Let’s start off this post by noting that I know that some people hate anything and everything having to do with generative AI and insist that there are no acceptable uses of it. If that describes you, just skip this article. It’s not for you. Ditto for those who insist (incorrectly) that AI is nothing but a “plagiarism machine” or that training of AI systems is nothing but mass copyright infringement. I’ve discussed why all of that is wrong elsewhere.
Separately, I will agree that most uses of generative AI are absolute shit, and many are problematic. Almost every case I’ve heard of journalistic outfits using AI are examples of the dumbest fucking ways to use the technology. That’s because addle-brained finance and tech bros think that AI is a tool to replace journalists. And every time you do that, it’s going to flop, often in embarrassing ways.
However, I have been using some AI tools over the last few months and have found them to be quite useful, namely, in helping me write better. I think the best use of AI is in making people better at their jobs. So I thought I would describe one way in which I’ve been using AI. And, no, it’s not to write articles.
It’s basically to help me brainstorm,critique my articles, and make suggestions on how to improve them.
As a bit of background, let me explain how we work on articles at Techdirt. We try to make sure that no article goes out into the world until it’s been reviewed by someone other than myself. Most of the reviews are for grammar/typos, but also other important editorial checks along the lines of “does everything I say actually make sense?” and “what things might people get mad about?”
A while back, I started using Lex.page. Some of what I’m going to describe below is available for free accounts, and some in the paid “Pro” accounts. I don’t know the current limits on free accounts, as I am paying for a Pro account and what’s included in what may have changed.
Lex is an AI tool built with writers in mind. It looks kind of like a nice Google Docs. While it does have the power to do some AI-generated writing for you, almost all of its tools are designed to assist actual writers, rather than do away with their work. You can ask it to write the next paragraph for you, but I’ve never used that tool. Indeed, for the first few months I barely used any of the AI tools at all. I just like the environment as a standard writing tool.
The one feature I did use occasionally was a tool to suggest headlines for articles. If I thought my own headline ideas could be stronger, I would have it generate 10 to 15 suggestions. The tool rarely came up with one that was good enough to use directly, but it would sometimes give me an idea that I could take and adjust, which was better than my initial idea.
However, I started using the AI more often a couple of months ago. There’s a tool called “Ask Lex” where you can chat with the AI (on a Pro account, you can choose from a list of AI models to use, and I’ve found that Claude Opus seems to work the best). I initially couldn’t think of anything to ask the AI, so I asked people in Lex’s Discord how they used it. One user sent back a “scorecard” that he had created, which he asked Lex to use to review everything he wrote.
I changed around the scorecard for my own purposes (and I keep fiddling with it, so it will likely change more soon), but the current version of the score card I use is as follows:
This is an article scorecard:
Does this article:
#1 have a clear opening that grabs the reader score from 0 to 3
#2 clearly explain what is happening from 0 to 3
#3 clearly address the complexities from 0 to 3
#4 lay out the strongest possible argument 0 to 3
#5 have the potential to be virally shared 0 to 3
#6 is there enough humor included in the article 0 to 3
Given these details, could you score this article and provide suggestions on how to improve ratings of 0 or 1?
I created a macro on my computer, so with a few keyboard taps, I can pop that whole thing up in the Ask Lex box and have it respond.
I’ll note that I don’t really care that much about the last two items on the list, but I have them in there for two reasons. First, as a kind of Van Halen brown M&M check, to make sure the AI isn’t just blowing smoke at me, but knows when to give me low ratings. Second, somewhat astoundingly, there are times (not always, but more frequently than I would have thought) when it gives really good suggestions to insert a funny line somewhere.
I’m going to demonstrate some of how it works, using the article I wrote last week about the legal disclaimer on the parody mashup of the Beach Boys singing Jay-Z’s 99 Problems. Here’s what it looked like when I ran my first draft against the scorecard:
The responses here are fairly generic, but I can dig deeper. While it said my opening was good, I wondered if it could be better, so I asked it for suggestions on a better opening. And its suggestions were good enough that I actually did rewrite much of my opening. My original opening had jumped right in to talking about “There I Ruined It,” and Lex suggested some opening framing that I liked better. Of course, it also suggested a terrible headline, which I ignored. It’s rare that I take any suggestion verbatim, but this time the opening was good enough that I used a pretty close version (again, this is rare, but it does often make me think of better ways to rewrite the opening).
Then, I know that above I said that I don’t much care about the humor, but since this story involved a funny video, I did ask if it had any suggestions on ways to make the article funnier. And… these were not good. Not good at all. So I basically ignored them all. However, sometimes it does come up with suggestions that, again, at least get me to add an amusing line or two into a piece. Even if they weren’t good for this article, I figured I should share them here so you get a sense of how it doesn’t always work well, but at least gets me to think about things.
Somewhat amusingly, when I ran this very article through the same process I’m discussing here, it suggested adding “more personality” to the piece. I asked it if it had suggestions on where, and its top suggestion was to “lean into the absurdity of some of the AI suggestions” in this part, but then concluded with an awful joke.
So, yeah, it’s suggesting I joke about how shit its jokes are. Great work, AI buddy.
I also will sometimes ask it for better headlines (as mentioned above). Lex has a built-in headline generator tool, but I’ve found that doing it as part of the “Ask Lex” conversation makes it much stronger. On this article we’re discussing, it didn’t generate any good suggestions, so I ignored them. However, I will admit that it came up with the title of the follow-up article: Universal Music’s Copyright Claim: 99 Problems And Fair Use Ain’t One. That was all Lex. My original was something much more boring.
Also, just this weekend, I added a brand new macro, which I like so far, in which I ask it to generate other headline ideas, based on some criteria, and then ask it to compare that to my existing headline that I came up with myself. I’ve only been using this one for a day or two, and didn’t use it on the fair use article last week, but here’s what it said about this very article you’re reading now:
Then my next step is to input another macro I created as a kind of gut check. I ask it to help me critique the article, highlighting which points are the weakest and can be made stronger, which points are strongest and could be emphasized more, and which points readers might get upset about and which I should improve. Finally, I ask it if anything is missing from the article.
Again, I don’t always agree with its suggestions (including some of the ones here), but it often makes me think carefully about the arguments I’m making and seeing how well they stand up. I have strengthened many of the things I say based on the responses from Lex that just get me to think more carefully about what’s written.
Occasionally I’ll ask it for other suggestions, such as a better metaphor for something. When I wrote about Allison Stanger’s bonkers congressional testimony a couple weeks ago, I was trying to think of a good example to show how silly it was that she thought Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) were the same thing as decentralized social media. I asked Lex for suggestions on what would highlight how absurd that mistake is, and it gave me a long list of suggestions, including the one I eventually used: “saying ‘social security benefits’ when you mean ‘social media influencers’.”
Finally, after I go through all of that, I do use it to also do some basic editing help. Recently, Lex introduced a nice feature called “checks” which will “check” your writing and suggest edits on a variety of factors. Personally, the only ones I’ve found useful so far are the “Grammar” check and the “Readability” check.
I’ve tried all the rest, and don’t currently find them that useful for my style of writing. The grammar check is good at catching typos and extra commas, and the readability check is pretty good at getting me to chop up some of the run-on sentences that my human editors get frustrated with.
I do want to play more with the “Audience” one, but my attempts to explain who the Techdirt audience is to it hasn’t quite worked yet. The team at Lex tells me they’re working to improve it.
There are a few more things, but that’s basically it. For me, it’s a brainstorming tool and a kind of “gut check” that helps me review my work and make it as strong as it can be before I hand it off to my human editors who will review it. I feel like I’m saving them time and effort as well by giving them a more complete version of each story I submit (and hopefully getting them less frustrated about having to break up my run-on sentences).
The important parts are that I’m not trying to replace anyone. I’m certainly not relying on it for actually writing very much. And I know that I’m going to reject many of the things it suggests. It’s basically just another set of eyeballs willing to look over my work and give me feedback. And, it does so quickly and is less sick of my writing quirks.
It’s not revolutionary. It’s not changing the world. But, for me, personally, it’s been pretty powerful, just in helping me to be a better writer.
And yes, this article was reviewed with the same tools, which obviously prompted me to include one of its suggestions in that screenshot above. I’ll leave the other suggestions that it made, and I took, up to your imagination.
Authentication service Okta is warning about the “unprecedented scale” of an ongoing campaign that routes fraudulent login requests through the mobile devices and browsers of everyday users in an attempt to conceal the malicious behavior.
The attack, Okta said, uses other means to camouflage the login attempts as well, including the TOR network and so-called proxy services from providers such as NSOCKS, Luminati, and DataImpulse, which can also harness users’ devices without their knowledge. In some cases, the affected mobile devices are running malicious apps. In other cases, users have enrolled their devices in proxy services in exchange for various incentives.
Unidentified adversaries then use these devices in credential-stuffing attacks, which use large lists of login credentials obtained from previous data breaches in an attempt to access online accounts. Because the requests come from IP addresses and devices with good reputations, network security devices don’t give them the same level of scrutiny as logins from virtual private servers (VPS) that come from hosting services threat actors have used for years.
The costly procedure was supposed to give women a new kind of freedom. Is that what it really offers?
“For me, it was almost like a message from the universe,” says MeiMei Fox.
It was 2009, and Fox was a 36-year-old divorced writer and editor when she sat down to interview a fertility specialist for an upcoming book. He pulled out a chart showing female fertility after age 35 — in her memory, a curve swooping exponentially downward. “I was like, holy moly, this is not a pretty picture,” Fox recalled.
