"This WTF is in Matlab" almost feels like cheating. At one place I worked, somebody's job was struggling through a mountain of Matlab code and porting it into C. "This Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien," also doesn't really get much traction- all Matlab code looks like it was written by an alien. This falls into the realm of "Researchers use Matlab, researchers may be very smart about their domain, but generally don't know the first thing about writing maintainable code, because that's not their job."
But let's take a look at some MatLab Carl W found:
The uigetfile function opens a file dialog box. When the user selects a file, FileName holds the filename, PathName holds the containing path. If the user doesn't select a valid file, or clicks "Cancel", both of those variables get set to 0. It's then up to the caller to check the return value and decide what happens next.
Which is not what happens here, obviously. The developer responsible seems to believe that it maybe throws an exception? And they can just catch it? Carl's best guess is that this is a "weird" way to catch the cancel button. But it does mean that FileName and PathName get set to 0, and those zeros propagate until something finally tries to open those files, at which point everything blows up and the user doesn't know why.
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Born in 1863 in Atchison, Kansas, Marlatt went to what became Kansas State University, the land grant school for that state. He went into agriculture, got a job at the University of Kansas, stayed a couple of years, and then got hired by the U.S. Bureau of Entomology in the Department of Agriculture, right as it was created in 1894. It stayed open for 40 years before it was merged into other things, but its job was to work on the intersection of insects and farming, which is of course a tremendously important topic, though often done without really thinking through the consequences.
Marlatt became perhaps the premier entomologist in the United States over his life. One of the biggest things to do at this time in this field was to introduce non-native species to counter other non-native species, a sequence whose logic led to one of my favorite bits ever from the Simpsons. So there was a bug called the San Jose scale, because it was discovered near there, in California. But it was from China and was introduced thanks to the globalization of the shipping industry that continues to bring non-native species to the Americas especially that absolutely destroy plant life. A guy brought it over on some trees in about 1870 and it spread across the country by the end of the century. It’s not unnatural I suppose to think, well, maybe we should also introduce something that eats this scale. This was the red-spotted lady beetle, which is actually from Italy, but which eats scales. Marlatt decided in 1902 to bring it over to the U.S. in order to eat the scale. I am not sure the extent to which this worked, but the scale is definitely still around in the U.S. today. In fact, said decision was based on his honeymoon. He got married in 1901 and what better honeymoon than a trip to China and Japan to look for insects. Of course he had to be pretty rich to make that work. In any case, his wife got sick on that trip and died shortly after. But at least he got his scale studies in.
Despite this, Marlatt was one of the early advocates to actually care about stopping pests from entering the country, which most of the agricultural world thought was a minor point at best at the turn of the twentieth century. He considered the importation of plants to be very dangerous because of what they carried with them, whereas most people just saw a useful plant and didn’t consider secondary questions. The growth of the exotic fruit market, increasingly possible thanks to refrigeration technologies in shipping, really turbocharged this issue. In 1909, Marlatt began lobbying for a bill to regulate the importation of exotic plants. He actually wanted a complete ban. But he couldn’t get any regulations either. The nursery lobby was too strong and don’t underestimate that. Americans were getting very into their exotic plants.
It was the next year after all that the Japanese cherry trees were planted in Washington and everyone loved them. But….Marlatt had an opportunity. He got the ability to inspect the trees. He found scales and all sorts of things. He publicized this. President Taft ordered the trees burned. There were concerns over an international incident. It was two years later that another group of trees came from Japan that passed inspection and there we have it today. But of course Marlatt was right. The bugs were coming in. Look at the state of the eastern hardwood forest today. The chestnut blight was just hitting at this time. The elm are basically gone thanks to Dutch elm disease. The ash are rare now due to the emerald ash borer. The hemlock is declining thanks to the woody adelgid. And now the beech are going extinct, just starting last year in my state. All of this is due to the importation of bugs and diseases on foreign plants. The forest is undergoing rapid ecological disaster and Marlatt, to an extent, warned about this. But the logic of capitalism demands treating the planet as a sewer. But Marlatt did get the Plant Quarantine Act passed in 1912, which helps a little bit sometimes.
Marlatt’s true expertise was cicadas. You might think they are all the same, but they are of course not. He discovered–or at least made the claim–that there are 30 different broods of cicadas in the United States (turns out they are called broods, who knew). It turns out that there are only 15 different broods thanks to further research, but Marlatt laid the groundwork for studying these animals. Every few years, one of the big cycles hits and it is a big story for the summer since they make a lot of noise. Of course, cicadas are in decline because humans are the worst species to ever exist on the planet. We are the only species smart enough to completely transform the planet but too dumb to contain those changes. So since cicadas live underground, the massive growth of suburban construction and the car-sprawl development that goes along with it has destroyed a lot of cicada habitat. In any case, there are 17 year cicadas and 13 year cicadas and Marlatt created sequencing for us to understand what is going on with them.
In fact, Marlatt was so dedicated to his cicada studies that when he built himself a big fancy home in Washington, D.C. in 1908, he had the wooden bannisters carved with cicada figures. Because of this, the home is not only known today, but somewhat famous. The family held it until 1970. Then they sold it to the Soviets of all things. The Soviets then used it as housing for their KGB agents and other officials in the U.S. Brezhnev even stayed in it. I didn’t see this post including Brezhnev, let me tell you that.
Marlatt retired in 1938. He lived forever, dying in 1954, at the age of 90.
Charles Marlatt is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.
If you would like this series to visit other entomologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Vernon Lyman Kellogg is in Monterey, California and Royal Norton Chapman is in Roseville, Minnesota. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
Every time someone buys an assault weapon in the US, such as an AR-15, they’re funding wildlife conservation. | Paige Vickers/Vox; Getty Images
Here’s a weird fact: Every time someone buys an assault weapon in the US, such as an AR-15, they’re funding wildlife conservation. The same is true if they purchase a handgun, a shotgun, or any other kind of gun or ammunition.
That’s thanks to a law most people have never heard of: the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, commonly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act. Passed by Congress in 1937, the law channels revenue from a tax on firearms, ammo, and archery equipment to state wildlife agencies — government organizations that restore wildlife habitat, monitor threatened species, and oversee hunting and fishing. Levied on firearm manufacturers and importers, the tax is 11 percent for long guns and ammunition and 10 percent for handguns, and it sits on top of other common taxes.
Over the last decade, the law has channeled close to $1 billion a year into state wildlife agencies across the country, amounting to a substantial share of their budgets. One recent analysis found that Pittman-Robertson made up about 18 percent of state agency budgets, on average, in 2019. (License fees for fishing and hunting, along with a hodgepodge of other revenue streams, including a similar tax on fishing gear, make up the rest.) And revenue from Pittman-Robertson has been increasing, roughly doubling in the past two decades — in no small part because gun sales have surged.
