VoxModify

2026-03-08 20:00:00

If you’ve been taking antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications for years, you might have certain questions. Do you still need the medication? How would you know if you didn’t? Does it make sense to stay on it indefinitely, or do you owe it to yourself to see what life would be like without the medication?

I don’t believe any of us has one true self, so I don’t think you can “owe” it to a central self to act in this way or that. Instead, I offered an alternative way of approaching this dilemma in a recent installment of my Your Mileage May Vary advice column. 

But beyond the philosophical question of what you do or don’t owe yourself, there are medical questions that might still gnaw at you. Some people worry, for instance, about the withdrawal symptoms they might experience should they try to taper off selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the most commonly prescribed type of antidepressant. Others worry that perhaps they’ve become dependent on a drug and are not sure how to feel about that.

Since I have no medical training, I can’t give medical or psychiatric advice. But one of the most interesting voices tackling these questions is Awais Aftab, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. I came across him through his insightful newsletter, Psychiatry at the Margins, and a piece he wrote for the New York Times calling for psychiatry to engage honestly and transparently with patients’ concerns about antidepressants, rather than ceding that conversation to those — like RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement — who would exploit it for political ends.

Aftab is critical of the psychiatric establishment’s failings, but he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; he is very aware that for some people, antidepressants can be lifesaving. I reached out to him because I knew he’d have a nuanced take on all these questions — some of which have niggled at me as someone who’s been taking an anti-anxiety medication for years. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Why are so many people unsure how to think about the meaning of taking antidepressants, especially long-term? Are most psychiatrists failing us in some way? Or is ambivalence just an unavoidable feature of living at a time when medical progress keeps handing us choices that come loaded with tradeoffs?

I think it’s both, honestly. Let me start with the deeper issue. Medical progress keeps giving us more and more control over aspects of our lives, such as our moods, our anxiety, our emotional reactivity, but that control is imperfect and comes with genuine tradeoffs. [The philosopher] Bill Fulford has articulated the idea that scientific progress creates new technologies which create new choices for us, and this increasingly brings the full diversity of human values into play. More choices mean more uncertainty, more ambivalence. That’s just the moral cost of living in a world where these options exist. 

We can choose to take antidepressants or not, continue them or stop them, but we can’t choose not to have the choice. And the uncertainty is genuine. “Are the drugs helping?” “Do I still need them?” aren’t always easy questions to answer for any specific person.

That said, too few clinicians are attuned to any of this. Most psychiatrists aren’t trained to explore the meaning and emotions patients assign to their medications. Patients can feel relieved by symptom improvement and simultaneously detest feeling dependent on a pill. They may credit the drug with saving their life and still wonder who they’d be without it. When clinicians don’t anticipate and directly address that ambivalence, patients are left to navigate it alone.

The goal should neither be to nudge people toward staying on medications or encourage them to discontinue, but to support them in making decisions that align with their own priorities. That requires a kind of clinical attention most people just aren’t getting.

If someone says to you, “Look, I’ve been on these meds for years, and at this point I honestly can’t tell whether they’re still necessary” — what would you advise them to do?

I’d say: That uncertainty you’re feeling is completely legitimate, and you’re not alone in it. A lot of people on long-term antidepressants feel this way. What I’d recommend depends on multiple factors. Their mental health history is especially relevant. Someone who’s had multiple severe depressive episodes with hospitalizations has a very different risk calculus than someone who started an SSRI for mild anxiety five years ago and has been stable since. The subjective meaning matters too. Some people are at peace with taking a daily medication; for others, it gnaws at them. Some patients would rather stay on a medication and minimize any chance of relapse or deal with withdrawal; others are determined to find out whether they still need it, even if that means going through some rough patches.

What I recommend to my patients is the courage to make an informed choice — to continue or taper, whatever the case may be. A lot of people stay on antidepressants because they’re stuck in a kind of ambivalent inertia. Years pass while they wonder what their life would be like without the drugs, whether they’d feel more brightly, think more creatively, have a more intimate sense of their own resilience.

If someone wants to stop their meds, it should be done carefully, with clinical help and with a slow taper. If someone has been on SSRIs for years, a cautious taper would take several months at least. But I also want to be honest: A slow, gradual taper is not easy because it often requires using doses that are not available in standard pills available at pharmacies, which means people at times have to use liquid versions of the medications or use expensive compounding pharmacies. There is also no agreement in the psychiatric field right now about the best tapering protocols, and patients will encounter all sorts of guidance online.

How common is it for people who take antidepressants for years to form either a physical dependence or a psychological dependence on them? What does each kind of dependence look like?

Physical dependence on antidepressants is a well-established phenomenon. Your body adapts to the presence of the drug, and when you stop or reduce the dose, you can experience withdrawal symptoms, like dizziness, nausea, “brain zaps” (an electric shock-like sensation in the head), vertigo, irritability, insomnia, and sometimes a rebound of anxiety or mood symptoms that can be difficult to distinguish from a relapse of the original problem. Most people who have been on antidepressants for years will experience some degree of withdrawal, although severe withdrawal appears to be less common. Some people have also reported protracted withdrawal online, lasting months or even years, though this remains poorly understood.

Psychological dependence is more about the anxiety of going without it. Once you’ve internalized the idea that you need the pill to feel okay, it can feel almost impossible to stop. Why run the risk? Why open yourself up to withdrawal, to a possible return of depression or anxiety? This is understandable, but it can keep people on medications for years and decades more out of fear and inertia than any active choice. My view is that such psychological dependence shouldn’t be ignored by clinicians and any distorted worries and fears should be addressed.

One thing that confuses some people is whether it makes sense to think of this dependence in terms of “addiction.” Some people reason that if they experience withdrawal symptoms when going off the pills, that means they’re addicted to the pills in some way. Is addiction the wrong frame when thinking about antidepressants?

Yes, addiction is the wrong frame. Addiction in the clinical sense involves compulsive use of a substance despite harmful consequences, quickly escalating doses to achieve the same effect (tolerance in the classic sense), craving, and loss of control. Antidepressants don’t produce any of that. People don’t crave antidepressants the way someone addicted to opioids craves opioids.

