Ever since the earliest known recording of whale song was made in 1949, researchers have been captivated by the wails, rumbles, clicks, grunts and squeals of their communication. As technology improves, scientists are decoding the intricate patterns that make different species’ vocalisations distinctive. Madeleine Finlay hears from Emma Bryce, a journalist who has spent months investigating human efforts to understand whale song. She explains how this knowledge could help us better protect whales from human-made harms.
Credits:
1. Valeria Vergara/Raincoast Conservation Foundation
2. Footage courtesy of Raincoast Conservation Foundation - Obtained for research under SARA permit XMMS 4 2026
3. Video by Amanda Cotton/Project CETI
4. Footage courtesy of Valeria Vergara and GREMM. Obtained for research under SARA permits QUE-MM02-2016 and QUE-LEP-001-2018
The chicken liver sponge has sailed through a test of its ability to filter pollutants in a harbour in Spain’s Costa Brava
In the polluted waters of Marina Palamós on Spain’s Costa Brava, Manuel Maldonado, a sponge biologist, noticed something unusual last month: red starfish had started settling in the area.
Nearly two years earlier, the Spanish National Research Council scientist and his colleagues had begun transplanting sea sponges into the port to study whether they could survive in its polluted waters.
Critically endangered New Zealand bird enjoys record breeding season triggered by mass fruiting of native tree, pushing its numbers to 325
The population of the world’s heaviest parrot, the kākāpō, has surpassed 300 birds for the first time in 75 years, after a record breeding season triggered by the mass fruiting of a native New Zealand tree.
Ninety chicks were officially added to the population of the critically endangered birds on 1 September, pushing the total to 325 – a record high since recovery efforts began.
Critically endangered New Zealand bird enjoys record breeding season triggered by mass fruiting of native tree, pushing its numbers to 325
The population of the world’s heaviest parrot, the kākāpō, has surpassed 300 birds for the first time in 75 years, after a record breeding season triggered by the mass fruiting of a native New Zealand tree.
Ninety chicks were officially added to the population of the critically endangered birds on 1 September, pushing the total to 325 – a record high since recovery efforts began.
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
My wife says I’m a people pleaser. I want to turn over a new leaf (maybe to please her?!) so I’m making a resolution to be less of a weathervane and stand up for myself more. But it’s hard — I love to fit in. I’m a joiner and a collaborator. It’s not that I’m passive, it’s more that I find other people’s “ways of being” contagious. Sometimes I catch myself slipping into imitation of the friends or colleagues I’m talking to.
What’s a chameleon to do? Or, more scarily, who am I when I’m alone? How do I find out who I really am?
Dear Identity Crisis,
At first glance, it’s a bit funny to be accused of being a people pleaser as if it’s entirely a bad thing. It sounds like you have others’ interests genuinely in mind, and that seems like a nice way to build connection.
But I find the term people pleaser to also be a sneaky euphemism. Do you want to know how this sort of behavior is often discussed in the psychological literature? In studies, it’s not always called people pleasing; it’s called lying.
In fact, wanting to please other people is an incredibly prevalent motivation for lying; it’s more common than lying for personal gain or pleasure. When psychologists evaluated the top reasons that people lied in their everyday life, many wanted to seem more agreeable. Their lies support seemingly magnanimous goals, like complimenting a friend or making sure a social interaction went well. But they were lies all the same, defined by the researchers as a “message that one gives to another in which they are deliberately deceiving them.”
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I find this shift in perspective helpful, if a little harsh, if you’re looking to break a people-pleasing habit. It’s one thing to think about yourself as dedicated to keeping other people pleased. But when you consider that actually, all of your interactions are suffused with lies, the approach becomes a bit more unsavory.
Imagine the situation in reverse: What if you found out that all the time you had spent with a close friend, they were keeping their real thoughts and feelings from you? You might feel differently about the time you’d spent together. I can bet it certainly wouldn’t feel as authentic.
I used to be a bartender, and I would be nice and mildly obsequious to frequent customers. Several of them I genuinely liked. But I’ll never forget the uncomfortable moments of running into a regular elsewhere — and their figuring out that we weren’t actually friends. There’s a distance between two people when one’s main role is to please the other. You are creating that distance, even if you may not realize it, and not even getting tipped for it.
So for starters, try trusting that the people around you are able to handle your real thoughts and feelings. But what areyour real thoughts or feelings? This points to the bigger conundrum you face: Who is your true self?
You’re in good company worrying about this. Religious figures, philosophers, and scientists alike have been trying to figure out if there even is a continuous self, and if there is, what is it made up of?
Scientifically speaking, there’s not a part of your brain that’s “truer” than others, or where the true self resides. But your ideas about your true self matter, according to research by Rebecca Schlegel, a social scientist at Texas A&M University. She has found that people have greater well-being and find their lives to be more meaningful if they think that they’ve made choices that align with who they “really” are.
When people make a decision that they think aligns with their own true self, it regularly leads to feeling more satisfaction with that decision — more so than choices steered by considering what other people want, by religious belief, or by advice from others.
Doing this yourself can be remarkably simple. In one experiment, Schlegel asked participants to make an arbitrary decision and told some to “use your true self” to make up their minds, and others to “use rational thinking.” Those who framed their choices as being guided by their true self were much happier with their selection. For you, it could be that just introducing the question — what would my true self do? — can start making your life feel more like it belongs to you.
If it feels odd to ask your true self what to do, defining your truest self as what’s moral about you isn’t a bad place to start. Researchers have found again and again that when they ask people which of their traits feel the “truest,” it’s usually the parts that are morally good. When I call my mother on her birthday, that’s my true self. When I say something hurtful to my friend, that’s a deviation from my true self, who knows better. I wasn’t myself this morning, I might say as an apology. So you could make a list of your best qualities, like your generosity or your creativity. Then, when you ask what your core self would do, you’ll have even more specific guideposts to follow.
Of course, if having a true self still doesn’t feel relatable, you can turn to an approach I’ve found helpful in my own life from Eastern traditions, like Buddhism and Taoism. They endorse the idea that there is no rigid self at all. In Buddhism, this is called anatman, which translates roughly to “no self.” This teaching emerged in response to an earlier Hindu belief: a concept called “atman,” which asserted that all people had an eternal and unchanging core, similar to a soul. Anatman was a rebuttal to that idea.
I’ve found that anatman relieves some of the pressure around all of this. We feel as if there should be an essence to us, some permanent quality that persists over time that you can point to. But anatmanreminds us that there’s no aspect of the self that doesn’t change.
Life is long, and we transform throughout it. As we grow, we learn new physical skills like playing soccer and the piano, and eventually acquire back problems and wrinkles. Our minds evolve too. We read novels, maybe we can do calculus, and we develop political convictions. Hopefully, we gain the skills of being kind and patient. In all of these developments, change is the only constant. This is why the Buddha thought that you couldn’t find the singular, stable self in any of these places — not the mind, the physical form, our habits, or our perceptions. “What is impermanent, subject to change…cannot be taken to be ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ or a ‘self,’” the Buddha taught.
You asked what you, as a chameleon, should do? You could frame everything you do as being in service to your deeper self. Or you could try halting the search for a strictly defined, enduring version of you, and start making decisions based on who you want that person to become.
Bonus: What I’m reading
My book club just read Love, Always, a novel by Ann Beattie, about a group of people who start a magazine in rural Vermont. It’s a summery tale, though somewhat frustrating, about what happens when people don’t change themselves, and only follow their worst instincts.
This is a fascinating story of multiple selves in Popular Mechanics by Michael Natale. It documented what happened when seven men confessed to being the culprit of a plane hijacking in 1973 in the Pacific Northwest.
Over the course of several nights recently, I watched the 1926 silent movie, Faust, directed by F.W. Murnau. It’s a haunting tragedy about the consequences of wanting to hold onto a quality of yourself indefinitely — in this case, staying young forever. I was amazed by the special effects they pulled off for that era! An evergreen reminder that if someone promises you something that’s too good to be true (especially if he looks like the devil), it probably is.
Over the years, Julianne Holt-Lunstad has fielded many requests from startups looking for her help. These entrepreneurs came to the Brigham Young University professor with the well-meaning goal of “solving” loneliness; they believed their app or company could help consumers build genuine connections, and wanted Holt-Lunstad’s opinion on this feature or that business tactic.