Key takeaways
An obscure law from the 1930s channels money from an excise tax on firearms and ammo into state wildlife agencies.
Revenue from this tax makes up almost a fifth of these agencies’ budgets on average.
Some scholars and environmental advocates worry that funding conservation with guns is morally problematic and creates perverse incentives for state agencies to promote firearm use.
Yet, these agencies already face severe funding shortfalls, and losing revenue from this gun tax would likely be disastrous for wildlife.
Even with this tax in place, state wildlife agencies need more money to conserve the increasingly long list of endangered wildlife within their borders.
Despite the dedicated tax revenue, wildlife agencies are still chronically underfunded. They oversee the bulk of the nation’s imperiled species — which now comprise more than one-third of all plants and animals in the US — and threats to biodiversity like climate change are only getting worse. These agencies need all the money they can get.
As a result, “wildlife agencies have a clear incentive to increase firearm use if they want to sustain themselves,” said John Casellas Connors, a researcher at Texas A&M University and one of the leading experts on the Pittman-Robertson Act. “There’s a desire to increase access to opportunities to shoot, to ensure that people keep buying guns and using guns.” Indeed, the purchase of firearms of any kind helps pay for staff, wildlife monitoring, and many of the other conservation tasks they do.
This raises an important question: Is it okay to fund conservation with tools of violence?
Fewer hunters, more guns
The link between conservation and guns is as old as the modern conservation movement itself. For a long time hunters were the movement.
In the late 1800s, elite and influential sportsmen like Theodore Roosevelt raised concerns about vanishing wildlife — deer, elk, bison, waterfowl, and other game species they liked to hunt. Ironically, rampant, unregulated hunting for profit is what threatened these animals in the first place. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, market hunting drove now-abundant white-tailed deer populations close to extinction, and similarly eliminated all but a few hundred bison.
As much as Roosevelt and his peers recognized hunting as a problem for wildlife, however, they also saw sportsmen as conservation champions.
“In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen,” Roosevelt said. “The genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”
That sentiment gave rise to the conservation movement that we know today — and to state wildlife agencies, most of which first appeared in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Staffed with biologists and ecologists, these government divisions sought to preserve habitat and regulate fishing and hunting, a remit still reflected in many of their names (Arizona Game and Fish, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Pennsylvania Game Commission, and so on).
But they needed money.
That’s where Pittman-Robertson came in. The idea behind the law — named for its two Congressional sponsors, hunters Key Pittman and Absalom Willis Robertson — redirected an existing excise tax on certain firearms (and later, through amendments, all firearms) to state wildlife agencies. The law also prohibited states from redirecting revenue from selling hunting licenses away from those agencies.
The law put into practice what’s known as a “user-pay” model of conservation, the idea being that hunters rely on wildlife, so they should pay to preserve it — in this case through revenue from their hunting licenses and weapons. It also fueled the now-pervasive idea, perpetuated by hunters, that they pay for conservation.
That was largely true for a time, but over the last few decades the number of hunters in the US has slowly declined — from more than 14 million hunters who are 16 years and older in 1991 to fewer than 11.5 million in 2016. The share of people in that age range who hunt has fallen even more, from 7.4 percent to 4.5 percent over that same period.
This trend has been worrying for wildlife agencies precisely because they have relied so much on hunters for funding.
But here’s the thing: While hunters have declined, gun sales in the US have increased — dramatically so. Estimates from the Trace, a newsroom that reports on gun violence, indicates that gun sales have roughly doubled since 2000. That means people are buying more guns but for purposes unrelated to hunting, such as handguns and AR-style weapons for self defense or for use at shooting ranges. Indeed, more than 70 percent of firearm and ammo sales these days are intended for purposes other than hunting, according to a 2021 report from the market research firm Southwick Associates.
This has funneled more money overall to state wildlife agencies — just not from hunters. “The money that is going toward this largely is being borne by people who may never, ever step into the field, may never go into a duck blind, may never go out to a hunting stand,” said Mark Oliva, managing director of public affairs at the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for the firearms industry. And that, in turn, has prompted wildlife agencies to cater to this growing population of firearm users.
State wildlife agencies generally have two main goals: to manage hunting and fishing programs and to conserve native species and their habitats. That often entails things like removing invasive species, reintroducing animals back into the environment, and studying the spread of zoonotic diseases. Bringing wolves back to Colorado, for example, was a project led by the state’s wildlife agency, Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
But because of Pittman-Robertson and the ever-present crunch for funding, these organizations have become incentivized to encourage more gun and ammo purchases. Along with a handful of more recent amendments to the law — which make it easier to spend Pittman-Robertson funds on shooting activities — that incentive has led wildlife agencies to increasingly fund or build their own public shooting and archery ranges. Pittman-Robertson funding has supported more than 120 new ranges since 2019.
By promoting firearm use (and related ammo purchases), target ranges do indirectly support wildlife conservation. But they are of course not wildlife conservation, said Christopher Rea, a sociologist at Brown University, who’s studied Pittman-Robertson. This is an important point, considering the speed at which ecosystems and animal species are declining across the US — and considering that agencies are supposed to use their resources to stem such losses.
“Pittman-Robertson has drifted from preserving the biotic community and moved instead towards preserving firearms use,” Rea and Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, wrote in a 2022 paper.
Some environmental groups have argued that, by using their limited resources to support sport shooting, wildlife agencies are pulling back on their responsibility to safeguard native species. “During a global extinction crisis requiring an all-hands-on-deck effort to conserve and protect declining species, state agencies are instead abusing the nation’s largest pot of restoration funding to promote recreational gun use and other ‘shooting sports,’” the advocacy group Wildlife for All said in a post on its website.
Wildlife for All estimates that about a quarter of Pittman-Robertson funding for state agencies goes towards shooting and archery ranges, hunter education, and promoting shooting sports. But still, the group found, most of that money is spent on wildlife restoration and projects to safeguard animals and their habitats. And barring a resurgence in hunting, promoting other uses of firearms is a way for wildlife agencies to maintain as much funding as possible for increasingly essential conservation projects.
There is, however, a deeper concern about funding conservation with firearms, though it has more to do with the human animal. Casellas Connors, Rea, and many other researchers point out that guns and gun ownership rates are linked to a higher risk of homicides and suicide. That means conservation is also tied to violence and harm.
“As a matter of my own personal politics and moral preferences, I don’t think we should be funding conservation by selling [what are] essentially tools of violence,” Rea, of Brown, told me. “That’s really problematic.”
