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<title type="text">Vox</title>
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<updated>2024-07-26T21:51:38Z</updated>
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<author>
<name>Bryan Walsh</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[The good, the bad, and weird of the 2024 Olympics opening ceremony]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/sports/363338/2024-paris-olympics-opening-ceremony-winners-losers" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=363338</id>
<updated>2024-07-26T21:51:38Z</updated>
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<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Olympics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Sports" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Ready or not, the 2024 Paris Olympic Games have begun.  As with any quadrennial, there will be stories of glorious triumph, heartbreaking defeat, feel-good underdogs, and maybe even a villain or two. But headed into Paris this year, one of the main storylines was whether or not the city could properly host the Games — […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="The Eiffel Tower ahead of the Olympic Games on July 22, 2024, in Paris, France. | Michael Reaves/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Michael Reaves/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/gettyimages-2163080636.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>The Eiffel Tower ahead of the Olympic Games on July 22, 2024, in Paris, France. | Michael Reaves/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
Ready or not, the 2024 Paris Olympic Games have begun. 
As with any quadrennial, there will be stories of glorious triumph, heartbreaking defeat, feel-good underdogs, and maybe even a villain or two. But headed into Paris this year, one of the main storylines was whether or not the city could properly host the Games — and whether Parisians even wanted this in the first place. 
This will be the first “normal” Olympics since the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, after the global pandemic completely altered Tokyo 2020 (so much so that those Games were actually held in 2021) and the attendance-limited 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. 
There were big questions about what the 2024 Games would look like. With some of the events taking place in major hubs of the city — <a href="https://olympics.com/en/paris-2024/venues">the beach volleyball stadium</a> overlooks the Eiffel Tower — will Paris be able to handle the crush of visitors coming to see the Games? Are the security restrictions going to make being in the city a hassle? Who’s going to perform at the opening ceremonies? What is everyone going to wear? Is the Seine River clean enough to swim in? Why is Parisian Mayor Anne Hidalgo so eager to swim in it?
Today, we started to get a few answers. 
For these first truly post-pandemic Games, Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Opening Ceremony, pursued a hugely ambitious performance. 
Not only did he intermingle the parade of athletes with the show — typically two separate portions — but he also took both portions out of a stadium into the city itself, along a 6-kilometer route along the Seine. Instead of marching on a stadium floor, the athletes floated down the river on a variety of boats as the camera occasionally cut away to musical and dance performances, pretaped videos highlighting Parisian or French cultural touchstones, or the mysterious masked figure hurtling through the city like a cat burglar and carrying Olympic torch over Parisian roofs and through the city’s spooky, watery underground. <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/culture/article/2024/07/04/paris-olympics-director-defends-david-guetta-snub-after-dj-expresses-shock_6676722_30.html#">Over 3,000 musical artists, dancers, actors, and circus performers participated</a>.
At times, it was inspiring; at others, the attempted grandeur was somewhat lost. <a href="https://apnews.com/article/france-trains-olympics-74c9727d33ac86bfc126f98e45cb874f">That wasn’t all that was going on today, too</a>. 
From the Opening Ceremony of the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, here are four winners and six losers. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Loser: Not having the 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony in a stadium </h2>
Instead of having the festivities in a stadium, as is standard, French officials decided to have their commencement ceremony throughout the city, snaking down the Seine — and in case you hadn’t already heard about that choice, the video intro starring French football legend Zinedine Zidane stated as much. Weaving performances within the city allowed for some impressive visuals that highlight Paris’s history and stunning architecture. You could see why this city is one of the greatest in the world.
But the tradeoff was that it wasn’t always TV-friendly. Because of the way the stage was set up and where cameras were placed, Lady Gaga’s feather-filled cabaret on the Seine was cut off at the ankles, hobbling the full impact of the choreography. And, in a sequence entitled “Liberty,” with decapitated Marie Antoinettes singing alongside flamethrowers, the wide shots failed to convey the spectacle. As country delegations floated down the Seine, it was difficult to pick out individual athletes — both for viewers and announcers potentially interested in sharing information about their talents
When you hold an event in a stadium, you can anticipate sight lines and figure out how to stage and block a show. Stadiums are built for performance and visuals! And Paris’s opening ceremony is the clearest example of how hard it is to design a show without those tools. 
—Alex Abad-Santos, senior correspondent
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Winner: Lady Gaga and the Joker: Folie à Deux press tour </h2>
That said, Lady Gaga still had a fantastic performance. 
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-dnt="true">…Gaga oh la la! Excuse us as we pick our jaws off of the floor 🤯 <a href="https://twitter.com/ladygaga?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@ladygaga</a> just blew us away with a dazzling French cabaret performance at the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Paris2024?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Paris2024</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OpeningCeremony?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#OpeningCeremony</a>! <a href="https://t.co/oXBtU8wit3">pic.twitter.com/oXBtU8wit3</a>— The Olympic Games (@Olympics) <a href="https://twitter.com/Olympics/status/1816896511529087437?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 26, 2024</a></blockquote>
</div></figure>
One of the opening ceremony’s worst-kept surprises was Lady Gaga. Spotting a grand piano positioned near the river in the days beforehand, Little Monsters (the self-created name for Gaga’s dedicated fans) deduced that the superstar would be performing. And that she did, conjuring up a French cabaret number on the banks of the Seine. Gaga performed Renée Jeanmaire’s <a href="https://x.com/ladygaga/status/1816903201020583980">“Mon Truc en Plumes” (“My Thing With Feathers”)</a> in full plumage, showing that she’s still the most theater-inclined pop star in the business. Of course, Gaga will star in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy8aJw1vYHo">Joker: Folie à Deux</a> later this year, a musical-ish sequel to the infamous Batman villain’s origin story. And this performance will, no doubt, build hype for Gaga’s turn in that movie.
—Alex
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">Winner: Celine Dion </h2>
In her first performance since she was diagnosed with stiff-person syndrome in 2022, Celine Dion ascended the Eiffel Tower and performed Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a L’Amour.” To be honest, even though the legendary vocalist sounded fantastic, it wouldn’t have mattered how well Dion performed — simply appearing in public after the <a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/what-is-stiff-person-syndrome-celine-dion-disease.html">physical and emotional toll</a> she’s endured over the last few years would be considered an accomplishment. That Dion delivered a beautiful triumph on one of the world’s biggest stages was simply Celine.
—Alex
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Loser: The hope that the Paris Games won’t be disrupted by a security issue</h2>
As my colleague Josh Keating wrote earlier this week, the Paris Olympics face an unprecedented array of security threats, from renewed worries about ISIS terrorism to the very real danger of Russian sabotage. In part to keep the athletes and the spectators safe, French officials have <a href="https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-security-police-military-terrorism-34b168e7a511e22ce7119a91932d2759">flooded Paris with police</a>, and are even employing a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/surveillance-artificial-intelligence-2024-olympics-paris-games-c5c05842f8970daedc9893f93e8b24c8">controversial artificial intelligence system</a> that can flag potential security concerns. It’s all meant to fulfill France’s <a href="https://apnews.com/article/olympics-paris-corruption-terrorism-crime-2c64905237dbd8fb6ed2aa6dde92a08a">promise</a> that Paris during the Olympics will be “the safest place in the world.”
So far, not so great. Early Friday morning France was hit by what appeared to be coordinated arson attacks <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/world/olympics-paris-attack-opening-ceremony">targeting</a> the country’s high-speed rail lines. The result was numerous canceled trains, disrupting travel plans of up to a million people, including spectators, Parisians fleeing the city, and potentially even some athletes. Fortunately, the attacks, which no one has yet claimed responsibility for, caused no deaths or injuries, and the Opening Ceremonies themselves started on schedule. But it’s still an ill omen when something goes wrong before the Olympic flame is even lit.
—Bryan Walsh, editorial director
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Loser: Russia</h2>
With <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_table">423 total medals</a> in the country’s Summer Olympic history — not to mention the 1,010 won when it was part of the Soviet Union — Russia has a solid claim as one of the most successful nations in Olympic history. But only 15 athletes from Russia will be among the more than 10,000 Olympians in Paris. They won’t be able to compete under the Russian flag, and should any of them win a gold medal, they won’t hear the Russian national anthem at the medal podium.
That’s because Russia has been banned from participating as a national team because of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a ban that came on the heels of another ban earlier because of a widespread doping scandal. (The same goes for Russia’s close ally Belarus.) 
Partially as a result, Russia’s reaction to being excluded from the Paris Games amounts to “well, we wouldn’t want to play in your silly Olympics anyway.” The Games won’t be shown on Russian TV, and the media largely seems to be ignoring the Olympics. 
It’s fair to feel bad for the hundreds of Russian athletes who were more than good enough to make the Games (and potentially win medals), though at the very least Moscow <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics/russia-compensates-athletes-not-invited-paris-games-2024-07-11/">will be compensating them</a>. But hopefully sour grapes will be the extent of Russia’s reactions. There are <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c88509f9-c9bd-46f4-8a5c-9b2bdd3c3dd3">legitimate fears</a> that Moscow could decide to sabotage the Olympics in some way, either through cyberwarfare or even something in the real world.
—Bryan
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Loser: The Seine </h2>
Headed into the Olympics, one of the biggest questions was whether or not the Seine, Paris’s famous and famously coffee-tinted river, would be safe to swim in. The city has spent <a href="https://sph.emory.edu/news/news-release/2024/07/seine-sanitation-paris-olympics.html#:~:text=Keeping%20Our%20Rivers%20Clean,contaminants%20out%20of%20the%20river.">$1.5 billion</a> to clean it and make it safe enough to host Olympic open-water swimming events. Yet, like the litany of tragic man versus nature stories, all that money and manpower could be a wasted testament to hubris.
Earlier this spring, French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Hidalgo <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sports/paris-2024-athletes-village-inaugurated-macron-visits-site-2024-02-29/">promised</a> to swim in the Seine themselves, a gambit to demonstrate how safe it was. Ultimately, only Hidalgo followed through. 
And as mentioned in the NBC broadcast, it’s been raining and storming in Paris and that means <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/olympics/article/paris-olympics-costly-effort-clean-seine-at-risk-19591407.php">sewage</a> could flow into the Seine making it unsafe to swim in. Announcers said it was touch and go, and officials will be monitoring bacteria levels in the river before anyone gets in. 
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<div><div><iframe title="Can Paris fix its poop problem before the Olympics?" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cwyJQ9VKxbE?rel=0" allowfullscreen allow="accelerometer; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share;"></iframe></div></div>
</div></figure>
—Alex
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Winner: South Sudan</h2>
South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation, only gaining independence in 2011. It only sent its first team to the Olympics in the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, which included just three athletes. It has yet to win any medals. But this year South Sudan has sent 14 Olympians to Paris, all but two of whom are on the men’s basketball team. That team, which is known as the Bright Stars, has been writing a Cinderella story of its own. With former NBA star Luol Deng <a href="https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nba/news/south-sudan-basketball-team-roster-2024-olympics/6cad743688c85a17c4b4fdff">as its driving force</a>, South Sudan made the Olympics as international basketball’s top team in Africa. And only a last-minute layup from Team USA’s LeBron James kept the South Sudanese from pulling off an <a href="https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/40592342/team-usa-south-sudan-live-score-updates-olympics-tuneup">all-time basketball upset</a> during a warmup game last week.
If you’re not rooting for these guys in Paris, you’re either actually on one of the 11 other basketball teams competing for gold, or you have no heart. Shine on, you crazy Bright Stars.
—Bryan
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Loser: The Team USA Opening Ceremony outfits </h2>
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/gettyimages-2162879223.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,10.732984293194,100,78.534031413613" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="The Team USA opening ceremony uniform. | Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for USOPC" data-portal-copyright="Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for USOPC" />
Since 2008, <a href="https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/sporting/g61075534/team-usa-olympics-opening-ceremony-outfits-through-the-years/">Ralph Lauren</a> has designed the opening ceremony looks for Team USA and 2024 is no different. This year, Team USA are once again sporting blazers and pairing them with blue jeans. Americana! Perhaps it’s because this year’s outfits make the athletes resemble kids at a fancy country club or that the uniforms look vaguely like this at every Olympics, but the design just didn’t have the wow factor this year — especially when you compare the fits to the stunners coming from <a href="https://www.instagram.com/stellajean_sj_/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=30e97673-33e0-4a75-ad22-322570af3eae">Haiti</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/michelamazonka/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=b66216c3-8ae2-4b2a-93d5-14674c4037db">Mongolia</a>, and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/justinxx_official/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=8472ed61-9f89-47e1-a705-467a16686cbb">Taiwan</a>.
—Alex
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Loser: Whoever selected the US Olympic team flag bearers</h2>
Let me be clear — I’m a big fan of LeBron James, who is the US team male flag bearer at the Opening Ceremonies. And the same goes for tennis star Coco Gauff, currently the world’s <a href="https://www.wtatennis.com/players/328560/coco-gauff">No. 2 women’s player</a> and the US team female flag bearer. And I can understand Team USA’s desire to put two of its biggest stars front and center in the march down the Seine.