What antidepressants can produce is physiological dependence. The body adapts to the drug’s presence and reacts when it’s removed. The confusion with addiction is understandable. If you experience withdrawal symptoms when you stop a substance, the intuitive conclusion is “I must be addicted.” But dependence and addiction are different phenomena medically. Many medications can produce physical dependence without being addictive.

That said, I’m sympathetic to why people reach for the addiction frame. When you’re experiencing terrible withdrawal and you feel trapped on a medication you want to stop, the language of addiction becomes appealing and powerful. But clinically, it’s not accurate, and using that becomes confusing and stigmatizing.

My own psychiatrist once told me that my SSRI is not the kind of drug where it makes sense to worry about addiction. She said that instead, I should put it in the mental category of “if you have high blood pressure, you take blood pressure medication.” Is that a more accurate way to think about it? 

Your psychiatrist is right about the core point: Antidepressants aren’t addictive in the way that, say, opioids or benzodiazepines can be. Putting them in a different mental category from drugs of abuse is appropriate. But the blood pressure medication analogy is limited in its own way, and I think it can be misleading if taken too far. 

With most blood pressure medications, if you stop taking them, your blood pressure goes back up and possibly may even shoot up higher than what it used to be, but you don’t experience a distinct withdrawal syndrome with symptoms you hadn’t previously experienced. With SSRIs and other antidepressants, stopping can trigger symptoms that are distinct from a return of depression or anxiety. Like dizziness, brain zaps, nausea, electrical sensations, severe irritability. For some people, these symptoms are mild and brief. For others, they’re genuinely debilitating.

Why has the psychiatric establishment been slow to research withdrawal struggles? What would fixing the research gap require? 

The failure here is multilayered. Part of it is a funding problem. Federal research funding in psychiatry has been heavily tilted toward basic neuroscience and drug development, understanding the brain, finding new molecules, at the expense of studying the everyday clinical realities of how people actually experience medications, including what happens when they try to stop. Tapering and deprescribing just aren’t where the prestige or the grant money has been. Nearly four decades after the approval of Prozac, there is not a single high-quality randomized controlled trial that compares specific methods of tapering patients off antidepressants. That’s a remarkable gap.

Part of it is ideological. There’s been a prevailing attitude in psychiatry that withdrawal is rare and mild, “low on the list of priorities,” as a group of prominent psychiatrists once put it in a letter to the New York Times. This dismissiveness has been enormously damaging. Patients who experience severe withdrawal have been told it’s just their depression coming back, or that what they’re experiencing isn’t real. Clinicians who are trained to see medications primarily as solutions naturally have difficulty recognizing them as sources of harm.

Part of it is methodological. The tools we have to measure withdrawal are inadequate. We don’t have good ways to distinguish withdrawal from relapse. We don’t know what tapering strategies actually work best under rigorous conditions.

Fixing this would require making research into iatrogenic harm, that is, harm caused by medical treatments, a genuine funding priority. It would require developing better measurement tools, running proper tapering trials, updating clinical guidelines, and training clinicians to take deprescribing as seriously as prescribing. Deprescribing should be the bread and butter of every working psychiatrist, not outsourced to fringe critics of the profession.

Speaking of critics of the profession, how do you see the MAHA movement and RFK Jr. fitting into this? Is their war on antidepressants complicating psychiatry’s ability to course-correct?

I’m deeply concerned about the direction of that movement. RFK Jr. has said things about antidepressants that resonate with many people who’ve been harmed by them. He’s echoing language that has circulated in prescribed-harm communities for a long time. But RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement are not equipped to navigate the clinical and scientific complexity here. Their political agenda and funding decisions will not lead to better research and better clinical care. They will, in all likelihood, lead to confusion, distrust, stigma, polarization, and possibly restricted access to medications for people who need them.

2026-03-08 19:00:00

When America’s Next Top Model premiered in 2002, it was a juggernaut. The show was a part of a cohort of programming that built the foundations of reality television as we know it today. A new documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, asks the show’s creator, Tyra Banks, her collaborators, and former contestants to look back at some of the biggest moments in the show’s history and reckon with its legacy. 

More than 20 years after the show first aired, viewers have found many elements of the show did not age well. In that time, our standards around reality television have surely changed. So, should we be evaluating the show through a 2026 lens? 

Scaachi Koul, a culture writer for Slate, spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about how much accountability we can expect from people like Banks and what a show like America’s Next Top Model tells us about ourselves. An excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me why we’re talking about America’s Next Top Model again?

Culture moves in 20- to 30-year cycles. And so there’s always nostalgia that comes up with these things. That is a show that premiered right after 9/11. It speaks to a very particular slice of early to mid-aughts reality show culture. 

We are in a phase where we’re rethinking all of those things. It is an interesting time to reassess the culture that continues to dominate. All of the things we watch, they are all guided by these reality shows from 2000 to 2010.

What was America’s Next Top Model?

It was a reality competition show. They would bring on a bunch of teenagers and young women. They would get these girls, they put them in a house together, and they would have to do these modeling competitions every week. 

The show created a whole lexicon for us that we didn’t have before. It was such a strange fever dream of a show. It is exactly like a lot of reality competition still, but it was so specific and weird and saliently, helmed by a lunatic.

Tyra [Banks] was cuckoo bananas, and that’s why we loved her. She was amazing TV. She was always trying to trick the girls. There’s one where she pretends to faint in front of them. And then they put it in the show. 

So much of what the documentary has to grapple with, ultimately, is what was happening on that show was sheer lunacy. And some of what went on in the show is in retrospect rather appalling.

Let’s talk through some of the things that the documentary tries to address, and I want to start with a model named Shandi.

Shandi has maybe the most devastating story in the documentary. She was someone that I still remembered. She was on the second season of the show.  She seemed primed to win, in fact. 

Near the end of the show, they take all the models to Milan and while she was there, she got really drunk and there were a bunch of male models. And in the show’s version, when you watch it in real time, it’s like a drunken hookup. She cheats on her boyfriend in Milan and that’s how it’s framed. And her shame is, I can’t believe I did this to my boyfriend. 

When you watch the documentary, it is recast not — I wouldn’t even say it’s a 2026 lens. I don’t necessarily think that it is. I think a lot of people still view sexual assault like this and still view drinking and women like this, but she’s an adult, and so now really, in her adulthood, she’s able to look at this and be like, yeah, that wasn’t a place where I could consent.