Oliva, with the firearms trade group, strongly disagrees with the idea that more firearms means more violence. National crime rates have fallen substantially, he said, relative to the late 1900s. The number of gun deaths has declined in the last few years, too, even though there are more guns in the US than ever. (One major caveat here is that gun deaths are still well above pre-pandemic levels, and suicide-related gun deaths have continued to increase.)
Gun laws are, of course, among the most contentious topics in US politics, and it’s unlikely that questions about funding wildlife agencies will change opinions on either side. But even if you think promoting or benefiting from the purchase of guns is morally wrong, it’s hard to argue that — under the existing budgetary circumstances — losing nearly a fifth of funding wouldn’t decimate wildlife agencies’ work. There’s no getting around the fact that any laws that have the effect of meaningfully reducing firearms sales would also likely eat into critical funding for conservation.
Gun sales are essential for wildlife, at least for now
Proposals to repeal Pittman-Robertson have been floated before, most recently in 2022. That would be a disaster for wildlife, said Mark Duda, executive director of the outdoor market research firm Responsive Management and a former state biologist in Florida. Money made available by the law has helped bring back all kinds of once-rare species across the country, he said, from elk and turkeys to peregrine falcons and bald eagles. In Montana, for example, the state agency — Fish, Wildlife, and Parks — used funding from Pittman-Robertson to study and later bring back bighorn sheep.
Other people I spoke to agreed. “Wildlife agencies probably wouldn’t have been able to do almost any of the work they’ve done without Pittman-Robertson funds,” said Casellas Connors, of Texas A&M, who’s currently working on a book about the law. Even with that funding, they often don’t have enough staff or resources they need to adequately monitor and restore declining wildlife populations, he said.
Jonah Evans, who oversees non-game and rare species at Texas Parks and Wildlife, the state’s wildlife agency, said that money from gun taxes funds staff salaries and research on a range of imperiled native species, such as the tricolored bat and the loggerhead shrike, a songbird. “Pittman Robertson is like the backbone of wildlife management at our agency,” Evans said. In Texas alone, there are more than 1,000 animal species in decline that need help. Trying to conserve them all with the limited resources that Parks and Wildlife has, Evans said, “is an overwhelming project.”
Disentangling the firearm industry from conservation could also have other, less obvious consequences. Beyond funding state agencies, Pittman-Robertson has also helped build a diverse political coalition of support for conservation, Rea says. The firearm industry — which tends to be much more conservative than the broader environmental movement — strongly supports Pittman-Robertson, in part because it helps sustain the animals that hunters want to shoot. And, by extension, the law gives the industry’s right-oriented constituency a stake in conservation. Even sport shooters and gun owners who don’t hunt support the excise tax, Duda told me, citing survey data.
“At a time when environmentalism is evermore polarized and left-coded, Pittman-Robertson helps continually reinject pro-conservation rhetoric into a right-leaning political sphere, via its links to hunting and guns,” Rea told me. “I strongly believe it’s one mechanism that helps maintain that long history of bipartisan support for conservation.”
The moral debate aside, most people agree that wildlife agencies need more money than they have now, even with Pittman-Robertson in place. And, over the years, lawmakers have proposed additional sources.
In 2022, the US House passed a non-partisan bill called Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, which would send $1.3 billion a year to agencies specifically to help them safeguard vulnerable species. But the bill never passed the Senate, because lawmakers couldn’t agree on how to pay for it. (For scale, the war against Iran has so far cost the US about $25 billion.)
Another idea that’s circulated for decades now is to place an excise tax on outdoor gear like backpacks and hiking boots that would, like Pittman-Robertson, go towards state agencies. The logic of a so-called backpack tax follows a similar “user-pay” model: Hikers, rock climbers, and birdwatchers are also using the outdoors, so they should pay in some way to protect it. And while hunting is declining, these outdoor activities are booming.
Nonetheless, the outdoor gear industry has successfully fought against putting such a law into practice, Rea said. “That’s really disappointing,” he told Vox. “That’s a way we could solve this problem.”
I asked the Outdoor Industry Association, a trade group, about this. Kent Ebersole, OIA’s president, told me that the group opposes a backpack tax, because it would make gear more expensive and, thus, make outdoor recreation less accessible. “You’re harming people by increasing the price of an already expensive product,” he said, adding that outdoor companies are already facing steep costs of production from tariffs. ‘We do care about conservation,” Ebersole said. There are other ways to fund conservation besides burdening the industry with another tax, he said. (Ebersole highlighted a law in Georgia that directs a large portion of existing sales tax on outdoor gear to state wildlife conservation.)
Wildlife conservation is one of the rare causes that people seem to value across the political spectrum. “I’ve done 1,200 studies on how people relate to wildlife, and that is the common denominator,” Duda said. “People care deeply.” And yet, somehow, it’s hard to get anyone but the gun industry to pay for it.
For years, the internet sold us the idea that connection doesn’t have to be local to be meaningful. Your people could live anywhere: in a Discord server, a group chat of far-flung friends, or a TikTok comment section. Geography was optional.
Now, more people are turning toward the ones physically closest to them: the neighbor down the block, the parent from the playground, the person whose wifi shows up in your network list. It’s not just about wanting connection; folks are looking for support. Childcare is expensive.Rent and groceries are high.Climate emergencies are more frequent. For many Americans, the difference between stability and crisis comes down to whether someone nearby can help.
Call it neighborism: the growing practice of treating proximity as a resource. Increasingly, digital tools aren’t replacing local relationships — they’re helping activate them.
Sometimes it looks small: introducing yourself to the people on your floor, starting a group chat for your building or block, sharing babysitters, watering a neighbor’s plants. But it can also look overtly political.
In Minneapolis, community responses to ICE activity blurred the line between everyday care and organized resistance. As federal immigration enforcement ramped up this winter, residents organized patrols, filmed arrests, shared alerts, and trained one another to document potential abuses.What emerged was something bigger than “borrow a cup of sugar” friendliness. It was infrastructure: informal, fast-moving, and built on trust. And what happened there isn’t an outlier; it’s a large-scale example of a broader shift already underway.
Getting to know your neighbors isn’t new, but its visibility is. After decades of isolation and a slow drift toward digital, long-distance connection, people are embracing an old-fashioned idea: Communities function best when people feel responsible for one another.
From digital connection to local reconnection
According to Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Americans were more likely to socialize with neighbors 60 years ago than they are today. Some of this was due to the fact that it was far more difficult to keep in touch with people who lived in other areas. “Long distance phone calls were expensive! Email did not exist,” Klinenberg tells Vox by email. Most people’s lives revolved around their home base. And at the time, “women were less likely to be in the paid labor force, which meant they spent more time in and around the neighborhood, where they anchored the family’s social life,” he added.