But here’s the thing about big-time pro sports stars in the Olympics. Their Olympics are not these Olympics. James likely cares about getting one more NBA championship ring, while Gauff is probably already thinking about her chances at the US Open in New York. The Olympics, for highly paid pro stars, are not the be-all and end-all of their athletic careers. 
So why not put two athletes front and center at the Opening Ceremonies for whom the Paris Games really will be the pinnacle of their sporting life? How about 42-year-old Diana Taurasi, who is making her <a href="https://www.usab.com/players/diana-taurasi">unprecedented sixth Olympic appearance</a> for the (honestly superior to the men’s) women’s basketball team?? And for the men, how Noah Lyles, who is aiming to <a href="https://www.kcra.com/article/10-athletes-to-watch-from-team-usa-2024-paris-olympics/61701661">sweep</a> the individual and relay short-distance sprinting events? I’m sure LeBron and Coco would have gotten over it.
—Bryan
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Winner: Parisians not in Paris</h2>
Hundreds of thousands of athletes around the world competed desperately to be one of the 10,500 who made it to Paris. And from the sound of it, hundreds of thousands of Parisians are competing just as hard to ensure they won’t be in Paris. Attitudes among Parisians toward the Paris Olympics have been profoundly mixed. One survey from last year found that nearly half the city was considering leaving during the Games. To some degree, not being in Paris during late July and August is a precondition of being a Parisian — as any tourist who has come to the City of Light in the summer can attest, actual Parisians can be hard to find. But the Olympics have turbocharged the migration, with the number of Paris apartments listed on Airbnb <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2024/07/23/paris-2024-during-the-olympics-paris-homeowners-dreams-of-hitting-the-airbnb-jackpot_6695350_19.html#:~:text=Tourism-,Paris%202024%3A%20During%20the%20Olympics%2C%20Paris%20homeowners'%20dreams%20of,but%20not%20all%20found%20takers.">increasing by 85 percent</a> over the past year. Sure, they might miss a sporting moment of transcendence, but I’d probably rather be sunning myself on the Côte d’Azur too.
—Bryan
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Joshua Keating</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Arson attacks underscore the security and terror threats to the Paris Olympics]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/olympics/362512/olympics-paris-isis-russia-terrorism-security" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=362512</id>
<updated>2024-07-26T19:15:19Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-26T14:25:33Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Cybersecurity" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Olympics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Privacy & Security" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Russia-Ukraine war" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Sports" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Terrorism" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="World Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Editor’s note, July 26, 2024, 10 am: This story has been updated to include news of arson attacks on the French train system. It’s not as if no one was thinking about security issues when Paris was awarded this summer’s Olympics back in 2017. Just two years earlier, the French capital had been the scene […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="Two policemen with their backs to the camera in front of the Arc de Triomphe." data-caption="Police officers patrol by the Arc de Triomphe ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris, France on July 23, 2024." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/gettyimages-2162493996.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Police officers patrol by the Arc de Triomphe ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris, France on July 23, 2024.</figcaption>
</figure>
Editor’s note, July 26, 2024, 10 am: This story has been updated to include news of arson attacks on the French train system.
It’s not as if no one was thinking about security issues when Paris was awarded this summer’s Olympics back in 2017. Just two years earlier, the French capital had been the scene of one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history, when Islamic State gunmen killed <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Paris-attacks-of-2015">more than 130 people</a>. That attack came only a few months after a massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Then-French <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/world/europe/olympics-2024-paris.html">President François Hollande said</a> that when he was lobbying for the Olympics in 2016, he was asked by International Olympic Committee officials “whether Paris would be able to organize safe Games.” He made the case that not only would Paris be ready, but an Olympics in the City of Light would be the “most beautiful answer we could give to fundamentalism.”
Seven years later, the Olympics are finally coming to Paris in a very different era with a very different landscape of security threats. While the attention of governments and the media has largely <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/352855/war-on-terror-biden-isis-al-qaeda">shifted away from terrorist groups like ISIS</a>, the group and its affiliates have demonstrated they can continue to carry out major attacks, including a <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/3/23/24109865/moscow-crocus-city-hall-theater-terrorist-attack-russia-isis-vladimir-putin-ukraine-war">horrific recent one in Moscow</a> with a death toll similar to what Paris suffered in 2015. The Olympics also take place against the backdrop of the October 7 attacks, Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, and a global surge in antisemitism, <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240125-anti-semitic-acts-nearly-quadrupled-last-year-in-france-says-jewish-organisation">France very much included</a>.
The Olympics, which were originally <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22918000/beijing-olympics-world-peace-russia-ukraine-war">meant to mark a period of truce from war</a>, are taking place in a Europe embroiled in the biggest armed conflict since WWII. The impact of the war in Ukraine will be visible during the competitions themselves: Russian and Belarusian athletes are barred from competing under their countries’ flags, though some will be present as “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/12/09/1218406353/russian-belarus-athletes-ioc-2024-olympic-games">individual neutral athletes</a>.” A recent string of mysterious events, including past arson attacks, has also raised concerns that Russia could attempt to disrupt the games in retaliation for France and other Western countries’ support of Ukraine, and European intelligence allies have <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c88509f9-c9bd-46f4-8a5c-9b2bdd3c3dd3" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.ft.com/content/c88509f9-c9bd-46f4-8a5c-9b2bdd3c3dd3">specifically warned</a> of Moscow-backed acts of sabotage.
Some of those fears appeared realized even before the Olympic flame was set to be lit Friday evening Paris time. What looks to be coordinated arson attacks early Friday morning <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cxe24vg59lzt" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cxe24vg59lzt">heavily disrupted</a> service on three of France’s high-speed rail lines, causing travel chaos in the hours before the Opening Ceremonies in Paris. According to Jean-Pierre Farandou, chief executive of the railway company SNCF, fires were set in pipes used to carry cables for signaling. The company said one additional attack had been thwarted.
While there were no deaths or injuries reported from the fires, they clearly seemed to be set with an eye toward causing maximum disruption for the Olympics. “The locations were chosen specifically to have more serious consequences, since a single fire cuts off traffic on two branches of the network,” Farandou <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/world/olympics-paris-attack-opening-ceremony/ae6f3db0-5df5-528c-8e72-9b902f3f09ea?smid=url-share" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/world/olympics-paris-attack-opening-ceremony/ae6f3db0-5df5-528c-8e72-9b902f3f09ea?smid=url-share">told reporters</a>.
Train service is projected to be disrupted through the weekend, complicating travel plans for over a million people, including Olympic spectators, Parisians fleeing the Games, and potentially even some athletes. While no one has yet taken responsibility for the attacks, French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal called the fires “acts of sabotage that were carried out in a prepared and coordinated way” <a href="https://x.com/GabrielAttal/status/1816757934677762056" data-type="link" data-id="https://x.com/GabrielAttal/status/1816757934677762056">in a post on X</a>, and that the government would investigate.
The Olympics have been the target of political violence in the past – mostly famously the killing of 11 members of the Israeli team at the 1972 games in Munich by a Palestinian militant group and a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/04/13/eric.rudolph/">bombing by a right-wing anti-abortion extremist</a> at the 1996 games in Atlanta. Al-Qaeda was also known to have <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/al-qaeda-targeted-olympics-jews-court-20040520-gdiymj.html">planned to attack the 2000 Sydney Olympics</a> but ultimately didn’t follow through.
Large sporting events, with their massive crowds and built-in global media attention, will always present a tempting, if presumably well-defended target. Though it’s less remembered today than the slaughter at the Bataclan rock venue during the 2015 ISIS attacks in Paris, one terrorist attempted and failed to enter the Stade de France where 80,000 people including the French president were watching a France-Germany soccer match. 
Not surprisingly, security levels at the Games are high with a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/paris-olympics-security-police-military-terrorism-34b168e7a511e22ce7119a91932d2759">heavy police and military presence </a>in Paris, as well as the controversial use of artificial intelligence technology for video surveillance. But notably, the opening ceremonies on Friday evening will be held for the <a href="https://olympics.com/en/news/paris-2024-olympic-games-opening-ceremony-all-you-need-to-know">first time outside a stadium</a>, with athletes parading in boats along the Seine. It promises to be a beautiful sight — but it will also be a security headache, set out across a sprawling metropolis rather than a closed and controlled location.
One US security official who spoke with Vox said that all Olympics pose their particular concerns, from <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2012/07/26/sport/olympic-security-overview/index.html">terrorism in London in 2012</a> to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/weeks-from-olympic-games-rio-worries-about-rising-crime-police-cutbacks/2016/06/08/16343886-2c0b-11e6-b9d5-3c3063f8332c_story.html">crime during</a> Rio de Janeiro in 2016 to <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2021/10/05/national/2020-games-cyberattacks/">cyberattacks at the last summer games in Tokyo</a>.
With Paris in 2024, the official said, “you have everything.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">ISIS: Down but not out</h2>
In May, French police <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/french-officials-foil-olympics-terrorism-plot-/7638153.html">arrested an 18-year-old Chechen national</a> who was accused of plotting to attack a soccer game at the Paris Olympics, alleging that he “wanted to attack spectators, but also security forces and die as a martyr.” A month earlier, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sports/soccer/france-spain-tighten-security-champions-league-games-citing-islamic-state-2024-04-09/">security was tightened</a> at Champions League soccer games around the continent after ISIS threatened to launch drone attacks on the elite European club tournament.
There’s been no known comparable threat to the Olympics, but the attack on the Crocus Concert Hall near Moscow that killed <a href="https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/3/23/24109865/moscow-crocus-city-hall-theater-terrorist-attack-russia-isis-vladimir-putin-ukraine-war">more than 130 people in March</a> was a wake-up call to many officials: While greatly diminished, the threat from groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS has not disappeared. “If you can do Moscow, you can do Paris,” Gilles Kepel, a French expert on terrorism, <a href="https://www.economist.com/international/2024/04/29/beware-global-jihadists-are-back-on-the-march">told the Economist</a>.
Responsibility for the Moscow attack was claimed by Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the group’s Afghan affiliate in Afghanistan and Central Asia. (Khorasan is a historical name for a region that includes Afghanistan and parts of several neighboring countries.) In the years since the dismantling of ISIS’s territorial “caliphate” in parts of Syria and Iraq, ISIS-K has emerged as arguably the most dangerous and high-profile of the group’s global affiliates. It carried out a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-vows-revenge-after-biggest-attack-since-1979-revolution-2024-01-04/">bombing that killed more than 100 people</a> in Iran at the beginning of this year, as well as the attack in Kabul that killed 13 US troops and more than 100 Afghans during the chaotic evacuation of US personnel from Afghanistan. Authorities in Europe have broken up several alleged <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-charges-six-suspected-isis-k-members-over-attack-plots-2024-04-24/#:~:text=Germany%20charges%20seven%20suspected%20ISIS%2DK%20members%20over%20attack%20plots,-By%20Reuters&text=BERLIN%2C%20April%2024%20(Reuters),prosecutor's%20office%20said%20on%20Wednesday.">ISIS-K plots</a> in recent months.
Experts say the ISIS of today operates differently than it did in its heyday. Many of the attackers involved in the 2015 massacre had traveled to Syria for on-the-ground training. That’s no longer feasible. “All these things used to be done from ISIS hubs, but ISIS doesn’t have territory anymore. It’s totally dematerialized,” Wassim Nasr, a Paris-based terrorism analyst with the France 24 television network, told Vox. 
But ISIS operatives in Europe aren’t quite the proverbial “lone wolves” either. They interact online with what Nasr called “cyber-coaches” abroad who advise them on planning and logistics. 
The result, Nasr says, is that ISIS operatives in Europe are likely less trained and less able to carry out attacks than their predecessors. “That’s the difference from 10 years ago,” he says. “The European recruits who could have done this [carried out a successful attack on a high-security event like the Olympics] are now either dead or in jail.”
A US security official told Vox that while authorities aren’t taking ISIS’s decline for granted, particularly in light of the Moscow attack, they see no sign of an active threat. “You have a lot of aspirational chatter online,” the official said. “What we’re not seeing is those aspirational views turned into anything concrete.”
October 7 and the war in Gaza have, of course, raised the level of tension as well. Israel’s presence at the games may drive some protests, as it did at the recent <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-gears-up-eurovision-final-amid-israel-protests-dutch-controversy-2024-05-11/#:~:text=There%20was%20also%20booing%20when,slogan%20%22United%20by%20music%22.">Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden</a>. French authorities <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/france-give-24-hour-protection-israeli-olympics-team-amid-gaza-tensions-2024-07-22/">announced this week</a> that the Israeli Olympic team would be given 24-hour protection after a left-wing lawmaker said the team was not welcome and should be protested.
The US official said street protests, whether about Gaza or anything else, were not a major security concern and that French authorities were well-equipped to handle them: “It’s the national pastime here. It’s what the French do.”