Is anyone held to account for the way Shandi was treated?

A lot of people want more responsibility from Tyra, and I get that she’s the face of it and a good person to ask, but these shows are constellations of people. There’s a lot of people who work on these shows and there’s a lot of people who have responsibility for it, and some of them are in the doc and maybe some of them aren’t. 

What happened with Shandi is there’s five, six, 10 people who have to say okay to that. And you keep saying it and you keep saying it. That is what’s interesting to me, how the machine lets that pass.

There was a model, Dani, who had a beautiful, charming, delightful gap in her front teeth. And she was made to close it. Tell me about how the documentary deals with young women being told something distinct about you is not right, it’s not good enough.

It’s a tough gig that Tyra gave herself because she’s trying to tell these women, this is how the industry works and these are the things you need to do to be able to thrive in it. At the same time, she’s propagating those same things. 

I believed her and I still believe her when she would say, you need to lose weight because you’re not going to get a cover girl campaign if you’re bigger. Which was true at the time. It’s still true for a lot of campaigns. 

Tyra says, “This is what I knew with the information that I had.” I kind of believe her. The show was still interested in moving that narrative forward and making sure that was the tension. The point of the show was the tension between who you were and who you are supposed to become.

You watched the documentary. What did you want to get out of it and what do you feel like you got out of it? Did it feel like an honest reckoning?

Intent and result are always different. And I don’t know what the intent was, but I think with the result, she comes off looking like what we knew her to be, which is pretty craven, and pretty aware of what she’s done, and not that sorry. 

That’s what we bought. And the idea that she is going to be this font of accountability — I don’t think that’s likely. A lot of her answers are like, “Well, that was the time.” That’s always the argument people make. 

I never really get that in hindsight, because it’s still the time. The president is posting gifs or AI videos of the one and only Black president we’ve had as a monkey. So I don’t actually know that it is of a time. It’s just of a different place. 

That kind of stuff doesn’t live in reality TV like it used to, but it permeated everywhere else and it has always been there. [Banks] was responding to what she had, but we are always responding to what we have and we always have this. 

It actually has never really improved. One day we get to decide if we’d like to improve it. I think those retrospectives are worthwhile because they help us see how the Overton window has moved and where it’s moved, and how we can maybe shift it back.

2026-03-08 18:30:00

We’ve painted ourselves into a corner on climate change — our planet is going to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. And while greenhouse gas emissions aren’t rising as fast as they used to, we’re still emitting carbon dioxide at record-high levels, so further warming is inevitable.

Stopping Earth from heating up further demands effectively zeroing out everything we emit from burning fossil fuels. But at this rate, there’s no way around the fact that we have to go further: We must not just reduce carbon emissions, but pull carbon dioxide back out of the air. The latest comprehensive report from the United Nations’ body of climate scientists made it clear that every scenario that sees us escaping dangerous warming requires carbon capture.

It’s possible to wrench the thermostat back in the other direction and avoid the worst outcomes. It just requires the small matter of scaling up nascent technologies to a global scale and building an entirely new industry from scratch to pull upward of 9 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. No problem.

But there may be a solution to this that checks all the right boxes and very few of the bad ones: extracting carbon directly from the sea.

It gets around some of the squeamishness around geoengineering approaches like dimming the sky to cool the Earth since there’s nothing being added to the environment; just removing the waste that shouldn’t have been spewed so recklessly in the first place. In 2023, hundreds of scientists signed onto a letter calling for more research, development, and field-testing of ocean-based CO2 removal.

It can also address another problem created by our gargantuan carbon emissions: ocean acidification. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it forms carbonic acid, which is slowly starting to shift the pH of the world’s oceans. That affects marine chemistry in ways we’re only beginning to understand, and can threaten sea life by dissolving the shells of tiny organisms that form the foundation of the ocean’s food pyramid. Pulling carbon out of the ocean can slow this down.

So two fish on one hook. Simple, right?

Of course not. “There are quite a lot of challenges, to be honest,” said Adam Yang, who studies ocean CO2 removal at Dalhousie University in Canada. “This whole field of marine carbon dioxide removal is quite new.” 

Yet there are already companies working on the problem with new technologies who say there is a business here that is planet-saving and profitable. Later this year, one ocean CO2 capture company — Equatic — is planning to commission the largest marine CO2 removal plant in the world in Singapore. It will pull about 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the ocean every day. That’s a miniscule amount compared to the billions of tons of extraction needed, but it would provide a demonstration that the technology does indeed work. 

The bigger question is whether this can turn into a viable business, especially in an era where international cooperation is breaking down and some of the largest greenhouse gas emitters are backing away from their climate change commitments. When it comes to carbon dioxide, can we finally create an industry out of withdrawing more than we deposit? 

How ocean-based CO2 removal works

The notion of pulling carbon dioxide out of seawater makes a lot of sense if you look at the basic physics. Current carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are around 430 parts per million. Those are likely the highest levels humans have ever experienced. 

Yet at the same time, 430 parts per million is only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. Extracting one metric ton of carbon dioxide would require combing through 1.8 billion cubic meters of air. That’s the equivalent of 720 Olympic swimming pools. That requires a lot of scrubbers, a lot of energy, and thus a lot of money.

But because of how carbon dioxide reacts with water it’s about 150 times more concentrated in the sea  than in the sky. About 30 percent of humanity’s carbon emissions are absorbed by the ocean. This gives us a huge leg up on collecting carbon compared to drawing it straight from the air. 

“We’re focusing on direct removal because the capture step is the most expensive and most complicated part,” said Gaurav Sant, an engineering professor at UCLA and co-founder of Equatic, the company building the largest ocean CO2 removal system. (Sant also noted that what they’re doing is “removal,” not “capture,” because capture implies a step where you have to concentrate the CO2).

When you take carbon dioxide out of the water, Henry’s law means that removed carbon dioxide is replaced by more carbon dioxide from the air, said Steve Oldham, the CEO of Captura, another company developing a system to capture carbon dioxide from the ocean. So if you keep drawing CO2 out of the ocean, it will also draw down the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. 