Across the pond, University College London professor Noreena Hertz was getting the same calls. They wanted her to join their boards, to advise them, to give their proof of concept a stamp of approval.
“Of the many startups who’ve approached me, and it’s probably about 50 or 60 in the space,” Hertz told Vox, “there hasn’t been one where I felt convinced by their business model.”
In the years since Hertz gave it a name, the loneliness economy has only ballooned. As public attention to loneliness has mounted — despite the fact that research doesn’t consistently show whether a loneliness epidemic exists in the first place — the market stepped in to offer solutions. No longer are the lonely limited to joining a running club, they can now rent friends and cuddlers. They can hire acoach to help vanquish loneliness and build a community. (One charges $3,000 for a three-month program.) They can attend a $1,000 weekend-long summer camp to make friends (with the option to pay in installments via Klarna). They can buy a $250 pendant that listens to their every word and can communicate back via voice or text. They can join a coworking space meant to quell loneliness with a nearly $300 a month price tag. They can enroll in a bootcamp for how to be less shy, hop in a group travel excursion with other solo venturers, download an app where AI pairs you with other strangers for activities. Loneliness is no longer a societal issue with mental and physical costs and structural solutions but one businesses hope consumers can buy their way out of.
But is it possible to disrupt the slow burn that is making a friend? To outsource the intimacies of friendship to AI? To put a price tag on human connection?
“I would caution developers to really critically evaluate their business model and the barriers to who they’re actually reaching,” Holt-Lunstad told Vox. “Think about ways that [connection] can occur organically without monetizing it.”
The cottage industry of loneliness services is just another example of capitalism wrapping its tentacles around human desire. But in most cases, the cost of the app, or product, or experience is going to be much higher than the possibility of eliminating loneliness.
One person’s loneliness is another’s business opportunity
Since the early 2000s when Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam warned of the decline of civic and social spaces in his seminal work Bowling Alone, we have witnessed the “privatization of community,” according to Sam Pressler, a fellow at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program who studies community, connection, and class. Gathering spaces shifted away from places of worship and union halls to boutique fitness centers and private, members-onlyclubs. “There was already this dynamic in place where you could, at a premium level, sell people on community,” Pressler said.
Naturally, the startup world began to see a business opportunity, Pressler said. WeWork founder Adam Neumann launched a new residential real estate company with a goal of “solving loneliness” and $350 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The app 222, which uses AI to pair strangers for group activities based on personality-based questions, raised $10 million in funding. “You then get this anchor within startup land that really has an approach of solve customers’ problems and pain points, in that loneliness is a customer problem or pain point to be solved, through productized market solutions,” Pressler said.
Brian Choi had heard of the male loneliness epidemic, but luckily didn’t feel like he fell into that category. He grew up in the Los Angeles area, where he still lives, and has plenty of friends, but he signed up for 222 several years ago as a way to supplement his social life and meet people who might be interested in activities his existing friends aren’t.
“Dance, for me, means a lot,” the 34-year-old video game character artist, told Vox. “For my best friends, hard to sell them on that. So 222 is a good angle on sharing that experience with other people who are presumably also open to dance.”
But most of the platform’s events, Choi found, were centered around dinner and drinks, which didn’t appeal to him. If there was a meetup with an interactive element, like brunch and a pottery class, he was more likely to engage. But despite attending about a dozen 222 events over the years, Choi hasn’t fostered any serious friendships. “It’s dependent on individuals to be proactive about inviting folks into their lives after the 222 event,” Choi said. “And that can be scary for a lot of people.”
Once a market emerged for loneliness-adjacent services and products, influencers started promoting them. Over the last few years, the content creator Zaid Khan observed his peers hosting “community” events that seemed well-meaning enough until a few common themes emerged: The events seemed to be furthering the creators’ brands, they often came with a ticket price, and they were attended mostly by young, white people. This widespread commodification of community is what Hertz refers to as “WeWashing” — like greenwashing — because an occasional knitting club with a $50 fee does not a community make.
Charging any sort of premium for a social event or service runs the risk of exacerbating inequities. According to Holt-Lunstad’s research, people with only a high school education or less or those who made less than $75,000 a year were less socially connected than those with higher education and incomes. People who stand to benefit the most from interventions to build relationships often can’t afford a $200 a month gym, or lack the time to swipe for friends. These spaces can then become, like Khan observed, homogenized by race, class, and ability. “I’m sorry, but young, attractive, white, straight, 20-somethings living in New York will have no issue. … You can walk into any West Village bar and meet those people,” Khan said. “It’s excluding the people who, I think, genuinely could need it.”
“Masking” a symptom
There is a contradiction at the heart of the loneliness economy: the need for human connection in the modern world is difficult to solve, let alone value and commodify. In order to make money, companies either have to charge top dollar for their social club or camp, or, they need their product to be used by as many people as possible, as often as possible, which inherently flies in the face of how relationships are fostered.
“The ethical problem begins when a company intentionally exploits a consumer’s loneliness, insecure attachment, or fear of missing out to pressure that person into purchasing.”
Cindy Rippé, Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia
Relationships are projects of patience. They unfold after repeated interactions in a physical space, after slow revelations and disclosures and laughs. The loneliness economy isn’t built on unhurried bonding. Instead of consistently showing up to a community event and slowly building connections, some apps are effective at connecting users with strangers for one-time events, but are less focused on encouraging users to exchange numbers and hang out again. “We know from the research that relationships take time to develop, and that there needs to be consistency also over time. When you get to know someone, it takes time,” Holt-Lunstad said. “If you’re only doing it sporadically or once, that’s going to be less likely. If it’s all virtual, that’s going to be less likely.”
Just like hunger and thirst cue you to eat and drink, loneliness is a sign to interact. Swiping for friends may feel productive and occupy time, but without actually hanging out, it may just be a distraction, Holt-Lunstad said. “What I worry is that [apps] may be effective in masking that symptom without actually fulfilling any social needs,” she said. “It would be like no longer feeling thirsty, but we’re not actually drinking any water.”
The loneliness economy also fails to take into account the barriers preventing people from making friends in the first place. In recent surveys, the results of which have not been published, Holt-Lunstad has found both internal and external obstacles to connection, including anxiety, a fear of rejection, physical and mental health limitations, the economic cost of participation, and the time investment required with joining a club. “It might be, that’s a great program, but it’s too far away, or that’s a great program, but it costs too much,” Holt-Lunstad said. “And then, of course, there’s the internal barriers where there’s so much shame and stigma associated with this that many people don’t want to feel like I have to have an app or a program to make friends.”
These potentially lonely consumers may be more vulnerable to companies’ marketing efforts, even though the products are unlikely to solve the underlying issue. According to research, when people feel like they are lacking close, intimate relationships, they are more likely to buy themselves things. “One of the things, for instance, could be spending money to go on group activities rather than individual activities,” Aulona Ulqinaku, an associate professor of marketing at Università Carlo Cattaneo LIUC in Italy, told Vox. People could spend money to join a club you aren’t particularly interested in just to feel a part of something.
Shopping can also serve as a social experience in itself, Cindy Rippé, a senior lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, told Vox in an email. Employees and other patrons can become familiar and friendly faces, effectively turning a retail space into a third place. A paid social experience, such as a club, could theoretically achieve the same fulfilling effects as shopping, Rippé said. But spending money isn’t what makes people feel better; it’s repeated social interaction, familiarity, belonging.
Because companies can track your activity online, users who search for local clubs or interact with these groups on social media may be repeatedly served ads for other community-centric businesses and thus spend more money on services that may not be effective.
“I hope that we are looking at a world where marketing can be looked at as an instrument for helping people rather than exploiting people,” Ulqinaku said. “The aim should not be, ‘I make money [off] of you.’ The aim should be, ‘I want to make you feel better. I don’t want to exploit you.’”
Putting a price tag on relationships
The pairing of lonely consumers who might be willing to spend money and businesses that definitely want to make it may be good for the bottom line in the short-term, but perhaps not for social health or for revenue in the long-term. (After all, if these products don’t work, people will stop paying for them, and if they do work as promised, people will also stop paying for them.) Friendship isn’t a product you can advertise or put a dollar amount to, Pressler said, and we shouldn’t apply market solutions to non-market goods.