“Today, Americans work longer hours than they did sixty years ago, and often in more than one job. Temp work, gig work, and full time jobs all demand a lot,” Klinenberg writes — as do the familial demands facing the “sandwich generation.” “One consequence is that Americans socialize at work more than they used to; another is that they have less energy to socialize when they get back home,” he continues. “Finally, of course, there is the extraordinary rise of the internet, social media, dating apps, and the like, all of which make it far easier to socialize online, or to stay close to people who live far away, or to be anti-social, but deeply entertained, while the algorithms do their work.” Platforms made it possible to find your people anywhere, leading many of us to build relationships around shared interests and history rather than shared space. As more of our social lives moved online, the everyday, in-person interactions that once structured daily life began to fall away.
“So many technological promises that were supposed to…make our lives better, make us feel more connected to each other,”says Garrett Bucks, founder of the Barnraisers Project, which has trained nearly 1,000 participants to organize majority-white communities for racial and social justice.“But the problem with that model is that most of us live where we are and we miss out on interpersonal human companionship face to face.”
Increasingly, that version of connection is starting to feel thin — wide-reaching, but not particularly reliable when you actually need help. As neighborism grows, social media isn’t disappearing, but its role is changing. Instead of replacing local relationships, apps are becoming a tool to facilitate them: a way to stay in touch with parents at the playground or pool, organize a bulk grocery run, or find out who lives down the block.
In that sense, this generation has something earlier ones didn’t: connective infrastructure at their fingertips. The same platforms that once promised limitless, frictionless, global belonging can now be repurposed for something smaller, slower, and more grounded, helping translate online awareness into offline care. As Bucks puts it, “We’ve tried everything else. Maybe we should try each other.”
What neighborism looks like in practice
For many people, not knowing your neighbors doesn’t seem unusual — it just feels like how life works now. You occasionally pass each other, maybe exchange a quick hello, and keep moving. The distance becomes routine. Until, eventually, it doesn’t.
“There was a certain point where I just realized how few of my neighbors I actually knew,” says Alec Patton, 45, who started a WhatsApp group in December 2024 for his neighborhood in South Park in San Diego. “It was kind of horrifying. I think I imagined that other people knew their neighbors better than I did, or maybe all my neighbors knew each other and…they just weren’t hanging out with me. But I just think the extent to which neighbors don’t know each other is pretty staggering. And so I was really feeling like I knew I wanted to do something to change that.” Patton says he read a Substack post about how to start a neighborhood group chat and thought, That seems worth trying.
Patton built his neighborhood group chat the old-fashioned way: He printed 50 fliers and dropped them in mailboxes on streets radiating out from his home. The effort paid off — today, the group has about 50 members and continues to grow organically. “I often drink coffee and read a book on the stoop in front of my house and sometimes, when I’m feeling unusually bold, I ask passersby if they’re on the chat,” Patton says. “I’ve got a QR code for the group set on a lock screen on my phone so people can scan it easily.” He also puts up a sign with the QR code at neighborhood gatherings. Others have started spreading the word too, turning it into a shared community effort.
The chat has already proven its value in both small and significant ways. In one instance, Patton realized he had lent the car seat he keeps in his car to a friend, and his wife had driven away with the other one. “I needed to take the kids to school in half an hour so I posted an urgent message on the chat — a neighbor responded in five minutes and saved the day!” he says. In a more serious moment, the group became a real-time information hub during an ICE raid at a nearby restaurant, helping neighbors understand what was happening and coordinate support. While Patton initially envisioned the chat as apolitical, he came to see moments like this not as politics, but as neighbors showing up for one another in times of need.
That kind of care, however, doesn’t emerge passively — it requires time, repetition, and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of showing up. There’s no app or shortcut that can replace the slow accumulation of trust. “Dude, I really do have to invite my neighbors over for a potluck — shoot,” Bucks, the community organizer, says. “I really do have to go to that annoying meeting that I don’t want to go to at 7 pm — shoot. I have to keep going back and forth with folks in the Signal group even if they’re getting on my nerves because it’s worth it.”
When that effort is missing, the absence is palpable — shaping not just how neighbors support one another, but how they perceive even the smallest everyday annoyances. “If you don’t know your neighbors, then all they can do is annoy you,” Patton says. “It’s just a sort of a sad and unpleasant situation.” He says he’s had instances where a neighbor was being loud and getting on his nerves, and finally had a moment where he realized that if he knew someone and had a relationship outside of the thing they do that bothers him, he’d be less irritated.“First of all, I could actually talk to them and say, ‘Hey, could you not do that?’” Patton says. “But also, I’d be less annoyed because I know who they are. It’s one thing if your anonymous neighbor is just being really noisy, and it’s another thing if you know that Mike is having a barbecue.”
Robert J. Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard University known for his work on collective efficacy, which is the process of taking social ties among neighborhood residents and activating them to achieve collective goals,says that getting to know your neighbors isn’t necessarily about building super-tight friendships. In his research, he’s found that neighborhoods function best when residents are loosely connected but willing to step in for one another, whether that’s maintaining a sense of order or simply helping out in small ways.” Any mechanisms that can bring people together, particularly in public spaces, I think, can create a certain kind of public good,” Sampson tells Vox. That level of cohesion doesn’t require intense intimacy or even liking everyone you encounter; it requires regular interaction and a shared sense of responsibility to the people around you.
Neighborism isn’t just feel-good — it’s filling the gaps institutions can’t
Good Looking Out, a Facebook group started in 2014, connects West Philadelphia residents who use it to ask for help, share information, and flag urgent issues — everything from flooded basements to lost pets. At its core, it’s about neighbors taking care of each other.
For co-founder Gabriel Nyantakyi, 43, the group grew out of discussions about law enforcement and a desire to build something more community-led. “It emerged from conversations being had about police and policing and wanting to provide some support through community to fill some of those needs,” he tells Vox. “Just establishing some independence from the state.”
Since then, both the network and the broader culture around it have expanded. “Mutual aid culture has grown as a whole,” Nyantakyi says, pointing to the rise of community fridges and food giveaways across West Philly. The shift accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, when digital tools became essential and institutional gaps became harder to ignore. “It was all a clear case of the government being inadequate in addressing people’s needs,” Nyantakyi says. “People in the community stepped up.”
Aisha Nyandoro, the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit organization that helps support residents of federally subsidized housing, tells Vox that in the communities she works with, neighborism is not new or optional. It’s how people survive. It’s “a practice of radical, everyday care rooted in proximity,” she says. “It’s the belief that the people who live closest to you are not just strangers who share a wall or a street, but co-creators in your safety, your joy, and your ability to thrive. It is about reciprocity — not in a transactional sense, but rather a mutually helpful way.”
Nyandoro says that, in practice, it looks like “a neighbor watching a child when a parent’s shift runs long” or “moms texting each other to see if someone needs a ride to the grocery store.”Sampson, the Harvard sociology professor, notes that these kinds of interactions — even small ones — build the trust that allows communities to function.