Since the ocean covers two-thirds of the planet, there is massive surface area for this reaction to take place.

Their specific technologies are different, but both Captura and Equatic separate seawater into acids and bases to extract carbon dioxide and then recombine them to return neutral water back into the ocean. The water, now depleted of carbon and returned to the sea, can go on to soak up more CO2.  

Oldham said that there are several key advantages to Captura’s system. One is that it generates its reaction chemicals from the ocean and returns them there; no extra chemicals are left in the water. The chemical process is in a closed loop.

Another benefit is that when their electrodialysis unit breaks down saltwater, it can store the elements for a while and run them back through the electrodialysis unit to generate electricity. Effectively, it’s a battery. That means the system can run on intermittent power, like from solar panels, and supplement its own electrons when necessary. 

This is in contrast to other forms of marine carbon dioxide management techniques, like ocean alkalinity enhancement. This is where companies dump minerals into the ocean to make it more basic, raising its pH so it can absorb more carbon dioxide from the air. “If you have to add mountains of material into the ocean, it becomes hard to scale,” Oldham said. “We try to position ourselves differently.”

Captura currently has a pilot unit in Hawaii that they built in 70 days for less than $10 million. It extracts about 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Even if we could scale that up to a commercial level 500-kilotonne ocean-based CO2 capture plant, you’d need about 20,000 of those to remove 10 gigatonnes of global greenhouse gases. 

On one hand, that doesn’t sound so far-fetched when you compare it to the scale of other industrial facilities. There are about 14,000 coal power plants and more than 100,000 wastewater treatment plants in the world. Mim Rahimi, an engineer at the University of Houston, noted that there’s already a lot of coastal infrastructure in many parts of the world to support shipping and oil and gas extraction. Ocean-based CO2 extraction can piggyback on the existing power grid, pipelines, and technical know-how in these areas, reducing some of the operating costs. 

On the other hand, this is still a buildout of an entirely new sector based on a new technology at an extraordinary scale, and it needs to reach that in just a couple decades.  

There are still some big technical and scientific obstacles too, starting with the sheer size of the ocean. It’s a big, complicated organism. Its composition shifts with the currents and the seasons, so extraction systems will have to adapt. Seawater is corrosive and full of living things that can readily foul machinery.

To ensure this is all carbon negative, the energy to power the system has to come from a source that itself doesn’t emit greenhouse gases. The captured carbon also has to be put to use or stored in a way that will prevent it from ever getting back into the atmosphere. And there’s so much about the ocean that we still don’t know. While electrochemical seawater carbon extraction is less invasive than some other marine carbon management ideas, we’ve never tried artificially removing carbon at scale and the full ripple effects are unclear. 

Where does marine carbon removal fit into the climate toolkit?

While carbon-negative technologies will be essential for meeting our climate goals, we still have to do everything we can to curb greenhouse gases as much as possible first. This means decarbonizing power generation, driving, heating, and so on. But even then, there are still sectors of the economy with no easy route to zero greenhouse gases where it’s also difficult to capture them at the source, like air travel and shipping.

Captura’s Oldham said that leaves about 10 gigatonnes of emissions from these hard-to-abate sectors. It’s for these last remaining bits of emissions where carbon removal comes in. 

But Equatic’s Sant said that if they get their costs down and performance up enough, CO2 removal could be an option for anyone looking to reduce their impact on the environment instead of just a last resort.   

“If carbon management is cheap enough, indeed you go economywide,” Sant said. “You don’t create this tiered structure of saying we go after some things first and other things later.”

And marine CO2 removal will be one of many approaches we’ll need. Closing the gap on the remaining emissions will require a variety of systems like direct air capture, enhanced rock weathering, alkalinity enhancement, and so on. No one technology is going to have a monopoly, and given the scale of the problem, we need all the help we can get. But marine CO2 extraction does have a lot of advantages. 

So how do you get someone to pay you to do this?

Carbon management is effectively a waste management problem, and we have business models for dealing with things like garbage and sewage. But history shows people only do this grudgingly, often long after a problem has become impossible to ignore. And right now, climate change is still pretty easy to ignore: carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas that’s tricky to trace to its source whose effects are spread out across the planet. 

“I think you could almost imagine if there was like a black cloud of carbon in front of your house, you would be like, ‘I need to get rid of this.’ And that just doesn’t happen,” said Jackson Somers, an economist studying the environment at the University of Connecticut. Absent regulations on carbon, if you want to get into the business of CO2 extraction, you need a customer who wants to compensate for their emissions, and right now, that’s a shallow pool. 

The US, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, is withdrawing from all things climate-related. There is still the 45Q tax credit that offers upward of $180 per metric ton of carbon dioxide captured from the air for facilities that begin construction before 2033. But marine CO2 removal is not eligible for this. Meanwhile, in the corporate world, the winds are blowing against environmental, social, and governance goals in the corporate world. “To be blunt, our timing is lousy,” said Captura’s Oldham.

Additionally, CO2 removal systems are decoupled from their sources — they’re not grabbing carbon where it is emitted, like with carbon capture and storage systems attached to power plants — so it requires a crediting mechanism to account for how much carbon is removed and where to send the bill. Carbon offsets, however, have earned some well-deserved skepticism after failing to deliver meaningful CO2 reductions. 

So in order to function, marine carbon extraction companies will need iron-clad measurement, reporting, and verification of their CO2 removals, said Mai Bui, who studies carbon removal technologies at Supercritical, a firm that has developed a carbon removal market. While the market will set the price, the goalpost for CO2 removals is around $80 to $100 per metric ton. 

There are some regulations that do encourage carbon removal at the moment. In several US states, the UK, and the European Union, there is a cap-and-trade policy system for limiting greenhouse gas emissions that would be able to use credits generated by extracting carbon from the ocean. Bui also noted that while political momentum around addressing climate change is weak, companies like airlines and shipping firms have to plan for decades ahead and are all too aware of how the political winds can change direction. They want to be ready for a world with more restrictions on carbon and are looking for any way they can to stay within their limits. In addition, Frontier, a consortium of companies including Google and JPMorgan Chase & Co, have pooled $1 billion to buy carbon removal credits to create a market signal for developers of removal technologies. 