“You can approach it with a consumptive mindset where it’s like, ‘Well, I just need to consume more relationships, and if I consume more relationships, ergo, I will not be lonely or disconnected,’” he said — but that’s not how real-world interactions work. The power imbalance between the companies earning money and the consumer spending it to fulfill a core human need may veer on exploitative, too, Rippé said: “The ethical problem begins when a company intentionally exploits a consumer’s loneliness, insecure attachment, or fear of missing out to pressure that person into purchasing.”
Which isn’t to say communal gatherings with a price tag are inherently exploitative. Live music and events, like concerts, successfully bring people together for shared experiences, according to Hertz, the professor and author. (Of course, tickets have become so expensive that seeing your favorite act perform is becoming a luxury.) Groups centered around an activity have the potential to connect people, too. But buying your own yarn and needles to bring to a weekly craft night at your local knitting shop is different from paying $50 to join a one-off “knitting club” organized by a VC-backed friendship app.
Because social health touches so many aspects of life — the physical spaces we inhabit, the technology that both facilitates and inhibits socialization, the costs of interacting — the path toward connection is more complex than marketable products or individual purchases. It involves government investment in public spaces and low- or no-cost community events; policies that allow everyone to lead a dignified life, which includes the space for leisure activities; and a societal shift that prioritizes slow, intentional relationship building instead of instant connection.
“The need is real,” Hertz said. “The purported solutions are many. Some of them I think can be part of the solution. Some of them may well end up making us lonelier as a society.”
Leah Stewart, who was bitten while swimming at Coogee beach, says she asked herself ‘which limb am I willing to lose’ as she fought back
An Australian woman who lost an arm after a shark attack at a Sydney beach has described delivering a “left hook” punch to the four-metre great white as its open mouth came within centimetres of her face.
Leah Stewart, 34, a teacher and mother of a one-year-old, was attacked by the shark while on a morning swim at Coogee beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs on 13 June.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and state Attorney General Letitia James at a press conference on August 12, 2026, in New York City. | Selcu Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
On Tuesday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked about an upcoming appearance by Mohan Bhagwat, a leader of a Hindu nationalist organization, at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.
“I don’t support the rally, but I don’t know if the city has any jurisdiction on canceling a private event,” he said at a press conference. “It has been incredibly troubling to see the rise of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country, frankly, and so it is one that I find myself in deep opposition to.”
His statement has led to a flurry of controversy and allegations that Mamdani is “Hinduphobic,” biased toward Muslims, and picking a fight with another religious and ethnic group. The mayor has continued to make headlines this year for his vocal criticism of Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leading to tensions with Jewish leaders and communities in New York.
First the Jews. Then the Italians. Now Hindus.
Zohran Mamdani has found yet another New York community to target, opposing a Hindu celebration at Madison Square Garden because he objects to its politics. The mayor of America’s most diverse city seems determined to divide it one…
But Mamdani was far from the only critic of the event; other Hindu, Muslim, interfaith, and human rights activists protested the event and demanded it be canceled this week.
What’s actually going on here?
Bhagwat is the leader of the Indian organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (or RSS for short), a Hindu nationalist group affiliated with India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Bhagwat is not a politician or an officeholder in India, but is frequently described as being one of the most influential men in that country, primarily because of his role in leading RSS, which describes itself as a “Hindu-centric civilisational, cultural movement.”
Yet plenty of activists, academics, experts, and critics contest that description of RSS, instead casting it as a right-wing Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, accused of fueling intolerance, endorsing discrimination, or inciting violence against minorities in the subcontinent, particularly Muslims — essentially promoting an ideology that “amounts to ‘an Indian version of fascism,’” as one India scholar told my colleague Zack Beauchamp in 2023.
And one of the most vocal recent critics is Mamdani, who is himself Muslim and of Hindu descent on his mother’s side.
To better understand the RSS, Bhagwat, and the reasons for Mamdani’s criticism, I turned to Nishant Upadhyay, an associate professor in Asian American studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Upadhyay has done extensive research on the intersection of race and caste, as well as Hindu nationalism in both India and diaspora communities.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Could you explain to me what these groups behind Saturday’s event are?
Mohan Bhagwat is the president of this Hindu nationalist organization, RSS, which loosely translates to National Volunteer Corps. The group that’s organizing this event in the US is called American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue. In choosing someone like Bhagwat, who has been the president of this organization since 2009, which is perhaps the largest paramilitary religious nationalist organization in the world, it’s very concerning and shocking.
American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue say they’re all about fostering understanding, building bridges, strengthening communities, but the Hindu nationalist project in India is anything but that. In the diaspora, for them to say that we believe in diversity, we believe in building bridges, we believe in a vision of multiculturalism, it shows the contradiction between what Hindu nationalists are doing in India versus what they pretend to do in the diaspora.
Does RSS have a long history in India?
It was founded in 1925, when India was under British colonial rule, with the idea that India should only be for Hindus. And who is “Hindu” changes, but mostly the violence we see has been put on Muslim and Christian communities. And over the last hundred years, that violence just keeps escalating. Muslims are the primary target, but across the country, Christian communities have also become a big target.
The whole idea is that India should be for Hindus and religions that have originated in South Asia. So Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism — they can be part of the Hindu nation as long as they identify themselves as Hindu, because these religions have some similarities with Hinduism. But all of them actually came as anti-caste critiques of Hinduism. Practitioners of these religions assert a very separate identity than Hindu because of what their scriptures have been grounded in: a very anti-casteist and anti-patriarchal critique of what we understand as Hinduism now.
How does India’s current government fit into this?
RSS is the biggest umbrella organization of all Hindu nationalist organizations in India and the diaspora. And BJP, the ruling party in India, is seen as the political wing. So RSS does not necessarily participate in elections and government, but provides the spiritual, religious, and intellectual foundation for a political party like BJP that does come to power.
They have this really massive network of RSS followers across the country who are then mobilized for elections, who are mobilized to support BJP, who are mobilized to then commit violence against Muslims. Some people come from the RSS and become leaders in the BJP, though BJP also has other people who might not be directly affiliated with RSS, but it’s the main political organization.
For the last 12-ish years, Narendra Modi, who’s the prime minister of India, has been in power with the BJP, which has drastically changed the social, political, and economic landscape of the country. The Hindu nationalist agenda has become more and more frontline and mainstreamed and normalized. Religious minorities like Muslims and Christians face constant violence, everyday surveillance, everyday policing, from the minutiae to extreme violence on a regular basis across the country. If Hindu nationalists had their way, they would either take away citizenship rights from Muslim communities or render them nationless and kick them out of the country.
It’s also caste-oppressed communities, Indigenous communities, ethnic communities like Kashmiri and Manipuri communities. We have just seen drastic escalation and violence against everyone who’s not a Hindu and everyone who’s not a dominant caste, or caste-privileged Hindus across the country.
So this group’s leader is coming to the US — how do Indians in the American diaspora feel about all this? When Modi came to the US in 2019, he had massive crowds, and Donald Trump joined him. Do folks here feel the same way about someone like Bhagwat?
It’s complicated, and there isn’t just one view. For context: Modi was banned from coming into the US until about 2014, because he was accused of encouraging genocide against Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, where over a thousand people were killed.
But since being elected prime minister, he’s visited the US multiple times and has often had huge gatherings in cities like New York and Houston. He won a third election two years ago, and his closeness with Trump…he’s projected often as a world leader. But there is, in the diaspora, along with human rights organizations in the US, active work against RSS and BJP for the last 20, 25 years. They are doing the consciousness-raising work of saying how this is a fascist ideology, anti-Muslim ideology and that we should not be in cahoots with them.
But what we’ve also seen is, especially in the last 15 years since Modi has come into power, that the Hindu right-wing diaspora has also become very active and mobilized. And so there used to be a more secular diaspora, which in some ways was the mainstream, that has been taken over by [the] Hindu right-wing diaspora now because of how they’re in alignment with both the Democrat and the Republican Party. They’re also working with Indian millionaires and billionaires in the US economy, and so they’ve started gaining this economic and political power in the US where they’re becoming more dominant.
And they’re able to do these things at a much larger scale now and counter the critiques of nationalism in the diaspora. There is power in the Hindu diaspora, and now, in some ways, the right-wing diaspora. That ideology works very well with Trump’s ideology and actually also works with Democrats in many ways because Modi has also allowed more and more American corporate interests to come into the Indian economy.
But that’s not to say that the majority of the Indian diaspora is Hindu and the dominant caste; there are many who are non-dominant-caste and many who are not Hindus, and many who are Hindus and dominant-caste and critical of Hindu nationalism because we see the violence that is happening under the name of our religion in many ways.