A greater concern is that the events in the Middle East could inspire violent one-off attacks by individuals. Europol recorded over a <a href="https://www.icct.nl/publication/terrorism-threat-2024-paris-olympics-learning-past-understand-present">dozen jihadist terror plots in Europe</a> in the nine months following October 7 compared to just six in all of 2022. These include the ISIS sympathizer who <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231017-killer-of-french-school-teacher-claims-attack-for-islamic-state-group">stabbed a schoolteacher to death</a> in Northern France in October, and the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67604591">killing of a German tourist</a> in a hammer and knife attack near the Eiffel Tower in December.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Moscow rules</h2>
For the first time in years, European security officials may be worried less about non-state groups like ISIS than about a hostile government. The continent has been on increasingly high alert for acts of sabotage <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/europe-on-high-alert-after-suspected-moscow-linked-arson-and-sabotage">orchestrated by the Russian government</a>, linked to the war in Ukraine. Russian agents have been <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68843541">accused of plotting sabotage attacks</a> against military targets in Germany, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/f8207823-f5e1-4caf-934d-67c648f807bf">interfering with railways in the Czech Republic</a>, and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/suspects-alleged-russia-linked-uk-arson-attack-face-trial-next-year-2024-05-10/#:~:text=United%20Kingdom-,Suspects%20in%20alleged%20Russia%2Dlinked%20UK%20arson,to%20face%20trial%20next%20year&text=LONDON%2C%20May%2010%20(Reuters),British%20court%20heard%20on%20Friday.">arson attacks in the UK</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/europe-on-high-alert-after-suspected-moscow-linked-arson-and-sabotage">Lithuania</a>.
Earlier this month, it was reported that US and German authorities had foiled a Russian plot to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/11/politics/us-germany-foiled-russian-assassination-plot/index.html">assassinate the CEO of Rheinmetall</a>, Germany’s largest defense contractor and a significant contributor of ammunition to the Ukrainian war effort. US military bases across Europe were recently placed on high alert because of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/09/politics/intelligence-russian-sabotage-threat-us-bases-europe/index.html">intelligence about potential Russian sabotage attacks</a>.
Last month, a Russian-Ukrainian man <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2024/06/27/man-arrested-with-explosives-near-paris-airport-was-part-of-vast-russian-sabotage-campaign_6675959_7.html#:~:text=The%2026%2Dyear%2Dold%20Russian,sabotage%20campaign%20orchestrated%20by%20Moscow.">was injured while making explosives</a> near Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport. French authorities say he had been planning to attack a hardware store in Paris as part of a Moscow-orchestrated sabotage campaign.
At the recent NATO summit in Washington, Gabrielius Landsbergis, foreign minister of Lithuania, referred to these events saying, “I’m not sure it can be called “hybrid events” or “gray zone events any longer. It’s quite clear that [these are] terrorist attacks by a hostile neighboring country against NATO countries.” 
Petter Nesser, an expert on terrorism in Europe with the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, told Vox that while it can be very difficult to attribute some of these events to Russia directly, it is clear that “Russia wants to sow discord and weaken cooperation among European states to help them have their way in Ukraine. They have shown in the past they can use their spy networks and proxies to sow discord.”
The exclusion of Russia and Belarus — at least officially — from the Games may make them an even more tempting target for sabotage. This need not take place in physical space. The Olympics are always the target of cyberattacks, and British authorities have alleged that Russia <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/19/russia-planned-cyber-attack-on-tokyo-olympics-says-uk">plotted large-scale cyberattacks</a> against the Tokyo Olympics in 2020 before they were postponed due to the coronavirus. French organizers say these Games are facing an “unprecedented level of threat” online, and not just from the Kremlin.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The AI eye in the sky</h2>
Despite the numerous threats, Olympic organizers have promised to turn the French capital into the “<a href="https://apnews.com/article/olympics-paris-corruption-terrorism-crime-2c64905237dbd8fb6ed2aa6dde92a08a">safest place in the world</a>” during the games, an effort that involved the deployment of some <a href="https://apnews.com/article/france-paris-olympics-olympic-games-security-e8f9b8812dc06dae22ffdfad9d15858e">30,000 police per day</a> — and up to 45,000 during the Opening Ceremony — including reinforcements from around 40 countries.
Authorities are also using a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sports/olympics-how-france-plans-use-ai-keep-paris-2024-safe-2024-03-08/">controversial artificial intelligence system to</a> analyze images captured by surveillance cameras around the city in real-time to identify potential threats such as unusual behavior, abandoned objects, or weapons. French legislators had to <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/tech-24/20230324-france-passes-controversial-ai-surveillance-bill-ahead-of-2024-olympics">amend the country’s laws</a> last year to allow for deployment of the new technology. The system was successfully tested at a Depeche Mode concert in Paris in March.
Privacy advocates worry that the use of the system opens up the floodgates to future use of AI technology to undermine privacy and criminalize what authorities deem to be aberrant or unusual behavior in crowds. 
“When the next event comes up in another country, they will, of course, look at France and whether or not there was a political reaction,” Patrick Breyer, a German minister of the European Parliament who organized an open letter protesting the use of the system, told Vox. “There’s a risk this will become standard procedure in connection with large events.”
Before every Olympics, there is a tendency in media coverage to <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/pre-olympics-bummers.html">accentuate the negative</a>: terrorist risk, political controversy, shoddy facilities, crime, environmental damage. Once the Games start and the athletes are on the court or off the blocks, these issues tend to be brushed aside, for better or worse. 
All indications so far are that the Paris Olympics will be a safe and successful Games. US security officials who spoke with Vox emphasized that for all the threats, they have no concerns about the French authorities’ ability to handle them. 
Since 1993, before every Olympics the UN General Assembly has voted to urge member-states to observe the <a href="https://olympics.com/ioc/olympic-truce">Olympic Truce</a>, which calls for a cessation of hostilities during the course of the Games. This Olympics was no different, with the vote passing in November. 
The Olympic Truce has <a href="https://apnews.com/article/what-is-the-olympic-truce-5ea915f2f856d2b1c5edba2e9fc23cbe">always been more aspiration than reality</a>, and between the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, not to mention countless other conflicts around the globe, we can be sure that war won’t come to a pause during the two weeks of the Paris Games. But as International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach <a href="https://olympics.com/ioc/news/un-general-assembly-adopts-olympic-truce-for-paris-2024">said at the UN that day</a>: “The Olympic Games are the only event in our fragile world where people can still come together in peace and harmony.” The hope can only be that the thousands of athletes and the millions of spectators who will gather in Paris can be kept safe from a fragile world beyond the Games.

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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Kelsey Piper</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Warren Buffett’s breakup with the Gates Foundation will hurt the world]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/363170/warren-buffett-bill-gates-foundation-billion-charity" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=363170</id>
<updated>2024-07-26T19:30:06Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-26T13:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Bill Gates" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Influence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Philanthropy" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Public Health" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[It’s been an eventful couple of weeks, so much so that what I think will ultimately prove one of 2024’s most important revelations largely flew under the radar. That is the revelation that 93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated fortune of $137 billion makes him the fifth-richest person in the US, will no longer give away […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="Bill Gates and Warren Buffett speak at an event organized by Columbia Business School on January 27, 2017, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Spencer Platt/Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/GettyImages-632858732.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Bill Gates and Warren Buffett speak at an event organized by Columbia Business School on January 27, 2017, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images</figcaption>
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It’s been an eventful couple of weeks, so much so that what I think will ultimately prove one of 2024’s most important revelations largely flew under the radar.
That is the revelation that 93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated fortune of <a href="https://www.forbes.com/profile/warren-buffett/">$137 billion</a> <a href="https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/list-of-richest-persons-in-united-states-of-america-usa-1696481087-1">makes him the fifth-richest person</a> in the US, will <a href="https://fortune.com/2024/06/28/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-charity-foundation-bill-melinda-gates/">no longer give away</a> his fortune on his death to the Gates Foundation, as had long been planned. Instead, it will go to a trust where his three adult children will decide what to do with it.
“The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death,” Buffett told the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/finance/warren-buffett-gives-us-a-preview-of-his-will-419ad46d">Wall Street Journal.</a> “I feel very, very good about the values of my three children, and I have 100 percent trust in how they will carry things out.”
The philanthropic trust Buffett intends to set up will rapidly <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindseychoo/2024/07/15/meet-the-most-powerful-philanthropists-in-america-warren-buffetts-kids/">become the world’s largest charitable foundation</a>, endowed with the kind of funding that could conceivably save lives by the millions. But in reality, it seems very unlikely to actually help the world.
Why’s that? Buffett has said that to spend the money he’s leaving, there will have to be unanimous agreement among his three children. One issue there is that they all have very different interests.
Susie Buffett has an existing foundation that strives to bring about <a href="https://sherwoodfoundation.org/">social justice in Nebraska</a>, where both she and Warren Buffett live. Howard Buffett, who has served as a county sheriff in Illinois, has <a href="https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/howard-buffetts-warren-buffet-son-border-war-cochise-county-11103225">attracted criticism for his private volunteer border control efforts in Arizona</a>. Peter Buffett, who is based in Kingston, New York, <a href="https://novofoundation.org/">has a foundation</a> that “supports initiatives that promote a holistic, interconnected and healing vision for humanity.”
These are three very distinct visions of how to bring about change in the world, and as people quickly observed, “three eccentrics have to agree on how to spend $135 billion” sounds <a href="https://x.com/RiverTamYDN/status/1810400622979752038">more like the premise for a sitcom</a> than a process that will accomplish real good with that much money. 
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">The case for (posthumously) giving effectively</h3>
Does Warren Buffett owe it to the world to give away his fortune at all, let alone well? I’d argue that yes, he does. 
With $137 billion comes extraordinary responsibility. If Buffett thinks, as he <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-bill-melinda-gates-foundation-ceo-abcs-philanthropy-dangers-2021-7">has been indicating</a>, that the Gates Foundation to which he has <a href="https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/with-4-words-warren-buffett-explained-why-hes-cutting-off-gates-foundation-taught-a-lesson-for-every-leader.html">already given over $40 billion</a> is headed in the wrong direction, he can absolutely do something different. But he should be aspiring to do something better than this.
And doing better than the Gates Foundation isn’t easy. 
Among other achievements, the Gates Foundation launched Gavi, a nonprofit for providing vaccines in poor countries. Gavi has vaccinated more than 1 billion children and estimates its work has saved <a href="https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/programmes-impact/our-impact/Gavi-Facts-and-figures-October-2023.pdf" data-type="link" data-id="https://www.gavi.org/sites/default/files/programmes-impact/our-impact/Gavi-Facts-and-figures-October-2023.pdf">17 million lives.</a>
The Gates Foundation was also a leader in creating the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and funded basic research and engineering aimed at making necessary medical care cheaper and easier to deliver. 
The foundation, to be sure, is far from perfect. As my colleague Dylan Matthews has written, its well-intentioned work in US education policy has seen <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/30/17862050/education-policy-charity">much less stellar returns</a>, and it’s recently frustrated many of its partners with its <a href="https://www.gavi.org/news-resources/knowledge-products/malaria-vaccine-market-shaping-roadmap">approach to malaria vaccine rollouts</a>. But perfection might be too much to expect.
You might expect it’d be easy to do good with billions of dollars, but it’s actually a lot harder than it looks — harder, perhaps, than doing good with less money. 
Many well-intentioned charitable efforts <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/11/18129580/gates-donations-charity-billionaire-philanthropy">fail or even backfire. </a>Many great programs can’t absorb billions of dollars in funding, and scaling up existing programs is usually challenging. Giving out grants either requires lots of due diligence or accepting that you’ll sometimes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/business/mackenzie-scott-giving-scams.html">be scammed</a>.
But some people swing all the way to the other end of the spectrum and act like no charity really does any good. That’s simply false. 
There are millions of people alive today because of the charitable work of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Their lives matter as much as yours or mine. There are inventions and discoveries that Gates Foundation grants, often paid for with Buffett money, have made possible, and medications being distributed right now that will save and improve more lives. 
The difference between $137 billion being spent on vaccinations and fundamental research for the world’s deadliest diseases, versus it being spent on nothing important in particular, can be measured in millions of lives. It may well be the most impactful of the stories in the news the last few weeks; very few US presidents make decisions that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8894019/george-w-bush-pepfar">save or kill millions of children</a>.
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">With great fortune comes great responsibility</h3>
There is something that feels a little uncomfortable about saying “this decision will lead to millions of children dying,” even when it’s probably true. It feels unfair to Buffett to evaluate him more harshly than, say, Elon Musk, who is spending his billions on purchasing Twitter, or Jeff Bezos, who <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/23553730/jeff-bezos-philanthropy-giving-pledge-charity">is still early</a> in his philanthropic career, just because Buffett has such a strong past record as an effective philanthropist. And it’s important to note that Buffett announced his new plans alongside a gift of an additional $5 billion to the Gates Foundation — money that will save a lot of lives. I want to do something more nuanced here than condemn him.
My sense from reading years of Buffett’s own writing is that Buffett is a fundamentally admirable and generous person. He’s a man who <a href="https://jweekly.com/2006/05/19/buffett-has-long-history-of-business-with-the-jews/">refused to join a country club</a> because it wouldn’t let in Jews, and who <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/03/warren-buffett-lives-in-the-same-home-he-bought-in-1958.html">still lives</a> in the Omaha home he bought in 1958. He has consistently advocated for society to help the less fortunate. This sense of obligation has led him to do incredible, valuable, lifesaving things with his money.