She’d always wanted a family, but since her divorce, she hadn’t met the right person to share it with. That’s why she took notice when she and the doctor discussed a technology called egg freezing, still experimental, that could help preserve people’s eggs until they were ready to have kids. At about $10,000, it was expensive, and typically not covered by insurance. She started pulling the money together right away.
Fox was an early adopter of a technology that was about to explode in popularity. Initially used primarily by people undergoing chemotherapy or other treatments that can harm fertility, the procedure became more mainstream after the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) announced in 2012 that it should no longer be considered “experimental.” Since then, the number of egg-freezing cycles performed each year has skyrocketed, from around 7,600 in 2015 to 29,803 in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology.
Egg freezing was also hailed as the next big step in reproductive health. “It was supposed to revolutionize the whole field just as much as the birth control pill did,” says Janet Takefman, a reproductive health psychologist at McGill University.
For Fox and for many, many people who underwent the procedure, however, freezing their eggs was more than just a medical decision; after an increasingly frantic race against the clock to find a partner, it felt like a way to take back control over their own lives. “Oh my god, I just bought myself years,” Fox remembers thinking. “The stress level went way down.”
Many patients report the same sense of relief after making the decision to freeze eggs. Marcia Inhorn, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale, interviewed more than 100 women about their egg-freezing experiences for her 2023 book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. After the procedure, more than 90 percent of women had something positive to say.
But in other ways, egg freezing has failed to live up to its early hype.
For many years, the effectiveness of the procedure was a bit of a black box: Not enough people had tried to use their frozen eggs for scientists to pull together reliable data. Now, however, a picture is emerging.
“It was supposed to revolutionize the whole field just as much as the birth control pill did”
In one groundbreaking 2022 study conducted at NYU Langone Fertility Center and looking at 543 patients over 15 years, the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. “There isn’t a guarantee of having a baby from egg freezing,” says Sarah Druckenmiller Cascante, a reproductive endocrinologist at NYU Langone Fertility Center and one of the study’s authors. The study made a splash because it provided numbers where little comprehensive national data exists, though experts at other clinics tell Vox that its results are in line with what they’ve found.
And far from ushering in a new era of gender equality, some experts say, the procedure serves as another way for companies to make money from stoking women’s anxieties.
Sales pitches about egg freezing, rather than liberating women from their biological clocks, simply became another way to put pressure on them, says Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the book Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception. “In a capitalist society, you’re going to have that incentive to get women’s dollars by piggybacking on this guilt, shame, anxiety, whatever you want to call it, about how we’re supposed to reproduce and we haven’t done so yet.”
About a decade after it shed its “experimental” label, the procedure has become ubiquitous in pop culture and ballooned in popularity, with over a million frozen eggs or embryos stored in the United States today. It has done little, however, to materially change women’s lives.
The first successful births from frozen eggs were twins, born in Australia in 1986. But the procedure used in this case was difficult to replicate, and egg freezing didn’t begin to take off until the 1990s, starting at a clinic in Bologna, Italy. The Italian government had passed a law, backed by Catholic politicians, that gave embryos the same rights as citizens and restricted freezing them. Freezing eggs instead became a way to circumvent the law and still treat patients with infertility.
In the early 2000s, the procedure spread to the US and around the world, gaining more interest after 2012, when the ASRM removed the “experimental” label.
For patients, egg freezing can be an arduous process. It starts with 10–14 days of hormone injections, often two or three per day, to stimulate the ovaries to produce large numbers of eggs at once, Cascante said. On top of that, the patient also has to visit a clinic two or three times a week for ultrasounds and bloodwork. Finally, when the eggs are the right size, another injection known as a “trigger shot” gets the eggs ready for collection.
“Physically, you go through a lot,” says Fawziah Qadir, a 38-year-old education professor at Barnard College who froze her eggs in 2022.
If all goes well, patients under 38 can expect to retrieve between 10 and 20 eggs, which are frozen using liquid nitrogen and stored in a lab until they’re ready to be used. If it doesn’t, more cycles may be necessary — meaning more shots, and more money.
When egg freezing first became widely available, there wasn’t a lot of long-term data on its effectiveness. But there was buzz — lots of it — especially around the idea that it would give women more time to focus on their careers. “Imagine a world in which life isn’t dictated by a biological clock,” Emma Rosenblum wrote in the 2014 Bloomberg Businessweek story. “If a 25-year-old banks her eggs and, at 35, is up for a huge promotion, she can go for it wholeheartedly without worrying about missing out on having a baby.”
In the next few years, new companies sprang up to market the procedure to women, often with a millennial-pink, girlboss sheen. Extend Fertility, launched in 2016 in New York City, offered Instagram influencers reduced rates in exchange for posts. Trellis, a “fertility studio” in Manhattan’s fancy Flatiron district that opened in 2018, offered Turkish-cotton bathrobes and called itself “the Equinox of egg freezing,” a reference to the upscale gym chain. One wall bore the slogan, “It’s up to each of us to invent our own future.” The startup Kindbody, also launched in 2018, hosted parties with drinks and scented candles and peppered its social media ads with taglines like “Plan your path.”
“Egg freezing has become like a mantra for how to be an independent woman,” Rebecca Silver, director of marketing for Kindbody, told NBC in 2018. “The people who have frozen their eggs are doing the cool new thing.”
That cool new thing, however, was pricey. It took Fox a year to save up the money. Today, with the process still coming in at $10,000 to $15,000 per cycle, several companies offer loans specifically for egg freezing. Qadir’s procedure in 2022 cost about $14,000, which her mom paid as a gift to her, Qadir says. That included storage fees, which are rising rapidly and can run to $800 a year or more. The costs of egg freezing and storage usually aren’t covered by insurance, although more large companies are beginning to offer fertility benefits that include them.
The price tag of the procedure limits who can access it; the majority of egg-freezing patients are white women with professional jobs. For Black women like herself, “sometimes it’s unattainable just because it’s so expensive, or we don’t have the jobs that would cover it,” Qadir said. Some experts say stigma and stereotypes, dating back to the history of slavery in America, also contribute to lower rates of fertility treatment among Black women.
Startups have attracted enough customers to draw interest from deep-pocketed backers, with fertility companies gaining more than $150 million in investment in 2019, according to the New York Times. “It is an attractive investment for venture capitalists who are looking to make money because it’s an almost unlimited market, potentially, of people who think they need to extend their fertility,” says Karey Harwood, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at North Carolina State University and the author of The Infertility Treadmill: Feminist Ethics, Personal Choice, and the Use of Reproductive Technologies.
It’s no surprise that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars, or even go into debt, for the chance to build the family they’ve always imagined. But that key word — chance — can fall by the wayside in an industry built on selling optimism.
Getty Images
The year after she froze her eggs, Fox got together with her now-husband. After about a year of trying to get pregnant and one miscarriage, the couple had Fox’s frozen eggs shipped from the San Francisco Bay Area, where they were stored, to Los Angeles, where Fox and her husband lived.
“Here’s where the story goes rotten,” Fox says. The Bay Area clinic had failed to pack the vials properly, and when they arrived in LA, all the eggs were destroyed. It was “one of the worst days of my life,” Fox recalls.
She’s not the only patient to fall victim to storage or transportation mistakes. One 2022 study found at least nine storage tank failures over 15 years, affecting 1,800 patients.
Egg-freezing patients also have had to contend with the unpredictable nature of the human body. The process can fail at many points, Cascante said. The ovaries may not produce enough eggs, the eggs may not survive the freezing process, they may not fertilize properly, or the fertilized embryos may not implant in the uterus.
One UK-based woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she was concerned about professional ramifications, told Vox she froze 14 eggs, beginning about 10 years ago when she was 36. At the equivalent of about $1,200 per egg, the process wasn’t cheap. But by the end, she says, “I felt really proud that I was doing something proactive, and something that gave me options.”
When she decided to use the frozen eggs to conceive on her own at 40, however, none of them fertilized. “I felt really angry at the universe,” she says. She later married and had a child using a donor egg. “In a single cycle of egg collection and fertilization, our donor produced more eggs and created more embryos than I had done in seven cycles.”
Despite her experience, “I never felt like I was mis-sold,” the woman says. “I’m a nerd; I did my research.”
At the same time, when she was freezing her eggs a decade ago, there wasn’t much research to do. “There weren’t a lot of people who had frozen their eggs, and there were even fewer who had gone back to try and conceive.”
Today, there’s more data available, and mainstream fertility clinics are likely to be frank with patients about success rates, says Madeira, the author of Taking Baby Steps. Findings at other clinics have been in line with the NYU study, with another study finding that about a third of patients who returned to use their eggs ended up having a live birth. “Clinics have an actual ethical imperative to give accurate information.” But egg-freezing parties hosted by for-profit companies may be another story.
There’s also a difference between listing success rates in fine print and really emphasizing the uncertainty of a procedure. Even Brigitte Adams, the woman featured on the 2014 Bloomberg cover after freezing her eggs, eventually told the Washington Post that she was unable to conceive using her frozen eggs.
“They’re going to tell you, in all the paperwork you sign, that this is no guarantee, but you’re still going to have a sense of, oh, this works,” Fox says.
Some of that feeling may stem from a kind of relentless optimism in American culture — or, perhaps, a Protestant work ethic — around the idea of having biological children, the message that if people simply try hard enough and long enough, they will eventually be rewarded with a child. This messaging has led some women to open up in recent years about their unsuccessful infertility treatments, to destigmatize their experiences. “For those of us who close our infertility chapters without a baby, we’re often met with unsolicited advice, reinforcing the narrative that we obviously gave up too early,” one woman, Katy Seppi, told CNN.