And that’s where the conversation heats up, because Zohran Mamdani’s family also comes from a much more secular, pluralist, anti-Hindutva [the RSS/BJP ideology that defines Indian identity through Hindu identity] ideology. And a place like New York has many amazing diasporic groups who are working every day to fight against fascism in India and the US.
Every time this erupts in the mainstream, we see this conflict between the much more conservative Hindu right-wing voices versus the much more liberal, secular, pluralist Indian diaspora.
So let’s talk about Mamdani’s critique. What’s the context we need to know that explains why he would speak up?
He is such a curious figure to have someone in the public realm like that. So he is Muslim, but his mother is Hindu, and his mother is from India. His mother has been a very renowned progressive filmmaker who’s made films about different forms of structural violence in India for a long time. So he is Muslim, but also someone from a progressive Hindu background. He can see the violence in the Indian state in ways that are not accessible to many others.
I would not say it’s just because he’s Muslim. I think because he’s Muslim and has a progressive anti-violence kind of approach that for him then these are very important issues. That kind of outlook is not targeting Hindus, he’s specifically talking about the violences of Hindu nationalism. It’s not a blanket statement against all Hindus, that they are like that. And he’s also Hindu, comes from a Hindu-heritage family as well.
How does this compare to his comments and criticisms of Netanyahu? Some on the American right have cast him as having it out against Jewish people, or Israel, and now he’s moving on to Hindus.
It’s very similar, in the sense that criticizing an ideology or a nation’s policies is not the same thing as saying all people are responsible. The conversation that criticizing Netanyahu or Israel is not antisemitic is a similar conversation: it’s actually not a critique of Hinduism or Judaism, it’s a critique of hyper-nationalist politics that can come out of Zionism and Hindu nationalism and what the Indian state and the Israeli state does.
His critique and my critique and many of us in the US, our critiques are saying, no, actually let’s look at what Hindu nationalism and Zionism does. And that’s where I think Mamdani comes from.
Anything Mamdani says and does or his wife says and does becomes news anyway, but these are much more grounded in politics that his and his family have been grounded in for a long time, to fight against violence and fascism and stand up for minoritized communities here and globally.
He does have a track record of speaking up about Hindu nationalism. I believe he has called Modi a “war criminal.”
Yes, he’s been doing this even before he became mayor or before he came into US politics. If you see his track record when he was a younger organizer, he has always been consistent on standing up for Palestinians, standing up for Muslims, standing up against all forms of fascism here and globally.
He’s very openly spoken about what is happening to Muslims in India in the last 10-plus years. Quite recently, he has spoken up about an Indian Muslim PhD scholar, Umar Khalid, who was critical of BJP and was arrested and has been detained in Delhi for six years. So Mamdani has shown solidarity to many Muslim folks in India who get unjustly incarcerated or face violence.
So it’s not surprising that Mamdani would weigh in now. But is it significant?
I’m wondering now with your question, if Mamdani hadn’t said anything, would this have been an issue? Or if Mohan Bhagwat had gone somewhere else in the US, if the mayor would have not said anything, or if it would have sparked any interest.
I want to emphasize that this is beyond players like Zohran Mamdani and Mohan Bhagwat, and more about the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalist ideology in the US. It is really scary and we need to be very attentive to it even when they use the language of pluralism and dialogue and building bridges.
Even Indian Americans who are Muslims and Kashmiris and Dalit and Manipuri and others get attacked on a very regular basis. So many academics in the US academy and grassroots-level organizers, who are mostly women and who are mostly Muslim or mostly Dalit, are publicly hounded. They get threats, threats against their children in their inboxes, in their phone calls, on their social media feeds. And this has been going on for the last 10 years and more. And so it is when we give power to people like Mohan Bhagwat that these violences escalate more.
Whitley Bay, North Tyneside: A huge community effort is under way to clear up a spill of these disastrously resilient beads. We take a family trip to the beach to do our bit
My son spots the first one. It’s about the size of a lentil, and half-buried in the dry sand.
We’re on the beach at the seaside town of Whitley Bay. We’ve just walked past a clean-up crew of about 40 volunteers in hi-vis clothing and rubber gloves, kneeling or stooped over black buckets. This is the aftermath of the Tyne nurdle spill, which sounds much funnier than it is.
My mom was excited and confused when she opened her Apple Watch at Christmas a few years ago. “What a nice gift!” A pause. “What am I supposed to do with this?” We told her the truth: A smartwatch can do all kinds of useful things.
Fitness tracking became the thing my mom latched onto. She loved counting her steps and seeing how many miles she walked in a day. It motivated her to become more active, too. We didn’t tell her until much later that the Apple Watch’s fall detection feature was the real reason we got her the watch. The feature worked, too.
On the coldest day of the year, this past winter, my mom tripped on an uneven sidewalk and broke her wrist. The Apple Watch called 911 almost as soon as she hit the ground, and we took an ambulance to the hospital, where my sister, who was nearly a thousand miles away, texted and asked what was wrong. She’d been watching my mom’s location on Apple’s Find My app, a fact that we revealed to my mom for the first time when she was in the emergency room. We also had to confess that the Nest security cam we’d set up in her living room was indeed useful in spotting intruders but also let us check in on her from time to time.
My mom wasn’t thrilled about any of this. She realized that these handy gadgets doubled as surveillance devices, and we’d essentially be spying on her.
But at the same time, she recognized why we wanted to keep an eye on her. If she’d fallen alone at home alone, for instance, an easy way to call for help could’ve been a lifesaver.
Perhaps grappling with how to spy on your aging parents — ethically! — is something you’re grappling with, too. A growing number of people are weighing the privacy trade-off as boomers get older and their millennial children get moreinvolved. Roughly 59 million Americans now help take care of an adult over 50, up from 34 million a decade ago. A third of those are sandwich-generation caregivers, meaning they’re looking after their parents and their own children at the same time. It can be an overwhelming task. So enlisting a home security system, like Nest, or a wearable, like an Apple Watch, to keep an eye on their parents seems like a time-saving way to gain some peace of mind. It certainly helped my sister and I feel better about our mom aging in place.
It turns out, a growing community of researchers and tech developers has thought a lot about this problem that many of us are now facing. There are labs focused on how technology can make growing older more humane, as well as federally funded research efforts and startup accelerators from groups like AARP working on solutions. All of the experts I spoke to for this story told me the same thing: Good communication is essential.
And there’s a whole cottage industry of tech for older adults, known as age-tech, that includes everything from healthcare gadgets, like the Hero Smart Pill Dispenser, and more futuristic devices, like the social robot ElliQ, that promise to help seniors combat loneliness. Many of these products and services are designed to help keep older adults safe and to help them age in place. Some, like the Haelo smart ring, are designed to do it all, everything from fall detection to health tracking to emergency alerts if something suddenly looks wrong. Others, like Life360, use software designed to track kids to keep an eye on their grandparents.
The big challenge with all of this, however, is finding a way to implement it in a way that respects the aging loved one’s privacy and independence. Boomers and Gen Xers didn’t grow up with as much tech in their lives as younger generations — much less gadgets that could double as monitoring devices — so introducing these tools stands to alienate them. And beyond that, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that technology reduces a caregiver’s mental load rather than add to it. After all, too much tech can create new problems rather than solve existing ones. If the overwhelm becomes too much to bear, everyone involved might just abandon the effort.
“Start with: What do they need support for and what is the best solution for that?” Wendy Rogers, director of the Human Factors and Aging Lab at the University of Illinois, told me. “Sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s not.”
You might be surprised by what technology can do, when it’s purposefully designed and properly introduced into an aging person’s life.
If you’re a caregiver — Rogers prefers the term “care partners” — you should think of this problem-solving project as a collaboration. Start the conversation with your parents or loved ones early and maintain an open dialogue about how it’s working out. Perhaps most importantly, keep updating the plan as time goes on and lives change. And this might go without saying, but try to avoid any big surprises.
Don’t wait until an emergency
It’s difficult to know when to offer an older adult help, even if that help is as simple as a smartwatch. On one hand, you don’t want to offend or infantilize them. On the other, if you wait too long, you might find yourself trying to set up a monitoring system when it’s no longer optional, like after a fall or other health scare. In these instances, you risk rushing to a solution before you identify the specific problem.