I believe that he does not want people to die and wants to make use of his fortune to fix the world. My sense is that his gradual breakup with the Gates Foundation — beginning when he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/business/warren-buffett-gates-foundation.html">departed their board</a> shortly after Bill Gates’s divorce — has been complicated and certainly painful, and that he no longer believes it’s the best way to give away his money. I don’t have all the context there, and it seems entirely possible to me that if I did, I’d think he was right.
But even so, I think it would be a tragedy for his final act to be locking up one of the world’s largest fortunes in a foundation for his aging children to quibble over. If he no longer believes the Gates Foundation is the right place to do good with it, I wish he’d consider <a href="https://www.givedirectly.org/">giving it directly to the world’s poorest people</a>, or charging his new foundation with tackling the world’s <a href="https://blog.jacobtrefethen.com/10-technologies-that-wont-exist-in-5-yrs/">biggest remaining killer diseases</a>, or declaring the money a prize for the company that develops the best tuberculosis vaccine.
And I hope that his children, whose philanthropy so far has mostly focused on the pursuit of eccentric visions in different parts of small-town America, keep in mind that their father made his fortune by buying at a discount — and <a href="https://www.nice.org.uk/glossary?letter=q#:~:text=and%20cognitive%20impairment'.-,Quality%2Dadjusted%20life%20year,of%20life%20in%20perfect%20health.">quality-adjusted life years</a> are purchased at the greatest discount overseas. A version of this story originally appeared in the <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect">Future Perfect</a> newsletter. <a href="https://www.vox.com/pages/future-perfect-newsletter-signup">Sign up here!</a>
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Ian Millhiser</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[A new Supreme Court case threatens to gut the Court’s one good trans rights decision]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/363215/supreme-court-transgender-schools-bathrooms-tennessee-louisiana" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=363215</id>
<updated>2024-07-25T21:49:05Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-26T12:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="LGBTQ" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Supreme Court" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) was one of the few pleasant surprises for liberals to come out of the Supreme Court during the Trump administration.  Authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch and joined by Republican Chief Justice John Roberts, Bostock held that a decades-old federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Elena Kagan at a White House ceremony in 2018." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25048100/1063108716.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Elena Kagan at a White House ceremony in 2018.</figcaption>
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<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf">Bostock v. Clayton County</a> (2020) was one of the few pleasant surprises for liberals to come out of the Supreme Court during the Trump administration. 
Authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch and joined by Republican Chief Justice John Roberts, Bostock held that a decades-old federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s also written using such expansive language that it leaves little doubt that discrimination against LGBTQ people is forbidden in many other contexts, including health care and education.
Nevertheless, two separate appeals court panels — both of them dominated by Republican judges — recently suggested that Bostock has nothing to say about discrimination by educational institutions like public schools and universities. 
One <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A78/319569/20240722154922885_Title%20IX%20Louisiana%20Stay%20Application.pdf">opinion</a>, by the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, simply ignored Bostock altogether, as though it didn’t exist. Another <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A79/319576/20240722155838924_Title%20IX%20Tennessee%20Stay%20Application.pdf">opinion</a>, joined by two Republicans on the Sixth Circuit, spent just two paragraphs trying to explain why the plain language of Bostock does not apply to schools.
Now, both of these cases — known as <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A78/319569/20240722154922885_Title%20IX%20Louisiana%20Stay%20Application.pdf">US Department of Education v. Louisiana</a> and <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A79/319576/20240722155838924_Title%20IX%20Tennessee%20Stay%20Application.pdf">Cardona v. Tennessee</a> — are before the Supreme Court on its “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/8/11/21356913/supreme-court-shadow-docket-jail-asylum-covid-immigrants-sonia-sotomayor-barnes-ahlman">shadow docket</a>, a mix of emergency motions and other matters that are often decided on a very tight timeframe. The stakes are enormous, as these two cases could determine whether the justices intend to enforce the one significant pro-LGBTQ rights decision they’ve handed down since former President Donald Trump started to remake the Supreme Court in the Federalist Society’s image.
Both cases involve a <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/29/2024-07915/nondiscrimination-on-the-basis-of-sex-in-education-programs-or-activities-receiving-federal">fairly comprehensive set of Biden administration regulations</a> interpreting Title IX, a law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. And both cases are exceedingly messy.
Most of the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations have nothing to do with transgender rights. Among other things, they lay out certain rights for pregnant students and school employees. They establish that parents and legal guardians may act on behalf of students whose Title IX rights are violated. And the new regulations define terms, such as “complainant,” “disciplinary sanctions,” or “postsecondary education,” which frequently arise in Title IX disputes.
That said, the regulations do include three provisions that impact trans students, including one that, according to the Justice Department, requires schools to allow these students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The regulations also adopt Bostock’s definition of “sex” discrimination, which includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The red-state plaintiffs in Louisiana and Tennessee do not challenge any of the new rules that do not touch on transgender rights. And yet the lower courts struck down the Title IX regulations in their entirety. That alone is an error warranting intervention by the Supreme Court. As the Court held in <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1161_dc8f.pdf">Gill v. Whitford</a> (2018), when a court finds a legal violation, the “remedy must of course be limited to the inadequacy that produced the injury in fact that the plaintiff has established.”
But even setting aside the overbreadth of the lower court’s orders, the lower courts also committed another egregious error. They struck down a trans-rights provision of the new regulations that isn’t just consistent with the Court’s decision in Bostock, it is compelled by Bostock. The lower courts faulted the Biden administration for doing the only thing it is allowed to do after Bostock was decided.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What do the new regulations’ trans rights provisions actually do?</h2>
The new regulations include three provisions touching on transgender rights in education, all of which are challenged by the plaintiffs in Louisiana and Tennessee.
Title IX provides that no one shall face discrimination “<a href="https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/tix_dis.html">on the basis of sex</a>” in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The first challenged provision of the new regulations defines the phrase “on the basis of sex” to include “discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A78/319569/20240722154922885_Title%20IX%20Louisiana%20Stay%20Application.pdf">gender identity</a>.”
Though the plaintiffs challenge the inclusion of gender identity in this definition, this challenge should be frivolous under Bostock. Bostock held that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf">without discriminating against that individual based on sex</a>.” There’s really no way to read that language other than the way the Biden administration read it.
The other two challenged provisions stand on somewhat less firm legal ground. One provision establishes, in the Justice Department’s words, that “a school discriminates on the basis of sex if it requires a student to <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A78/319569/20240722154922885_Title%20IX%20Louisiana%20Stay%20Application.pdf">use a restroom or locker room that is inconsistent with the student’s gender identity</a>.” As I’ll explain in more detail below, Bostock does not guarantee a student’s right to use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.
The remaining challenged provision <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A78/319569/20240722154922885_Title%20IX%20Louisiana%20Stay%20Application.pdf">prohibits schools from engaging in “unwelcome sex-based conduct”</a> that “is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from” a school’s educational program. This provision is similar to many longstanding laws and legal precedents prohibiting sexual harassment. But the plaintiffs object to it on the theory that it might prohibit students and teachers from misgendering a student or from referring to them using the wrong pronouns.
Notably, however, the Justice Department does not ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on these later two provisions — that is, the Biden administration is willing to leave the lower court order blocking the bathrooms and anti-harassment provisions in place for now while those issues are litigated in the courts below. It is likely, however, that they will ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on these two other provisions at a later date.
For now, the Justice Department only asks the justices to block the two parts of the lower courts’ orders that are unambiguously wrong: the lower court’s decisions to strike down provisions of the new regulations that weren’t even challenged, and the decision to strike down a definition of the term “on the basis of sex” that is identical to Bostock’s definition.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">So what does Bostock have to say about this case?</h2>
To understand why the Justice Department decided only to challenge part of the lower courts’ orders, at least at this early stage in this litigation, it’s helpful to dig into Bostock’s reasoning.
Bostock involved Title VII, a federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination “because of … sex.” Significantly, Bostock assumed that the term “sex” refers “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf">only to biological distinctions between male and female</a>.” So a child born with a penis is considered male, for purposes of Bostock, regardless of their gender identity.
Yet, even with this restriction in place, Bostock still reached its conclusion that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” The Court reasoned that, if a male employee is allowed to date women, to dress in traditionally masculine clothing, and to otherwise present as a man, then a female employee must be allowed to do the same. Otherwise, the employer would be treating men differently than women, and that is discrimination based on sex.
Moreover, while Bostock itself involved an employment dispute, the case uses sweeping language that clearly encompasses other anti-discrimination laws such as Title IX. Again, Title IX forbids discrimination “on the basis of sex” and Bostock held that it is impossible to discriminate against someone for being transgender “without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Bostock does have some limits. For one thing, the Court explicitly refused to “<a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf">address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind</a>.” So the Biden administration cannot rely on Bostock to uphold its rule permitting transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Similarly, Bostock has little to say about whether schools can exclude transgender women from women’s sports teams because the law has <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/2023/6/26/23752360/supreme-court-lgbtq-transgender-bathrooms-sports-gender-affirming-care-bostock">historically permitted sex segregation in sports</a>.
So the Justice Department’s decision to ask the Supreme Court to reinstate most, but not all, of the struck-down regulations is consistent with what the Court said in Bostock. After Bostock, the question of whether schools may exclude transgender students from the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity is still an open question. And the Biden administration probably realized that it was unlikely to persuade this very conservative Supreme Court to extend Bostock — especially in a case asking the justices to intervene while litigation is still ongoing in the lower courts.
But the question of whether the term “on the basis of sex” includes discrimination against transgender people is not difficult. The Supreme Court answered that question in the affirmative in Bostock, and it did so clearly and directly. The lower court decisions refusing to apply Bostock to Title IX fail a very basic reading comprehension test.
Louisiana and Tennessee, in other words, will reveal whether Roberts and Gorsuch were being honest in the Bostock case. 
There is no plausible way to read Bostock other than the way the Biden administration read it. The only question is whether two of the Court’s Republicans will reach that same conclusion.
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</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Nicole Dieker</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Money Talks: The mother-daughter duo who won’t let their franchise fail]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/even-better/362770/cartridge-world-small-business-owners-franchise" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=362770</id>
<updated>2024-07-25T18:03:05Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-26T11:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Even Better" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Life" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Money" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Vox Guide to Entrepreneurship" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another. Jamie Parker is 45 and has owned a Cartridge World franchise in Christiansburg, Virginia, for 10 years. Ieshia Ahmed, her daughter, is 25 and describes herself as her […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="An illustration of two women on either side of an imagined dollar bill. A storefront is in the middle with music notes floating around it." data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/MoneyTalks_PaigeVickers_Vox_01.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
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Welcome to <a href="https://www.vox.com/personal-finance/2019/8/20/20813748/money-debt-personal-finance">Money Talks</a>, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another.
Jamie Parker is 45 and has owned a Cartridge World franchise in Christiansburg, Virginia, for 10 years. Ieshia Ahmed, her daughter, is 25 and describes herself as her “mother’s sidekick.” Together, the two of them have turned a franchise into a family business and are actively working to maintain in-person customer relationships in an increasingly online world. 
<a href="https://cartridgeworldusa.com/">Cartridge World</a>, which provides office printing systems to small businesses and individuals, has approximately 100 franchises and makes over $20 million in sales.
The following conversation has been lightly condensed and edited. 
Jamie: When I was about 25, maybe 27, my ex-husband and I were working at a chain restaurant called Country Cookin’. That’s when we started researching franchises. We thought about Chick-fil-A for a while, but we didn’t like restaurant work. We wanted something that we could do on our own, with minimal employees. 
We opened our first Cartridge World in 2005. No one was doing cartridges or anything like that — no one had even heard of a refill cartridge at that time. I built that store from zero to 100 percent in the first year. Got it off the ground. We started with inkjets and lasers, got the bigger businesses — Roanoke County public schools and that type of thing.
We really chose Cartridge World because of the minimum staff. We liked the idea that we could run it by ourselves. With a restaurant, you need a minimum of 15 employees. We wanted something that we could do on our own, that we could grow and that would be successful.
Ieshia: It became the family business. All of the teachers at my school who had toners or cartridges that needed to be recycled would put them into a recycle box, and I would carry the box onto the school bus and take it home to Mom and Dad. 
I’ve been in the business since I was 5 years old. Did I understand the mechanics behind it? Definitely not — but I remember carrying toners and cartridges that teachers wanted to recycle.
Right now I’m in school for law, and that’s my passion. That said, I took a hiatus during the pandemic. Covid ruined a lot of things, and going to college and trying to learn online — and paying for it! — didn’t make sense to me, so I stopped. My brother is autistic and nonverbal, and my mom needed to be home to help my brother throughout the summer. It was time for me to step in. Mom could help Bubby, and Sissy could work at Cartridge World. 
If something ever happened and my mom needed to be at home full-time with my brother, she could be — because I know the material, and I know what I’m doing. I would never allow our family business to fail.
