2026-07-18 06:25:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump fired one of his own appointees who was reportedly trying to stop his team from illegally interfering with the IRS.
What happened? Ken Kies headed tax policy at the Treasury Department and was simultaneously serving as the IRS’s top lawyer on an acting basis.
But, according to the Wall Street Journal, he’s now been forced out. And his ouster comes after he’d clashed with White House officials over certain requests they were making about IRS audits — requests that, Kies believed, were illegal.
Federal law prohibits the president and White House staffers from requesting, “directly or indirectly,” that the IRS “conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer.”
What was the White House trying to do? We don’t know yet. Possibilities include that they were requesting that certain people or groups, perhaps political enemies, be audited — or that they were trying to make ongoing audits of Trump’s allies go away.
Do we know Kies was fired because of this? Not for sure. The Journal reports that administration officials and conservative activists had other complaints about Kies, including that he wasn’t working fast enough to roll back Biden-era regulations, and that he was cracking down on wealthy investors’ attempts to get huge tax breaks by not developing certain lands.
What’s the takeaway? In 1971, President Richard Nixon privately told his aides that, atop the IRS, he wanted “a ruthless son of a bitch” that will “go after our enemies and not go after our friends.”
When these and many other Nixon-era abuses came to light, new laws were passed, and new norms were established to prevent this.
But these norms have been fraying. Indeed, Vice President JD Vance recently argued that Nixon’s scandals weren’t actually so bad and shouldn’t have taken down his presidency at all.
The World Cup final between Spain and Argentina is this Sunday…or is it? That will depend on whether the wildfire smoke-ridden air in northern New Jersey (and much of the East Coast and Midwest) improves enough by then.
Fingers crossed that it will, but while we wait, read Caitlin Dewey on how US cities had some of the unhealthiest air in the world this week.
2026-07-18 04:05:00
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this week that the Pentagon would begin testing the testosterone levels of all military members over the age of 30 as part of their regular, annual physical exams. And — if their levels are low — service members could choose to receive testosterone replacement therapy.
“It’s not about artificial enhancement,” Hegseth said. “It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”
It’s another example of the performative masculinity that has defined Hegseth’s time atop the US military. He has sought to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of “War,” preached a “warrior” ethos, rolled back DEI initiatives while blocking promotions for women, and taken an unusual interest in the beard-grooming standards of service members.
The testosterone obsession is just one of several ways that the military is having a Make America Healthy Again movement. Hegseth announced over the spring that service members would no longer be required to get an annual flu vaccine. (The military later reinstated the mandate for new recruits, after a major flu outbreak at a boot camp.) And also this week, he launched a new investigation into the Defense Department’s decision in 2021 to mandate the Covid-19 vaccine — shades of the efforts being made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The “T” trend is not just a fixation of Kennedy’s, who has said that he takes testosterone supplements, and Hegseth. More Americans of every age group are taking testosterone. By one count, prescriptions grew from 7.3 million in 2019 to more than 11 million in 2024.
So, is getting more people to take supplemental testosterone actually a good idea? Should everybody be screened, as Hegseth is suggesting for service members over 30?
The Endocrine Society said in a statement after Hegseth’s announcement that there was “insufficient evidence” to support testosterone-level screening for asymptomatic Americans. Previous research suggests that, if anything, testosterone is already overprescribed in the US; only 12 percent of men receiving a prescription had received appropriate diagnostic testing.
Testosterone levels indeed fall as men age, and there has been a general decline in testosterone among men today compared to men of the past. But what’s not clear is whether widespread testosterone testing and supplementation is the solution.
For one, distinguishing between a natural decline in testosterone and a decline that warrants clinical intervention is the subject of ongoing debate among doctors. Low T can also be a sign of other chronic health conditions that it would be better to treat. If your T is dropping because of obesity, for example, it would be better to lose weight (or take a GLP-1 drug instead of a testosterone supplement). The evidence is mixed on how much taking T actually improves things like mood, energy, sexual performance — or military effectiveness — and taking too much testosterone could come with its own health risks.
The dialogue around T supplements is still evolving. Doctors used to worry that extra testosterone could cause cardiovascular problems, but more recent research has allayed those fears, leading proponents in the Trump administration to call for more prescribing. But the evidence right now does not appear to support the widespread T testing and supplementation that the military’s new program would suggest.
How to keep your cool on a bad day: As a parent of three children, I’m always on the lookout for better ways to manage my stress — and took heart in the four strategies suggested by Vox’s Allie Volpe in her piece this week. If we can take the time to acknowledge how we’re feeling and really reflect on what has led us to feel that way, we might be able to avoid a full-blown meltdown. That’s news you can really use.
2026-07-18 01:00:00
Update, July 17, 1 pm: On Friday, one candidate — Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez — dropped out of the Wisconsin governor’s race, while another who had exited the race earlier, Milwaukee County executive David Crowley, said he was considering restarting his campaign. The moves raised speculation in Wisconsin media that Democratic leaders are scrambling to rally behind a candidate to defeat Francesca Hong. The article below was originally published earlier in July 17.