Waiting until an emergency to start thinking about this also necessarily means there’s less time to plan. That sets the younger person up for a situation in which they’re inundated with more information than they can manage. If you set up a smart camera, like a Nest, to notify you every time your parent wakes up and goes into the kitchen, you’re bound to face a huge stack of notifications every time you open your phone and no real strategy for separating the signal from the noise. Good planning helps you to avoid looking at all that raw data and instead look for deviations from the norm. Once I involved my mom in this process, we had the chance to clarify not only the details of her routine but also our goal in keeping tabs on her. In the end, she had no doubt this all came from a place of love.
“In those cases, the technology serves as a safety net, not to check every day what’s going on but to be notified when something doesn’t seem to be happening the way it was supposed to,” said George Demiris, a professor of informatics at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school.
You can imagine the broader implications of this safety net concept. If your goal is to make sure your parent is going about their daily routine, you don’t actually need cameras at all. Motion sensors can do the job just as well, all while maintaining privacy. There are even camera-free systems, like Nomo Smart Care and Silvie, designed to spot worrisome deviations from an older person’s routine. Even still, the benefits of planning — at the very least, identifying a specific problem in need of a solution — will make it more likely that you’ll maximize the technology’s benefit.
Make privacy and empathy central to your approach
The first step in planning to use tech to monitor your parents is simply talking. You should have a conversation with them to find out what worries they have and consider those alongside your own. Ask what level of monitoring they’d be comfortable with. When the time comes, teach them how to use the tech you’re introducing into their life. Give them the agency to make changes and even turn off the tech when they want.
One way to go about this is to try reversing the roles. Consider how you’d feel if someone wanted to install a bunch of surveillance cameras in your home and track your every move. If you’re asking an older loved one to wear a health tracker, think about why a device like that might be useful to you. Heck, you could even buy matching Apple Watches and start sharing your step count in order to show that you’re trying to stay active and healthy together.
“Saying, ‘Okay, let me stop for a second. Let me imagine I’m their age and my kid wants to do this thing — what would that be like?’” said Amanda Lazar, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information. “I think that can help you approach it more sensitively and in a more understanding way.”
The privacy question deserves extra attention. While motion sensor-based monitoring systems can offer extra privacy, there might be situations where you do want a camera. You should talk to your parent or loved one about where they’re comfortable with having a camera and what level of control they’d like to have over it. If you’re thinking about tracking someone with an AirTag or through an app, tell them you’re doing it and explain how it works. They won’t enjoy being surprised if you pull a Big Brother and start asking about specific whereabouts.
All that said, if the person you’re helping care for has dementia or other cognitive issues, these conversations are more complicated. You should talk to their doctor about their individual needs, potential tech solutions, and the possibility of involving professional caregivers.
Start simple and with tech people actually want to use
There’s a reason my sister and I bought my mom an Apple Watch and not a Life Alert pendant. We knew she’d like it, if not for the fitness tracking, then at least as a fashion accessory. And, as a direct result of liking it, she’d wear it. Indeed, we were nervous about her falling, so the fall detection feature was a selling point. But as someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking and writing about gadgets like these, I knew that some of the health tracking features could help be active and have fun doing so. Now, every other time I call, she tells me how many miles she walked that day.
If you’re considering a monitoring device for your parents or an older loved one, think about what they might actually want to use. For many people, smart speakers are a great way to introduce potentially lifesaving tech into the home. Your dad might like asking Alexa for recipe advice, and you might find comfort in the fact that he can also ask Alexa to call 911 if he falls. “Engaging people with technology tools early on and making it part of their everyday repertoire can be very helpful,” said Rogers, “and then as their needs change you can increase the support.”
Down the line, it’s relatively seamless to connect cameras, motion sensors, smart locks, or smoke alarms to systems like these. And because the older adult has been in the loop from the start, you can teach them how to use these devices, and they can remain aware of what you can see on your end. Again, the empathy-focused approach is more likely to win someone over.
Change your plan when life changes
Like anything related to tech, you’ll need to do some software updates along the way. And I don’t mean making sure your Nest camera firmware is up to date. You’ll want to revisit your conversation about monitoring with your parents or loved ones at least once a year. You might try doing it over the holidays when you’re all together or when there’s a need for some tech support. Regardless, it’s essential to communicate about what’s working and what’s not.
These conversations can also be opportunities to talk about other ways you might help. Beyond monitoring their physical space, some aging parents could benefit from some help in the digital world, especially as they’re being targeted by a growing number of AI-powered scams. Do they need help managing their finances or keeping track of login credentials? Do your parents know what a passcode is? They might not ask you for help with these things, and again, it’s better to get out in front of issues before an emergency happens.
“Everyone’s in denial,” said Amelia Hay, a vice president at AARP Innovation Labs. “Everyone’s thinking their parents are fine, whatever, and then something happens where you’re in a state of emergency.”
So don’t wait. And don’t be in denial. Aging, as much as some tech billionaires would like to deny it, is one of those things in life that’s inevitable. If everything seems fine now, that means it’s a great time to start planning for when things go sideways.
I was in India, performing dentistry on my first animal patient, and it was supposed to be a straightforward operation
I’ve been a dentist for 40 years. I spend most of my time treating patients at my surgery in Chichester, West Sussex. When I studied to become a dentist in the 1980s, I didn’t think I’d be getting my hands anywhere near the teeth of any exotic animals.
Twenty years later, in 2000, that changed. A patient of mine, Alan Knight, the CEO of International Animal Rescue (IAR), showed me photographs of the inside of a bear’s mouth. The bear was called Jojo and his teeth had been broken off by poachers. Some of the teeth were too rotten to be saved – if left untreated, Jojo would become more prone to infection and abscesses.
Children sleep during nap time at Minnesota Child Care in Minneapolis, on December 30, 2025. | Renee Jones Schneider/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images
Affordability is the top political problem of the moment, and lawmakers in both parties have increasingly blamed large investors for buying up housing, hospitals, and other staples families can’t do without, while jacking up prices and degrading quality.
Earlier this year, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who has backedbills on both fronts, turned his attention to childcare. The ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee sent sweeping documentrequests to KinderCare Learning Companies and Learning Care Group, the two largest private-equity-owned childcare companies in the country, seeking information like board minutes, subsidy totals, staffing ratios, dividend records, and the investment memos the firms wrote when they bought in. Private equity, Merkley said in announcing the requests, has increasingly prioritized “investor profits over the well-being of the families and communities that depend on these services.”
The federal inquiry follows severalyears of national childcare advocacy groups warning that private equity, an industry known for acquiring businesses for quick-turnaround sales, should be kept far away from kids.
In 2022, Elliot Haspel, a progressive childcare expert, wrote in the New Republicthat private-equity owned childcare chains “ultimately answer to investors or shareholders first, parents second.” Citing their record in nursing homes, where acquisitions have been associated with declines in quality, Haspel wrote that there’s “little reason to think that early care and education would be magically exempt from these sideways influences.” In 2024 the Open Markets Institute, the National Women’s Law Center, and Community Change put out a report contending that private equity-owned centers would not only seek to soak up public funding, but stall reforms limiting their reach long enough to capture local market share, until they could argue they’d become too embedded to remove without harming families.
Since then, lawmakers in at least five states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania — have introduced or passed bills that write ownership structure into childcare policy, cap what large for-profit chains can draw from state grants, or attach strings to public dollars that apply to those providers alone. The coalition of national groups published model state legislation of its own this past February, built partly on those state experiments.
But a forthcoming paper reviewed by Vox from two leading national researchers focused on the economics of childcare — Jessica Brown at the University of South Carolina and Chris Herbst of Arizona State University — complicates the case that has been building against the private-equity owned centers. In the country’s first systematic, descriptive look at how far private equity has actually spread through American childcare, the scholars found no smoking guns.
If anything in the findings gives Herbst pause, it’s the geography.
Private equity is not sweeping the childcare sector, the researchers report. Its share of the childcare workforce stopped growing around 2010 and has hovered near 10 percent ever since. It isn’t everywhere, either — three-quarters of private-equity childcare centers sit in just 5 percent of US counties, clustered around Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Atlanta, and northern Virginia. Nor do the centers look uniformly distressed. They have been operating for 18 years on average, longer than other chains — and between 2021 and 2024, while non-private-equity providers cut staff, these programs added workers.
“Given what we see,” Brown told me, “private equity is notthe reason that childcare is unaffordable.”