Jamie: You can tell which one of us is more extroverted and which one of us is more introverted. I’m more behind-the-scenes, I take orders, drop-ship, pay the bills, that type of thing. Ieshia is more up-front, with the customers. She’s really the face of the business. She has a beautiful face!
Ieshia: I’ve done pageants, and I’ve learned so much from them. I had no idea that I was going to win Miss Commonwealth Outstanding Teen — my family was so surprised that they dropped the camera, and you don’t actually see me getting crowned — but it made me who I am today. I was thrown into a chaotic environment, and my option was to thrive. I was doing appearances every single day, and I had to go out there and socialize. I had to wear my crown. I had to wear it up high and never let it tilt, and it’s been that way for my entire life.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote"><blockquote>“I know the material, and I know what I’m doing. I would never allow our family business to fail.”</blockquote></figure>
When our customers come in through the door, they see us. They connect with us. We listen to them. If they’re having a bad day, and they just need a 63XL HP cartridge, they’re going to get it — but they’re also going to tell me what’s going on in their lives. They’re going to get human connection. That’s what you can’t get anywhere else. We’re not just selling cartridges, we’re selling a service. We’re part of the community. 
Jamie: We were in Roanoke when I opened my first store with my ex-husband. Note the ex.
Ieshia: They got divorced!
Jamie: I left Cartridge World for about 10 years [during which she worked for Country Cookin’ and started a catering business] and then I dusted myself off and opened my own Cartridge World in Christiansburg. 
Ieshia: The definition of girlboss. Literally.
Jamie: The Roanoke location closed in November, but I’m thriving. It’s difficult to get people from Roanoke in the Christiansburg store because they think, “Oh, I have to drive 45 minutes,” but I can drop-ship them cartridges online.   
Ieshia: We don’t want to be an online-only business because our customers wouldn’t see us anymore. That’s also why we came up with things like Wiggle Wednesdays. Halfway through the week, we’re playing music at the store and it’s another way to connect. I have footage of customers, people with dogs, couples, everyone dancing to the music we put on, so they can get 10 percent off their order!
We always have business cards on us. I don’t care if I’m in Roanoke and I’m out to dinner — if I hear someone say they’re a business owner, I’m going to give them my business card. You never know where it’s going to go.
Jamie: I have my territory, but I can sell to anyone. I have a lot of customers in North Carolina, and I just picked up a customer in Washington state. 
Cartridge World has told us multiple times that we should just go online, but that’s not how I choose to do things. I’d rather open my store and come here every day. I do it for my customers. My customers are my everything. I provide a service that’s more than ink and toner, if that makes sense at all.   
Ieshia: Until you get here, you don’t understand how small our town is. For us to go online, we’d go out-of-sight, out-of-mind. We would drown. 
Jamie: I’ve thought about starting my own business, and we have the kind of following now so that I probably could, but I truly believe in the Cartridge World name. I really do. I could very well go out and do my own thing, but I feel like Cartridge World is going to be much bigger than it is today, very soon. 
Ieshia: We’re making a profit — if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be doing this, and I wouldn’t be on payroll — but I still need to save money for college. So I got a second job. I’m in management in the hospitality business, but I’m also working here, too. In today’s society, it’s not realistic to have just one job. 
I’ve promised my mom that if she gets to the point that she can’t run it anymore — it’s a family business, and it’s been in my life since I was 5 years old — I’m not going to just let it go away. If something happens, and she can’t do it any more, I will put my law career goals on hold. I have my legal assistant, and I have my paralegal, and even if I’ve gotten my esquire, I will put it on pause and build up the business until I can step away and have other people work here. That’s always been my plan. My brother is going to need a source of income, so keeping the family business going is very important to me.
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</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Celia Ford</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[Scientists are trying to unravel the mystery behind modern AI]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/362759/ai-interpretability-openai-claude-gemini-neuroscience" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=362759</id>
<updated>2024-07-26T19:23:14Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-26T10:30:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Artificial Intelligence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Future Perfect" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Innovation" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Technology" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[On May 23, AI researcher Jide Alaga asked Claude, an AI assistant created by tech startup Anthropic, how to kindly break up with his girlfriend. “Start by acknowledging the beauty and history of your relationship,” Claude replied. “Remind her how much the Golden Gate Bridge means to you both. Then say something like ‘Unfortunately, the […]]]></summary>
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On May 23, AI researcher <a href="https://www.governance.ai/team/jide-alaga">Jide Alaga</a><a href="https://x.com/jide_alaga/status/1794011249828614353"> asked Claude</a>, an AI assistant created by tech startup <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23794855/anthropic-ai-openai-claude-2">Anthropic</a>, how to kindly break up with his girlfriend.
“Start by acknowledging the beauty and history of your relationship,” Claude replied. “Remind her how much the Golden Gate Bridge means to you both. Then say something like ‘Unfortunately, the fog has rolled in and our paths must diverge.’”
Alaga was hardly alone in encountering a very Golden Gate-centric Claude. No matter what users asked the chatbot, its response <a href="https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fhas-anyone-tried-golden-gate-claude-yet-v0-53kouqhtu92d1.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D978e249a58cc9229ecc1c4467b6f5742bbf20c36">somehow circled back</a> to the link between San Francisco and Marin County. Pancake recipes called for eggs, flour, and a walk across the bridge. Curing diarrhea required getting assistance from Golden Gate Bridge patrol officers.
But several weeks later, when I asked Claude whether it remembered being weird about bridges that day, it denied everything.
<img src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/goldengatedenial.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=14.267688454198,0,71.442748091603,100" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="" data-portal-copyright="" />
Golden Gate Claude was a <a href="https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1793741051867615494">limited-time-only AI assistant</a> Anthropic created as part of a <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/mapping-mind-language-model">larger project</a> studying what Claude knows, and how that knowledge is represented inside the model — the first time researchers were able to do so for a model this massive. (Claude 3.0 Sonnet, the AI used in the study, has an <a href="https://lifearchitect.substack.com/p/the-memo-special-edition-claude-3">estimated 70 billion parameters</a>) By figuring out how concepts like “the Golden Gate Bridge” are stored inside the model, developers can modify how the model interprets those concepts to guide its behavior.
Doing this can make the model get silly — cranking up “Golden Gate Bridge”-ness isn’t particularly helpful for users, beyond producing <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Anthropic/comments/1cztu2q/chatting_to_golden_gate_claude_is_a_lot_of_fun/">great content for Reddit</a>. But the team at Anthropic found things like “deception” and “sycophancy,” or insincere flattery, represented too. Understanding how the model represents features that make it biased, misleading, or dangerous will, hopefully, help developers guide AI toward better behavior. Two weeks after Anthropic’s experiment, <a href="https://openai.com/index/extracting-concepts-from-gpt-4/">OpenAI published similar results</a> from its own analysis of GPT-4. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)
The field of computer science, particularly on the software side, has historically involved more “engineering” than “science.” Until about a decade ago, humans created software by writing lines of code. If a human-built program behaves weirdly, one can theoretically go into the code, line by line, and find out what’s wrong.
“But in machine learning, you have these systems that have many billions of connections — the equivalent of many millions of lines of code — created by a training process, instead of being created by people,” said Northeastern University computer science professor <a href="https://baulab.info/">David Bau</a>. 
AI assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 are powered by<a href="https://www.ibm.com/topics/large-language-models"> large language models</a> (LLMs), which developers train to understand and generate speech from <a href="https://gizmodo.com/chatbot-gpt4-open-ai-ai-bing-microsoft-1850229989">an undisclosed, but certainly vast amount of</a><a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23674696/chatgpt-ai-creativity-originality-homogenization"> text scraped from the internet</a>. These models are more like plants or <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/14/24069722/political-ban-cell-cultivated-lab-grown-meat-plant-based-labeling-laws">lab-grown tissue</a> than software. Humans build scaffolding, add data, and kick off the training process. After that, the model grows and evolves on its own. After millions of iterations of training the model to predict words to complete sentences and answer questions, it begins to respond with complex, often very human-sounding answers.
“This bizarre and arcane process somehow works incredibly well,” said <a href="https://www.neelnanda.io/about">Neel Nanda</a>, a research engineer at Google Deepmind.
LLMs and other AI systems weren’t designed so humans could easily understand their inner mechanisms — they were designed to work. But almost no one anticipated <a href="https://www.vox.com/2023/4/28/23702644/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-technology">how quickly they would advance</a>. Suddenly, Bau said, “we’re confronted with this new type of software that works better than we expected, without any programmers who can explain to us how it works.”
In response, some computer scientists established a whole new field of research: AI interpretability, or the study of the algorithms that power AI. And because<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CzZ6Fch4JSpwCpu6C/interpretability"> the field </a>is still in its infancy, “people are throwing all kinds of things at the wall right now,” said <a href="https://cs.brown.edu/people/epavlick/">Ellie Pavlick</a>, a computer science and linguistics professor at Brown University and research scientist at Google Deepmind.
Luckily, AI researchers <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389041723000906">don’t need to totally reinvent the wheel</a> to start experimenting. They can look to their colleagues in biology and neuroscience who have long been trying to understand the mystery of the human brain. 
Back in the 1940s, the earliest machine learning algorithms were <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./epxing/Class/10715/reading/McCulloch.and.Pitts.pdf">inspired by connections between neurons in the brain</a> — today, many AI models are still called “artificial neural networks.” And if we can figure out the brain, we should be able to understand AI. The <a href="https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009">human brain</a> likely has over 100 times as many <a href="https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?s=n&v=3&id=112055">synaptic connections</a> as <a href="https://the-decoder.com/gpt-4-architecture-datasets-costs-and-more-leaked/">GPT-4 has parameters</a>, or adjustable variables (like knobs) that calibrate the model’s behavior. With those kinds of numbers at play, <a href="https://x.com/thebasepoint?lang=en">Josh Batson</a>, one of the Anthropic researchers behind Golden Gate Claude, said, “If you think neuroscience is worth attempting at all, you should be very optimistic about model interpretability.”
Decoding the inner workings of AI models is a dizzying challenge, but it’s one worth tackling. As we increasingly hand the reins over to large, obfuscated AI systems in <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23827785/artifical-intelligence-ai-drug-discovery-medicine-pharmaceutical">medicine</a>,<a href="https://www.vox.com/videos/2023/12/12/23998858/ai-chatgpt-education-cheating"> education</a>, and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-black-box-ai-system-has-been-influencing-criminal-justice-decisions-for-over-two-decades-its-time-to-open-it-up-200594">legal system</a>, the need to figure out how they work — not just how to train them — becomes more urgent. If and when AI messes up, humans should, at minimum, be capable of asking why.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">We don’t need to understand AI — but we should </h2>
We certainly don’t need to understand something to use it. I can drive a car while knowing shamefully little about how cars work. Mechanics know a lot about cars, and I’m willing to pay them for their knowledge if I need it. But a <a href="https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/11/numbers">sizable chunk of the US population</a> takes antidepressants, even though neuroscientists and doctors still <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/well/mind/antidepressants-effects-alternatives.html">actively debate how they work</a>.
LLMs kind of fall into this category — an estimated <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23948386/chatgpt-active-user-count-openai-developer-conference">100 million people use ChatGPT</a> every week, and neither they <a href="https://observer.com/2024/05/sam-altman-openai-gpt-ai-for-good-conference/">nor its developers</a> know precisely how it comes up with responses to people’s questions. The difference between LLMs and antidepressants is that doctors generally prescribe antidepressants for a specific purpose, where multiple studies have proven they help at least some people feel better. However, AI systems are generalizable. The same model can be used to come up with a recipe or tutor a trigonometry student. When it comes to AI systems, Bau said, “we’re encouraging people to use it off-label,” like prescribing an antidepressant to treat ADHD.
To stretch the analogy a step further: While Prozac works for some people, it certainly doesn’t work for everyone. It, like the AI assistants we have now, is a blunt tool that we barely understand. Why settle for something that’s just okay, when learning more about how the product actually works could empower us to build better?
Many researchers worry that, as AI systems get smarter, it will get easier for them <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YgAKhkBdgeTCn6P53/ai-deception-a-survey-of-examples-risks-and-potential">to deceive us</a>. “The more capable a system is, the more capable it is of just telling you what you want to hear,” Nanda said. Smarter AI could produce more human-like content and make fewer silly mistakes, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/10/1092293/ai-systems-are-getting-better-at-tricking-us/">making misleading or deceptive responses tricker to flag</a>. Peeking inside the model and tracing the steps it took to transform a user’s input into an output would be a powerful way to know whether it’s lying. Mastering that could help protect us from misinformation, and from more existential AI risks as these models become more powerful.
The relative ease with which<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/business/ai-chatgpt-safety-research.html"> researchers have broken through the safety controls</a> built into widely used AI systems is concerning. Researchers often describe AI models as “black boxes”: mysterious systems that you can’t see inside. When a black box model is hacked, figuring out what went wrong, and how to fix it, is tricky — imagine rushing to the hospital with a painful infection, only to learn that doctors had no idea how the human body worked beneath the surface. A major goal of interpretability research is to make AI<a href="https://www.interpretable.ai/interpretability/why/"> safer by making it easier to trace errors back to their root cause</a>.