In the meantime, the CO2 extraction companies are also developing side hustles. Oldham said that Captura is licensing its electrodialysis system, which has a lot of other applications beyond CO2 capture, like desalination and lithium mining. Some companies might also pay to use the captured CO2 as a raw ingredient. Equatic’s Sant said the company is aiming to sell the hydrogen their system generates as an industrial chemical. 

Despite the tough business and governmental environment, if marine CO2 extraction firms can survive the current moment and get their costs so low that investors want to get in on the ground floor before the pendulum swings back, then they could come out much stronger. 

Whether this will work — as a technology at scale or as a viable business — is still unclear, and scientists are still learning what it would mean to reverse the damage to the climate since the dawn of the industrial revolution. 

But we’re already in the middle of a giant uncontrolled planetary experiment on the effects of heat trapping gases. We must undertake a more thoughtful experiment on how we can avert the worst outcomes of a warming world. We know we will need something to withdraw CO2 from the biosphere, so we should probably get started.

2026-03-07 20:45:00

Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today host Savannah Guthrie, has been missing for over a month now. While the investigation remains active, with no new breaks over the past several weeks, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona has returned some of its police officers back to their previous positions. The media circus outside of Nancy’s house left with them.

That isn’t the case for everybody, however. There are social media influencers still milling around the missing Guthrie’s home, waiting for a break in the case. And they’re not just waiting — but trying to actually solve the case. They’re looking for clues while their followers give their own theories that can verge into outrageous. 

Slate’s Luke Winkie told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that he “thinks people think that this case could be solved despite the fact that it’s not, and that has driven a lot of the speculation.” 

Below is an excerpt of Winkie’s conversation with Today, Explained, 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.

Tell us where you went and tell us what it looked like.

I flew into Phoenix, Arizona, jumped in a rental car, took out my phone, and I tapped in Nancy Guthrie’s address. I drove to Tucson, about an hour and a half away, all pretty ordinary. And then I took this one right turn onto a street, and immediately, there were all these cars parked on the side of the road. There were drones overhead — media people just kind of wandering around. There’s people filming front-facing camera videos and talking to their streaming setups. There’s not a police barricade or anything. Anyone can just show up there to cover the case. 

Is there something about this Nancy Guthrie case that is particularly potent for these true crime tribes? Is it just that her daughter’s super famous?

This is a galactically famous person, almost like in the subconscious of America. And we live in kind of a low trust culture right now, and I think people are maybe more eager to believe that maybe the sheriff doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe the FBI has bungled this. So maybe you’re more inclined to think that a couple YouTubers might be getting to the bottom of something or are focusing on something that authorities out there have missed.

Did you get a sense being out there how much people wanted to solve this case versus how much they just wanted it to drag on for the views?

I can’t say that the influencers wanted it to drag on for the engagement, but I do think that the longer it went on, in some ways that was more validating for some of the influencers, in the sense that it let them kind of exist within this narrative, that I’m the one that’s going to be able to solve this. I remember there was this one guy, Jonathan Lee Riches, JLR, he goes by, and the longer I was out there, his content stopped being so much about Nancy Guthrie and started being about [the authorities]: “I understand people have to have health and fitness, but would you go — like if you’re the sheriff — would you go to the gym and work out, just like, the next day when Nancy goes missing? He’s been there for days, like working out in the morning.”

What’s funny about that is here we are a month and a couple of days out from Nancy Guthrie being abducted, and none of them have figured it out! What are the influencers doing out there?

Most influencers are literally just setting up a camera in front of her house and talking to a chat box that is filled with people that are tuning in to basically stare at Nancy Guthrie’s house and wait for updates to trickle in, or to share random theories they saw on Twitter, or to pass along rumors. 

And you might think, why would anyone tune into that? [But] clearly there is a market for this. The top guy out there, JLR, was getting almost 80,000 concurrent views of people just staring at a static [shot] of Nancy Guthrie’s house. I talked to another guy out there who’s from California; he drove out there and his reasoning [was]: No one was taking the night shift.

How different is that, I guess, from CNN being out there and not breaking any new news?

This is the thing I found myself thinking about a lot, because you are right. The engagement [from the audience] is really good; you were covering the biggest story in the world, and if you are in the game of true crime, this is where you want to be. You have kind of the veneer of giving the people what they want. I’m out here covering this story and piping it to the people that trust me on true crime. 

I didn’t get a great sense that ultimately what these influencers were doing and what these cable news entities were doing were especially different. I think at the end of the day, everyone was sort of milling around Nancy Guthrie’s house waiting for the sheriff to show up to make their statements.

You could say they’re not hurting anyone, but they kind of are — because haven’t they gassed up certain theories to the detriment of alleged suspects who weren’t even suspects?

A good example is the sheriff, when I was out there, made a statement kind of reiterating that they had ruled out Nancy Guthrie’s immediate family as suspects in this investigation. And that’s because there’s been all this speculation that someone close to Nancy Guthrie might’ve been the person to abduct her.

And I talked to one guy out there who was a true crime streamer, and he told me, “Well, I go about things a different way. I like to have direct interaction with my viewers. So when the sheriff put out that statement, I put a poll in my chat saying like, Hey, do you believe the sheriff that her family had nothing to do with it? And in that poll everyone said that, No, I think their family still had something to do with it.” 

It wasn’t like he was taking charge of saying, No, guys, listen, we can’t be talking about that, because the authorities ruled them out. They were still willing to kind of engage in that kind of speculation, which you could say is a little bit damaging and not necessarily helpful to solving the case. 

It’s like doing your own research about vaccines, except you could ruin someone’s life, right?

I was talking to this guy who was an influencer, and we were talking about how streamers like him get accused of passing along misinformation. He had starred in an Inside Edition feature about how he and these other influencers were putting out these rumors, and how the police want them gone. I expected him to push back hard against the idea that he was spreading misinformation. And he did that a little bit, but that wasn’t really the thrust of his defense. 

Instead, he told me that, Listen, I’m going to get things wrong. But I’m a true crime content creator, and that’s what makes true crime fun. To come up with a rumor and a theory and talk about that and explore it, and maybe it later [gets] debunked — that is kind of what we do here in true crime. The next day he was going to go investigate a golf course, because some of his viewers thought that Nancy Guthrie’s body might be stowed away in this golf course. I was chilled about how much I related to what he was saying, and how icky it felt, nonetheless.