Democratic socialists have scored surprising wins in several mayoral and congressional races across the country.
But a swing-state governorship is a different story. In fact, there’s never been a socialist governor in any state in all of American history.
Francesca Hong is trying to make that happen in Wisconsin. A 37-year old former chef and restaurant owner, Hong first ran for office in 2020, when her industry was in crisis due to the pandemic, and won election to the state assembly. After six years there, she’s running for governor.
The primary is on August 11 and, so far, the state’s Democratic establishment has failed to consolidate around one opponent to stop her. (The leading contenders appear to be former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes and current lieutenant governor Sara Rodriguez.)
Republicans in the state appear to be hoping they’ll face Hong in the general election. One GOP-tied Super PAC is spending $2 million to air ads that heavily feature Hong before the primary. And her past comments on policing — “Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option,” she tweeted in 2021 – will give them some ammunition.
Yet, when I reviewed Hong’s platform, I was struck by its relative pragmatism, especially compared to the grander goals often put forward by socialists running from Congress who have fewer budget and political constraints than governors. Many of her top goals, like expanding access to child care and pushing back on data centers, have been adopted by Democratic leaders elsewhere.
Hong doesn’t see it that way, exactly. “Incrementalism is irresponsible,” she told me. “Pushing for the middle or the moderate has not yielded us the wins that we need.”
But as she acknowledged, many of her ambitions will depend on whether non-socialist Democrats manage to win enough state legislative seats to topple a 16-year GOP majority, and, then, what they’d be willing to pass.
I spoke with Hong about how she thinks about being a socialist, about how she hopes to govern differently from traditional Democrats, and about how she’d work to use the powers of the governor to advance some of her more controversial causes like police abolition (which she’s said is still “a very long term vision”). Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.
If you win this governor’s race, you’ll be the first socialist governor in United States history. How should we think about what that means? And how would you govern differently from more traditional Democrats, like your state’s current governor?
I think it means that the people are ready for power to answer to them — ready for a new type of politics. The same plays and players, the policies that we have enacted in the past, have gotten us here. With the struggles with affordability, with the climate crisis, all these different existential crises that are happening — folks are pragmatically demanding a new type of government.
And as a democratic socialist, I plan to govern by ensuring that every policy is focused on bringing more democratic control into our economy and making it work for working class people.
So, let’s drill down into the office of the governor itself. I’ve covered a lot of races with different socialists or left candidates around the country. There are a lot of bold sweeping promises that are made in congressional races.
But, as governor, you’re going to actually have to balance the budget. You’ll have to deal with the legislature. As you were shaping your campaign agenda and your platform, how did you think about these constraints?
Incrementalism is irresponsible. I’m a community organizer. This is a grassroots powered campaign. We have volunteers and supporters who are talking to their neighbors right now about the importance of winning a trifecta and flipping the legislature in both the senate and the assembly — that the work to govern begins now.
And I think that I’ve built relationships with Republicans and many of my Democratic colleagues, who disagree with me on different issues when it comes to more democratic-socialist-centered policies. The executive has a responsibility to work collaboratively with the legislature, make the decisions in determining when to use executive order, but also be willing to govern unafraid and wield the full power of the executive.
So, tell me about some of your top priorities on that front — both what might be able to be done with the executive power of the governor itself and also other things that you would probably need a legislative majority for.
Public education. There is no strong democracy without strong public education.
And so, here in Wisconsin, we’ve been defunding public education under the Republican legislature for the last 16 years. Fully funding public education, to me, means ensuring public dollars stay in public schools, phasing out the voucher program; reimbursing special education at 90 percent; and moving to “two-thirds,” an equitable funding formula [in which two-thirds of public school funding is paid for by the state government].
We have to fund local governments adequately. So many essential programs and services that our local governments provide have been compromised because the state has been hoarding our state dollars and resources and not giving their fair share back to local governments.
And for executive order, I think it’s important to look at what can be done in the calling for special sessions — to bring the legislature in to take up high priority items like a moratorium on AI data centers. We’ve pledged that within the first hundred days, we’d like to see a special session for passing common sense gun safety legislation.
These are bills that Democrats have introduced, that are ready to go. We need that majority to enact them with the swiftness that we need.
A lot of what I see in your platform — public school funding, taxing the rich, child care programs similar to that in states like New Mexico, gun safety — these are definitely strong progressive proposals. But they don’t seem to me inherently different from what Democrats are advocating elsewhere in other states and from what your rivals in this primary are advocating.
What would be the biggest contrast issues where you would be really offering something different, or going further?
When it comes to health care, I have not seen my opponents or heard about their plans to lower health care prices, to look at how our corporate hospitals are taxed here in the state.
How to prevent private equity and take on monopoly by investing in our attorney general’s office — it is the regulation piece of taking on corporate control and corruption that we have not seen very many specifics about from my opponents.
And we are the only campaign to support — and I’ve introduced the legislation — calling for a moratorium on the construction of hyperscale AI data centers.