The exact definition of “interpretable” is a bit subjective, though. Most people using AI aren’t computer scientists — they’re doctors trying to decide <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10740686/">whether a tumor is abnormal</a>, parents trying to <a href="https://www.khanmigo.ai/">help their kids finish their homework</a>, or writers using ChatGPT as <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualConversation/comments/17ku7to/chatgpt_is_a_better_thesaurus_than_any_thesaurus/">an interactive thesaurus</a>. For the average person, the bar for “interpretable” is pretty basic: can the model tell me, in basic terms, what factors went into its decision-making? Can it walk me through its thought process?
Meanwhile, people like Anthropic co-founder <a href="https://colah.github.io/about.html">Chris Olah</a> are working to fully reverse-engineer the algorithms the model is running. Nanda, a former member of Olah’s research team, doesn’t think he’ll ever be totally satisfied with the depth of his understanding. “The dream,” he said, is being able to give the model an arbitrary input, look at its output, “and say I know why that happened.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What are large language models made of?</h2>
Today’s most advanced AI assistants are powered by transformer models (the “T” in “GPT”). Transformers turn typed prompts, like “Explain large language models for me,” into numbers. The prompt is processed by several pattern detectors working in parallel, each learning to recognize important elements of the text, like how words relate to each other, or what parts of the sentence are more relevant. All of these results merge into a single output and get passed along to another processing layer…and another, and another.
At first, the output is gibberish. To teach the model to give reasonable answers to text prompts, developers give it lots of example prompts and their correct responses. After each attempt, the model tweaks its processing layers to make its next answer a tiny bit less wrong. After practicing on most of the written internet (<a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/352849/openai-chatgpt-google-meta-artificial-intelligence-vox-media-chatbots">likely including many of the articles on this website</a>), a trained LLM can write code, answer tricky questions, and give advice.
LLMs fall under the broad umbrella of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGCvY4gNnA8">neural networks</a>: loosely brain-inspired structures made up of layers of simple processing blocks. These layers are really just giant matrices of numbers, where each number is called a “neuron” — a vestige of the field’s neuroscience roots. Like cells in our human brains, each neuron functions as a computational unit, firing in response to something specific. Inside the model, all inputs set off a constellation of neurons, which somehow translates into an output down the line.
As complex as LLMs are, “they’re not as complicated as the brain,” Pavlick said. To study individual neurons in the brain, scientists have to <a href="https://www.gsnetwork.com/neuroscience-techniques-to-study-neurons/">stick specialized electrodes</a> inside, on, or near a cell. Doing this <a href="https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6">in a petri dish</a> is challenging enough — recording neurons in a living being, while it’s doing stuff, is even harder. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/24425/chapter-abstract/187426587?redirectedFrom=fulltext">Brain recordings are noisy</a>, like trying to tape one person talking in a crowded bar, and experiments are limited by technological and <a href="https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidance-documents/institutional-review-boards-frequently-asked-questions">ethical constraints</a>.
Neuroscientists have developed many clever analysis hacks to get around some of these problems, but “a lot of the sophistication in computational neuroscience comes from the fact that you can’t make the observations you want,” Batson said. In other words, because neuroscientists are often stuck with crappy data, they’ve had to pour a lot of effort into fancy analyses. In the AI interpretability world, researchers like Batson are working with data that neuroscientists can only dream of: every single neuron, every single connection, no invasive surgery required. “We can open up an AI and look inside it,” Bau said. “The only problem is that we don’t know how to decode what’s going on in there.”
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How do you study a black box? </h2>
How researchers ought to tackle this massive scientific problem is as much a philosophical question as a technical one. One could start big, asking something like, “Is this model representing gender in a way that might<a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/23738987/racism-ai-automated-bias-discrimination-algorithm"> result in bias</a>”? Starting small, like, “What does <a href="https://openai.com/index/language-models-can-explain-neurons-in-language-models/">this specific neuron</a> care about?” is another option. There’s also the possibility of testing a specific hypothesis (like, “The model represents gender, and uses that to bias its decision-making”), or <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@tysaiahfranklin/video/7148626782084697390?lang=en">trying a bunch of things just to see what happens</a>.
Different research groups are<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01314-y"> drawn to different approaches</a>, and new methods are introduced at every conference. Like explorers mapping an unknown landscape, the truest interpretation of LLMs will emerge from a collection of incomplete answers.
Many AI researchers use a neuroscience-inspired technique called <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/veterinary-science-and-veterinary-medicine/neural-decoding">neural decoding</a> or <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/coli/article/48/1/207/107571/Probing-Classifiers-Promises-Shortcomings-and">probing</a> — training a simple algorithm to tell whether a model is representing something or not, given a snapshot of its currently active neurons. Two years ago, a group of researchers <a href="https://thegradient.pub/othello/">trained a GPT model</a> to play <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDnYEOsjZnM">Othello</a>, a two-player board game that involves flipping black and white discs, by feeding it written game transcripts (lists of disc locations like “E3” or G7”). They then probed the model to see whether it figured out what the Othello board looked like — and it had.
Knowing whether or not a model has access to some piece of information, like an Othello board, is certainly helpful, but it’s still vague. For example, I can walk home from the train station, so my brain must represent some information about my neighborhood. To understand how my brain guides my body from place to place, I’d need to get deeper into the weeds.
<a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&oi=ao&user=GLnX3MkAAAAJ">Interpretability researcher</a> Nanda lives in the weeds. “I’m a skeptical bastard,” he said. For researchers like him, zooming in to <a href="https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/NfFST5Mio7BCAQHPA/an-extremely-opinionated-annotated-list-of-my-favourite-1">study the fundamental mechanics</a> of neural network models is “so much more intellectually satisfying” than asking bigger questions with hazier answers. By <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14082">reverse-engineering the algorithms AI models learn</a> during their training, people hope to figure out what every neuron, every tiny part, of a model is doing.
This approach would be perfect if each neuron in a model had a clear, unique role. Scientists <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6822296/">used to think</a> that the brain had neurons like this, firing in response to super-specific things like <a href="https://www.nature.com/news/2005/050620/full/news050620-7.html">pictures of Halle Berry</a>. But in both neuroscience and AI, this has proved not to be the case. Real and digital neurons fire in response to a confusing combination of inputs. A <a href="https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/">2017 study</a> visualized what neurons in an AI image classifier were most responsive to, and mostly found <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Mona_Lisa%22_with_DeepDream_effect_using_VGG16_network_trained_on_ImageNet.jpg#/media/File:%22Mona_Lisa%22_with_DeepDream_effect_using_VGG16_network_trained_on_ImageNet.jpg">psychedelic nightmare fuel</a>.
We can’t study AI one neuron at a time — the activity of a single neuron doesn’t tell you much about how the model works, as a whole. When it comes to brains, biological or digital, the activity of a bunch of neurons is greater than the sum of its parts. “In both neuroscience and interpretability, it has become clear that you need to be looking at the population as a whole to find something you can make sense of,” said<a href="https://gracewlindsay.com/"> Grace Lindsay</a>, a computational neuroscientist at New York University.
In its <a href="https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/index.html">latest study</a>, Anthropic <a href="https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticity/umap.html?targetId=34m_31164353">identified millions of features</a> — concepts like “the Golden Gate Bridge,” “immunology,” and “inner conflict” — by studying patterns of activation across neurons. And, by cranking the Golden Gate Bridge feature up to 10 times its normal value, it made the model get super weird about bridges. These findings demonstrate that we can identify at least some things a model knows about, and tweak those representations to intentionally guide its behavior in a commercially available model that people actually use.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">How interpretable is interpretable enough? </h2>
If LLMs are a black box, so far, we’ve managed to poke a couple of tiny holes in its walls that are barely wide enough to see through. But it’s a start. While some researchers are committed to finding the fullest explanation of AI behavior possible, Batson doesn’t think that we necessarily need to completely unpack a model to interpret its output. “Like, we don’t need to know where every white blood cell is in your body to find a vaccine,” he said.
Ideally, the algorithms that researchers uncover will make sense to us. But biologists accepted years ago that nature did not evolve to be understood by humans — and while humans invented AI, it’s possible it wasn’t made to be understood by humans either. “The answer might just be really complicated,” Batson said. “We all want simple explanations for things, but sometimes that’s just not how it is.” 
Some researchers are considering another possibility — what if artificial and human intelligence co-evolved to solve problems in similar ways? Pavlick believes that, given how human-like LLMs can be, an obvious first step for researchers is to at least ask whether LLMs reason like we do. “We definitely can’t say that they’re not.”
Whether they do it like us, or in their own way, LLMs are thinking. Some people <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/24/artificial-intelligence-consciousness-thinking/">caution against using the word “thinking”</a> to describe what an LLM does to convert input to output, but this caution might stem from “a superstitious reverence for the activity of human cognition,” said Bau. He suspects that, once we understand LLMs more deeply, “we’ll realize that <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351893/consciousness-ai-machines-neuroscience-mind">human cognition is just another computational process</a> in a family of computational processes.”
Even if we could “explain” a model’s output by tracing every single mathematical operation and transformation happening under the hood, it won’t matter much unless we understand why it’s taking those steps — or at least, how we can intervene if something goes awry.
One approach to understanding the potential dangers of AI is “red teaming,” or trying to trick a model into doing something bad, like <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2024/red-teaming-the-risks-of-using-ai-in-biological-attacks.html">plan a bioterrorist attack</a> or <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/26/is_your_ai_hallucinating/">confidently make stuff up</a>. While red teaming <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/red-team-ai-llms">can help find weaknesses</a> and problematic tendencies in a model, AI researchers haven’t really standardized the practice of red teaming yet. Without established rules, or a deeper understanding of how AI really works, <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/challenges-in-red-teaming-ai-systems">it’s hard to say exactly how “safe” a given model is</a>.
To get there, we’ll need a lot more money, or a lot more scientists — or both. AI interpretability is a new, relatively small field, but it’s an important one. It’s also hard to break into. The largest LLMs are proprietary and opaque, and require huge computers to run. Bau, who is leading a team to <a href="https://news.northeastern.edu/2024/05/02/nsf-funds-democratizing-ai-research/">create computational infrastructure</a> for scientists, said that trying to study AI models without the resources of a giant tech company is a bit like being a microbiologist without access to microscopes.
Batson, the Anthropic researcher, said, “I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you solve all at once. It’s the kind of thing you make progress on.” 
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Andrew Prokop</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[How Kamala Harris could win (or lose) the Electoral College]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/politics/363256/kamala-harris-electoral-college-swing-state-polls" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=363256</id>
<updated>2024-07-25T22:32:18Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-26T10:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="2024 Elections" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Kamala Harris" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But can she win the presidency? Due to the wonders of the Electoral College system, the answer depends on how she will do in a limited number of swing states. In 2020, seven states had their presidential winner determined by less than 3 percentage points: […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="Vice President Kamala Harris holds a color-coded map of state abortion laws on October 17, 2022. | Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images " data-portal-copyright="Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images " data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/GettyImages-1244047283.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Vice President Kamala Harris holds a color-coded map of state abortion laws on October 17, 2022. | Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images </figcaption>
</figure>
Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But can she win the presidency?
Due to the wonders of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/21539173/electoral-college-explained-2020-trump-biden">Electoral College system</a>, the answer depends on how she will do in a limited number of swing states.
In 2020, seven states had their presidential winner determined by less than 3 percentage points: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. Joe Biden won the first six out of those seven, so he won the White House.
When President Biden was still in the race, polling was looking grim for him <a href="https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model">in all these states</a>. Commentators speculated that North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and perhaps even Nevada were out of reach for him. 
Biden’s best path to victory, it was believed, was to hold strong in the Rust Belt trio of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Those three swing states, plus the traditionally Democratic states and a single electoral vote from <a href="https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/4/3/24119984/nebraska-electoral-college-vote-trump-biden-kirk">Nebraska’s Second Congressional District</a>, would have given Biden 270 electoral votes — the bare minimum he needed to win.
But Biden’s best path may not be Harris’s. There’s an optimist’s case that that’s good news for her — and a pessimist’s possibility that it’s a real problem.
The pessimistic case is that some suspect Harris may do worse among Rust Belt working-class whites than “Joe from Scranton” did — making states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania a tougher reach for her.
The optimistic case is that perhaps Harris will do better than Biden among nonwhite voters — putting states with particularly large Black populations (Georgia and North Carolina) or Hispanic populations (Arizona and Nevada) back into contention. 
Some initial poll results on how Harris does in swing states have trickled in since Biden dropped out, though given the recent upheaval in the contest, it’s not clear how much to make of them. But here’s how the swing state math stacks up. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The seven swing states</h2>
In 2020, Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, but the contest for an Electoral College majority was much closer. Biden stacked up 19 safe Democratic states, the District of Columbia, and Nebraska’s Second District. 