For their part, fertility companies and practices say they work hard to make patients aware of the possibility of failure. At Extend Fertility, every prospective egg-freezing patient gets a free consultation session that includes information on their odds of a live birth from frozen eggs, based on their age and initial test results, says Joshua Klein, the company’s chief clinical officer. After that, “we try to trust women” to make an informed decision, he said.
Kindbody also provides every prospective client with “expected outcomes based on their individual hormones and sonograms,” and offers a fertility calculator that estimates a patient’s chance of a live birth based on test results and number of eggs retrieved, Margaret Ryan, the company’s VP of communications, said in an email.
“They’re going to tell you, in all the paperwork you sign, that this is no guarantee, but you’re still going to have a sense of, oh, this works”
For some people, egg freezing isn’t the only option on the table. Another path is freezing embryos, which are denser and have a lower water content, making them “less sensitive to the freeze-thaw process,” said Amanda Adeleye, a reproductive endocrinologist and the medical director of CCRM Fertility of Chicago.
Doctors also are able to screen embryos to help give patients a better sense of how likely they are to have a successful pregnancy. The process has even found its way into the American cultural imagination, with Succession’s Shiv Roy suggesting to her beleaguered husband Tom that they freeze embryos because they “survive way longer than eggs.”
Embryos, however, require sperm. The majority of people freezing eggs are single, and they’re often hoping to have biological children with a partner one day. Using donor sperm would defeat that purpose. Fox, for example, was told that freezing embryos might be more effective but “I had zero interest,” she says. “I did not want to be a single mom.”
If a patient has a partner or is comfortable using a donor, doctors may recommend embryo freezing. But “if you’re doing all of this to expand your flexibility and time to build your family, to prematurely close the door on part of that by fertilizing the eggs doesn’t necessarily help you,” Adeleye said.
Eggs, embryos, freezing, thawing, shots, ultrasounds, thousands of dollars — it’s a lot for patients to navigate, often without much guidance.
For example, there’s no single regulatory agency overseeing fertility centers in the US, as NBC has reported. That means no one is ensuring that patients are given a clear picture of the effectiveness of procedures. A lack of oversight also allows companies to use sales pitches that experts say are misleading, like an Instagram ad for Extend Fertility that claimed, “When you freeze your eggs, you #freezetime.”
Klein calls that message “oversimplified,” but says it contains a kernel of truth because the procedure gives patients a chance to get pregnant with younger, more viable eggs. Advertising egg freezing is always a difficult balance, he tells Vox. The company doesn’t want to be too aggressive, but at the same time, to keep silent about a technology that can be “life-changingly impactful” risks doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit, Klein says.
Others, however, argue that egg-freezing companies are being too aggressive, not just about the effectiveness of the procedure but about its necessity. Companies can “scare women into freezing their own eggs when they might not really need to,” Madeira says.
In recent years, fertility startups have reached out to younger and younger groups of women. “We are now targeting women in their 20s and early 30s,” Susan Herzberg, the president of Prelude Fertility, told the New York Times in 2018. “Fertility declines at 22,” Jennifer Lannon, founder of the website Freeze.Health, told the publication.
It’s true that egg quality declines with age and that younger patients have better luck with egg freezing. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists puts the age of significant fertility decline at 32, not 22 (the chance of conceiving drops more precipitously after 37).
In the NYU study, the success rate rose to 51 percent for patients who froze their eggs when they were under 38. But the idea that large numbers of people should be freezing eggs in their 20s to guard against future infertility is misguided, some experts say. People in their 20s and early 30s often have time to conceive naturally, without the need for a lengthy, expensive medical procedure.
Indeed, only about 12 percent of patients worldwide actually go back for their frozen eggs. Many patients conceive without assistance, Takefman says, while others decide not to become parents. Patients who froze eggs when they were younger than 34 are especially unlikely to use them, Madeira says.
Those numbers don’t capture people who froze eggs only a few years ago and might still return, Klein says. And it’s not necessarily a problem that not everyone uses frozen eggs — after all, the process is meant as a “proactive investment,” he says. “You don’t know if you’ll need it.”
To some, that investment comes at too high a cost. “More women are freezing eggs, and paying a lot to freeze eggs, than are actually ever going to need [them],” Madeira says.
Ten years ago, egg freezing was seen as a path to economic and social empowerment for women. But most people aren’t freezing their eggs so they can work; they’re freezing their eggs so they can date.
Eliza Brown, now a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley, and her team interviewed 52 women who had frozen or were considering freezing their eggs in 2016 and 2017. None of them cited a desire to climb the corporate ladder. Instead, almost all were interested in egg freezing because they lacked a romantic partner. “Most of our participants understood egg freezing as a way to actually temporarily disentangle romantic and reproductive trajectories,” Brown tells Vox.
However, in many cases, egg freezing was a bandage on a bigger problem. The women Inhorn interviewed for her book Motherhood on Ice were largely educated professionals who could afford a five-figure elective medical procedure. “They wanted an eligible, educated, equal partner,” Inhorn said, and “they were having trouble finding that.”
Both Brown and Inhorn spoke with some egg-freezing patients who were seeking female partners. However, the majority were dating or seeking men, and struggling with the process. Some had tried dating men with less education or career success, but found “there was a lot of intimidation,” Inhorn said. “Men were not comfortable with who they were.” Others were frustrated with “men who will just wine you and dine you, but really have no intention of committing.”
MeiMei Fox describes the sense of rush and pressure that can be attached to dating for women in their late 30s: “You go on the first date and you’re like, well, do you want to have kids? No? Okay, bye.”
Egg freezing doesn’t change the fact that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, nor that social norms still fetishize the male-breadwinner family, pressuring women and men alike to look for something that may no longer fit them or the times they live in. It also doesn’t change the fact that many women find dating men to be a frustrating and demoralizing experience, as Anna Louie Sussman writes in the New York Times. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating, told the Times that many men were “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available” and that dating today “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack.”
To actually fix straight women’s dating problems, you would need to “fix men,” one of Inhorn’s study participants told her. Until then, Inhorn writes in her book, “egg freezing will remain educated thirty-something women’s single best reproductive option — a techno-medical solution to a fundamental gender inequality that provides them with some hope and allows them to retain their motherhood dreams.”
For Fox, freezing her eggs indeed took the feeling of time pressure away. She felt more relaxed and confident.
“It was really positive for me,” she says. “Until I tried to use them.”
After Fox’s frozen eggs were destroyed, she and her husband went through three rounds of IVF. It cost about $100,000, but she eventually got pregnant and gave birth to twin sons. Today, she’s not against egg freezing but says, “I tell people it is no guarantee.” Fertility centers don’t always “present that to their clients in an honest way,” she adds.
Only about 12 percent of patients worldwide actually go back for their frozen eggs
Better regulation would help, experts say. Creating a single regulatory agency to oversee fertility centers — as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority does in the UK — could make it easier to require those centers to educate patients on the risks and effectiveness of egg freezing and to follow accuracy guidelines in their advertising, Rachel Strodel argues in an NBC op-ed. “I still certainly respect people’s freedom to make the decision that’s best for them, but they’ve got to be armed with the facts and realize that it’s a gamble,” says Harwood, the Infertility Treadmill author.
Federal lawmakers should also require that egg storage facilities follow proper freezing protocol and report any failures, legal scholars Naomi Cahn and Dena Sharp write at the Conversation. Meanwhile, helping women with the relationship problems that push many to freeze eggs in the first place may require bigger social changes.
“Maybe men are going to need to get more comfortable marrying women who are more educated than they are and make more money than they do,” Harwood said. “Maybe the change happens there, in our gender ideologies and how we think of family.”
Greater support for single parents and other family forms beyond the heterosexual two-parent household could also take the pressure off of women to bank eggs in hopes of meeting a male partner. So, too, could a greater social acceptance of the value of a child-free life, especially since more and more people are choosing not to have children. While many people who freeze eggs have a deep and personal desire for children, it’s also the case that women, especially, experience enormous social and even political pressure to reproduce — and reducing that pressure could free some people to pursue other shapes for their lives.
Patients and scholars alike are clear that they don’t want to see egg freezing disappear as an option. “Reproductive choices are being eclipsed in this country,” Inhorn said. “This is a technology that does give women some help with difficult situations they find themselves in.”
The process could take on added importance now that an Alabama court ruling has cast doubt on the future of IVF using frozen embryos. Federal oversight of and research into fertility technology and treatment in general have been hampered by opposition to abortion in the US, which has made it difficult to form nationwide policies around reproductive health.
Egg freezing also remains an especially important option for people dealing with cancer or other conditions or treatments that can damage ovarian function, and it can be a useful tool for trans people who want to remove their ovaries or who are taking hormones that affect them, Adeleye said.
For many patients, however, experts say that the sense of control that egg freezing offers — at a high price — turns out to be illusory. If anything, Fox’s experience with the procedure was an exercise in letting go.
“It’s taught me some more patience with life and the universe,” she says. “There are many different pathways to getting what you dream of.”
Amanita muscaria mushrooms, a poisonous variety, are seen at a garden in Poland on October 2, 2022. | Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
When AI comes for mushroom foragers.
Six months ago, I spoke with a man named Elan Trybuch about a problem he was seeing online. He kept coming across different ebooks about mushroom foraging that looked somehow off. Off as in: maybe poisonous.