Talk to me about the data center issue, because it’s becoming so important in so many places around the country. What did you see, what did you hear that led you to take this stance and decide that this is what the state needs?
We’re hearing from communities across the state — whether it’s Wisconsin Rapids or Menominee, Beloit, Janesville — that people don’t want to be controlled by big tech and developers. They feel like we’re selling out our natural resources, that we already have rising utility bills, and we’re risking sending those energy costs even higher.
And the reason the moratorium is the most practical and responsible legislation is the scale and speed in which these data center proposals are popping up across the state and the resources that our local governments lack.
We cannot govern by promise. We cannot go into deals with developers where taxpayers could potentially be on the hook. We cannot afford to be Foxconned again.
We need communities that have a say. We want there to be long-term investment in local economies, and we don’t have the enforceable mechanisms in place to hold polluters and developers accountable so that taxpayers aren’t on the hook.
So, would the goal be to permanently put a halt to this because AI is bad? Or is it more that the goal is to come up with frameworks, a consensus of some kind that can allow maybe certain data center construction that makes sense in certain areas to proceed?
This is very much about local control, with the statewide enforcement mechanisms to protect natural resources, rate payers, and make sure that our local communities have the strongest negotiation tools that they need, should this be something the community decides they want to move forward with.
So, let’s shift gears and talk about another issue that has been really common in these contested primaries around the country, which is Israel and Gaza.
You were part of the “Uncommitted” movement in 2024 to try to pressure Joe Biden to change course on Gaza. You’ve been pretty clear in describing it as a crucial moral cause, a moral test. If you win the governorship, what would be your major priorities as governor on this issue?
Protest is free speech and direct democracy. And right now, we have an anti-BDS [boycott, divestment, and sanctions] law on the books that we’ve had legislation we’ve introduced to repeal, so that the state is not interfering in the right to protest.
We have passed the IHRA definition of antisemitism: the IHRA legislation, here in our state, that was quite controversial. I would be looking at potentially repealing that legislation.
In continuing to make sure communities, all communities, regardless of faith, feel safe, it’s imperative that the executive use their microphone — the governor has one of the largest microphones in the state — to ensure that Wisconsin is not a place that will tolerate hate and discrimination of any kind.
And I think, oftentimes, the genocide in Gaza has led to a lot of very painful conversations. And I want folks to know that feeling safe and the right to practice faiths is something that is of utmost priority to me and a future Hong administration.
Tell me about how you got into politics, because it’s a very unusual trajectory. You were a chef, you co-owned a restaurant, what inspired you to actually make the leap and say, “I’m going to run for office”?
This was COVID in 2020. And seeing a failure in our state legislature, and responding to a pandemic that was hurting — and so many communities. I think, it wasn’t one moment, it was a combination of grief, frustration, and wanting new leadership and representation.
I was asked multiple times to run. They say you have to ask a woman six times before she’ll run for office.
Who was asking you?
Actually, a couple of fellow chefs. Not a lot of folks who were involved in local politics. But I found out that some of my regulars were actually Republican staffers and folks who worked in the Capitol, because my restaurant was right next to the Capitol.
But I think in times of chaos and crisis, there’s opportunity for change and a desire for change.
I think our community was ready for a foul-mouthed, cussing at [longtime GOP speaker of the Wisconsin assembly] Robin Vos restaurant worker who just wanted to make sure people were fed during the pandemic, too.
What would you say you’ve learned from the legislature? You’ve been there six years, and it’s been Republican-controlled the whole time, so you’ve been in the minority.
I’ve learned being a service industry worker serves you very well in politics. Whether it’s from work ethic — I didn’t go to culinary school, and so when I was line cooking and working my way up to becoming a chef, I had to outhustle everyone. I also learned the importance of working on a team in high-stress situations.
I learned that relationships and information are currency, that you have to be persistent in building these relationships. Did I have beers with Republicans at the bar to talk about economic development? I absolutely did. I also talk to Republicans on the assembly floor. And I passed bipartisan legislation. A lot of folks are surprised that a Madison lib was able to move a bill. It was a bill that would require K-12 public schools to teach Asian American history.
Of course, the other thing going on in 2020 to 2021 was the racial reckoning and talk of police reform. You came out pretty strong on that, saying things like: “Defund then abolish. Reform can’t be an option.”
Some on the left have disavowed those views, but you told CNN earlier this year that this is still “a very long term vision.”
As governor, you’d have influence over the state patrol, prison administration, and pardon power. What sort of things would you do differently with those tools when it comes to criminal justice?
To be tough on crime, we must be tough on causes.
To be serious about public safety requires community investment in our public schools and mental health resources and decriminalizing.
We criminalize poverty. The safest communities in Wisconsin are ones where the people have good jobs with benefits; there are great public parks, community centers; people have housing; there’s not food insecurity; there are lots of grocery stores.
So, building in these investments, but also having a more efficient pardon process. Our governor has a relatively efficient pardon process, he also just reinstated commutation.
We have some of the highest incarceration rates in the country when it comes to incarcerating Black and brown folks. And our prison system is currently — to folks who are incarcerated, many of the conditions are unsafe and inhumane.