Klinenberg sees neighborism as part of a broader shift back toward what he calls social infrastructure: the physical places that make connection possible. “If you live in a neighborhood with a great playground…a great library…sports facilities, green space,” he says, you’re “much more likely to have strong local ties.” Without those spaces, connection becomes “a lot harder and less likely.”
The emotional pull of neighborism is real, too. Juli Fraga, a psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that proximity-based relationships are easier to maintain and access in real time. Low-stakes interactions do wonders for our well-being. “Just being around other people can help us feel less isolated,” she tells Vox. Patton says that’s been the case for him — knowing his neighbors has improved his quality of life. Meanwhile, doing small favors for others, even strangers, cultivates positive emotions. Plus, these situations give people a chance to connect and know that others are experiencing similar struggles, which helps them feel less alone.
Ultimately, though, neighborism may be less about sentiment and more about function. After years of too-online hyper-optimized isolation, people are rediscovering that life is better when somebody nearby knows your name and your general comings and goings. They might not be your closest friend, but they show up anyway — sometimes awkwardly, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes just to stand there and witness.
As Bucks sees it, none of this is entirely new. “We’re not learning to do something that human beings haven’t done previously,” he says.
Сава Шуманович — один из столпов сербского модернизма. Он писал очень много и оставил богатое наследие, его картины можно увидеть кажется во всех главных музеях. Две его любимые темы — пейзаж и ню. Лучшие свои картины писал в последние 9 лет жизни, но начинаю я с начала.
“This isn’t what a turnaround looks like. This is what a train wreck looks like.”
That was how one veteran television executive put it to me Tuesday, after I asked about new ratings data showing that Tony Dokoupil’s “CBS Evening News” has continued to hemorrhage viewers and sink to new lows, as Bari Weiss’ hand-selected anchor struggles to hold the audience.
Indeed, according to Nielsen data obtained by Status, Dokoupil’s most recent week, beginning April 20, marked the lowest-rated stretch in total viewers since he took over the broadcast. The program averaged just 3.7 million viewers—slipping below the once-unthinkable 4 million threshold. In the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demographic, the show averaged only 467,000 viewers.
But that’s not the worst of it. According to the ratings data, the broadcast has now logged three consecutive weeks under 4 million viewers, a prolonged slump that was once unimaginable. The alarming audience erosion likely won’t be aided by the fact that summer is about to begin, suggesting that he may be stuck in the mud for some time. At the very least, it is not the narrative the David Ellison-owned network wanted saturating the public discourse as upfronts season gets underway.
Ultimately, April 2026 ranked as the second lowest-rated April for the “CBS Evening News” this century in total viewers—and the lowest ever in the 25–54 demographic. In that key demo, Dokoupil’s broadcast has now posted 12 straight weeks below 600,000 viewers, undercutting Weiss’ push to reinvent the broadcast to resonate with younger audiences.
[…]
Veteran television news executives who spoke to Status described the CBS News numbers as nothing short of disastrous, with one noting that “many news businesses are thriving” with the massive crush of news hitting audiences on a daily basis. That person blamed Weiss for the network’s troubles, saying the audience is “rejecting her brand of faux centrism.”
“Her decisions have turned off even more of their shrinking audience,” the veteran television news executive said, adding: “These declines are part of a larger and deeper crisis at CBS News.”
A second veteran television news executive commented to Status, “I think we have enough evidence now to draw a conclusion. The audience has decided. Bari Weiss’s first major move as a television executive did not work.”
A third flatly described the situation as “a sinking ship,” adding: “It’s clear they have no idea what they are doing—and one has to wonder what will be left of CBS News once the merger goes through and the Ellisons are done having to placate [Donald] Trump.”
The plunging ratings are almost certainly hurting CBS News as a business, given that fewer eyeballs translate to less advertising revenue. “There’s no way it can’t be affecting their bottom line,” the second television veteran said.
Some people will continue to claim that this is actually what Ellison wants, but this remains implausible. It’s not just that plutocrats do not like losing money even if it has no material impact on their lives. It’s that the reason that Fox News is a very effective propaganda network is because people watch it. The Ellisons just figured that someone who made money running a group blog that relentlessly panders to the prejudices of people like them must be able to run an actual news division, for reasons inherent in the previous clause.
On Monday night of Tony Dokoupil’s first week as anchor of the CBS Evening News,Bari Weiss walked into the newsroom and asked to see the script. This was unusual—the network chief does not typically edit scripts directly—but Weiss was the new boss. After some objections from the show’s producers, she was given access and proceeded to add a few lines to a January 5 segment on the US military raid targeting Nicolás Maduro. Weiss’s edits, according to a former CBS producer, sought to cast President Donald Trump’s operation as a cunning maneuver to box out China, Russia, and Iran.
“Of course she writes it in the wrong place,” recalls the producer. The text was added to the teleprompter twice, leaving her new star anchor flummoxed, stumbling over his words for several excruciating seconds. “First day, big problems here,” he told the millions of viewers who’d tuned in.
“What a disaster,” says one former CBS News anchor. “Honestly, I would’ve fucking killed her. Are you serious? On the first night?”
The average price of gas nationwide reached a new high for 2026: $4.23 a gallon.
This chart of average national gas prices in 2026 starts January 1, when prices averaged $2.83 a gallon. Through January and February, prices ticked up all the way to $3 a gallon on March 2. Then they skyrocketed. Up to $4.17 a gallon on April 9. Then down a little. Then up even higher.Jan.2026Feb.MarchApril1.001.502.002.503.003.50$4.00 per gallon$2.83$4.23Jan. 8$2.82 per gallonJan. 8$2.82 per gallon
Notes: Gas prices are rounded to the nearest cent.
The chart isn’t showing up for some reason, but it’s a line going almost straight up the day after Donald Trump launched his glorious war intended to [objectives missing here].
I confess to teetering on the brink of an overdose of schadenfreude, when I think of the moron swing voters who put this Category 5 disaster of a person in the White House because Eggs Exponsive and a Good Businessman would bring back 2019 pricing by draining the swamp.
We need the average price of a gallon of gas to go to six or seven dollars soon, and that may well happen before the “author” of The Art of the Deal manages to bribe the Iranians with enough billions to remove his own dick from the door in which he slammed it.