The books were shorter than most foraging guides were, and way, way cheaper, says Trybuch. He’s a software engineer and volunteer secretary for the New York Mycological Society, a nonprofit devoted to “spreading knowledge, love and appreciation of fungi.” He knows mushrooms and he knows AI, and he thought the covers of these books were probably AI-generated.
“They had mushroom structures that don’t quite make sense,” says Trybuch. They were the mycological equivalent of a picture of a hot blonde with six fingers and too many teeth.
Most disturbing was the information inside the books was totally wrong. “They aren’t even giving you descriptions of real mushrooms. They’re giving you something completely made up,” Trybuch says. Any readers looking to try to use these books to figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren’t would be out of luck, which to Trybuch was seriously concerning. “It could literally mean life or death” if you eat the wrong mushroom, he says.
The problem of very low-quality, very low-priced, probably at least partially AI-generated ebooks is not confined to mushroom foraging. Garbage ebooks have been a problem on Amazon for at least a decade, but — not unlike many strains of fungi — they’ve exploded over the last few years.
Inside the scammy world of garbage ebook publishing
Garbage ebooks are all over Amazon’s Kindle store, on every topic. Searching for Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling new book The Anxious Generation, I found Jonathan Haidt: The Biography of Jonathan David Haidt, Navigating Morality and Policy; A Joosr Guide to... The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom; and The Jonathan Haidt Story: Exploring the Life and Work of a Renowned Social Psychologist, Author, and Advocate.
None of these are actually books so much as book-shaped digital files, designed to be picked up in keyword searches and get clicked on in a hurry by someone a tiny bit distracted or not digitally savvy enough to notice what they’re doing.
This kind of grift has been around for a while. Now, with the rise of large language models, garbage ebooks have become easier and cheaper than ever to make. Garbage book grifters often don’t use AI to write their books, but they do use it to pick a topic and build an outline. Then they give the outline to a wildly underpaid ghostwriter to flesh it out into something that will pass muster as a real book. The model is a dangerously inviting prospect for anyone who’s ever toyed with the idea of publishing a book but doesn’t want to actually write one.
It turns out, though, that the people who make garbage ebooks mostly lose money.
The real cash seems to come from the people who teach others the garbage ebook scheme. These teachers claim they’ve shared the key to a life of passive income, but their students say all their courses offer is demands for more and more money, with the ever-deferred promise to teach you the real secrets to easy money once you’ve paid just a few thousand more dollars.
Even these grifters are not the real villains. They are often small-time operators working one level of a very big grift industry.
The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books. They’ve built an ecosystem where all the incentives are to sell at high volume and low cost. In book production, the biggest cost-saving and time-saving measure you can take is cutting out the labor of writing the actual book. Together, without ever caring enough about the issue to deliberately try to do so, these corporations have built a landscape in which it’s hard to trust what you read and hard to sell what you write.
In the end, everyone loses: the would-be writers getting grifted in a fake publishing school, the real writers whose products are getting choked out of the marketplace by floods of cheap garbage, and the readers who just want to be able to buy a book without having to check to make sure the author isn’t a robot.
I asked Elan Trybuch if he thought anyone was buying all those fake mushroom foraging guides.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, there’s a sucker born every minute.”
Gazan teams, civil defense, crime scene investigation, and forensics continue to carry out investigation at the scene after Israeli siege and attacks that destroyed Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza, on April 17, 2024. | Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images
What we know — and what we don’t — about the mass graves at Gaza hospitals.
A mass grave with 324 bodies was uncovered at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, members of Gaza Civil Defense said over the weekend. The discovery follows reports of similar mass graves at the al-Shifa Hospital complex, where some 381 bodies have been exhumed since Israeli troops withdrew from the facility at the beginning of April.
As part of its ongoing war in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the Israeli military conducted extensive raids at both hospitals earlier this year.
There’s a lot that’s unknown about the victims, including their causes of death. Some bodies had been buried at and around the hospital grounds because they could not safely be interred at cemeteries. But the sharp increases in the number of dead raise concerns that both hospitals could be the sites of serious crimes, including possibly extrajudicial killings, that require an independent investigation, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
That’s why the discovery of hundreds of bodies in the grave sites is so alarming. There are allegations that IDF soldiers moved bodies that were temporarily buried at the hospital, which could lead to families losing track of remains, among other issues. Hospitals are supposed to be protected spaces under international humanitarian law, with an exceptionally high legal bar for carrying out military operations there. And if people were killed during those raids, authorities must be able to determine who they were and how they died, as the intentional killing of civilians is a war crime. In the near term, the ongoing conflict will make it difficult to determine exactly what happened, hindering accountability efforts if wrongdoing occurred.
Some of the victims “were allegedly older people, women and wounded, while others were found tied with their hands ... tied and stripped of their clothes,” Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Tuesday in a press release. (The UN has not said if it has independently verified these reports but has said they have “renewed concerns about possible war crimes amid ongoing Israeli airstrikes.”)
The Israeli military has rejected the idea that its soldiers buried the bodies, calling such accusations ”baseless and unfounded.” The IDF told CNN that it had examined some bodies in their search for the remains of Israeli hostages, but returned the remains “to their place.”
Here’s what we know about the graves
Starting last fall, Israeli forces targeted Gaza’s hospitals with bombing campaigns and with weeks-long raids at Nasser and al-Shifa, on the premise that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure like hospitals to plan and conduct operations. After a siege on al-Shifa Hospital and a later raid, as well as one on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, medical officers suggested many had died. It is not clear how many people were killed in each hospital, how they died, or who they were.
Here’s what we do know about what happened at each hospital.
Al-Shifa Hospital
At al-Shifa Hospital, the IDF says that it killed 200 “terrorists” hiding at the facility and has for months alleged that the hospital was a base of Hamas operations. Hamas media officials say that 400 people were killed during the raid, including at least 20 patients who died from lack of access to medical care, according to the WHO.
Hospital staff have denied that Hamas fighters were at the hospital, according to Reuters. Al-Shifa was destroyed, rendered essentially inoperable during the raid.
At the time, the IDF told Vox, without providing any evidence to support this assertion, that “Hamas terrorists are likely hiding behind injured civilians inside Nasser Hospital right now and appear to have used the hospital to hide our hostages there too.” The IDF later claimed to have detained 200 “terrorists and suspects in terrorist activities,” but when contacted this week, the IDF did not provide information about what happened to those detained.
Some bodies had been buried at a temporary site at Nasser Hospital during the Israeli siege and raid in February, according to Gaza Civil Defense. But the number of bodies discovered after the raids surpasses the number previously thought to be buried at either site, and it’s not clear where the new bodies came from.
Furthermore, Col. Yamen Abu Suleiman, head of Gaza Civil Defense in Khan Younis, said some of the bodies at the mass grave at Nasser Hospital show signs of summary execution, and some bodies had their hands and feet bound. “We do not know if they were buried alive or executed,” he told CNN. “Most of the bodies are decomposed.” (CNN and other media organizations have not been able to independently verify these allegations.) The group is also searching for the bodies of about 400 people missing since Israeli forces left Nasser Hospital.
The broader picture
Those allegations — and the uncertainty around where the unexpected bodies came from — prompted UN human rights commissioner Volker Türk’s call for “a clear, transparent and credible investigation” into how the people buried at the sites died.
“What appears to have happened, or what is alleged to have happened, is that the IDF dug up many of those bodies, removed identifying information, and then put the bodies back in the grave,” Adil Haque, an international humanitarian law professor at Rutgers University, told Vox. “So now people can’t identify their loved ones without great difficulty.”
There are provisions in international law regarding the dignity of the dead; people should, whenever possible, be buried in marked graves, and their families and loved ones should be able to engage in mourning practices. The presence of mass graves can indicate improper burials, though that is not always the case.
Very little is known about the mass graves so far, especially what happened to the new people buried within them — and that is what’s alarming.
“The question is, what happened during the IDF takeover of the hospital that explains why there’s so many more bodies in the grave than were originally there?” Haque said.
And it’s not clear that the justification for the raids on the hospitals was legal under international humanitarian law, given that medical facilities and personnel receive special protection.
“You cannot attack a hospital, medical services, medical units; medical personnel and medical institutions must be protected,” Anjli Parrin, director of the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, told Vox. “That you’re seeing large numbers of deceased individuals at a hospital is very troubling. There’s a question not just of the bodies but why did you attack these places? Who were the civilians harmed? Was it really the only option? Was it under the legal standard of hostile acts harmful to the enemy?”
Mass graves show a real need for an independent investigation
What happened to the people in the mass graves and why they are there is difficult to understand in part because of the lack of independent information coming out of Gaza. No outside reporters have been allowed in, almost a hundred Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, aid groups struggle to operate, and independent investigative bodies have not been able to access the territory.
“That we don’t know is not good enough,” Parrin said. “The discovery of these mass graves suggests that there’s a really urgent need to carry out investigations, one, but even before you get to that point, to preserve evidence, which the International Court of Justice has ordered Israel to do” following the court’s January ruling that Israel was not doing enough to prevent genocide in Gaza.
If the IDF indeed willfully killed civilians or even militants hors de combat— meaning they’re not on the battlefield due to injury, for example — at the hospitals, that would be a crime. All of the parties to combat are obligated to make sure that evidence is preserved for later investigations and prosecution per IHL.
But getting that investigation into motion will be difficult; for one, it’s not clear who would carry it out, though Haque suggested that the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights would be the appropriate bodies. And there would need to be a ceasefire, or at the very least guarantees that the investigators could carry out their work safely.
But there is still the question of why Israel has raided so many hospitals in Gaza, which, as Parrin said, is highly unusual in conflict.