Herbst agreed: “You know, we jokingly at one point said we’re gonna call our paper, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’”
This is not to say the researchers have no further questions. Their work explores the recent past, but their findings are not causal, so they couldn’t say specifically what happened when private equity took the centers over. And their data also couldn’t confirm what the chains pay their teachers, or what benefits they offer. Critics have guessed both ways — that they squeeze wages for profit, or that their size allows them to pay more than a small provider could offer and muscle out competitors.
An important question is what actually separates private equity-owned chains from other large childcare companies. Herbst and Brown found that on price, private-equity chains operate not so differently from large competitors that aren’t investor-owned. They are less likely to take public subsidies (70 percent do) than other large chains (78 percent), but are more likely to hold their state’s top quality rating. Large chains, private-equity-owned or not, tend to locate in wealthier areas with more college-educated families. Private-equity providers, though, seem distinctly drawn to states with looser staffing rules and to counties with the tightest childcare markets in the country.
If anything in the findings gives Herbst pause, it’s the geography. “It may not be that they are rendering low-quality care,” he said. “They may be rendering very high-quality care, but inaccessible to a large number of families because of where they are doing business.”
How this study came to be
Despite the amount of national attention, very little research has existed on private equity and childcare up to this point.
“People were sort of copying and pasting evidence from these other domains like nursing homes and hospitals, extrapolating results from these other sectors to childcare, and we were skeptical about this,” Herbst said.
While they were gathering information, new international evidence did come out — a working paper on Dutch childcare, which found that private-equity centers charged more and had fewer regulatory violations overall, but more staffing-related violations. The Netherlands sets its childcare rules nationally, though, which makes the findings harder to apply in the US, where staffing ratios and teacher qualifications are set state by state.
Nobody had done a deep US analysis before, largely because it’s expensive. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Brown and Herbst had to stitch together at least seven sources, including two proprietary databases costly enough to be out of reach for most researchers even with a grant — one tracking every business in the country year by year since 1997, the other tracking private equity deals. Then they merged all of it against state licensing records, accreditation files, and an original survey they fielded themselves in three states.
“It took an extraordinary amount of resources — both monetary and labor — to put our datasets together,” Herbst said. The lack of quality national data on childcare providers broadly has been a major barrier for researchers, and leaves the terms of the debate often set by interest groups. No federal survey tracks what providers charge, and most states don’t collect it either. Brown and Herbst could compare prices in only two states, the ones that require providers to report them as a condition of licensing.
Why is private equity interested in childcare?
One of the main questions looming over the conversation is that, broadly speaking, childcare is a low-margin business — so why is private equity involved at all?
“My answer right now is they’re not interested in childcare writ large,” said Herbst. “They’re interested in childcare in very select communities.”
The classic private-equity playbook is to buy a company, raise its value through expansion, consolidation, or cost-cutting, and sell within three to seven years. This is the model that ran through Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless, and a long line of local newspapers, and helped earn the industry a reputation for loading businesses with unmanageable debt they couldn’t carry.
But not every private-equity strategy is a short-term flip. Over the past decade Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle have all raised long-hold funds designed to keep companies for 15 years or more. It’s a small slice of the industry, but both childcare companies now under Senate scrutiny fit that longer pattern, with Partners Group having held KinderCare since 2015 and still controlling roughly 69 percent of it after an IPO, and American Securities having owned Learning Care Group since 2014.
A representative from KinderCare did not return a request for comment, but in an interview, Brian Gutman, the senior vice president of public policy at Learning Care Group, told me that yes, their investors want to see a profit and “be a sustainable company.” Something like childcare, he said, is “a long-term play, not a short-term play” because the costs that matter most can’t be recovered inside a short window. Refurnishing a single school might run $100,000 to $300,000, and a firm looking to exit in three years would have to push that into tuition, which wouldn’t be feasible. He put the company’s reinvestment at more than $1 billion dollars.
Merkley’s letter tells a different side of that story. In 2018 Learning Care Group borrowed to pay its owners at least $636 million, and now carries roughly $5.50 in debt for every dollar it earns. In other words, the money went out the door to the owners, but the loan stayed on the company’s books, and the interest is serviced out of the same tuition that pays teachers.
Asked how that squared with the long-term picture he described, Gutman did not address the 2018 payout or the debt load. He said that under American Securities’ ownership Learning Care has spent more than $1 billion on capital expenditures and maintenance — building upgrades, safety systems, classroom technology, not counting acquisitions — and that the company’s average wage growth has outpaced its own tuition increases, inflation, and national wage growth in each of the past three fiscal years.
What private capital buys, he says, is scale. The clearest example is cameras: Before the pandemic, Learning Care put livestreaming cameras in classrooms near military bases so deployed parents could watch their kids during the day. When Covid hit and parents couldn’t come inside, the company put one in every classroom across the chain, meaning tens of thousands of cameras. It’s the kind of investment he said families appreciate and an operator with two or three buildings can’t afford. Access to capital, he argued, is what made it possible.
The right target?
I reached out to Merkley’s office to learn more about their federal investigation and a staffer told me that it had been prompted by the number of concerning stories his team had been seeing in the media. KinderCare is also headquartered in Merkley’s home state of Oregon, though they said their inquiry wasn’t driven by complaints from his local constituents specifically.
The staffer said they hope to get their report out by the end of the year, but acknowledged that “a lot of the [companies]’ responses have been lackluster” so far. “Legislation is definitely something my boss is thinking about,” they added, but said they are waiting to hash out details until their probe is finalized.
Gutman said Learning Care responded to Merkley’s request, but sees the focus on private equity as a bit of a scapegoat, or red herring. The company isn’t opposed to new regulation, he said, including more transparency about investors, decision-making, and wages. His objection is to rules that sort providers by who owns them. “Where there’s a need for enhanced regulation,” he said, “that’s a need for the sector, not a need for a couple of actors within the sector.”
He said that plenty of large childcare operators, like family-owned regional chains and big nonprofits, aren’t private-equity backed, and that ownership structure doesn’t reliably predict behavior. He cited a venture-capital-backed Montessori chain in Colorado that closed its five locations abruptly. Because the bills moving through statehouses key on private equity ownership specifically, a company like that one wouldn’t trigger regulation.
Haspel said he’s fine with legislation that targets large for-profit chains more broadly, but emphasized that the focus on institutional investors will only become more important as the conversation around universal childcarepicks up momentum in the United States. “I don’t think the focus is a red herring…[private equity] presents some real threats potentially if you have bad actors that are attracted by the increased public funding,” he said. He pointed to England, where the competition regulator just launched an investigation last month to examine whether private-equity ownership is serving families or driving up childcarecosts. Provisional findings are due early next year.
Gutman said Learning Care Group will fight being cut out of public programs. Some of the state proposals would restrict which providers can access grants or participate in state pre-K, and Gutman argued that in much of the country there isn’t a backup. About 85 percent of the company’s families live within a 10-minute drive of their center, he said. “If we’re the only game in town, and we can’t access a grant program that helps us pay teachers better, I’m not sure who that serves,” Gutman said.
Brown and Herbst’s own immediate recommendation is more public information. More states could collect prices at licensing, they argue, and make wage and staff turnover data easier for researchers to find which in turn would help generate more targeted policy fixes. “I think in some ways people are trying to look for an easy solution,” Brown said, “but the thing is there is no easy solution in childcare.”
This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.
Update, August 27, 11 am ET: This article was originally published on August 27 and has been updated to includemore details about the study funders.
Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, speaks at a CPAC panel to discuss the threat of Islam in Texas. | Eleanor Dearman/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The Great American Conflict, a 75-minute documentary produced by a Texas-based organization dedicated to converting Iran to Christianity, declares its goal right at the beginning: “to reveal the true Islam to all people, especially in the West,” Iran Alive Ministries’s founder Hormoz Shariat says. “This film is also meant to be a warning to America. There is a serious threat of Islam in our nation.”
Released at the start of summer and having premiered at a gathering of the Dallas County Republican Party, it’s an obscure film — you’ve probably never heard of it — but it has so far had a surprising political influence. It’s been shown at gatherings of local Republicans and conservative activists in Texas, where Islamophobic rhetoric and policy proposals have played a key role in activating the Republican base, candidates, and party leaders over the course of this year’s elections. The documentary is both a symptom and a cause of a larger trend unfolding in American politics in 2026 that is picking up steam now: the rise of a new iteration of blatant Islamophobia paired with Christian nationalist sentiment on the American right.