And the cost to this state in both human lives, but also in terms of it costs more to incarcerate an individual in our state than it does for a year’s tuition at UW Madison.
There are practical, common sense reforms that we can do within the state budget and through standalone legislation when it comes to the carceral system, community investments, in ending juvenile life sentencing. We still try juveniles as adults in our state.
So, moving to ensure we have safer communities. Everyone has a right to feel safe. I plan to address all of that comprehensively. And if anyone has been defunding police, it is Robin Vos and the Republicans who have hollowed out our local governments of their funding and shared revenue for the last 16 years.
What do you say to the people who are concerned that you’ve taken positions that are too far left to win and that the party would be better off with a more traditional choice as the nominee?
If you talk to Trump voters, independents, democratic socialists, new voters, the issues and the solutions are more important than the labels.
We’re in a moment right now where there is a working class reckoning, of people feeling like they’re getting screwed — working multiple jobs and still putting bills on hold or not being able to pay them.
This is not left-right. This is about building working-class people power, and the issues are top down.
I think that pushing for the middle or the moderate has not yielded us the wins that we need.
We’re going to need to pass the most comprehensive legislation that will materially improve the people’s lives, in order for folks to look up and say, “Hey, Dems are in power and some good things happen.” Maybe then they’ll want to vote for them again.
2026-07-17 23:15:00
On a recent episode of Today, Explained, I explored Donald Trump’s ongoing succession wars, and whether the president that’s upended the Republican Party is taking an active role in deciding who might replace him.
The short version: The race to inherit MAGA, already underway, runs through Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump has every incentive to keep everyone guessing about how it ends.
As a guest host of Today, Explained, I talked to my former colleague, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who has covered Trump for years, and recently released a new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which she co-wrote with Times reporter Jonathan Swan.
Here are three things that stuck out:
“Vance is the presumptive frontrunner right now, and it’s hard for me to see who else that could be,” Haberman said. Rubio, Donald Trump Jr., and the Turning Point network have all signaled they’re lining up behind the vice president as Trump’s heir. Rubio has gone as far as telling Vanity Fair that if Vance runs, “he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
But being the frontrunner isn’t the same as having been anointed. Regime Change lays out real fault lines between Trump and his vice president; over the Iran strikes and the Epstein files, Vance repeatedly landed on the opposite side of the president. On the decision to go to war, Haberman reported, Vance “was the only one who really argued forcefully with the president,” and “it cost him with Trump.”
That offense could be remembered when the next Republican primary arrives.
The biggest obstacle to a clean handoff may be that Trump doesn’t want one. “Trump doesn’t want to cede the stage to anybody,” Haberman said. “The second that he anoints somebody or backs somebody or whatever, the clock starts ticking on his own relevance.”
And there’s nothing in his history, she added, to suggest he’ll ride quietly into retirement: “There is nothing in his history that suggests that he’s just going to go off and do paintings like George W. Bush.” Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 2028 should expect Trump to still be standing next to them — and still expecting credit.
Even with the field seemingly settled, Trump keeps reminding Vance that it isn’t. The most vivid scene in Regime Change comes from an October dinner in the White House Blue Room, with Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. executives at the table alongside the Vances and Rubio. Trump turned to Murdoch and asked what he thought of JD. “JD has the potential to be great,” Murdoch offered — a pointed answer from a man who had tried to talk Trump out of picking Vance in the first place. “Thanks a lot, Rupert,” Vance said.
Then Trump asked, “Well, what about Marco?” Murdoch’s reply, according to Haberman: “Marco is brilliant.” After that, Haberman says, the table got “uncomfortable.”
There’s no evidence Rubio is actually running — “quite the opposite,” Haberman said. But Trump has always pitted rivals against each other, and by Haberman’s account, he simply has better personal chemistry with Rubio than with Vance — a striking turn given the “Little Marco” cruelty of 2016.
So will Vance get the endorsement he needs? “I think anybody who is counting on Donald Trump’s anything often ends up pretty disappointed,” she said.
There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
2026-07-17 19:15:00
Scientists have started calling it the “Godzilla El Niño.”
The nickname comes from actual climate researchers, which should tell you something; they are not generally in the habit of comparing climatic systems to mega-monsters. What’s building in the eastern Pacific right now is a surge of ocean warming that is likely to make 2027 the hottest year in recorded history, possibly by a lot. The median projection puts next year at about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average. The high end gets close to 1.9, which, until recently, was a number climate models saved for the late 2030s.
David Wallace-Wells has spent a decade thinking about what numbers like that mean for the people who have to live under them, first in his 2017 essay “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the 2019 book that grew out of it, now as a writer and reporter at the New York Times. In a recent piece for the New York Times, Wallace-Wells made the case that 2027 could work as something stranger than a disaster forecast: a preview of everyday life in about 2035. It could be a full year lived at a temperature we weren’t supposed to reach for another decade: fire seasons, atmospheric rivers, disrupted monsoons, strained food systems, and all.