“There’s a risk [that] this kind of conduct becomes normalized,” she said. “It would be very worrying for other conflicts. It shouldn’t be the situation that attacks on a hospital are somehow justified.”
Enlarge / Federal Communication Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, then a commissioner, rallies against repeal of net neutrality rules in December 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)
The Federal Communications Commission voted 3–2 to impose net neutrality rules today, restoring the common-carrier regulatory framework enforced during the Obama era and then abandoned while Trump was president.
The rules prohibit Internet service providers from blocking and throttling lawful content and ban paid prioritization. Cable and telecom companies plan to fight the rules in court, but they lost a similar battle during the Obama era when judges upheld the FCC's ability to regulate ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.
"Consumers have made clear to us they do not want their broadband provider cutting sweetheart deals, with fast lanes for some services and slow lanes for others," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said at today's meeting. "They do not want their providers engaging in blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. And if they have problems, they expect the nation's expert authority on communications to be able to respond. Because we put national net neutrality rules back on the books, we fix that today."
The Senate last night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today.
The "Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" was approved as part of a larger appropriations bill that provides aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It passed in a 79-18 vote. Biden last night issued a statement saying he will sign the appropriations bill into law "as soon as it reaches my desk." He signed the bill into law today, according to news reports.
The bill classifies TikTok as a "foreign adversary controlled application" and gives the Chinese company ByteDance 270 days to sell it to another entity. Biden can extend the deadline by up to 90 days if a sale is in progress.
Last week, the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted to advance the Protecting and Enhancing Public Access to Codes Act, or the Pro Codes Act (H.R. 1631), to the full House. The bill would extend copyright protection to codes (such as building codes) that are developed by standards development organizations (SDOs) and incorporated by reference into local, state, and federal laws, as long as the SDOs make the codes “available to the public free of charge online in a manner that does not substantially disrupt the ability of those organizations to earn revenue.”
This is the latest development in a long-running battle between SDOs and public interest groups that have posted online standards incorporated by reference. SDOs have sued these public interest groups for copyright infringement, and the public interest groups have argued that once the standards are incorporated by reference, they lose their copyright protection. The public interest groups have argued in the alternative that the fair use right permits the online posting of the standards. The courts have ruled in favor of the public interest groups on the fair use theory without addressing the protectability argument. The Pro Codes Act seeks to foreclose the protectability argument without directly implicating the fair use theory.
The SDOs supporting the Pro Codes Act assert that it would increase access to the law by incentivizing the SDOs to provide online “reading rooms” where the public could read the standards incorporated by reference. However, such reading rooms are unnecessary because public interest groups already provide free online access to the standards in more usable formats. As Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), stated: “This legislation is a solution in search of a problem: at least one public interest organization is already providing much better access to the law, also for free, with no financial impact on the standard organizations.” In 2023, McSherry successfully represented Public.Resource.Org in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org, where the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit held that fair use permitted Public.Resource.Org to post online codes incorporated by reference because it served a nonprofit, educational purpose.
During last week’s markup of the Pro Codes Act, Representative Zoe Lofgren introduced dozens of amendments to improve the bill, one of which would codify the ASTM precedent established by the DC Circuit. Unfortunately, the committee rejected this amendment. (In fact, the committee voted down all of Lofgren’s amendments, except for one that would require the Government Accountability Office to study the effects of the bill.)
Rep. Lofgren also entered into the record an opposition letter in which a coalition of libraries, civil society, disability rights groups, and others argue that providing free access to the law furthers the fundamental purpose of copyright, which is to allow public access to knowledge. Some of the letter’s signers also made this point in an amicus brief in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org:
The Copyright Act ultimately aims to achieve the constitutional goal to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” U.S. Const. art 1, cl. 8, sec. 8.
During last week’s markup, some members of the House Judiciary Committee displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law. Proponents of Pro Codes claimed that the bill would strike a balance between copyright law and public access to information. But copyright law and access to information are not in tension; facilitating access to information is the constitutional purpose of copyright, as the library and civil society groups wrote in their brief in support of Public.Resource.Org.
Some members of the committee tried to parse standards incorporated by reference from other elements of the law. But as Rep. Lofgren rightly noted, in 2020 the Supreme Court reaffirmed the “government edicts doctrine” that works created by government officials in the course of their official duties are not copyrightable. Accordingly, when a work is incorporated by reference into an official government document it has the force of law and belongs in the public domain. In 2019, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) filed an amicus brief in State of Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org asking the Supreme Court to affirm this reasoning, and explaining how libraries rely on the government edicts doctrine to preserve and provide access to the cultural record, including all elements of the law.
Another flawed argument by lawmakers at the Pro Codes markup is that standards incorporated by reference is an unfair “taking” of the SDOs’ copyrights under the Fifth Amendment. As the lawmakers’ argument goes, governments must compensate property owners when they take over private property for public use under eminent domain; similarly, the government should extend copyright to the SDOs in exchange for the use of their standards. But this analogy falls apart because there is no reluctance on the part of the SDOs for the adoption of their standards; in fact, the SDOs actively lobby governments to adopt their standards.
A related argument by supporters of the Pro Codes Act is that the SDOs provide a valuable service, and therefore they deserve a revenue stream in exchange for their contribution to the public good. But copyright law does not grant copyright to reward hard work (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service). Further, the DC Circuit Court found that although Public.Resource.Org has been posting incorporated standards for 15 years, “the plaintiffs have been unable to produce any economic analysis showing that Public Resource’s activity has harmed any relevant market for their standards. To the contrary, ASTM’s sales have increased over that time.” The SDOs can also derive significant revenue from selling training materials and programs. SDOs do not need a copyright incentive; the development of standards advances the economic interests of their members.
Additionally, Rep. Lofgren pointed out that, in 2020, the Supreme Court in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org found constitutional limits to legislatures’ ability to expand copyright. Chief Justice Roberts stated “no one can own the law” and reaffirmed that if “every citizen is presumed to know the law, … it needs no argument to show … that all should have free access” to its contents. Pro Codes would be unconstitutional under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth amendments, which guarantee the public’s rights to read, share, and discuss the law.
It is worth noting that several House Judiciary Committee members made nearly identical arguments in favor of the bill, and I assume the standards development organizations circulated talking points in advance of the markup. We know that passing the Pro Codes Act is a major legislative priority for the SDOs.
ARL and our fellow advocates are disappointed that the Pro Codes Act will advance to the House, particularly since the House did not hold a hearing on the bill. We remain grateful to Representative Lofgren, who has defended copyright law against overprotection for decades.
Katherine Klosek is the Director of Information Policy and Federal Relations at the Association of Research Libraries. This post originally appeared on the ARL’s site.
Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan talks with guests during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 03, 2024 (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that it has issued a final rule banning noncompete clauses. The rule will render the vast majority of current noncompete clauses unenforceable, according to the agency.
"In the final rule, the Commission has determined that it is an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for employers to enter into noncompetes with workers and to enforce certain noncompetes," the FTC said.
The US Chamber of Commerce said it will sue the FTC in an effort to block the rule, claiming the ban is "a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses' ability to remain competitive."
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday announced that genetic fragments from the highly-pathogenic avian influenza virus H5N1 have been detected in the pasteurized, commercial milk supply. However, the testing completed so far—using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)—only detects the presence of viral genetic material and cannot tell whether the genetic material is from live and infectious viral particles or merely remnants of dead ones killed by the pasteurization process.
Testing is now ongoing to see if viable, infectious H5N1 can be identified in milk samples.
So far, the FDA still believes that the milk supply is safe. "To date, we have seen nothing that would change our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe," the agency said in a lengthy explanation of the finding and ongoing testing.
In December, Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address containing thousands of animation files. Included in the cache were animation cells, videos, and notes discussing the work, plus changes that needed to be made to ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from an Amazon Prime Video superhero show and an upcoming Max (aka HBO Max) children’s anime.
There's a new Linux distro on the scene today, and it's a bit specialized. Its development was led by the automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit, and it's the first open source OS that complies with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements.
One of the more interesting paradigm shifts underway in the automotive industry is the move to software-defined vehicles. Cars have increasingly been controlled by electronic systems during the past few decades, but it's been piecemeal. Each added new function, like traction control, antilock braking, or a screen instead of physical gauges, required its own little black box added to the wiring loom.
There can now be more than 200 discrete controllers in a modern vehicle, all talking to each other through a CAN bus network. The idea behind the software-defined vehicle is to take a clean-sheet approach. Instead, you'll find a small number of domain controllers—what the automotive industry is choosing to call "high performance compute" platforms—each responsible for a different set of activities.
Today we're releasing the first beta of Android 15. With the progress we've made refining the features and stability of Android 15, it's time to open the experience up to both developers and early adopters, so you can now enroll any supported Pixel device here to get this and future Android 15 Beta and feature drop Beta updates over-the-air.
Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity, give users a premium app experience, protect user privacy and security, and make your app accessible to as many people as possible — all in a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of devices, silicon partners, and carriers.
Android delivers enhancements and new features year-round, and your feedback on the Android beta program plays a key role in helping Android continuously improve. The Android 15 developer site has lots more information about the beta, including downloads for Pixel and the release timeline. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and thank you in advance for your continued help in making Android a platform that works for everyone.
We’ll have lots more to share as we move through the release cycle, and be sure to tune into Google I/O where you can dive deeper into topics that interest you with over 100 sessions, workshops, codelabs, and demos.