Iran Alive Ministries did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s no surprise who some of the backers and voices of this documentary are: Some members of this collection of right-wing, conservative, and evangelical activists are a throwback to early-2000s and 2010s Islamophobia, when some of the same figures spoke out against “radical Islamism” and “radical Islamic terror.” One of them, for instance, is the activist Brigitte Gabriel, the controversial founder of ACT for America, an early-2000s anti-Islamic extremism group. As the film makes clear, this latest version of Islamophobia in America has its roots in this post-9/11 era and borrows heavily from it, while making some modern-day tweaks.
What’s different now is how mainstream this stance is becoming in politics and how it appears to be getting only more mainstream.
“Islamophobia has passed the dinner table test. You can say things about Muslims with basic impunity today,” Nathan Lean, a researcher, assistant teaching professor at North Carolina State University and author of the book The Islamophobia Industry, told me. “And it’s institutionalized in the way that prejudice that targets other marginalized communities is not.” He pointed to the Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress, which is composed of 68 elected members of Congress representing 25 states. He also pointed to efforts in Texas to make eliminating “sharia” law an official stance of the Texas GOP, and then the subsequent vote to recommend Gov. Greg Abbott “ban” it on the Texas 2026 primary ballot.
Now, politicians, content creators, and politically connected advocacy groups are using films like The Great American Conflict, selectively edited clips spread on social media,and investigative-style pseudo-documentaries to spread this sentiment further and wider, power more wins of right-wing candidates, and take aim in particular at Muslim candidates and politicians.
This is all playing out as antisemitism and Islamophobia are peaking during the 2026 midterm cycle, accelerated by demographic change across America, increased Muslim visibility and engagement in politics, including elections of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the Senate campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and moreRepublican politicians feeling comfortable using Islam as a scapegoat and cudgel, particularly in Texas. It all paints a worrying picture of what’s to come.
What The Great American Conflict argues is coming
As a cinematic project, The Great American Conflict isn’t much of an accomplishment; it can broadly be described as a collection of testimonials from evangelical Christians and former Muslims who’ve converted to Christianity who each make a case against Islam. Though poorly organized, it starts with some rough accounting of the rise of Islam in world history, lays out the case through interviews that Islam is an ideology and not a religion, then zooms in on specific Texan communities and examples of how Muslim politicians and activists are using democratic processes to achieve “domination.”
There are broadly three core themes that these speakers come back to:
Islam is inherently violent and imperialistic: The documentary’s interview subjects argue that true believers seek to expand the faith and establish a cross-national Islamic state. They rely on some sketchy history of the prophet Muhammed and the contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran as examples of this “violence.”
Islam is incompatible with the American Constitution and Western liberalism: Speakers also argue that, as opposed to other religions, Islam does not tolerate diversity of thought and seeks to enforce its rules and guidelines on nonbelievers. They claim that Islam rejects the separation between church and state, and that mosques can function as political or military centers.
There is an ongoing effort by Muslims to infiltrate American politics and replace “Judeo-Christian” America: The rise of Muslim American politicians in Congress, in New York City, and at the state and local government level are all part of an effort to whittle away religious liberty and replace American values with “Islamic” values. Liberal and progressive allies are enabling this takeover. And they interpret public calls to prayer, halal food, school prayer rooms, Ramadan accommodations, mosque construction, and Muslim residential developments as evidence that American institutions are yielding to Islamic demands.
Interspersed throughout these testimonials are fearmongering compilations of social media clips of Muslim prayers and veiled women, and short selections of purportedly Muslim speakers making inflammatory comments about 9/11, about Jews and Christians, and about Islamic domination in the West, and violent clips of terrorist actions abroad.
And though the film’s main backer, Hormoz Shariat, says at the beginning of the film that his goal is not to inspire fear or hate, that’s precisely what the speakers seem to do for an hour.
For example, the Christian pastor Shahram Hadian, the founder of Truth in Love Ministry in Tennessee, repeatedly argues that America is at a turning point. “Western societies are right now at a critical decision point. Either they’re going to maintain, preserve, [and] fight for their Judeo-Christian values, or they’re succumbing,” he says.
And he takes a natalist turn, arguing that Muslims in the US are happy to continue to raise families as Western birth rates drop. “We continue to see the demise of Christianity, of our Judeo-Christian values, family values, family ethics, marriage — one man, one woman,” he says. “They’re just waiting us out. They’ll just wait us out. They’ll aid us in our own demise and destruction.”
To drill down on this, various speakers point to demographic change in Michigan and Texas as early signs of what they see as the capitulation of the United Kingdom and continental Europe to Islam. They point to self-segregating Muslim communities in Europe being mirrored in the US, particularly focusing on a housing developmentproject in East Plano, Texas, centered around a mosque and Islamic center, that has been a focal point for Republican politicians.
Other speakers argue against accepting Islam as a religion at all, instead casting it as a political ideology that is seeking to take over American institutions. Some, like Gabriel, allege a coordinated strategy to “infiltrate” and “dominate the West and establish an Islamic government,” tracing this back to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a supposed decades-long plan to infiltrate political parties, schools, media, and churches to use democratic institutions to establish Islamic law. She points to Mamdani as an example of this, and ropes in Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan as being loyal to a foreign Islamic identity rather than to the United States.
And they contrast this all with an idealized “Judeo-Christian” America defined by constitutional government, traditional marriage, Christianity, and cultural assimilation. The final call to arms is to preserve and promote this Christian vision of America, on top of defending the Constitution, religious liberty, and “American” culture against what is a coming ideological and demographic conflict.
The danger of rising Islamophobia
Iran Alive Ministries itself doesn’t seem primarily dedicated to anti-Muslim American advocacy and activism. Most of its YouTube and internet presence is focused on digital Christian evangelism, particularly in Iran. It’s not entirely hard to see how a group focused on conversions would drift into Islamophobic preaching, but it does seem like a peculiar move, Lean told me.
“There is a group of people who form a faction of this sort of anti-Muslim movement in the United States who are, by their own description, evangelical Christians,” Lean said. “And it’s no surprise that a group like Iran Alive Ministries, that is formed on the basis of, as they say, transforming Iran into a Christian nation, one soul at a time, would go there.”
Emphasizing that Christian proselytism and evangelism are not inherently Islamophobic, Lean told me that there has been a more overt merging of religious convictions with Republican politics in recent years.
“The…driving mission of the group leads to a marriage of, we want a Christian world on the one hand, versus there are active agents in the world that are potentially preventing that. And who represents that biggest threat to that right now? Well, in the eyes of these people, Muslims do,” Lean said.
Lean told me that he expects to see this momentum build as midterms approach. At the local level, it’s most visible in Texas, where the New York Times recently reported on the stunning rise in Islamophobia and fearmongering across the state, and in Michigan, where cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck have seen white nationalist and anti-Islam demonstrations.
Lean said many of these lines of Islamophobic thinking sound like familiar tropes, smears, and lies of the last couple of waves of fearmongering around Muslims. Still, as opposed to the post-9/11 era, he noteda worrying difference: the scale of Islamophobia, given its increasing presence on both social and traditional media.
Much of the growth of these sentiments is happening online, too. Since Mamdani’s election as New York City mayor, and especially since El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, these kinds of views have surged online and in conservative media, while conservative activists and influencers have been pushing similar narratives of infiltration and under-the-radar Muslim “encroachment.”
A recent survey of internet discourse and activity by the research group Magnitude Media found something similar, centered on Dearborn: “Since the beginning of the month, there have been 690 posts mentioning Dearborn, generating 5.1 million engagements. Right-leaning accounts drove 88% of that engagement, compared to just 7% from left-leaning accounts,” the authors write. “The broader anti-Muslim conversation online has been substantial for months. Over the past six months, 68% of posts that either mentioned Islamophobia or contained common Islamophobic language came from right-leaning accounts. Dearborn appears less like the cause of a new Islamophobia conversation than the right’s newest focal point.”
So the documentary certainly isn’t the only cause for concern — but the fact that Texas Republicans have used it in official events, on top of strategists saying they are pivoting to “sharia” and fearmongering, suggests just how politically useful the party thinks these messages can be.
Which all suggests more ugliness to come. And as Lean told me, talking about a coming conflict and a threat to survival indicates an existential threat that should be fought by any means.