What’s less certain is if any of this will change our politics. Americans tell pollsters they’re more worried about climate change than ever — more than after Katrina, more than at any point in the Bush, Obama, or Biden years — even as elite discourse on the subject has been waning. Meanwhile, the green transition keeps compounding. More than 90 percent of the new energy capacity built in America last year was green — and under an administration doing its best to stop it.
Sean Illing talked through all of it with Wallace-Wells for this week’s episode of The Gray Area. When Sean asked whether 2027 will be a real test of how much climate disruption we can manage, Wallace-Wells doesn’t blink: “I think it’s going to be a test on that score, which we will fail.”
So yes, it gets dark. But, it also ends with the most convincing case for hope on climate I’ve heard in a while — and I write a newsletter that goes looking for good news every week. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Just about everybody has heard the term El Niño, but most of us — myself included, until very recently — don’t really know what it is. So let’s just start there. What is an El Niño?
It’s a climatic event that happens irregularly but pretty often — usually about every three or four years, sometimes as infrequently as every seven — in which you get a burst of warmer-than-normal temperatures in the coastal Pacific, off the coast of South America. And that has a lot of amazingly global consequences, in ways that are not intuitive to most normies.
So, in this case, you tend to see a lot more rain across the western US. You tend to see a lot less rain across Brazil and the Amazon. You see disruption to the monsoon season in South Asia; a similar disruption to rain across the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa; and, typically, a suppression of hurricane activity in the Caribbean. Which is all to say: It’s a global disruption to the basic normal patterns that we come to depend on, but the disruption isn’t all in one direction.
At the global level, it makes things hotter — and the one that we’re seeing forming this year may be a record-setting one. I think the best way to think about it is just like we shook up the whole planet’s climate system, and we see a lot more disorder than we see in non-El Niño years.
What is particularly scary about this El Niño? Why do scientists seem to be alarmed?
There are a few different components to it. The first is that we are going to experience it at a much higher baseline of global average temperature than has ever been experienced before. Given that we are warming the planet quite rapidly, just about every year is warmer than just about every year that came before. We’ve normalized it so much that we don’t raise our eyebrows when we set new records for global average temperature. But novel events like an El Niño are happening on top of that baseline.
The things that terrified us into action not that long ago are now our inevitable future.
But another reason why scientists are concerned is because it is a super El Niño. Some of them are even calling it a Godzilla El Niño, which is to say the boost that we’re going to see because of this event may be bigger than any similar event ever observed in modern history.
That’s particularly alarming, because the El Niños of the late 1870s produced perhaps the most human suffering that the modern world has ever experienced: famines that killed tens of millions of people all around the world, from Africa to South Asia to China. I don’t want to suggest that this El Niño is capable of producing that kind of suffering. Obviously, 2026 is a different world than 1878, but it gives you a framework for how the consequences of an El Niño may filter through our political world if, over the next year, we see significant crop failures in multiple parts of the world, which is maybe even more possible because there’s a fertilizer shortage as a result of the war in Iran.
We probably will be able to respond to that such that 10 or 50 million people don’t die, but there will be considerable political disarray that results: bread riots, political protests, civil unrest, perhaps in multiple parts of the world. I’m not saying that’s inevitable, but it reminds us that a huge amount of what we take for granted as stable features of modern life is nevertheless subject on some level to disturbance by the climate system. And this climate system this year is winding up to really give us quite a wallop.
You write that next year, 2027,could be a preview of what everyday life will be like in a decade or so. Talk about that.
So, here we are in 2026, and the global average temperature is about 1.5°C above the preindustrial average. It doesn’t sound like very much, and on any given day that kind of effect is basically imperceptible to the average person. But it is a global average, and it hides a lot of extremes.
Our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.
It is also right about what we agreed we would try to limit warming to in the Paris agreement in 2015. We said we would definitely keep warming below 2 degrees, and we would do everything we could to keep warming close to 1.5 — a number that came from emerging science and emerging political sense among the world’s most vulnerable countries that 2 degrees wasn’t enough. That 1.5 degrees was itself going to be quite difficult to manage, but anything north of that was going to be quite catastrophic.
When we signed that agreement just 10 years ago, we were not yet north of 1 degree of warming. We are now, in the long-term average, somewhere about 1.3 or 1.4, [with] a single year at 1.5. And we are heading quite rapidly not just past the more ambitious goal we set for ourselves but toward the less ambitious one: 2 degrees. It now seems, practically speaking, inevitable. We’re heading toward a future that we defined as unacceptable.
And when I say that, I don’t just mean that the scientists at the IPCC defined it as unacceptable. When they published their research into the difference between those two levels that report was the event that gave us the huge global climate awakening of late 2018, 2019, into 2020. It’s the reason we know who Greta Thunberg is. It’s the reason we heard of Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. It’s the reason we started talking about a Green New Deal. All the lip service that presidents, and prime ministers, and CEOs paid to climate change in the years that followed came out of a report that was basically saying, “We need to limit warming below 2 degrees.”
And we now know that we will be heading north of 2 degrees. The things that terrified us into action not that long ago are now our inevitable future.
