands with Israel.” Salesforce, which has offices in Israel, put out a statement condemning Hamas’s attack and outlining support for employees there. And brands with less obvious connections to the region, such as Major League Baseball, have issued statements as well.

At one time in American history, tech firms and sports leagues would not have been expected to wade into geopolitical issues. For many years, for better or worse, the role of corporations was principally to make money. But over the past decade especially, some employees and customers have started expecting, or even demanding, that companies speak out on social issues. The rise of the social web, and the eagerness among many brands to establish a direct line of communication with consumers, created an environment in which such a dialogue wasn’t just possible but seemed unavoidable. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement continued to grow, many corporations made statements about racial justice (and many, in turn, faced blowback from employees and consumers who saw the statements as insincere). After the fall of Roe v. Wade, corporations generally took a circumspect approach, more commonly issuing statements about what they were doing to help employees access health care than taking a stance on the morality of abortion. Now companies are once again navigating the tricky terrain of public statements as the Israel-Hamas war continues.

A lot of the pressure on corporations to speak out about political or social issues is coming from younger workers who believe that companies should operate with a sense of purpose beyond just making money, Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told me. And some are vocal: Employees at Instacart and Procter & Gamble have reportedly complained about their employers’ lack of immediate public statements on the Israel-Hamas war. And some workers are pressuring their employers—including major tech companies, according to a Washington Post report—to issue statements condemning the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, which fewer large corporations have done thus far. (Plenty of companies have issued mealier-mouthed statements falling somewhere in the middle, angering even more people.)

It’s important, Argenti said, for executives to think about why releasing a statement in a fraught moment makes sense for them. Companies that speak out on one issue without truly thinking about why they are doing so may get caught in a challenging loop. “If you don’t have a plan for how you’re thinking about” social issues, “then you have to talk about everything,” Argenti said, adding that speaking without a clear reason can lead to “wishy-washy statements that are just trying to get on the bandwagon … That is a very dangerous place to be, because you’re going to get heat.” There are plenty of good reasons, he argued, for an executive to issue a statement—because of business interests in a region, for example, or to speak out on an issue of great personal importance. But saying something just because everyone else is, because employees are outraged, or because you want to seem like the good guy in a charged moment may well backfire. “Corporations are not political entities that have to speak out on every issue,” he told me.

The proliferation of company statements in recent years might suggest that customers are clamoring for their favorite brands to speak up, too, but it’s not clear that the majority of consumers actually care all that much, especially lately. This year, 41 percent of consumers said that businesses should take a stand on current events, according to a poll from Gallup and Bentley University, down from 48 percent last year. Forrester, a research and analysis firm, saw a dip for the first time in four years in the number of surveyed adults who say they “regularly purchase from brands that align with their personal values.” There are certain issues that consumers tend to think companies should comment on: 55 percent of people said companies should speak up about climate change, the Gallup and Bentley polling found. But just 27 percent of people said that companies should speak up about international conflicts (however, these data were gathered before the Israel-Hamas war began).

Businesses aren’t the only ones making statements—or taking heat for their stances. Universities, celebrities, and even many individuals with large followings on social media have shared public statements on the conflict in recent weeks. Sam Adler-Bell, writing about statement mania in New York magazine, suggested that part of the compulsion to speak out has to do with the sense of helplessness many feel about the war and their own ability to affect its outcome. “When our government is this unresponsive, it makes sense that Americans look closer to home for moral clarity. Powerless to influence actual policy outcomes, we settle for battling over discourse,” he writes.

Corporations exist to make a profit, and they sell goods and services that end up shaping our culture. But their role is also slowly morphing into something more personal—and much wider in scope than it once was. Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor tracking statements, told me that in his view, some of the pressure to speak out may come from the role that business leaders play in a time of deteriorating trust in politicians, media, and the clergy. “CEOs have become pillars of trust in society,” he said. The notion of CEOs as America’s hope for moral leadership may be enough to make skeptics raise an eyebrow, but the decline in public trust is worrying and real.

Even for the corporations whose CEOs are driven primarily by a mission in the public interest, more often than not, opining on issues of global foreign policy is of questionable value. Corporations are already deeply embedded in the political system because of their lobbying power and ability to influence regulations. “That’s enough,” Argenti said. “Do we want them involved in thinking about political issues,” too?

Related:

What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Beware the language that erases reality.

Today’s News

Mike Johnson was elected speaker of the House with unanimous Republican support. Hurricane Otis made landfall in Mexico as a Category 5 storm. Michael Cohen took the stand again today in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial after testifying yesterday that the former president instructed him to inflate the value of certain assets.

Dispatches

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Evening Read

The Asahi Shimbun / Getty

What If There’s a Secret Benefit to Getting Asian Glow?

By Katherine J. Wu

At every party, no matter the occasion, my drink of choice is soda water with lime. I have never, not once, been drunk—or even finished a full serving of alcohol. The single time I came close to doing so (thanks to half a serving of mulled wine), my heart rate soared, the room spun, and my face turned stop-sign red … all before I collapsed in front of a college professor at an academic event.

The blame for my alcohol aversion falls fully on my genetics: Like an estimated 500 million other people, most of them of East Asian descent, I carry a genetic mutation called ALDH2*2 that causes me to produce broken versions of an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, preventing my body from properly breaking down the toxic components of alcohol. And so, whenever I drink, all sorts of poisons known as aldehydes build up in my body—a predicament that my face announces to everyone around me.

By one line of evolutionary logic, I and the other sufferers of so-called alcohol flush (also known as Asian glow) shouldn’t exist.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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