I am running behind today because my lecture topic for my American Democracy class today is…the Voting Rights Act, which required some revisions based on some recent events. I will have more imminently, but I did want to highlight one critical part of Kagan’s dissent. The majority’s holding is that Section 2’s prohibition on race discrimination in voting does not apply if the state can cite any race-neutral justification, including the desire to disempower the other political party. The result of this, as Kagan points out, is that Rucho is not merely sanctioning is mass disempowerment of voters but is being used to dismantle the most important civil rights legislation since Reconstruction:
This is an incredibly perverse outcome even by Roberts Court standards. And as Kagan concludes, the impact of the majority’s illogical and lawless opnion will be far-reaching:
You cannot have a more dispositive illustration of Trump being a symptom of the rot of Republican elites than the cause than the Roberts Court’s voting rights jurisprudence, one that does not reflect any constitutional or statutory provision but does reflect the contempt that Roberts has had for the VRA for his entire professional career.
Утром, где-то в шесть, проснулся, и смотрел на проплывающие мимо скалы, совершенно не такие, как вчера. Серые, обсыпанные снегом. Стальное море, стальное небо. С неба летят редкие снежинки.
"По берегам замерзающих рек снег, снег, снег"
Только тут не реки, а море и проливы, и ничего ни е замерзает. Кстати, на Лофотене есть фьорд, в котором летом вода достигает 20 градусов, купайся - не хочу.
Ну а эти чёрно-белые скалы, ну не оторваться от этого.
После завтрака пошли гулять, чтоб натопать наши утренние 3000 шагов. Сначала обошли этажи (палубы) внутри, потом пошли оделись и вышли гулять по наружным палубам. Ну да, ветрюга, холодрынь - как прям в детстве.
У нас, кстати, мало что при качке, но и так вода из душа выливается вдоль стенки и на пол, а потом и из душевой в кабину чуток попадает. Ну мы позвали мастера. Результаты обследования привели к научному выводу, что дизайн херовый, и единственное решение - полотенце скручивать в рулон и загораживать, чтоб не вытекало. Ну, работает.
Обед пошли взяли ранний. Я, устав от дефицита салатов, взял caesar salad, которого я никогда не любил. Там было больше колбасы и ветчины, в этом цезаре. Ну ничо, ничо, немножко и салата имеется.
Мы причалили, в Тромсё, к большому причалу, и пошли гулять. Народ там на экскурсии какие-то, а нам просто поболтаться, да может, в какой антик-бутик-секонд-хенд. Один такой был очень близко. Пока жена искала каких-нибудь сувениров, я сел на диван у стола, налил себе кофе... Норвегия! Но с сувенирами всё неоднозначно - то ли они в Индии сделаны, которые поплоше; а которые получше - в Китае. А... всё фигня.
Поболтались по пристани (а ветрюга! и моросит - но никто с зонтиками тут не ходит). Да какие зонтики, унесёт же. А позавчера тут в Тромсё был большой снегопад, всё подзавалило. Сегодня уже порядочно подтаяло.
На молу пара легко одетых пацанов ловила рыбу, но свернули удочки, пошли сели на самокаты и укатили.
Народ гоняет на великах по мокрым гранитным улицам; один спорсмен в шортах и футболке бежит такой, рожа красная, взгляд сосредоточенный.
Мы зашли в ещё один магазин сувериров, я там погладил оленьи шкуры, посмотрели мы на фейковые саамские шапки, явно сделанные не в Китае так в Бангладеше... и пошли дальше гулять, в гору куда-то. Мимо бюста Амундсену, мимо памятника королю Хокану Седьмому, тощему, в шинели и фуражке.
На самую верхотуру города забраться не удалось, там что-то всё огорожено и написано, мол, приват.
И тут бац - и ветрюга прекратилась, и стало даже довольно тепло.
Спустились мы к пароходу, сели в кабину... по идее, собирались пойти выпить, но вместо этого жена сходила за чаем и пирожным. Кстати, к концу прогулки я как-то подочумел. не знаю, сахар или что. Но в сумме мы 12 тыс шагов таки протопали сегодня.
На ужин пошли; был сегодня прекрасный ужин, копчёный палтус, утиная грудка (ну, похоже на magret de canard), отварной голец (char, по-английски... теперь буду этот типа данных так называть, голец).
Подошли англичане, и мы весь вечер проболтали. Глядя на проплывающие черно-белые острова. Начали разговор, конечно, с обсуждения речи короля. Потом перешли на круизы... мнения у нас, если судить по разговору, довольно близкие. Особенно теоретические - мы ж ни на каких круизах и не бывали, этот первый, да и то не то чтобы круиз.
И так просидели чуть не до полдесятого, уже темнеть начинало.
Потом разошлись; и мы пришли домой, и смотрели на красивый остров Шервёя, и приплыли к деревне Шервёй, у которой дома лепятся по склону, всего тут, на островке, 2500 жителей. Красиво, конечно. Но и сложно, наверно. Это мы уже на 70-й широте ("а нам не страшен ни вал девятый")
Ладно, я уже спать. ведь ещё же и дуолинго успели сделать, Что за жизнь? Когда вообще чо успевать? Непонятно.
. . . And he [Senator John C. Spooner, of Wisconsin] said we had taken their rights away from them. He asked me was it right to murder them in order to carry the elections. I never saw one murdered. I never saw one shot at an election. It was the riots before the elections precipitated by their own hot-headedness in attempting to hold the government, that brought on conflicts between the races and caused the shotgun to be used. That is what I meant by saying we used the shotgun.
I want to call the Senator’s attention to one fact. He said that the Republican party gave the negroes the ballot in order to protect themselves against the indignities and wrongs that were attempted to be heaped upon them by the enactment of the black code. I say it was because the Republicans of that day, led by Thad Stevens, wanted to put white necks under black heels and to get revenge. There is a difference of opinion. You have your opinion about it, and I have mine, and we can never agree.
I want to ask the Senator this proposition in arithmetic: In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters. General Canby set up a carpetbag government there and turned our State over to this majority. Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task. You had handcuffed us and thrown away the key, and you propped your carpetbag negro government with bayonets. Whenever it was necessary to sustain the government you held it up by the Army.
Mr. President, I have not the facts and figures here, but I want the country to get the full view of the Southern side of this question and the justification for anything we did. We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. If no other Senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity. We have had no fraud in our elections in South Carolina since 1884. There has been no organized Republican party in the State.
We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his “rights”—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. But I will not pursue the subject further.
I want to ask permission in this connection to print a speech which I made in the constitutional convention of South Carolina when it convened in 1895, in which the whole carpetbag regime and the indignities and wrongs heaped upon our people, the robberies which we suffered, and all the facts and figures there brought out are incorporated, and let the whole of the facts go to the country. I am not ashamed to have those facts go to the country. They are our justification for the present situation in our State. If I can get it, I should like that permission; otherwise I shall be forced to bring that speech here and read it when I can put my hand on it. I will then leave this matter and let the dead past bury its dead.