Is it your belief that 2027 will be a real no-bullshit test of how much climate disruption we can effectively manage at this stage?
I think it’s going to be a test on that score, which we will fail. And the question is what impact that makes socially and politically. We are already seeing every year, in countless ways, how poorly prepared we are for the climate present, but most of the time it isn’t producing the kind of political and social response that I would like to see. And I worry that the basic pattern is going to continue, even into a much warmer future, where, rather than changing course and designing a much more responsive and resilient future, we will just find ourselves defining more and more suffering as acceptable and normal as the cost of going about our daily lives without being too preoccupied by the course of climate change.
A decade ago, a lot of people — myself included, I guess — really did believe that extreme weather would eventually force climate action. Can we just say by now that that theory has failed?
People are complicated, populations are complicated, and politics is complicated. I think of this story going back to Katrina, which was an eye-opening event more than 20 years ago now. It seemed, for a time, to mark a high point in American climate concern. It helped discredit the presidency of George W. Bush, gave us an upsurge of climate urgency and the election of Barack Obama — who said this would be the moment we looked back on as the moment the seas slowed their rise and the planet began to heal.
“We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive.”
We’re going to be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it.
We’ve seen a bunch of climate disasters just in the United States since then. Again and again, there’s a period of intense national focus and, then, a kind of withdrawing from the story of climate change. But that narrative — that we keep getting knocked back on our heels by climate disasters and then forget about them entirely — is also too simplistic. Looking at the headlines, you might think that everybody moved on from climate. The truth is that when you look into the survey data, we’re basically at the highest point for climate anxiety that we’ve ever been. Americans are more concerned about climate change than they were in the aftermath of Katrina. They’re more worried than they were at any point in the George W. Bush presidency, the Barack Obama presidency, and the Joe Biden presidency.
So, we have an interesting political story here. We’re telling ourselves that the country has moved on from climate. But, in fact, at the level of individual people — how they feel about their lives, the lives of their communities, and the future of their country — they are just about, if not more, worried about climate impacts than they’ve ever been before. And our elite discourse and our elite policymaking has somehow decided to treat those anxieties as irrelevant.
But the question is not whether they’re worried. The question is whether they’re worried enough to actually sacrifice anything in order to make headway.
You often hear from people who think we needn’t worry as much about climate change that most Americans are not willing to pay, say, $10 a month to take action on climate. In some ways, I feel like that’s a way of weaponizing American entitlement against one particular set of policy crusades. But the other thing I would say is that it’s not the case that we need to shoulder burdens in any meaningful sense to take action.
Solar power is dramatically cheaper than any fossil fuel alternative that’s ever been produced — at least by the levelized cost of electricity, which has been the industry standard for a generation. That measure is misleading, because it only accounts for the marginal cost of electricity and not the overall cost of a system; you get more solar when the sun’s shining and more wind when the wind’s blowing, so you have to build out around that to have a reliable supply. But because batteries have now made the same dramatic improvement in their cost that solar did a decade ago, you can use very cheap batteries to even out the distribution of solar and wind power. And that means the overall cost, according to recent research, of renewable power is now lower than any alternative system. We know those price declines are going to continue for renewables, and we know that they will not decline for fossil fuels.
I’m not an economic determinist — politics plays a huge role here, as does culture — but look at the United States right now. We have a president in the White House who is remarkably opposed to renewable energy. He has done an awful lot to try to kneecap the development and rollout of renewables in America. And, yet, last year, when he returned to office, more than 90 percent of all the new energy infrastructure built in America was green. For every unit of new fossil fuel infrastructure we were building, we built nine times as much green energy. This year, the share is going to be even bigger. It’s expected to be 93 percent, which is about what it is around the world entirely.
And with the Iran war, we see many countries around the world looking at the logic of their dependence on fossil fuels and thinking, “Why would I depend on international actors to continuously supply a power source at prices that they determine when I can do a one-time importation of green energy infrastructure and then collect the dividends in the form of sun and wind, which never stop and are domestically controlled?” If you’re talking about this as a race, it seems obvious that the green stuff is winning. The problem is that it’s not winning nearly fast enough to avoid some of these quite scary climate outcomes.
David, I feel smarter at the end of this conversation, because I know more, but I do not feel more optimistic about tomorrow. Do you have any good news that we can dip out of here with?
The world is full of good news. I can be the famous optimist David Wallace-Wells. Just on climate stuff: The green transition is proceeding at a breakneck pace, much faster than even its biggest boosters said was possible 10 or 15 years ago. The battery revolution changing the economic calculus for renewables is really profound. It means that we can probably, in large parts of the world, do 100 percent renewable power, which many people said was going to be completely impossible. And even before we get there, we are already dealing with free electricity in the middle of the day in sun-rich parts of the world. In Australia, they’ve literally passed a law promising citizens that, for several hours every day, they will be guaranteed free electricity.