Edge-to-edge
Apps targeting Android 15 are displayed edge-to-edge by default on Android 15 devices. This means that apps no longer need to explicitly call Window.setDecorFitsSystemWindows(false) or enableEdgeToEdge() to show their content behind the system bars, although we recommend continuing to call enableEdgeToEdge() to get the edge-to-edge experience on earlier Android releases.
To assist your app with going edge-to-edge, many of the Material 3 composables handle insets for you, based on how the composables are placed in your app according to the Material specifications.
On the left: App targets SDK 34 (Android 14) and is not edge-to-edge on an Android 15 device. On the right: App targets SDK 35 (Android 15) and is edge-to-edge on an Android 15 device. Note the Material 3 TopAppBar is automatically protecting the status bar, which would otherwise be transparent by default.
The system bars are transparent or translucent and content will draw behind by default. Refer to "Handle overlaps using insets" (Views) or Window insets in Compose to see how to prevent important touch targets from being hidden by the system bars.
Smoother NFC experiences - part 2
Android 15 is working to make the tap to pay experience more seamless and reliable while continuing to support Android's robust NFC app ecosystem. In addition to the observe mode changes from Android 15 developer preview 2, apps can now register a fingerprint on supported devices so they can be notified of polling loop activity, which allows for smooth operation with multiple NFC-aware applications.
Inter-character justification
Starting with Android 15, text can be justified utilizing letter spacing by using JUSTIFICATION_MODE_INTER_CHARACTER. Inter-word justification was first introduced in Android O, but inter-character solves for languages that use the white space for segmentation, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, etc.
Android and Google Play announced support for app archiving last year, allowing users to free up space by partially removing infrequently used apps from the device that were published using Android App Bundle on Google Play. Android 15 now includes OS level support for app archiving and unarchiving, making it easier for all app stores to implement it.
Apps with the REQUEST_DELETE_PACKAGES permission can call the PackageInstaller requestArchive method to request archiving a currently installed app package, which removes the APK and any cached files, but persists user data. Archived apps are returned as displayable apps through the LauncherApps APIs; users will see a UI treatment to highlight that those apps are archived. If a user taps on an archived app, the responsible installer will get a request to unarchive it, and the restoration process can be monitored by the ACTION_PACKAGE_ADDED broadcast.
App-managed profiling
Android 15 includes the all new ProfilingManager class, which allows you to collect profiling information from within your app. We're planning to wrap this with an Android Jetpack API that will simplify construction of profiling requests, but the core API will allow the collection of heap dumps, heap profiles, stack sampling, and more. It provides a callback to your app with a supplied tag to identify the output file, which is delivered to your app's files directory. The API does rate limiting to minimize the performance impact.
Better Braille
In Android 15, we've made it possible for TalkBack to support Braille displays that are using the HID standard over both USB and secure Bluetooth.
This standard, much like the one used by mice and keyboards, will help Android support a wider range of Braille displays over time.
Key management for end-to-end encryption
We are introducing the E2eeContactKeysManager in Android 15, which facilitates end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in your Android apps by providing an OS-level API for the storage of cryptographic public keys.
The E2eeContactKeysManager is designed to integrate with the platform contacts app to give users a centralized way to manage and verify their contacts' public keys.
Secured background activity launches
Android 15 brings additional changes to prevent malicious background apps from bringing other apps to the foreground, elevating their privileges, and abusing user interaction, aiming to protect users from malicious apps and give them more control over their devices. Background activity launches have been restricted since Android 10.
App compatibility
With Android 15 now in beta, we're opening up access to early-adopter users as well as developers, so if you haven't yet tested your app for compatibility with Android 15, now is the time to do it. In the weeks ahead, you can expect more users to try your app on Android 15 and raise issues they find.
To test for compatibility, install your published app on a device or emulator running Android 15 beta and work through all of your app's flows. Review the behavior changes to focus your testing. After you've resolved any issues, publish an update as soon as possible.
To give you more time to plan for app compatibility work, we’re letting you know our Platform Stability milestone well in advance.
At this milestone, we’ll deliver final SDK/NDK APIs and also final internal APIs and app-facing system behaviors. We’re expecting to reach Platform Stability in June 2024, and from that time you’ll have several months before the official release to do your final testing. The release timeline details are here.
Get started with Android 15
Today's beta release has everything you need to try the Android 15 features, test your apps, and give us feedback. Now that we've entered the beta phase, you can enroll any supported Pixel device here to get this and future Android Beta updates over-the-air. If you don’t have a Pixel device, you can use the 64-bit system images with the Android Emulator in Android Studio. If you're already in the Android 14 QPR beta program on a supported device, or have installed the developer preview, you'll automatically get updated to Android 15 Beta 1.
For the best development experience with Android 15, we recommend that you use the latest version of Android Studio Jellyfish (or more recent Jellyfish+ versions). Once you’re set up, here are some of the things you should do:
Try the new features and APIs - your feedback is critical during the early part of the developer preview and beta program. Report issues in our tracker on the feedback page.
Test your current app for compatibility - learn whether your app is affected by changes in Android 15; install your app onto a device or emulator running Android 15 and extensively test it.
We’ll update the beta system images and SDK regularly throughout the Android 15 release cycle. Read more here.
Dupont Circle, DC’s historic epicenter of LGBTQ+ life, has long been the backdrop for the annual Capital Pride Parade—until this year. The 2024 parade on Saturday, June 8 will begin at 14th and T Sts., NW, the same location as last year. However, instead of moving toward Dupont, revelers will continue down 14th Street to […]
Google is doing a major re-org of Android, Chrome, and the Google hardware division: They're merging! Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh will lead the new "Platforms and Devices” division. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google.
"Having a unified team across Platforms & Devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners," writes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster — as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making."
Google also justifies the decision the same way it does most decisions nowadays: by saying it's AI-related. The announcement is a few paragraphs in a wide-ranging post by Pichai, titled, "Building for our AI future," and the new division is taking a chunk of Google Research along with it, specifically the group that has been working on computational photography. Pichai wants the team to live in "the intersection of hardware, software, and AI."
Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)
Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.
User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:
While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.
Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.
Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)
Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals have mostly failed miserably at complying with the law.
A 2023 KFF analysis on compliance found that the pricing information hospitals provided is "messy, inconsistent, and confusing, making it challenging, if not impossible, for patients or researchers to use them for their intended purpose." A February 2024 report from the nonprofit organization Patient Rights Advocate found that only 35 percent of 2,000 US hospitals surveyed were in full compliance with the 2021 rule.
But even if hospitals dramatically improved their price transparency, it likely wouldn't help when patients need emergency trauma care. After an unexpected, major injury, people are sent to the closest hospital and aren't likely to be shopping around for the best price from the back of an ambulance. If they did, though, they might also need to be treated for shock.
A kidney transplant team in Nice, France. | BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Giving a kidney saves a life. Paying donors could fix the shortage.
What if I told you there was a way that the US could prevent 60,000 deaths, save American taxpayers $25 billion, and pay a deserving group of people $50,000 each? Would you be interested? Would you wonder why I’m pitching this to you like I’m the host of a late-night basic cable infomercial?
I am not a spokesman. I am simply a fan and supporter of the End Kidney Deaths Act, a bill put together by a group of kidney policy experts and living donors that would represent the single biggest step forward for US policy on kidneys since … well, ever.
The plan is simple: Every nondirected donor (that is, any kidney donor who gives to a stranger rather than a family member) would be eligible under the law for a tax credit of $10,000 per year for the first five years after they donate. That $50,000 in total benefits is fully refundable, meaning even people who don’t owe taxes get the full benefit.
Elaine Perlman, a kidney donor who leads the Coalition to Modify NOTA, which is advocating for the act, based the plan on a 2019 paper that estimated the current disincentives to giving a kidney (from travel expenses to lost income while recovering from surgery to pain and discomfort) amounted to about $38,000. That’s almost $50,000 in current dollars, after the past few years’ inflation.
The paper also found that removing disincentives by paying this amount to donors would increase the number of living donors by 11,500 a year. Because the law would presumably take a while to encourage more donations, Perlman downgrades that to about 60,000 over the first 10 years, with more donations toward the end as people become aware of the new incentives. But 60,000 is still nothing to sneeze at.
Due to a law signed by Richard Nixon, the US has single-payer health care for only one condition: kidney failure. Medicare picks up the bill for most patients with kidney failure, including for the main treatment of dialysis, in which an external machine replicates the functions of a kidney.
Dialysis is not only worse for patients than a transplant, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment; it’s more expensive too. In 2021, Medicare spent $33.4 billion, or almost 7 percent of its overall budget, on patients with kidney failure, much of it on dialysis treatment. Getting people transplants saves both lives and money: At about $416,000 in estimated savings each, those 60,000 transplants made possible by donor incentives over the first 10 years would save taxpayers about $25 billion.
I write about a lot of government programs, and usually there’s a tradeoff: You can do more good, but you’re going to have to spend a lot more money. Win-win scenarios where the government saves money while saving lives are virtually unheard of. We’d be foolish not to leap at this one.
The kidney problem, explained
The End Kidney Deaths Act is trying to solve a fundamental problem: Not nearly enough people are donating their kidneys.
In 2021, some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed with end-stage renal disease, meaning they would need either dialysis or a transplant to survive. That year saw only 25,549 transplants. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis.
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead within five years. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later.
Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining.
Most people who do get kidney transplants get them from deceased donors. There’s more we can do to promote that: One study found that about 28,000 organs annually, including about 17,000 kidneys, could be recovered from deceased donors but are not, largely because organ procurement groups and surgeons have strong incentives to reject less-than-perfect organs. People are working hard on fixing that problem, but they’d be the first to tell you we need more living donors too.