But he got over the top by triumphing narrowly in six of the seven swing states listed above. Here is his margin of victory in each:
<ul>
<li>Michigan: 2.8%</li>
<li>Nevada: 2.4%</li>
<li>Pennsylvania: 1.2%</li>
<li>Wisconsin: 0.6% (this was the “tipping point state” that put him over the 270 electoral votes he needed to win)</li>
<li>Arizona: 0.3%</li>
<li>Georgia: 0.2%</li>
</ul>
Trump, meanwhile, won just one of the closest swing states: 
<ul>
<li>North Carolina: 1.4% </li>
</ul>
Trump also won by 3.4 percent in Florida, which most analysts now believe should be considered a red-leaning state rather than a swing state.
The Biden-Trump rematch was set to focus on the same lineup of swing states, in about the same order of competitiveness as last time. However, one change is that <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2023/11/nevada-biden-trump-2024-polling/675997/">many polls suggested</a> that Nevada (a state Trump lost in 2016 and 2020) has since moved more to the right.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Does Harris have room to grow in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Arizona?</h2>
Now, Harris’s selection could scramble the map more. “Kamala Harris is doing SIGNIFICANTLY better than Joe Biden is among Black and Hispanic voters,” CNN polling analyst Harry Enten <a href="https://x.com/ForecasterEnten/status/1816463956707344444">wrote on X</a>, adding: “while Biden had really one path to win the electoral college, Harris has multiple. Specifically, she can win in the Sun Belt (AZ, GA, NC, & NV).”
Currently, the evidence that might happen is strongest in Georgia, where <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/us/georgia-white-population.html">33 percent</a> of the population is Black and where there is <a href="https://x.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1816462041927839868">polling </a>showing Harris-Trump is a much closer race than Biden-Trump was. A Landmark Communications poll <a href="https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/politics/elections/state/2024/07/24/new-poll-shows-trump-and-harris-are-nearly-tied-in-georgia/74526278007/">showed Harris down 1 point</a>, and an Emerson College poll <a href="https://emersoncollegepolling.com/july-2024-swing-state-polls-harris-trails-trump-in-arizona-georgia-michigan-pennsylvania-tied-in-wisconsin/">showed her down 2 points</a>. (Biden was trailing by about 4 points on average when he dropped out of the race.)
North Carolina is more of a reach, considering Trump won it twice, but it was close in 2020 and the state is <a href="https://myfox8.com/news/north-carolina/what-is-the-racial-breakdown-of-north-carolinas-100-counties/">21 percent Black</a>. So perhaps Harris could make the state competitive — though it’s worth remembering that she hasn’t led a nationwide ticket yet, so we don’t yet truly know just how well she’ll do among Black voters when she’s the nominee rather than Biden’s running mate.
For Nevada and Arizona, the question is more about Hispanic voters, who make up more than 20 percent of the electorate <a href="https://naleo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/1_23_24_-_NEF_Release_NV_Primary_Profile_-_FINAL.pdf">in</a> <a href="https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2024/03/08/latino-voter-share-arizona">each</a> state. Democrats have won Nevada in the past four presidential cycles, but it’s drifted right a bit in recent years. Arizona, meanwhile, is a traditionally Republican state that Democrats have had surprising success in in the past few cycles.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading">If Harris struggles in the Rust Belt, she’ll need to make up ground elsewhere</h2>
The Rust Belt power trio of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania famously determined the outcomes of both the 2016 and 2020 elections, by first swinging toward Trump and then to Biden.
If Harris wins all three again (as well as that Nebraska Second District vote), she wins the presidency. But what if she doesn’t win all three? 
Another way to think about this is: If she loses one or more of the Rust Belt trio, what would she have to do to make up for that in the other four swing states (Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Arizona)?
You can break down the scenarios in a few different ways, but here are a few:
1) If Harris loses all three of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania: She has a chance of still winning, but there’s no more room for error, and it relies on a big swing of both Black and Hispanic voters to her side. She would have to win all four of Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Arizona — that would give her 275 electoral votes. This is easier said than done — Trump won North Carolina twice and he only lost Georgia and Arizona in 2020 by the slimmest of margins.
2) If Harris wins Michigan, but loses Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: The trio won’t necessarily move together. Biden did slightly better in Michigan than in the other two Rust Belt states in 2020, it has a larger Black population, and perhaps Harris could win back voters alienated by the Gaza war.
If she secures Michigan’s 15 electoral votes, Harris would have two paths. Winning both Georgia and North Carolina would be enough to put her over the top. Alternatively, winning one of those two plus both Nevada and Arizona would do it.
3) If Harris wins Michigan and Pennsylvania, but loses Wisconsin: Adding Pennsylvania would put her close — at 260 electoral votes. She would only need to win one of Georgia, North Carolina, or Arizona to put her over the top. (Nevada’s electoral vote haul is too small to get her there.)
This helps make it clear why Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has emerged as a leading vice presidential contender — his state’s 19 electoral votes are extremely important to the electoral math, more so than, say, Arizona’s 11.
For now, all of this is speculative, since national voters have barely gotten a chance to make up their minds what they think of Harris since she became the presumptive nominee. She will have months to campaign in swing states to try to make her case — and the Trump campaign will also have months to try and make the case against her.
But the electoral math is already enough to show that, while her chances of victory may not utterly hinge on the Rust Belt states, her options are slim if she loses them.
]]>
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Rebecca Jennings</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[J.D. Vance didn’t have sex with a couch. But he’s still extremely weird.]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/363230/jd-vance-couch-sex-hillbilly-elegy-rumor-false" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=363230</id>
<updated>2024-07-25T21:27:28Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-25T21:30:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Internet Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Politics" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[The 2024 election is already historic for a number of reasons, from an assassination attempt to a last-minute dropout, with the country’s first Black woman candidate slated to secure the Democratic nomination. It is also perhaps the first time in American history that a vice presidential nominee has been rumored to have had sex with […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="J.D. Vance." data-caption="J.D. Vance, who probably definitely did not have sex with a couch." data-portal-copyright="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/GettyImages-1253803949.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>J.D. Vance, who probably definitely did not have sex with a couch.</figcaption>
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The 2024 election is already historic for a number of reasons, from an assassination attempt to a last-minute dropout, with the country’s first Black woman candidate slated to secure the Democratic nomination. It is also perhaps the first time in American history that a vice presidential nominee has been rumored to have had sex with a couch. 
Let’s get this out of the way: J.D. Vance did not say he had sex with a couch. The rumor began as a joke on X, when user @rickrudescalves tweeted on July 15: “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an Inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).” That the tweet appeared to be directly sourced from <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/360909/jd-vance-how-true-is-hillbilly-elegy-classism">Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy</a>, convinced many people that it was in fact true, but if they were to read pages 179 to 181, all they’d find is Vance talking about his time at Ohio State University.
So many people embraced the shitpost, however, that it took on a life of its own, with countless memes popping up on TikTok and X. “[W]e cannot let JD Vance near the oval office,” <a href="https://x.com/lolennui/status/1816253691407851623">one person tweeted</a> with a picture of the many sofas inside the room. <a href="https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1815596967516422476">Another juxtaposes</a> Vance staring longingly with zoom-ins of leather couches while Barry White’s “Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up” plays. When the rumor had spread widely enough for the Associated Press to publish a lengthy explainer headlined “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” someone else <a href="https://x.com/djtweets/status/1816296893028180064">quoted it and referenced the infamous Bill Clinton denial, writing</a>, “I did not have sectional relations.”
<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-dnt="true">we cannot let JD Vance near the oval office <a href="https://t.co/aKEAnaoLBB">pic.twitter.com/aKEAnaoLBB</a>— Amy A (@lolennui) <a href="https://twitter.com/lolennui/status/1816253691407851623?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 24, 2024</a></blockquote>
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It’s common for rumors about famous people that are objectively untrue but are funny or entertaining to go viral (a famous example suggests Glee actress <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/mychalthompson/lea-michele-responded-to-cant-read-comments">Lea Michele secretly can’t read</a>), whether started by intentional trolls, as was the case with Vance and the couch, or via games of digital telephone, where all context and factuality get left untranslated. Most of the time, the reason the rumors spread is because people genuinely want to believe them. In Vance’s case, the fact that he’d written a coming-of-age book meant that a common trope (teen boy tries to have sex with inanimate object) made some degree of sense, coupled with the fact that he’s espoused some <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/24/jd-vance-gender-views-00170673">extremely bizarre views</a> on sex and gender.
Curiously, the AP article debunking the rumor has been removed from its website — an unusual decision typically reserved for serious factual or editorial errors. As a spokesperson for the AP told Vox via email, “The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened.” Some still speculated that perhaps the AP’s commitment to fact-checking is such that, despite the fact that Vance didn’t write about it in Hillbilly Elegy, there’s <a href="https://x.com/knowyourmeme/status/1816498547753464034">no definitive proof</a> he didn’t try to have sex with a couch.
What’s more bizarre is that the couch joke was only one of the three most off-putting things Vance has been known for during his first 10 days as a VP nominee, and the only one that wasn’t verified as true. After Trump announced his pick on July 15, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gPGxB2FqEc">a clip</a> from his 2021 appearance on Tucker Carlson went viral in which he complained that the US was “effectively run” by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” naming Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children, and how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it,” he said, discounting Harris’s two step-children whom she co-parents with husband Doug Emhoff. Then, Vance tried and failed to get laughs at a Trump rally by <a href="https://people.com/internet-slams-jd-vance-for-cringe-diet-mountain-dew-joke-8682255">making an awkward joke</a> about drinking diet Mountain Dew and how “[Democrats] are going to call that racist.”
Vance already <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/24/jd-vance-gender-views-00170673">held extreme views</a> on sex and gender; he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest and has <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjk8bd/ohio-republican-jd-vance-abortion-slavery">compared it to slavery</a>. He <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/j-d-vances-sad-strange-politics-of-family">has voted against</a> a bill ensuring access to IVF and suggested a <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-senate-pornography_n_628d3ba1e4b05cfc2692705b">ban on porn</a>. He <a href="https://x.com/JDVance1/status/1387763955557445640">called</a> universal child care “a class war against normal people.” He <a href="https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2022/07/28/vance-would-vote-against-codifying-right-to-marriage-for-same-sex-couples/">opposes legislating codifying the right to gay marriage</a> and suggested that <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/93abve/jd-vance-suggests-people-in-violent-marriages-shouldnt-get-divorced">people in “violent” marriages</a> shouldn’t get divorced.
He is also among the nebulous group of young intellectual conservatives backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel loosely called the “<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets">New Right</a>,” whose main project seems to be making techno-fascist and incel-adjacent ideas seem cool and edgy. On X, where Vance has spent a great deal of time, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jd-vance-twitter-x-following-fyp-trump-b2583022.html">he at one point followed</a> several white nationalist accounts, many of whom glorify bodybuilding and fascism while promoting the <a href="https://www.vox.com/23076952/replacement-theory-white-supremacist-violence">Great Replacement theory</a>. He is, in other words, exactly the type of guy you could imagine claiming that couch sex robots were the beginning of a glorious future without women.
Pointing out Vance and Trump’s obvious weirdness now seems to be among Democrats’ main strategies in combating the Republican ticket. And it’s working: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz <a href="https://x.com/BrianOliu/status/1815955081977549272">was praised</a> for <a href="https://x.com/JoshRaby/status/1815889888207892619">his appearances</a> on MSNBC in which he stressed how “weird” the Trump-Vance platform is, while the Harris campaign went viral for <a href="https://newrepublic.com/post/184249/78-year-old-criminal-kamala-harris-roasts-trump-press-release">its statement</a> on Trump’s Fox News appearance, which read, “is Donald Trump ok?” and listed major takeaways like “Trump is old and quite weird?” That kind of blunt, call-it-like-you-see-it candor was once a boon to the Trump camp, which delighted in offending “blue-haired” “soy milk” liberals whom they saw as myopic and out of touch. But when we’ve got someone like Vance spouting deeply antisocial and bizarre ideas that are way outside the realm of normal political discourse, the most effective response is often a simple, “What the hell?”
I don’t really need to explain why everyone believing a joke about a vice presidential candidate having sex with a couch is funny, it just is. Much like the memes implying <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/362300/kamala-harris-meme-brat-summer">Kamala Harris is a pop icon queening out to “Brat” summer</a>, “JD Vance fucked a couch” is just another absurdity of the wildest election summer in recent history, one where the truth is so much crazier than fiction that the fiction starts becoming believable. No, J.D. Vance didn’t fuck a couch. But he’ll always be remembered as the vice presidential nominee that was once rumored to have fucked a couch. And that’s pretty weird.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Alex Abad-Santos</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[There’s a fantastic cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine’s post-credits scene]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/culture/362831/deadpool-wolverine-credits-scene-cameo-spoilers" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=362831</id>
<updated>2024-07-24T19:51:10Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-25T21:00:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Comic Books" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Culture" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Marvel" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Movies" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Major spoiler alert: This post will absolutely ruin this movie for you. Please don’t read this unless you have seen the movie or want to get spoiled.  While the hoopla of Deadpool & Wolverine was all about the introduction of two iconic characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the movie is also about saying […]]]></summary>
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<img alt="" data-caption="Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine. | Marvel Studios" data-portal-copyright="Marvel Studios" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/TDW-14349_R.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in Deadpool & Wolverine. | Marvel Studios</figcaption>
</figure>
Major spoiler alert: This post will absolutely ruin this movie for you. Please don’t read this unless you have seen the movie or want to get spoiled. 