And that’s just power. With the EV rollout that we’re seeing all around the world, you never have to go to a gas station ever again, because you just charge up at your house. Whenever we electrify anything, it gets dramatically more efficient. And we’re cleaning up air pollution, which is a much larger threat to human flourishing on any conceivable timescale than climate change is. Today, somewhere between 5 and 10 million people are dying every year from air pollution, but we’re past the peak of that. We’re drawing it down. There’s a lot of progress that is really wonderful and worth celebrating.
So, I don’t want to give the sense that, for all of my political despair, and for all of what I would call my climate realism, we are all doomed in some meaningful way. We’re living in an incredibly messy world. We have imposed on ourselves and our future much more suffering and difficulty than we needed to, because climate change will be that disruptive. But that challenge is a political one, it’s a social one, it’s a technological one. And while we are not pursuing each of those paths optimally, in my view, we also shouldn’t assume that we will fail each of those tests like we’re getting a zero.
We’re going to be muddling through, and the future that we live in as a result will have a lot of bad stuff in it and a lot of good stuff in it, which is, of course, human nature and human history. One hopes along the way we will wake up a little bit more — not just on climate, but on politics and governance. My hope, when I’m feeling optimistic, is that these stories are playing out on long enough timelines that we have at least the opportunity to take control of our climate system, our economic system, and our political system in ways that have eluded us in the past.
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts.
2026-07-17 19:00:00
We live in an era where you can bet on anything: sports, elections, wars, the temperature in Los Angeles tomorrow, company profits, and everything in between.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that people are spending millions of dollars on online prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket to bet on reality TV. Right now, you could place a bet as to who’s getting eliminated on Big Brother or whether former New York City Mayor Eric Adams will be cast on the upcoming season of Dancing With the Stars. What is shocking is how confident and accurate the calls have been — in the neighborhood of 90 percent and above — on the winners and losers of some of the biggest television shows.
But who is making these bets and how are they doing it so accurately?
The obvious answer is that people are trading on these prediction markets with insider information, which is easy to do when shows like Survivor and its results are taped months in advance. Thanks to the gambling regulation gray area that prediction markets currently occupy and the limits of NDAs, there’s plenty of money to be made with very little consequence for anyone who knows how a season of Survivor played out.
And now that spoiling a TV show has become so profitable so quickly, and because Kalshi and Polymarket are so culturally enmeshed, the show’s biggest fans are paying the price.
As long as there have been reality TV finales and winners, prognosticators have always had some odds-on favorites. Back in 2000, in the first season of Survivor, Vegas oddsmakers thought Sue Hawk — not eventual champion Richard Hatch — was going to win. Similarly, in 2002, Vegas (again incorrectly) placed the odds on Justin Guarini beating out Kelly Clarkson in the American Idol season finale. Since then, linemakers and bookies have sized up shows like The Bachelor (and all of its permutations), Big Brother, The Voice, Amazing Race, Top Chef, and sorted out the favorites and winners.
But despite the betting lines, you couldn’t legally put money on them. To this day, many states only allow gambling on lotteries, sports events, racing, and in commercial casinos. Only a few allow betting on entertainment awards shows like the Oscars.
That’s where Polymarket and Kalshi come in.
Because they’re categorized as federally regulated prediction markets, these apps allow users to wager on “outcomes” that do not officially fall under the umbrella of gaming or gambling, which would be governed by state authorities (Kalshi is currently in a legal battle with New York State over gambling regulation). And so predicting the winners, losers, eliminations and plot developments of reality shows and TV programs for money is — technically — totally legal. At least right now.
In addition to betting on who’s taking home the prize on shows like Survivor and Top Chef, Polymarket users can also bet on which Big Brother houseguest will get eliminated in week one or whether or not Traitors winner and former Love Islander Rob Rausch will be cast on the 35th season of Dancing With the Stars. Over on Kalshi, there are bets on whether or not Ariana Madix, who was just nominated for an Emmy, will host the next season of Love Island.
Because reality competition shows are typically shot a few months before they are released to the public, and because they feature a lot of cast members, crew members, and production team members, it’s possible — and easy — for insider information to trickle out before the biggest reveals are aired.
The networks’ goal is to prevent leaks and spoilers, which would ultimately make the season less exciting to watch and hurt ratings. They do that through NDAs. According to TMZ, Survivor’s contract reportedly has a $5 million penalty for leaks, while shows like The Bachelor, according to former participants, have NDAs that stipulate contestants cannot even reveal they’ve been cast. Ultimately, the goal is to make sure no one knows who won or how far anyone on the show got.
But even the strictest measures come with gray areas.
Even though a contestant might be bound by NDAs and contractual agreements, their neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances aren’t. Those people might notice that their neighbor, co-worker, or acquaintance went on a lengthy “vacation” and might be aware that a show like The Traitors or The Bachelor — which they happen to know their buddy applied for — was filming at the same time. If all these pieces fell into place, they could ostensibly put two and two together, figure out if the person in question was cast and how long they were away, and not be subject to any sort of NDA.