The gap between kidneys needed and kidneys available is about 10 times larger than that 17,000-a-year figure. Kidneys from living donors also last longer than those from deceased donors, and the vast majority of those who die (96.7 percent by one study’s estimate) are not even eligible to donate their organs, usually because the prospective donor is too sick or too old.
So we should be recovering the organs that are eligible. But it won’t get us all the way. We need living donors too.
But we don’t have enough — particularly enough nondirected donors. These are donors giving to a stranger, and thus donors whose kidneys can be directed to the person with the most need. While I and others have done our best to evangelize for nondirected donation, our ranks are pretty thin. In 2023, only 407 people donated a kidney to a stranger.
The End Kidney Deaths Act would aim to increase that number nearly thirtyfold. Perlman told me the Coalition to Modify NOTA is open to supporting donors who give to family or friends as well, or even providing benefits to families of deceased donors. But in part because nondirected donations are so rare, starting out by just subsidizing them saves money upfront. The act is meant as a first step toward a system of more broadly compensating donors; if it proves this approach can work, we can always expand eligibility.
The moral case for compensating kidney donors
The most common objection to compensating kidney donors is that it amounts to letting people “sell” their kidneys, a phrasing that even some proponents of compensation adopt. For opponents, this feels dystopian and disturbing, violating their sense that the human body is sacred and should not be sold for parts.
But “selling kidneys” in this case is just a metaphor, and a bad one at that. The End Kidney Deaths Act would not in any sense legalize the selling of organs. Rich people would not be able to outbid poor people to get organs first. There would be no kidney marketplace or kidney auctions of any kind.
What the proposal would do is pay kidney donors for their labor. It’s a payment for a service — that of donation — not a purchase of an asset. It’s a service that puts some strain on our bodies, but that’s hardly unusual. We pay a premium to people in jobs like logging and roofing precisely because they risk bodily harm; this is no different.
When you think of donor compensation as payment for work done, the injustice of the current system gets a lot clearer.
When I donated my kidney, many dozens of people got paid. My transplant surgeon got paid; my recipient’s surgeon got paid. My anesthesiologist got paid; his anesthesiologist got paid. My nephrologist and nurses and support staff all got paid; so did his. My recipient didn’t get paid, but hey — he got a kidney. The only person who was expected to perform their labor with no reward or compensation whatsoever was me, the donor.
This would outrage me less if the system weren’t also leading to tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily every year. But a system that refuses to pay people for their work, and in the process leads to needless mass death, is truly indefensible.
The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001.
"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortages," ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz said in a statement Thursday. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications stored in hospital crash carts and procedural areas. Ongoing national shortages of therapies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] also remain a serious challenge for clinicians and patients."
Enlarge / BYD electric cars stand at a BYD dealership on April 05, 2024, in Berlin, Germany. BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, is a Chinese manufacturer that went from making solar panels to electric cars. The company is seeking to gain a foothold in the German auto market. (credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
Influential US Senator Sherrod Brown (D–Ohio) has called on US President Joe Biden to ban electric vehicles from Chinese brands. Brown calls Chinese EVs "an existential threat" to the US automotive industry and says that allowing imports of cheap EVs from Chinese brands "is inconsistent with a pro-worker industrial policy."
Brown's letter to the president is the most recent to sound alarms about the threat of heavily subsidized Chinese EVs moving into established markets. Brands like BYD and MG have been on sale in the European Union for some years now, and last October, the EU launched an anti-subsidy investigation into whether the Chinese government is giving Chinese brands an unfair advantage.
The EU probe won't wrap until November, but another report published this week found that government subsidies for green technology companies are prevalent in China. BYD, which now sells more EVs than Tesla, has benefited from almost $4 billion (3.7 billion euro) in direct help from the Chinese government in 2022, according to a study by the Kiel Institute.
Enlarge / Generic, non-Western Digital SD cards. (credit: Getty)
Western Digital plans to release the first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage firm announced plans to demo the product in person next week.
Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association's Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward "complex media and entertainment workflows," such as those involving cameras and laptops that use high-resolution video with high framerates, the announcement said.
The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104 MB per second. It will support minimum write speeds of 10 MB/s, AnandTech reported. Minimum sequential write speeds are expected to reach 30 MB/s, the publication said.
A month after our report about The Block potentially going dark at Pike & Rose, employees inside the four-year-old food hall tell us they’re expecting it to close at the end of April. Originally planned as an all-Asian food hall with a central bar, The Block cycled through a number of different food vendors and eventually added tacos, cheesesteaks and other cuisines to the lineup. It’s not clear what’s next for this space, but we’re hearing rumors that a Japanese restaurant is moving in. Federal Realty, which owns Pike & Rose, declined to comment.
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it has finalized rules for handling water supplies that are contaminated by a large family of chemicals collectively termed PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Commonly called "forever chemicals," these contaminants have been linked to a huge range of health issues, including cancers, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and developmental disorders.
The final rules keep one striking aspect of the initial proposal intact: a goal of completely eliminating exposure to two members of the PFAS family. The new rules require all drinking water suppliers to monitor for the chemicals' presence, and the EPA estimates that as many as 10 percent of them may need to take action to remove them. While that will be costly, the health benefits are expected to exceed those costs.
Going low
PFAS are a collection of hydrocarbons where some of the hydrogen atoms have been swapped out for fluorine. This swap retains the water-repellant behavior of hydrocarbons while making the molecules highly resistant to breaking down through natural processes—hence the forever chemicals moniker. They're widely used in water-resistant clothing and non-stick cooking equipment and have found uses in firefighting foam. Their widespread use and disposal has allowed them to get into water supplies in many locations.
Starting today, home Internet and mobile broadband providers in the US are required to display consumer labels with information on prices, speeds, and data allowances.
"Today's nationwide launch of the Broadband Consumer Labels means internet service providers are now required to display consumer-friendly labels at the point of sale," the Federal Communications Commission said. "Labels are required for all standalone home or fixed Internet service or mobile broadband plans. Providers must display the label—not simply an icon or link to the label—in close proximity to an associated plan's advertisement."
The labels are required now for providers with at least 100,000 subscribers, while ISPs with fewer customers have until October 10, 2024, to comply. "If a provider is not displaying their labels or has posted inaccurate information about its fees or service plans, consumers can file a complaint with the FCC Consumer Complaint Center," an agency webpage says.
Honeybees are too valuable to go extinct. Not every species will be so fortunate.
One consequence of being a journalist since, oh, the 20th century, is that you accumulate a track record.
In the hundreds and hundreds of stories I’ve published over the last 25 years, some look eerily prescient (like this cover story from 2017 warning about a coming pandemic). Some are weird. (Did I really write a story in 2007 about bars in Tokyo where men dress up as English butlers to entertain female customers? Apparently.)
And then there are the stories that maybe haven’t aged all that well. Case in point: In 2013, I wrote a feature for Time magazine with the cover line: “A world without bees.”
The gist of it is that colony collapse disorder (CCD) — a still not fully understood syndrome that began killing honeybee colonies in large numbers beginning around the mid-2000s — was in danger of wiping out honeybees altogether in the US. And that in turn would mean catastrophe for the many crops that depend on honeybee pollination.
An advantage (or drawback) of being in journalism this long is that the predictions you made, say, 11 years ago, have time to play out. And as you may have noticed on your last visit to the supermarket, our agricultural system hasn’t collapsed.
Almonds — which are so dependent on commercial honeybee pollination that something like 42 billion bees are used during almond trees’ spring growing season — have seen their acreage more than double since 2007, when CCD was first identified. If honeybees were truly dying out, you wouldn’t see almond milk everywhere.
As the Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam wrote in a delightful column last week, the US may actually have more honeybees now than it ever has before. Data from the US Department of Agriculture’s extremely detailed Census of Agriculture indicates that there were, quite precisely, 3,800,015 honeybee colonies in the US in 2022.
That’s a startling 31 percent increase from 2007, and a larger increase than any other domesticated animals. Even chickens, which usually top these sorts of data tables.
So does that mean those who (ahem) predicted a possible “world without bees” were wrong? Yes. Does it mean that everything’s all good with Apis mellifera, better known as the Western honeybee?
Not quite, because honeybees are still dying in massive numbers. According to the most recent survey data, beekeepers lost 48.2 percent of their managed honeybee colonies between April 2022 and April 2023, chiefly due to infestations of Varroa mites and the viruses associated with them. That’s nearly 10 percentage points higher than the previous year.
So we have a situation where there are apparently more honeybee colonies than there have ever been but honeybees are still dying by the billions from CCD and assorted other threats. What gives?
A lot of the confusion, it turns out, stems from the difference between how we think about honeybees and how we actually use them.
Honeybees aren’t what you think
There’s a reason the USDA is in charge of counting up how many honeybee colonies there are in the US, and not, say, the Interior Department or the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s because honeybees aren’t a wild species — they’re essentially a farmed one.
Honeybees aren’t even native to North America — they’re colonists of a kind, first brought here by European settlers in the 17th century. And while a small number of them today are used to produce honey, the vast majority are effectively harnessed as biological machines to support specialized agriculture.
Consider the great spring almond pollination. Some 80 percent of the world’s almond supply comes from California’s Central Valley with trees that need honeybees for pollination. So every spring, beekeepers from around the US bring their colonies to California to carry out that lucrative pollination. And it’s lucrative: About $4 of every $5 spent on what the USDA calls “bee fertility assistance” goes to support the almond crop.