While the hoopla of <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/356083/deadpool-wolverine-gay-queerbaiting">Deadpool & Wolverine</a> was all about the introduction of two iconic characters to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the movie is also about saying goodbye. 
In the film, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) faces the prospect of the collapse of his entire timeline, which has been destroyed by the death of Wolverine in 2017’s Logan. To save it, he seeks out a still-living, alternate-universe version of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). But this new Wolvie has seen the rest of his X-Men die, and he can’t stop blaming himself. Together, they’re sent to the void (the same void that we see in Disney+’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22522332/loki-review-marvel-tom-hiddleston-owen-wilson">Loki</a>) where they sync up with an island of misfit toys: Marvel superheroes (mainly from Fox’s filmography) that, for one reason or another, did not make it to Disney’s promised land of perpetual intellectual property.
Deadpool and Wolverine’s fictional conflict is a self-referential gag about <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/20/18273477/disney-fox-merger-deal-details-marvel-x-men">Disney’s real-life 2019 acquisition of Fox</a> and its plethora of film rights, which includes some significant Marvel comic book characters. Reynolds’s Deadpool is one of those superheroes, but he’s currently the only actor playing a Marvel mutant slated to continue on and make the transition to Marvel Studios and the MCU. Having disposable superheroes of yore sent to the MCU trash heap is a meta way for <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10979782/deadpool-explained">Deadpool to make an inside joke</a> about how Disney (and, to an extent, Marvel) now owns everything, including esoteric superhero nostalgia that you never knew existed and Deadpool himself.
They first meet the Fantastic Four’s Johnny Storm (played by Chris Evans, reprising his pre-MCU role from <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120667/">2005</a>) who Deadpool mistakes for Captain America. All three are captured by the psychic villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin, playing an X-Men comic character we’ve never seen on film before). After Deadpool taunts her, as he taunts everyone, she telekinetically skins Storm alive before Deadpool and Wolverine make a miraculous, jetpack-fueled escape.
The duo eventually meet Storm’s compatriots, who have been living in this suspended state for years. There’s the half-human half-vampire Blade (Wesley Snipes, reprising his role from the <a href="https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/blade-at-25-marvel-vampire-ahead-of-its-time/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Blade</a> trilogy), ninja <a href="https://screenrant.com/deadpool-3-elektra-return-jennifer-garner/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Elektra</a> (Jennifer Garner, last seen in the 2005 <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287978/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_4_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_daredevl" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Daredevil</a> sequel of the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0357277/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_4_nm_4_in_0_q_elektra" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">same name</a>), murder clone X-23 (Dafne Keen, who appeared with Jackman in 2017’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3315342/?ref_=nm_knf_c_1" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Logan</a>), and mutant energy wielder Gambit (Channing Tatum, finally playing the part Disney’s Fox acquisition supposedly <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/channing-tatum-marvel-gambit-movie-canceled-disney-fox-deal-1234800607" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">made impossible</a>). Faced with an eternity of storytelling purgatory, the forgotten heroes team up with their new friends to help the two get back to Deadpool’s main timeline. The misfits break into Cassandra’s lair, drawing the attention of her henchmen and allowing the bosom buddies to take on Cassandra.
At the end of the film, Deadpool and Wolverine dispatch Nova as well as Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), the Time Variance Authority (TVA) middle manager who sent them to the void in the first place. They save Deadpool’s collapsing timeline and return home. Blade and the gang are rewarded by getting restored to their own timelines, mainly off-screen. Everything’s squared away and our <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/356083/deadpool-wolverine-gay-queerbaiting" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ambiguously coupled</a> duo get to be friends happily ever after.
And one post-credits scene can’t change that … or can it? 
There’s one scene that happens at the end of Deadpool & Wolverine’s credits scroll. 
In it, we find Deadpool at the TVA headquarters. As established in Loki, the TVA are essentially cops who watch every parallel timeline in the multiverse and make sure nothing goes sideways. Also established in Loki — and so many Marvel movies that deal with the splintering <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23024945/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-multiverse-explained-quantum-physicist">multiverse</a> — the TVA are susceptible to serious goofs. (Frankly, they aren’t very good at their job.) They’re also an authoritarian agency that imposes their will on these timelines and the countless people who live within them, so you don’t have to feel bad for them when they mess up.
Deadpool breaks the fourth wall; he wants to clear something up. Although he insulted Cassandra Nova and blamed it on Johnny Storm, he says he isn’t responsible for Storm’s death, even though it seemed like he was. He claims that he simply repeated what Storm told them when they were captured. 
To prove his point, he rewinds TVA surveillance footage and shows us what really happened. Sure enough, Johnny Storm unleashes a cuss-filled, raunch-heavy monologue — delivered in Evans’s native Boston accent, no less — that includes references to fellatio, analingus, <a href="https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Cain_Marko_(Earth-616)">Juggernaut</a> secretions, and derogatory comments about Cassandra’s baldness. He tells Deadpool that he can repeat it but would risk being skinned alive if he did because she is so beyond awful. The merc with a mouth is innocent!
Perhaps more importantly, he apparently has access to TVA HQ and ostensibly its timeline-jumping technology. By the logic and structure of this convoluted universe, that means Deadpool might be able to show up and snark in any MCU property (which, obviously, Marvel wants you to know). For now, though, he’s just content to show you Chris Evans saying absolutely filthy things.
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</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<author>
<name>Li Zhou</name>
</author>
<title type="html"><![CDATA[What we know about the police killing of Sonya Massey]]></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.vox.com/criminal-justice/363206/sonya-massey-police-killing-sean-grayson" />
<id>https://www.vox.com/?p=363206</id>
<updated>2024-07-25T19:50:28Z</updated>
<published>2024-07-25T19:50:00Z</published>
<category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Criminal Justice" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Police Violence" /><category scheme="https://www.vox.com" term="Policy" />
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[Body camera footage released this week offered a harrowing look at the police killing of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman in Springfield, Illinois, and renewed scrutiny of the disproportionate violence Black Americans face at the hands of law enforcement.  On July 6, Massey was shot by a sheriff’s deputy in her own home, after […]]]></summary>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[
<figure>
<img alt="" data-caption="Malachi Hill Massey, center, speaks at a news conference on July 23, 2024, at the NAACP headquarters in Springfield, Illinois, about his mother, Sonya Massey, who was shot to death by a Sangamon County Sheriff’s deputy. | John O’Connor/AP" data-portal-copyright="John O’Connor/AP" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/AP24205662506993.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />
<figcaption>Malachi Hill Massey, center, speaks at a news conference on July 23, 2024, at the NAACP headquarters in Springfield, Illinois, about his mother, Sonya Massey, who was shot to death by a Sangamon County Sheriff’s deputy. | John O’Connor/AP</figcaption>
</figure>
<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/video/bodycam-shows-moment-police-fatally-shot-illinois-woman-sonya-massey-215428165541">Body camera footage</a> released this week offered a harrowing look at the police killing of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman in Springfield, Illinois, and renewed scrutiny of the <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-are-still-killed-police-higher-rate-groups-rcna17169">disproportionate violence Black Americans</a> face at the hands of law enforcement.
On July 6, Massey was shot by a sheriff’s deputy in her own home, after officers responded to her call about a potential prowler. Following checks of her backyard and surrounding area, at least two officers entered her home as part of their visit. Inside, one of them asks her to turn off her stove. While doing so, she picks up a pot of boiling water and the officers back away, noting that they want to distance themselves from it. She makes a comment about rebuking them “in the name of Jesus,” at which point one of them, Sean Grayson, shoots at her three times, including once fatally in the head.
A grand jury has since indicted Grayson on three counts of first-degree murder, with some <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/22/us/sonya-massey-police-shooting/index.html">law enforcement experts</a> questioning why he’d shoot Massey rather than pursue other alternative responses like adding more distance between them or using a taser. 
The shooting also adds to a long history of <a href="https://www.vox.com/police-violence">police violence</a> against Black Americans — and underscores how enduring the problem continues to be. In 2020, mass protests erupted across the US following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after an officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes. Those followed extensive demonstrations in 2014 after Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Massey is also among a number of Black Americans who’ve been shot by police in their own homes, including <a href="https://www.vox.com/24153974/roger-fortson-police-killing">Roger Fortson</a> in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/05/us/aaron-dean-trial-atatiana-jefferson-killing/index.html">Atatiana Jefferson</a> in Fort Worth, Texas.
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">What we know about the incident</h2>
Police arrived at Massey’s home after she called 911 around 12:50 am on July 6, and proceeded to do a sweep around the house. They eventually tell her that they didn’t find anyone in the area and appear prepared to leave, when video shows them entering her home. While speaking with Massey, they also ask her if she’s doing okay mentally and she responds by saying, “Yes, I took my medicine.” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney for Massey’s family, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/body-camera-footage-released-illinois-state-police-woman/story?id=112162337">has said she dealt with mental health struggles</a>.
It’s not immediately apparent why the officers then go into Massey’s house, but video shows her looking for her ID. While they’re inside, the officers realize the stove is on and urge Massey to turn it off. As she goes to do so, she moves the pot of boiling water that’s on it, prompting the officers to back away. 
“Where are you going?” says Massey. 
“Away from your hot, steaming water,” says Grayson. 
“Away from my hot, steaming water?,” Massey asks, while holding the pot. “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
“You better f****** not or I swear to God I’ll f****** shoot you in your f****** face,” says Grayson as he draws his gun. 
Massey then says “I’m sorry,” and ducks while raising the pot over her head, as Grayson shoots multiple times and fatally wounds her. 
As his colleague moves to get a medical kit from their vehicle, Grayson comments, “Nah, she’s done. You can go get it but that’s a headshot.” <a href="https://cbs58.com/news/illinois-police-release-bodycam-video-of-fatal-shooting-of-black-woman-in-her-home">He also states later,</a> “Yeah I’m good, this f******* b**** is crazy.”
Last week, a grand jury indicted Grayson on charges of first-degree murder, as well as aggravated battery with a firearm and misconduct, all of which he pleaded not guilty to. He’s also been fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Department, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/sangamoncountysheriff/posts/pfbid02VdbzM22GpUQPiEaC5AJWeLHZRT59aNNtM2bDo9LjNLCeiupXFjPtbf9uYdm8rKHKl">which noted that</a> “it is clear that the deputy did not act as trained or in accordance with our standards.”
<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/24/us/sean-grayson-illinois-police-officer-shooting-sonya-massey/index.html">A state’s attorney review</a> of the incident similarly concluded that its analysis “does not support a finding that … Grayson was justified in his use of deadly force.” State prosecutors also cited an expert who described the act as comparable to “an officer intentionally and unnecessarily putting himself in front of a moving vehicle and then justifying use of force because of fear of being struck.”
Her family has said that Massey — a mother of two — was a “ball of energy,” and a “loving person” who was known for helping those around her. They also noted that they <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/24/us/sean-grayson-illinois-police-officer-shooting-sonya-massey/index.html">weren’t initially told</a> that the shooting had been committed by an officer and that there were early implications it was done by someone else.
Massey’s family are now calling for an investigation into the Sheriff’s Department’s hiring of Grayson, who has worked in <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-sheriffs-deputy-fatally-shot-sonya-massey-held/story?id=112229695">six different law enforcement agencies</a> in the last four years, and been <a href="https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/crime/illinois-deputy-charged-murder-dui-charges-macoupin-county/63-b1167b53-ef81-4af1-8383-e341359d41b4">charged twice</a> with driving under the influence. According to <a href="https://theintercept.com/2024/07/25/sonya-massey-police-killing-sean-grayson-army/">an Intercept report</a>, Grayson had also been discharged from the military due to misconduct.
In the wake of the indictment, prosecutors will continue to pursue the charges against Grayson in a case that could head to trial. He has been denied pretrial release. 
<h2 class="wp-block-heading has-text-align-none">It’s the latest incident to raise concerns about police violence</h2>
Massey’s shooting highlights how pervasive police violence toward Black Americans still is, and the dearth of effective policies that have been passed to combat it. 
In 2023, police killed more than 1,300 people, which was a new record, according to the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/01/17/police-killings-record-2023/72174081007/">organization Mapping Police Violence</a>. That same data set found that Black people were almost three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. 
Attempts to advance police reforms have varied at the city, state, and federal levels, with places <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/state-policing-reforms-george-floyds-murder">like San Francisco investing in crisis response teams</a> that serve as an alternative, and states like Minnesota <a href="https://www.minnpost.com/state-government/2021/04/the-minnesota-legislature-passed-new-deadly-force-standards-for-police-in-2020-why-lawmakers-are-already-looking-to-change-them/">approving new use of force standards</a>.
But any federal compromise on police reform — including attempts after Floyd’s shooting in 2020 to end officers’ protections from legal liability — has thus far faltered.
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