The easiest, no-fail way to make sure the internet and betting markets don’t spoil your favorite reality TV show is to make sure you never fall in love with a reality TV show. But if you do, maybe choose something off the Betting Beaten Path: For example, my current obsession is Peacock’s The Five Star Weekend. Jennifer Garner plays an Ina Garten-like fancy rich white woman, who invites four friends to have a girl’s weekend to mourn her dead husband. There are no Kalshi bets surrounding that show (that I’m aware of).
If you can’t help but love competitive reality TV and loathe spoilers, fans told me that you have to keep that interest as casual as possible. Don’t go on social media, don’t go to message boards, don’t follow Kalshi on social media, don’t even talk about it in person! They also told me that a live ongoing reality show like Big Brother or Love Island, where episodes are turned around quickly (usually daily) are less prone to spoilers.
This type of casual investigation is common in reality TV fandoms; aficionados triangulate social media presences, production dates, rumors, and gossip to pinpoint possible future contestants and learn everything about them.
Opening up Kalshi or Polymarket with this type of information could lead to more informed bets and better winnings.
And there’s increasing suspicion — though no proof — that people with advance knowledge of the outcomes are using it on prediction markets.
As Ben Blatt pointed out in The New York Times earlier this year, “enough bets are being placed to move the markets in very clear directions,” noting that two players — “Q” Burdette and Mike White were voted off with 98 percent odds the day their episodes aired. Kalshi even tabbed eventual champion Aubry Bracco as one of its favorites all season — way before Aubry became a player to watch closely — and had her at over 90 percent odds of winning leading up to the finale.
The accuracy of these bets, along with Survivor being pre-taped, raises the possibility that people with at least some knowledge of how the season played out, were making bets. That doesn’t rule out insider trading or other contractual violations. But it’s also possible that many of these bets came from a legal gray area, with people simply acting on information pieced together from obsessive fan forums and online sleuthing.
In May, Robert Denault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, wrote on X, “so far, no traders with large positions seem to have a relationship to the show or to the network. Thousands of traders took early positions consistent with the outcome, likely because of public rumors. And public rumors don’t equal insider information.”
Obviously, people placing bets are deeply interested in reality TV winners, but so are these shows’ devout fans. To many of them, especially those who have never been interested in putting down money, the online gambling aspect is yet another way the internet has significantly altered, if not ruined, their favorite pastimes.
To really understand the tension, you have to know that any episode of reality TV — whether it’s Big Brother, The Traitors, or The Bachelor, etc. — is just one part of the experience. There’s joy in speculation, discussing episodes, favorite players, clues, power rankings, and strategy on social media and message boards. For these fans, the important stuff may not be who wins and who gets eliminated, but the way the story unfolds. Griffin Nathaniel Brown, a Survivor aficionado who runs a Survivor and Big Brother fan account, believes Kalshi and Polymarket have trashed this integral component of reality TV.
“The huge problem with being in these spaces online is that you cannot escape seeing people post about the Kalshi projections,” Brown told me. “Sometimes, I’ll post something speculative about the show, and somebody will just put in the comments who wins. It’s so annoying, and I feel as though I can’t be surprised by the outcomes anymore.”
When it comes to reality TV, Survivor feels like it was built in a lab to satiate predictive markets. Every episode features someone winning immunity, someone getting kicked off, and a vote. There’s also a champion at the end of the season and (usually) a final three. These are all things you can bet on. And unlike shows like Love Island or Big Brother that air their results live, it’s all been taped months before.
“It’s wild to me that it’s allowed to happen because you’re literally betting on a predetermined outcome. It is a thing that has fully already happened,” said Joe Reid, a senior writer at Vulture, podcaster, and Survivor enthusiast.
Reid explained that while the show takes steps like the aforementioned NDAs and a live finale, secrecy is brittle because people love to talk. That’s why, he says, the show has always had spoilers about elimination order floating on the internet. But prediction markets and the opportunity to make a profit with little to no consequences have fully weaponized them.
“The easiest money to be made is if you are one of the 10 people who know who won a season of Survivor,” Reid said. “Aubry has the incentive to not tell anybody because she could lose her prize money. But it’s [spoilers] probably not coming from Aubry. It’s probably coming from somebody who knows somebody who finished 12th that season or something like that.”
Reid told me that he was spoiled on the most recent season while browsing Kalshi for Oscar odds earlier in the year, before any episode had aired. Once he saw Aubry’s odds flying sky high, it was essentially confirmed for him. But other fans I spoke to said that they’re not even on Kalshi and Polymarket, but because those two platforms have become such big cultural forces, the Kalshi and Polymarket spoilers are impossible to avoid.
“It would spread all over social media who was being voted out that night,” Zachary Flick, a Survivor watcher, told me. Flick explained that betting would shift the day of an episode airing, and everyone would start talking about the repositioning and irregularities online.
“I had Dee, Emily, and Ozzy’s boots spoiled for me that way,” he added.
Polymarket or Kalshi executives are probably not up at night, worried about ruining everyone’s favorite shows when millions of dollars are being traded on reality TV. Neither is the person making thousands (if not more) spoiling each episode. They, like the Survivor winners they’re betting on, have already won.