2026-03-07 20:30:00

For many of us who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — better known as ADHD — seemed like a condition for kids. 

But that perception is changing: Of the more than 15 million adults in America diagnosed with ADHD, about half of them got that diagnosis in adulthood. Laura Knouse, a licensed clinical psychologist and professor at University of Richmond, says that the condition can be a challenge to diagnose, leading to delays. 

“If we think about the core features of ADHD, it’s characterized by age-inappropriate and impairing inattention and it can occur by itself or with hyperactivity impulsivity,” she said. “What we know about these kinds of symptoms is that they can be because of ADHD, but they could be the result of so many other mental health conditions or other kinds of lifestyle factors.”

How did we get to our current understanding of ADHD? And why has there been an uptick in diagnoses? Knouse answers these and other questions in the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.

Historically, when did we first hear about ADHD?

The traits we associate with ADHD probably have existed in humans as long as they have been humans. But in terms of the medical literature, we can rewind the clock all the way back to 1775. A German physician named Melchior Adam Weikard is now the first documented clinical case description.

It was also independently discovered in different places through the 1800s. 

Then in the early 1900s, we start to see more mental disorders in general. ADHD didn’t become part of the diagnostic system that’s used in the United States until 1968, and the name of it has changed a number of times. It was first referred to as the hyperkinetic reaction of childhood. Then moving into the ’70s and ’80s, it evolved to not just focus on the behavior, but also the cognitive processes. That’s where we get a name change to attention deficit disorder. 

It wasn’t really until the ’90s that, even in clinical spaces, the idea that ADHD persists into adulthood became a prominent thing. We know that about 50 percent of ADHD cases persist into adulthood. But for a long time it was like, well, this kid’s just going to outgrow this so we don’t have to worry about it in adulthood. But now we know that is not the case.

Do we know what causes ADHD?

What we find when we’re talking about the core ADHD symptoms, the extent to which this varies between people is about 80 percent heritable — about as heritable as differences in human height. The place where the environment becomes exceedingly important is in the extent to which somebody with these ADHD traits experiences impairment.

One of the well-established ways to treat ADHD is with medications. Certain stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin are pretty widely used. But they don’t work for everyone. What are some of the other ways ADHD is treated? Are they just as effective?

There are non-stimulant classes of medications: atomoxetine, various other non-stimulant medications. From the research overall, they don’t tend to be as effective as the stimulants. 

The other thing is everybody’s brain is a little bit different. It would be so nice if we could just say, “Well, everyone is going to respond to this drug in this way,” but if someone doesn’t like how a stimulant makes them feel, that’s totally fine. They should talk to their doctor about trying some of these alternatives. 

Anyone can benefit from general supportive counseling, but where we really see the larger effects for adult ADHD is cognitive behavioral therapy for adult ADHD, where you’re working with a mental health professional on skills that address the inattentive and impulsive symptoms.

In the biological therapy space, there is some exciting stuff going on with something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. It’s a way of stimulating the brain in certain ways that is showing signs of being able to relieve symptoms, at least for limited periods of time. 

And finally, with this disorder, there have been a ton of unproven or disproven treatments out there. So I encourage buyer beware. I sit on the professional advisory board for an organization called Children and Adults with ADHD, and I would just encourage listeners to go to CHADD’s website in the National Resource Center for ADHD if they have a question about what’s the evidence for this kind of treatment.

Are you seeing an increase in people who have ADHD? 

That’s such a great question, and I think to answer it, you have to draw a distinction between an increase in the number of people getting diagnosed with ADHD versus if there is a true increase in what an epidemiologist would call the prevalence of ADHD in the population. 

I still can’t find solid evidence that the prevalence of the well-defined, neurobiologically related traits of ADHD are increasing. However, the thing I get concerned about as a clinician is there’s clear evidence that for certain populations, ADHD is still vastly underdiagnosed and undertreated. These populations may be the ones that are least visible to us on social media and even in advocacy spaces sometimes. These are the people that probably also have the least access to care. I want to highlight that it can simultaneously be over and underdiagnosed — depending on who you’re talking about.

I think we’ve seen a real rise in people talking about ADHD on social media, and there are even ADHD influencers. How accurate is what we’re seeing online?

I had a lot of fun looking up the very recent research studies on this that are fascinating. A couple of studies have taken the top videos on TikTok, and then had experts rate the quality of the information that is in these videos. There are only a couple studies, but they all land around that basically 50 percent of what’s on #ADHD TikTok videos is not accurate. There’s a lot of what I would call misinformation: not that people are necessarily trying to spread misinformation, but I think a lot of the content tends to communicate personal experiences. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I do think there is a risk of possibly overpathologizing experiences that are just part of normal human experience. 

On the other hand, it’s a tremendous opportunity for awareness for advocacy. I really think we so-called experts are really dropping the ball here. In one of the studies, almost none of these top videos were put out by people like me who study this for a living. We have got to change that.

2026-03-07 19:30:00

Outside the rural town of Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, about 2,000 dogs await their fate in small wire cages. They are confined at Ridglan Farms, a large-scale breeding operation that supplies beagles for research labs across the country. The current law treats the dogs as property of the company. We and others suggest that the conditions of their confinement have been so bad that their own legal rights should prompt their release.  

Ridglan Farms has come under increasing scrutiny for nearly a decade, based on allegations of serious animal mistreatment. In 2024, a special prosecutor was appointed to consider felony cruelty charges. After finding substantial evidence to back these accusations, prosecutors agreed to not pursue the charges on a single condition: Ridglan would close its sale and breeding-for-sale operations by this July (but keep its license to breed dogs for its own research purposes).

This is a major victory for animal advocates and for animal law. But it is a pyrrhic one for the thousands of beagles still confined there; many may be killed or sold to other laboratories before the July shutdown takes effect.

One of us (Justin Marceau) has been involved with the case from its early days, including helping to arrange for the appointment of the special prosecutor. Once the settlement was reached, as animal law scholars, we wondered what legal possibilities there might be for helping to transfer the remaining dogs before their fates were sealed. A law clinic founded by Marceau, the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, run through the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, teamed up with the Nonhuman Rights Project to bring a seemingly radical case to the courts: These dogs should be considered legal persons too. 