“Where does the logic of all of this take us? What’s the solution?” he said. “You can’t help but wonder when they’re issuing statements about fertility rates and these overtures are being kind of taken over, that this could very easily go to a dark place.”
Update, August 28, 11:45 amET: This piece was updated to reflect Nathan Lean’sfull job title.
The Marches, Shropshire: For this hoverfly, pretending to be far more dangerous than it actually is has been a useful evolutionary technique
Back in the analogue world – where “analogue” means signals transmitted by continuous waves of sound or light, but also means something that looks like something else – intelligence is more poetic and weirder than its shambling digital doppelganger.
In a bend of the heatwave, a remarkable fly lands on a rose leaf in full sun. The hornet mimic hoverfly, Volucella zonaria, is a stonking great (for a hoverfly) 2cm-long creature with a peachy-yellow and black striped abdomen. It has no sting, a chestnut thorax and a big-eyed head with a pad for nectar, not jaws for chomping insects, two rather than four cellophane wings folded at rest, and an aura to unnerve the uninitiated.
Bird eggs intercepted in homemade incubators at Johannesburg airport as officials try to halt wildlife trafficking
South African police have arrested two Thai nationals in separate incidents for allegedly attempting to smuggle endangered parrot eggs out of the country as authorities try to stem the tide of wildlife trafficking.
A 50-year-old Thai national was arrested at OR Tambo international airport in Johannesburg on 20 August, carrying 50 bird eggs in a homemade incubator in a hand-luggage bag, South Africa’s environment ministry said in a statement.
Richie Bell stood at the door of an East Village bar, nervous for a singular reason: he had to hand over his phone to a bouncer to get in. At 23 years old, Bell had hardly ever been without a device — he got his first iPhone in elementary school — but when he saw a video on TikTok advertising a queer, phone-free, funk dance party called Who’s Dancing?, he decided to test his limits. He immediately purchased a ticket and planned to attend alone.
Bell was pleasantly surprised to discover he wouldn’t have to relinquish his phone at all, but simply allow security to place tape on both the back and front-facing cameras. “You can’t scroll Reels because, think about it, on iPhones anyway, if they’re taping the front camera, that’s also the speaker area,” Bell told Vox. Without the temptation of content on his phone, Bell mingled with other attendees, who were similarly unoccupied and also flying solo. Even though event staff kept their eyes peeled for any errant phone usage, no one seemed to reach for them anyway.
Compared to other bars and parties he’s been to, Bell found this one more conducive to unbridled socializing and dancing. It’s easier to approach a stranger when they’re not hunched over their phone. No one is worried about looking like a fool, immortalized in video, because everyone is a little foolish, moving their bodies without fear of judgment.
Across the country, clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are encouraging attendees to lock their phones away — or, at least keep them out of sight — for screen-free gatherings. According to event hosting platform Eventbrite, phone-free experiences have increased more than 500 percent globally between 2024 and 2025. Musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles banned phones at their concerts; comedians John Mulaney and Bill Burr have followed suit. Clubs from Los Angeles to Miami are creating camera-free dance floors. Bars and restaurants in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that have long prohibited phone and camera use have been joined by newer establishments in Charlotte, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas.
The rise of phone-free socializing speaks to a growing exhaustion with an always-connected world. More than half of US adults say they use their smartphone too much, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. Excessive smartphone use has been linked to poor sleep quality and depression, and even the mere presence of a phone lessens cognitive capacity. The ubiquity of devices — and the cameras on them — has instilled a low-grade panic that you might end up going viral for eating a sandwich in the background of an influencer’s video. Even Gen Z, who has always lived under the spectre of technology, is nostalgic for times before everyone was “plugged in” and widely accessible.
Screen-free events are the natural evolution of the cultural desire to break up with tech. By transforming physical spaces, ridding them of distracting devices, event organizers and bar owners aim to foster connection, reclaim attention, and maintain a sense of privacy. Even a short detox from smartphones has the ability to dramatically shape the tenor of a get-together for the better.
“Exploited for content”
Before X&ND (pronounced “zand”), the funk and soul artist who organized the phone-free party Bell attended, first conceived of Who’s Dancing?, they noticed very few people actually cutting loose at clubs. Instead, they were on their phones. “The second that anybody starts dancing in a club where there’s meant to be dancing, people pull out their phone,” X&ND told Vox. “They’re getting surveilled, they’re getting essentially exploited for content and being put in a position where they’re on display for people that they didn’t necessarily want to be on display for.” X&ND wanted to create a space for women, queer, and trans people to dance and express themselves without the fear of ending up on the internet.
Since last summer, X&ND has hosted eight sold-out dance parties (and Bell estimates he’s attended seven). Phone-free events, X&ND said, are a reclamation of culture, of attention, of self-expression. “Influencers aren’t able to post anything. Different companies aren’t posting anything about our parties because we don’t give them the material to,” they said. “I think it’s the culture taking the culture back.”
The bar and nightclub scene has struggled in recent years, with many venues closing due to high rent and fewer patrons spending money on alcohol. But perhaps a less obvious culprit is the pervasive anxiety of being captured on video during a moment of vulnerability. Some might be turned off from entering these spaces altogether due to the high risk of embarrassment if they’re captured and mocked online.
In Washington, DC, 28-year-old Jo Vee had similar concerns about privacy and craved an environment where they could be anonymous. Like Bell, Vee has had access to a camera phone since they were a child and can’t remember a time when they weren’t thinking about what to post on Instagram. But when a friend organized a phone-free dance party, Vee jumped at the opportunity to enjoy themselves, free from the pressures of the algorithm — and the potential of accidentally becoming a meme. “There’s nothing more terrifying than thinking that you’re going to a party just to have fun, and then you wake up the next morning and there’s a video of you that has 10 million views that you had no idea about, and now you’re like a GIF reaction on the internet.” (Vee clarified that they do not speak from personal experience, but said that a version of this has happened to a couple of friends.)
Distraction-free connection
Although many people inherently recognize the downsides of excessive phone use, they also realize they’re fighting an uphill battle. Demanding jobs can tether workers to their emails and algorithms are designed to keep us engaged and scrolling. Our attention is constantly being pulled from the real world to the digital one. But even a brief respite from screens can be beneficial.
In his research, Georgetown associate professor Kostadin Kushlev found that phone usage during a social interaction undermines how much people enjoy spending time with others. “It’s not so much [that] the phone is making us feel unhappy,” Kushlev told Vox, “it’s more like I could be happier if I was not using a phone.” Put another way, people enjoy social gatherings more when they keep their phone out of sight because they can give their full attention to their conversation partner.
Kushlev’s other research has shown that as people curbed their phone usage over a two-week period, their ability to pay attention improved. Even a shorter detox period, like a two-hour phone-free gathering, could minimize overstimulation and encourage greater focus, Kushlev said.
Inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, bar Antagonist, couples on dates engage in heart-to-hearts and neighboring tables of strangers strike up conversations. That’s because the bar has banned phones. Upon entering, visitors are asked to secure their phone in a pouch which they keep with them for the duration of their stay. If they need to use their phone, they can do so outside.
Since Antagonist opened in March, owner Michael Salzarulo has observed patrons clamoring for a Friday night detox after a long week of screen-mediated work. “Normally Saturday is your biggest day,” Salzarulo said, “but Friday nights are our busiest nights of the week.” While anyone can lock their phone in another room for a few hours, Antagonist provides an element of accountability, Salzarulo said: a dedicated space for distraction-free connection.
Alex Becker was yearning for a break from her phone and her “email, Microsoft Excel job” when she co-founded PA Unplugged, a nonprofit championing policies that advocate for more mindful uses of technology, last year. One of the nonprofit’s initiatives, Screen Free Philly, maintains a calendar of screen-free events and organizes its own gatherings at breweries, parks, and other civic institutions, urging attendees to set aside their phones for discussions, art projects, and board games. At the most recent get-together, dozens of attendees handed their phones to Becker while they completed a series of puzzles throughout the city.
Although these gatherings are still fairly niche, Becker sensed a hunger among participants to seek out further opportunities for tech-free connection. While ditching a smartphone completely may be unrealistic, setting it aside for date night or an afternoon of gaming might be a salve for our tech-addled brains. We can implement these best practices at our own gatherings, too, by encouraging friends to leave their phones in a basket by the door or offering disposable cameras at parties.
“People are just done and ready to take their attention back, take their time back, and encourage more real-world connection,” Becker said.
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