...Президент США Дональд Трамп в ходе общения с журналистами после телефонного разговора с российским лидером Владимиром Путиным заявил о военном поражении Киева. По словам американского президента, информация о реальном положении дел на фронте намеренно искажается в западных средствах массовой информации.
«Я д/умаю, Украина в военном плане побеждена. Вы об этом не прочитайте в фейковых новостях», — подчеркнул Дональд Трамп. Глава Белого дома также добавил, что конфликт на Украине имеет все шансы завершиться одновременно с иранским или даже раньше...
We are ruled by people who were like my middle school cohort - almost everything you do means you're "gay" (effeminate, not a real man, etc.).
Continuing to address military culture, Cao said the services needed “meat eaters” instead of “leaf eaters.”
A funny thing about getting older is you see the same fads return again and again, with the details and justifications changing. The usual aesthetic of "meat eating is manly" has been bolstered by the "keto" and high protein diet fads, especially for wannabe muscleheads.
Aesthetics of masculinity aside, the one bit of diet advice which is likely more important than any other, at least in the context of a typical American diet, is: almost everybody needs to eat more fiber.
Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche at a news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, on April 27, 2026. | Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images
It’s been a big week for the Trump Justice Department, beginning with the arraignment of an alleged would-be presidential assassin on Monday.
Just one day after charges were brought against Cole Tomas Allen, who prosecutors say attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the DOJ pivoted to a new target: Former FBI Director James Comey, who is facing a second set of incredibly flimsy federal charges — this time, for allegedly threatening the president with a message written in seashells.
It’s a lot to keep track of, and overseeing it all is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal lawyer. Blanche, the deputy attorney general, got the top job on a temporary basis after his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, was fired earlier in the month; now, he’s auditioning for the real thing.
CNN’s chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid told Today, Explained co-host Noel King earlier this week that the job is Blanche’s to lose. She explains how he got here, how he’s doing so far, and how Trump administration insiders and the MAGA movement feel about him as a potential attorney general.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Has [Blanche] done anything that has surprised you?
Todd Blanche has actually, I think, really met the moment perfectly, especially in the larger context of my reporting on his audition for attorney general.
[The Correspondents’ Dinner shooting] is the first thing that has happened to the Blanche Justice Department as opposed to being something they’ve done or what we’ve seen throughout the Trump Justice Department, which has been a lot of self-inflicted controversies: the handling of the Epstein files, the controversial firings, decisions they’ve made around cases and trying to charge people. That’s all self-inflicted.
But when you’re the attorney general, you’re going to deal with a Boston Marathon bombing or a San Bernardino shooting. This is not quite of that level, but it is certainly a massive event that they have to respond to. That is a real test for the attorney general, and so far it’s been a textbook response from him. He did the Sunday shows. He took questions. And then we heard from him again after Monday’s arraignment.
Pam Bondi, of course, was fired earlier this month. Tell me about how Todd Blanche ended up in this job.
He started out as a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York for a long time. Then he went into white-collar practice, and then he joined the Trump legal team around 2023 when Trump was in the middle of those four major legal cases. Todd worked on the two federal cases brought by Jack Smith, and he also represented [Trump] in New York on the hush money case.
But what really distinguished Todd Blanche is that Trump lawyers come and go. I’ve probably talked to 40 of them over the past decade, right? Todd flourished. Yes, his client was convicted in New York, but he kept him out of jail, and ultimately their legal strategy on the federal cases resulted in Trump never facing trial on either one of those. In Trump’s eyes, Todd Blanche is the guy who kept him out of jail.
What has he been up to since he ended up in the acting role?
He’s been a busy bee. In my reporting, I talked to over a dozen high-level people inside DOJ. Some people I know don’t particularly care for Todd as a person. There was a general consensus, though, this is his job to lose, but in order to keep it, he’s going to have to deliver on weaponization for the president.
That means Trump wants his political adversaries to be prosecuted, and that is something that they have not been able to do yet. Judges and grand juries have to sign off on this. They’ve largely been reluctant, and so they’re getting tripped up by the checks in the system. But he’s made it clear this is what he wants. So ultimately, in order to get this job and to keep it, he needs to bring a case against the political adversary.
Does MAGA like Todd Blanche?
The two knocks on Todd Blanche are that “he’s not MAGA enough” and that he doesn’t get the Trump DOJ away from the “original sin” of how they’ve handled the Epstein files.
I have talked to officials inside the administration, including at least one White House official who said, yeah, we feel that Todd is not MAGA enough. He doesn’t do enough for the base. But even those people who in past stories have been pretty tough on Todd said, “When it comes to being the acting attorney general, he’s done the job. We’re not opposed to him having this job.”
When it comes to the Epstein files, one administration official told me that that is the original sin of the Trump Justice Department. And by that, they mean Pam Bondi’s repeated bungling of the rollout of those files, promising there was new information — those binders that she handed out that really had just a rehash of things that were already in the public domain, her saying that she had the client list on her desk when really there’s no client list.
Eventually, they just had Todd take over the messaging. He was also the one who went down and met with Ghislaine Maxwell. He was the one who oversaw the release of the documents. He has been front and center on this. So when he becomes the acting attorney general, the concern from some administration officials is, well, putting him in charge isn’t going to get us past our biggest embarrassment, which is Epstein. But I don’t think in Trump’s eyes that’s going to be disqualifying.
Is this job his if he wants it? Are there any other serious contenders?
My sources say this job is Todd’s to lose. Now, even if you get it, every Trump attorney general has been fired, replaced, or resigned. So we’ll see. But there are certainly other people nipping at Todd’s heels. But there are also some people in the wings. One is the US Attorney [for the District of Columbia] Jeanine Pirro.
It was funny — the night of the dinner and the shooting, Todd was at the White House. He did the press conference with the president, said there will be charges, there’ll be a gun charge, maybe a law enforcement-related charge. Thirty, 45 minutes later, Pirro did a press conference, and man, she was yelling the specific statutes into that microphone.
It felt a little like one-upsmanship — maybe it was just her enthusiasm, and I’m reading something into it, but her name has certainly been mentioned. We have two and a half more years. There’s probably time for everyone to be attorney general if Todd can’t or won’t stay in the job for two and a half years. It’s a tough job under any administration. But this one really brings some unique challenges.
Justices Samuel Alito, left, and Clarence Thomas wait to leave the stage after the inauguration ceremonies at the US Capitol on January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Get yourself a man who loves you as much as Justice Samuel Alito loves partisan gerrymandering.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which was handed down on Wednesday, was expected to deal a mortal blow to a longstanding federal rule that guarantees Black and Latino voters a minimum level of representation in some states, and Alito’s majority opinion in Callais unquestionably deals such a blow.