This may at least hold true for these dogs, who are being kept in such well-documented cruel confinement. The basis? A habeas corpus petition. One of the oldest common law writs, it harnesses a court’s power to demand of a jailor justification of a person’s imprisonment.

Such cases have so far failed to result in the release of chimpanzees and elephants, where the goal has been to have them transferred to sanctuaries. This new case, filed on behalf of the dogs at Ridglan Farms, brings a new approach, arguing that they have a legal right to a hearing on whether they are being held illegally based on the special prosecutor’s finding that a felony-level animal cruelty charge was justified and could have been brought. It is a novel approach and may open new opportunities for animals and their advocates. 

Can animals be treated like persons under the law?

The origins of habeas corpus as a legal claim for humans predate even the Magna Carta (from 1215). As a law, it was formally codified in the UK in the 17th century and carried over to North America by English colonists as an important way to protect against illegal imprisonment. It became a standard feature of US state-level laws and constitutions by the mid-19th century. In the case of Wisconsin, habeas corpus is as old as the state itself, having been included in its original state constitution in 1848. 

Under a habeas corpus claim, a judge can order someone holding an imprisoned body (the “corpus” part of habeas corpus) to justify the confinement, specifically to show that it is not unlawful. 

The Nonhuman Rights Project — founded by pioneering animal lawyer Steven Wise — has been bringing habeas petitions for chimpanzees and elephants since 2013, arguing that, due to their cognitive complexity, these animals have enough “practical autonomy” to make them a deserving recipient of this old and venerable process, a privilege that to date has been reserved for human beings. The group’s most famous case involved an elephant named Happy living at the Bronx Zoo. Originally from Thailand, Happy had been at the zoo since 1977, where she was living without elephant companionship since 2002. Happy famously passed the mirror self-recognition test, what many scientists see as an important demonstration of human-like self awareness. Ultimately, Happy was not released, and in 2022 the courts — as they have in each case of this sort to date — ruled that only humans can be “persons” for purposes of habeas corpus relief.

Up until now, the legal strategy of pursuing habeas for animals has hinged on animal cognition or some rough comparisons to human abilities. The claim is not exactly that human-like capacities are prerequisites for relief, but they are emphasized as a sufficient basis for relief. So the cases often focus considerable scientific attention on developing the claim that the animal in question is sufficiently autonomous and advanced so as to justify being treated legally as a person — rather than a mere piece of property. Such cases continue to garner public and judicial attention, quite rightly, in no small part because they marshal an impressive scientific record in support of recognizing animals as legal persons.

The new case on behalf of the beagles matters not only because it may represent a last-ditch effort to save the dogs, but also because it materially expands the scope of animal rights litigation by the Nonhuman Rights Project. For the first time the group has pursued a legal strategy that does not hinge on animal cognition or what preeminent moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum has called “so like us” comparisons to human abilities. Instead it rests on the straightforward claim that animals held in violation of statutory duties (more on that shortly) may seek their freedom through habeas corpus. 

Wise himself thought dogs did not reach the benchmark for practical autonomy when he published Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights in 2002. His plan was, after taking on elephant clients, to move to orcas, always showing that these animals have unique cognitive capacities that are rigorously substantiated by expert research. This new case makes no such claims of scientific support and does not turn on the cognitive or human-like sensibilities of dogs.  

This shift opens up a fresh and potentially transformative way of thinking about animal rights in law. Here, the idea is that the right of an animal to not be treated cruelly, at least in exceptional circumstances such as these, can be vindicated through habeas corpus.

What this means for these dogs — and other animals

Wisconsin law technically should prevent cruelty to animals, as it asserts that “No person may treat any animal…in a cruel manner” (Wisconsin Statutes Section 951.02). Allegations of mass confinement of thousands of dogs and puppies in cages in an unsanitary environment, without exercise/enrichment causing extreme stress and trauma, without proper veterinary care, etc., seems like it ought to fit that bill, but it becomes challenging when the “person” in question is a faceless company, and the “animal” numbers in the thousands. Each animal in this case is an individual and at a species level is no different in terms of his or her makeup than the ordinary family dog even if it is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the logistics of trying to help all of them. Why should we feel compelled to do it? What do we owe to dogs anyway? 

Dogs’ attachment to humans makes them quite reliant on us, whether as pets in the home or stray dogs who rely on the food scraps and sheltering opportunities created by human settlements. As Wise himself wrote, “Dogs have become extremely attached, even dependent, upon us, as our children are, sensitive to our desires and feelings, because for millennia we bred them to be that way.” Philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka argue in their book Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights that the dependency of domesticated animals in turn bestows upon us especially strong duties toward them. Such duties arising out of a species-wide dependence or connection might provide a case for recognizing animal rights that is no less strong than one grounded in cutting-edge animal cognitive science.

Beagles are prized in research precisely because they are gentle and compliant; they have a unique willingness to trust and submit. As University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman put it after revelations about inducing hours-long heart attacks in otherwise healthy dogs in a hospital in London, Ontario, dogs and beagles in particular “are very, very trusting and very willing to work with people, be with people and attach with people, and it is that very behavior in the dog that they take advantage of because they can then manipulate the dogs with all these very invasive, nasty procedures.” At Ridglan, that trust was met with allegations of brutal treatment — including a lack of stimulation or play, no access to the outdoors, and invasive procedures, such as “cherry eye” removal surgeries, performed without anesthesia or proper veterinary supervision, that amount to cutting swollen eyelids off with scissors. The dogs who remain there reportedly live amid constant barking, packed into small wire cages that cause chronic foot injuries and visible psychological breakdowns, including endless pacing in tight circles — a classic sign of severe distress. They are at risk of such surgeries (or worse ones) being performed on them again at a new research facility if they are sold and subjected to further experimentation.

The case against Ridglan offers a chance to translate some of our duties toward these dependents into legal ones. The case for freeing these dogs held in what appear to be classically cruel conditions we think is compelling in a number of ways.