That, in part, is why bee colony numbers have kept growing even as the toll from CCD and other threats to honeybees have continued to mount. Simply put, honeybees are so valuable that even as they continue to die in large numbers, it’s economically viable to keep replacing them. (Another contributor, as the Post story points out, is that agriculture tax breaks make it valuable for more farmers to raise a small number of bee colonies on their land.)
Yet both chickens and honeybees are so valuable that it’s in farmers’ economic interest to more than replace what they lose, with the result that numbers keep going up. Which is not the same thing as saying that honeybees are doing all right.
“You wouldn’t be like, ‘Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!” Eliza Grames, a biologist at Binghamton University, told the Post. “It’s kind of the same thing with honeybees.”
Bees are what they’re worth
A lot of the coverage at the height of the beepocalypse fears — my story included — used the mass death of honeybees as a symbol of how human beings had pulled nature out of whack. But it’s not, mostly because there is nothing natural about the way we’ve used honeybees over the past few decades, just as there is nothing natural about a factory farming system that raises and kills nearly 10 billion chickens each year.
Capitalism, as it turns out, is really, really good at finding solutions to scarcity when enough money is on the line. The mid-2000s moment that CCD was first entering the public consciousness also marked the height of fears around “peak oil”: the idea that the world had entered a terminal decline in oil production, with cataclysmic results for the global economy. And there was reason to believe this was true: On January 2, 2008, oil hit $100 a barrel for the first time, while US oil production had been declining for decades.
Capitalism, though, finds a way. In part because oil had become so valuable, companies and governments invested in new technologies and new efforts to find unknown or previously untapped resources. Cut to today, when the world is producing more oil than it did during the peak days of “peak oil” and the US has become the single largest oil producer ever.
So we have honeybees and we have oil because that’s what the market demands. But the market doesn’t care about the condition of those billions of hard-working bees any more than it cares about the climate consequences of keeping the oil taps flowing, because it ultimately doesn’t care about that which cannot be priced. Unless we require it to.
Which is why the real beepocalypse isn’t found among those millions of managed honeybee colonies, but among the thousands of wild, native bee species, nearly half of which are in some danger of extinction. No commercial beekeepers are coming to their rescue.
We won’t have a world without honeybees anytime soon, but we may be headed toward a world where they are the only bees.
Enlarge (credit: Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Tesla has abandoned plans to develop an affordable electric Model 2, according to a report in Reuters. The news organization says it has reviewed company messages that say the affordable Model 2, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed would sell for $25,000 or less, has been axed.
Musk has been talking about an affordable Tesla Model 2 for some time now. An affordable mass-market EV was supposedly always key to the company's long-term "master plans," and in December 2023, he said the company was working on a "low-cost electric vehicle that will be made at very high volume." Then, this March, Musk told Tesla workers that the Model 2 would go into production at the company's factory in Berlin.
In light of this news, that statement certainly raises eyebrows—Reuters reports that one of its three unnamed sources told it that the decision to scrap the Model 2 was made in late February. Instead, Musk is allegedly "all in on robotaxi," Tesla's plan to create an autonomous driving system that could allow its cars to compete with Uber or Lyft without a driver in the equation.
Enlarge / This photo taken in August 2014 shows macaque monkeys in a country park in Hong Kong. (credit: Getty | Alex Ogle)
A 37-year-old man is fighting for his life in an intensive care unit in Hong Kong after being wounded by monkeys during a recent park visit and contracting a rare and deadly virus spread by primates.
The man, who was previously in good health, was wounded by wild macaque monkeys during a visit to Kam Shan Country Park in late February, according to local health officials. The park is well-known for its conservation of wild macaques and features an area that locals call "Monkey Hill" and describe as a macaque kingdom.
On March 21, he was admitted to the hospital with a fever and "decreased conscious level," health officials reported. As of Wednesday, April 3, he was in the ICU listed in critical condition. Officials reported the man's case Wednesday after testing of his cerebrospinal fluid revealed the presence of B virus.
Enlarge / Chicago City Wire is a hyper-partisan website masquerading as an outlet that does journalism. (credit: FT Montage)
The number of partisan news outlets in the US masquerading as legitimate journalism now equals genuine local newspaper sites, researchers say, as so-called pink slime operators gear up ahead of November’s presidential election.
Pink slime sites mimic local news providers but are highly partisan and tend to bury their deep ties to dark money, lobbying groups, and special interests.
NewsGuard, which rates the quality and trustworthiness of news sites, has identified 1,197 pink slime sites operating in the US as of April 1—about as many as the estimated 1,200 real news sites operated by daily local newspapers.
Melissa Mattola-Kiatos, RN, removes the pig kidney from its box to prepare for transplantation as part of Mass General’s historic pig kidney transplant surgery on March 16, 2024. | Massachusetts General Hospital
We eat pigs. Do we need them to process our urine too?
No one tells you, when you donate your kidney, that from that point on you’re a Kidney Guy.
When kidney things happen in the news, everyone you know will text you. When a friend of a friend is diagnosed with kidney failure, as about 136,000 Americans were in 2021, you’ll hear about it. When acquaintances are thinking about donating, you’ll get a call.
It’s been nearly eight years since I donated mine in 2016, and my Kidney Guy status has not faded.
The flurry of kidney texts started anew at the end of March when researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced that they had transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into a living human for the first time.
They weren’t the first to try something like this. In 2021, researchers at NYU conducted the first pig kidney (or “pigney”) donation to a brain-dead patient, finding that the transplant took and the kidney was producing urine, the way kidneys should. They also used a genetically engineered pig to reduce the odds that the human immune system would reject the organ. In 2023, the NYU team repeated the experiment and found that a pigney could last for over two months.
But the Mass General researchers went a step further when they transplanted a pigney into Rick Slayman, a 62-year-old Weymouth, Massachusetts, man who was very much alive. Slayman died about two months after the surgery; the hospital claims there was no indication the procedure contributed to his death.In any case, for two months he was producing urine through the piece of pork that some doctors put in him.
While routine pig kidney transplants are still a few years off, not least due to how the experiment with Slayman ended, it’s obviously good for people with kidney failure to have more options.
We shouldn’t let the news distract us, however, from an uncomfortable fact: Humans could, if we wanted to, end the kidney shortage right now without any assistance from our porcine friends.
Why pigneys are a game changer
The Mass General surgery was big news for one simple reason: Not enough humans are donating their kidneys.
While some 135,972 Americans were diagnosed in 2021 with end-stage renal disease, a condition that you need either dialysis or a transplant to survive, only 25,549 transplants took place that year. The remaining 110,000 people needed to rely on dialysis.
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful. Over 60 percent of patients who started traditional dialysis in 2017 were dead by 2022. Of patients diagnosed with kidney failure in 2017 who subsequently got a transplant from a living donor, only 13 percent were dead five years later.
Life on dialysis is also dreadful to experience. It usually requires thrice-weekly four-hour sessions sitting by a machine, having your blood processed. You can’t travel for any real length of time, since you have to be close to the machine. More critically, even part-time work is difficult because dialysis is physically extremely draining.
Pigneys are exciting because they represent the possibility of a world where dialysis is a relic, like iron lungs for polio.
There’s still a ways to go before this future is realized. Technically, pigneys aren’t even in the clinical trial stage — to date, experiments have been allowed under “compassionate use” rules, and those participating have either been already dead or without any other option for survival. Researchers will need years to conduct formal trials and evaluate the approach for safety and complications.
But these early indications are promising, and logistically, it would be feasible.
We can easily have farms breed 68,000 pigs a year, each giving its kidneys to two deserving human recipients as soon as they’re diagnosed with kidney failure. The US has 75 million pigs alive now for meat production; a few dozen thousand more for transplantation is a drop in the bucket.
Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Dialysis is a miraculous technology, but compared to transplants, it’s awful.
We shouldn’t need pigneys
But there’s something sad to me about the pigney moment, too.
Partly this is because I’m an animal lover who thinks there’s something wrong with killing pigs, which are intelligent animals capable of tasks like playing video games, for meat.
And while I argue there’s obviously less wrong with killing them to harvest lifesaving organs, it seems like a necessary evil at best. Maybe we’ll take one kidney each from the pigs and then send them off to live on a beautiful farm, but I have my doubts.
The bigger issue is that we should not have to rely on pigs at all.
There are more than enough human beings walking around with spare kidneys who could donate them to strangers in need. They simply choose not to.
Getting 136,000 human kidneys for transplant every year in the US is very possible.
We can make up part of the gap by collecting more organs from deceased patients. Organ procurement organizations, which distribute organs from dead people, have been very conservative about which organs they’ll use; federal agencies are now investigating them for fraud. There are likely thousands more organs we could be recovering every year by reforming these groups — but not enough to wipe out the kidney backlog.
We can’t rely on dead people, or pigs, to close the kidney gap in the near term. We need living people.
We could do more to encourage donations. Going through a nephrectomy is real work, and it deserves compensation. Many kidney donors have rallied behind a proposal to give a $10,000-a-year tax credit for every donor for five years, to make up for lost wages and other costs incurred due to donating. This would go a long way toward filling the shortage
But that kind of policy change will take time as well.
In the meantime, we could eliminate the backlog, this year, if a tiny share of adult Americans agreed to donate their kidney to someone who needs one. Not everyone is eligible, but far more than most people think are. Maybe a friend of yours could. Maybe a family member. Maybe you.
Enlarge / This cylindrical object, a few inches in size, fell through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home in Florida last month. (credit: Alejandro Otero on X)
A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero's home, and NASA is on the case.
In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.
Otero wasn't home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That's an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.
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