But Alito, whose opinion was joined only by the Court’s Republicans, also goes much further. Callais is a cry of devotion to the idea that state lawmakers should be allowed to draw legislative maps that benefit their own political party, and that lock the opposing party out of power to the maximum extent possible.
Callais’s immediate effect is that it removes what was, until Wednesday morning, one of the few remaining federal legal checks on gerrymandering: the Voting Rights Act’s provision governing racial gerrymanders. Prior to Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act sometimes required states to draw additional legislative districts where a racial minority group is in the majority. Callais effectively neutralizes that provision. It does so in two ways.
First, Alito’s opinion effectively reinstates City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), which held that plaintiffs alleging that a state law violates the Voting Rights Act must show that the state legislature acted with “racially discriminatory motivation.” Congress repudiated Mobile in a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which clarified that a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” may violate federal law even if state lawmakers did not enact it with racist intent.
Though Alito denies that his opinion effectively repeals this 1982 law, his opinion rests on a fairly meaningless distinction. Though he claims that Callais “does not demand a finding of intentional discrimination,” he then writes that the VRA “imposes liability only when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” So the new rule is really the same as Mobile, albeit with the words “strong inference” tossed in.
Alito then makes an even deeper cut at anti-gerrymandering lawsuits, elevating the principle that states must be allowed to engage in partisan gerrymandering to a trump card that overcomes the VRA’s safeguards against racial gerrymanders.
Before Wednesday, the Voting Rights Act cast a particularly skeptical eye on legislative maps drawn in states where voters are racially polarized — typically meaning that white voters overwhelmingly supported Republicans while non-white voters voted for Democrats. Without the VRA, these states would tend to give racial minorities minimal representation because the white Republican majority could use race as a proxy to identify Democrats. And then it could draw maps that gave these non-white Democrats few seats in the state legislature or Congress.
But Callais demands that VRA plaintiffs “must ‘disentangle race from politics’ by proving ‘that the former drove a district’s lines.” Thus, if a state draws a map that does two things at once, minimizing both Black representation and Democratic representation, the map will almost certainly be upheld because it is exceedingly difficult to prove that the purpose of the map is to target Black voters and not Democratic voters.
As a practical matter, this means that states with racially polarized electorates will almost always be immune from racial gerrymandering suits, because they can defend against those suits merely by proving that their state’s maps were drawn to benefit the Republican Party.
Moreover, Alito handed this decision down in April, despite the fact that the Court’s most contentious cases are typically handed down in late June. That gives Republicans in red states that previously had to comply with the Voting Rights Act an additional two months to draw congressional maps that benefit their party. And even if those states do not redraw their maps for the 2026 election, many are all but certain to do so for future elections.
Callais, in other words, is a major victory for Alito’s Republican Party, and it is an even greater victory for the proposition that gerrymandering should flourish without federal regulation.
What the law governing gerrymandering looked like before Callais
Broadly speaking, state lawmakers can draw gerrymandered maps in two ways. One way, known as “racial” gerrymandering, occurs when a state draws a map in order to maximize the power of voters of one race, and to minimize the power of voters of another race. Imagine, for example, a map that crammed all of a state’s Black voters into a single congressional district, while spreading out white voters to more efficiently elect as many white candidates as possible.
“Partisan” gerrymanders, meanwhile, occur when a state draws maps that try to maximize one party’s representation and minimize the power of the other major party.
In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican majority held that federal courts may not hear challenges to partisan gerrymanders. But the Voting Rights Act, as it was amended in 1982, still sometimes prohibited maps that dilute racial minorities’ voting strength. Recall that the amended VRA prohibits a state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” A racial gerrymander abridges the right to vote by making votes cast by voters of one race matter less than votes cast by members of a different race.
The Court laid out this pre-Callais framework in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). While the Gingles framework is complicated, it primarily turned on two questions: 1) whether a state is residentially segregated by race; and 2) whether the states’ voters are racially polarized by political party.
Gingles recognized that, when residential segregation and racial polarization coexist, they produce two separate political communities who will consistently vote for opposing candidates — for example, white voters who vote for Republicans in one part of a state, and Black voters who vote for Democrats in another part of it. In such a state, the majority community will use its control of the state legislature to draw maps that leave the minority community with little, if any, representation. And so the VRA sometimes required these states to draw additional districts where a racial minority group was in the majority, in order to ensure that group was not unfairly denied representation.
Although Alito claims that his Callais opinion “does not require abandonment of the Gingles framework,” he’s not telling the truth. Gingles was the Court’s attempt to apply the 1982 VRA amendment’s command that a law which “results” in less representation for racial minorities is suspect. But, by reviving Mobile’s racist intent requirement, Alito effectively repeals the 1982 amendment — at least as it applies to redistricting cases.
On top of that, Alito’s Callais opinion turns Gingles on its head. Again, Gingles held that, because states that are racially polarized tend to produce unfair maps, those states sometimes had special obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Callais, by contrast, holds that racially polarized states enjoy enhanced protections against being sued for racial gerrymandering.
Under Callais, a state that is accused of racial gerrymandering may defend against that suit by demonstrating that its maps also benefit the political party that controls the state legislature. So the most racially polarized states will enjoy the highest level of immunity from lawsuits challenging their maps.
What happens to elections after Callais?
The most immediate impact of this decision is that red states that previously were bound by the Voting Rights Act are now free to redraw their maps to maximize Republican representation. As recently as 2023, for example, the Supreme Court ordered Alabama to draw an additional Black majority district in order to comply with the VRA. Alabama may now eliminate this district so long as it claims that it is doing so for partisan reasons, and not racial ones.
More broadly, Callais is such an effusive love letter to the concept of partisan gerrymandering that it is likely to eliminate any remaining concerns political parties may have that the Supreme Court might push back if states draw maps too obviously rigged in their favor. Rucho already established that partisan gerrymandering is allowed. Callais effectively rules that racial gerrymandering is also allowed, so long as it also achieves partisan ends.
A less certain question is what happens to Black representation over the course of the next several decades. Callais will allow Republican state lawmakers to eliminate many congressional seats that are currently held by Black or Latino lawmakers and replace them with white Republican districts. One upshot is that many minority voters will now need to form coalitions with white voters in order to elect their preferred candidates. It remains to be seen whether such alliances will form in the future.
Unless and until that happens, however, Callais will increase the power of white Republicans and diminish the power of Democrats and voters of color generally. The gerrymandering wars are only beginning, and the Republican Party just gained a powerful new weapon.
Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea. For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride, and that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride.
The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.
Notice the white nationalist theme; America is a nation of British, Anglo-Saxon people, and that’s what makes us great. Never mind all those other people who built the country, it was English destiny that forged this nation. Never mind the principles of representative democracy.
Yuck.
Anyone want to bet that Stephen Miller was the author? Total Nazi shit.
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