First, prior habeas cases for nonhuman animals challenge the confinement of animals at facilities like zoos, where the judges may assert — often incorrectly — that the conditions are adequate and even enjoyable for the animals. As a result, the litigation asks courts to disrupt socially normalized, familiar institutions. The legal arguments must contend not only with doctrine but also with ingrained, inaccurate cultural assumptions about zoos as benign places. By contrast, the legal filing against Ridglan contains images of beagles in the facility that would be impossible to see as anything other than a violation of the most basic of animal rights.

Second, the Ridglan case requires no special sanctuary transfers and there are no debates about whether one or the other environment is only marginally better or worse for the animal. Lawyers for zoos holding elephants are famous for (often incredulously) defending their enclosures and arguing that moving the elephants to a larger sanctuary is a small improvement at best, and may actually be harmful to the elephant given the rigors of transport or their current poor state of health due to the length of their confinement. By contrast, it’s highly doubtful that the beagles crammed into tiny cages with no toys or companionship or access to the outdoors will be better off than if they are released to ordinary homes with people who will give them a chance at a normal doggie life. In this sense, it is easier to understand what upholding the beagles’ rights would mean for the dogs. 

Lastly, it is worth noting that by focusing on the domesticated and dependent nature of the animals — and their right not to be cruelly treated in confinement — the litigation may offer animal rights lawyers an opportunity to move beyond criticism that prior litigation has focused too much on the abilities of animals, and in the process privileged certain traits or even certain species of animals — namely the ones we’ve characterized as super smart. Feminist legal scholar Maneesha Deckha has probably done the most to highlight that this strategy problematically creates a benchmark that some humans might not meet and most animals will never be able to reach. It’s like saying that among all the humans, the only ones who really get to be protected by the law are able-bodied, white, male, and cisgendered. Focusing on dependency will allow the field to embrace what philosopher Jennifer Nedelsky has called “a relational theory of self, autonomy, and law” in which we see ourselves as living fundamentally in relation to others.

To be sure, Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project had a principled reason for initially focusing on just a few species, and doing so based on their proven cognitive capacities. Such a strategy is a way of threading the needle between the human and animal world, and a way of attempting to attract judges. The cognitive approach has gained traction with some judges, notably two dissents in Happy’s case, a concurrence in a case regarding chimpanzees, and an earlier case in which the judge recognized legal personhood is a legal fiction and it was a matter of policy, not biology, who is included in it and gets to count under the law — but didn’t think it was a decision she could issue. No court in the United States has yet granted the release of an animal under the cognitive capacity approach to habeas and most of the judges have reacted poorly to comparisons to human groups. 

At the end of the day, Wise was an iconoclast precisely because he dared to think about new ways to protect animals through law. But he was not dogmatic. By seeking to vindicate the rights of dogs who are confined in documented cruel conditions, it is possible to conjure a theory of animal rights that is not particularly shocking to judges or the public. The Ridglan freedom-from-cruelty suit continues Wise’s bold vision, challenging the legal system by asking a question that is at once both radical and modest: Do animals have a right to be free from cruelty, at least some aspects of which, a prosecutor was prepared to find was felony-level illegality?

Where the case stands now

Only a week after the case was filed late last month, a Wisconsin trial judge dismissed it. But an appeal will be immediately pursued once the court issues a written judgment. 

Important to the appeal will be a response to the question why the settlement agreement between the prosecutor and the company should not be the end of the matter, dealing definitively and conclusively with the claims of all parties. The answer? That settlement agreement is not one the dogs agreed to. They were not a party to it despite the fact that they are the ones most directly affected. Like the victims in a human criminal case, they should not be left where the crimes occurred, facing ongoing cruel conditions and high risk of new abuses, just because the government and the company have worked out something they can both live with. What about what the dogs can live with? Shouldn’t the agreement also require their consent or some reasonable stand-in for it? The groups bringing the action are effectively asking to be the “guardian ad litem” or guardian for the lawsuit, helping the dogs speak up to say that they did not consent to the agreement and being left at the facility.

Representatives for Ridglan Farms noted that, “If successful in this case, the animal activism community will undoubtably [sic] use this same justification to repeatedly seek to halt the use of animals for food, research, hunting, fishing and other activities that involve animals,” according to a statement they provided to a local ABC news station. 

Pointing to a slippery slope and marching out a supposed parade of horribles that would ensue if the law were to protect these particular animals, while a typical reaction, steers the public away from what actually could occur if the habeas petition is honored. Granting habeas corpus in this case would have no impact on what humans can eat because the case is not about animals used for food, who are regulated differently from animals used in research. The case also does not argue that no dogs can ever be held by humans, or even that other types of animals cannot be confined for other purposes. And it wouldn’t enable someone to “liberate” your dog; the government would still control such a prosecution in the case of alleged mistreatment. These particular dogs would be “persons” only for the very limited purpose of a hearing to determine if their living conditions at Ridglan Farms violate their right to be free from criminal cruelty and its ongoing threat. They would effectively be made legal persons for a limited purpose and with limited effects, to challenge the conditions of their confinement, not confinement per se for other animals in other situations. 

The larger claim in the lawsuit, ultimately, is still a relatively small one: Lawyers should be able to use the courts to challenge captivity that is arguably illegal, and have a court determine whether the animals should be freed so as to avoid breaking the law. By requiring a justification, the captor must appear publicly to defend their actions, telling the court — and everyone listening — why what they are doing is okay. This is important when a lot of people do not seem to know what these dogs’ lives are like, the conditions they live in and risks to which they are routinely exposed.

The court that dismissed Happy the elephant’s case made a lot of grand gestures toward the supposedly robust protections that exist for animals in US law today. At that time we wrote about how this was “almost laughable” given the realities of so many animals’ lives and the ways in which the laws (including those which are supposed to protect them) routinely facilitate their use and abuse. This case with the dogs at Ridglan offers a chance to give proper effect to protection laws that do exist and for a judge to use habeas to do the right thing for the animals, these particular animals, who have a shot at a very different fate.

At the end of the day, if there was enough evidence of felony-level animal cruelty found to justify shuttering this breeding-for-sale facility, then so too it seems like it should warrant the release of the dogs. They are the parties at the heart of the matter. They should not be left out of the process and its resolution, as if the matter doesn’t concern them at all when nothing could be further from the truth. It should be all about them.