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Vox
5 days ago
- Science
- Vox
How the largest digital camera ever made is revolutionizing our view of space
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Ten areas in the sky were selected as 'deep fields' that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy. Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York's Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen. It was breathtaking. But it didn't compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its 'first light' — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame, a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen. Eye on the sky Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide an exceptionally clear window into space, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began construction in 2015 with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy. Named for the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation helped prove the existence of dark matter, the observatory was built to run a single, audacious experiment: the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. It will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights to tackle four grand goals: unmask dark matter and dark energy, inventory the Solar System's asteroids and comets, chart the Milky Way's formation, and capture every transient cosmic event. What makes Rubin so special is its eye, which is a marvel. At its core is a 27-foot-wide dual mirror cast from 51,900 pounds of molten glass that is still light enough to sweep across the sky in seconds. The mirror directs a flow of light from the cosmic depths to the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera, a 5-by-10-feet digital jumbotron that is the largest digital camera ever made. It's like a massive magnifying glass paired with the world's sharpest DSLR: Together they capture a swath of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons every 30 seconds. Related Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time And those images, which will be continuously shared with the world, are jaw-dropping. The headlining shot from Rubin's debut, nicknamed 'Cosmic Treasure Chest,' stitches together 1,185 exposures of the Virgo Cluster, our nearest major collection of galaxies, some 55 million light-years away. But the Rubin Observatory is about much more than producing pretty cosmic wallpaper. Its unprecedented scale gives it the ability to search for answers to grand questions about space science. The NSF notes that Rubin will gather more optical data in its first year than all previous ground telescopes combined, turning the messy, ever-changing sky into a searchable movie. Cosmic Treasure Chest. RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA It's not just pretty pictures As I've written before, the world has made great strides in planetary defense: Our ability to detect and eventually deflect asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. Rubin has already begun paying dividends toward that goal. In a mere 10 hours of engineering data, its detection software identified 2,104 brand-new asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects, heavenly bodies whose orbit will bring them near-ish our planet. That haul came from just a thumbnail-sized patch of sky; once Rubin begins its nightly scan of the whole Southern Hemisphere, it's projected to catalog over 5 million asteroids and roughly 100,000 NEOs over the next decade, tripling today's inventory. That will help NASA finally reach its congressionally mandated target of identifying 90 percent of the 25,000 city-killer-class NEOs (those over 140 meters) estimated to be out there. How powerful is Rubin's eye? 'It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids,' Jake Kurlander, a grad student astronomer at the University of Washington, told 'Rubin will double that number in less than a year.' Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA And the images that Rubin captures will go out to the entire world. Its Skyviewer app will allow anyone to zoom in and out of the corners of space that catch Rubin's eye, including celestial objects so new that most of them don't have names. Looking at the app gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the first human beings, gazing up at a sky filled with wonder and mystery. Finding perspective in a pixel It might seem strange to highlight a telescope at a moment when the world feels as if it is literally on fire. But the Vera Rubin Observatory isn't just a triumph of international scientific engineering, or an unparalleled window on the universe. It is the ultimate perspective provider. If you open the Virgo image and zoom all the way out, Earth's orbit would be smaller than a single pixel. Yet that same pixel is where thousands of engineers, coders, machinists, and scientists quietly spent a decade building an eye that can watch the rest of the universe breathe, and then share those images with all of their fellow humans. Seeing Rubin's images brought to mind the lines of Walt Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.' I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. On days when life on our little world feels chaotic, Rubin's first-light view offers a valuable reminder: We're just one tiny part in a tapestry of 10 million galaxies, looking up from our planet at the endless stars. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
22-06-2025
- Business
- Vox
The economic theory behind Trumpism
For more than half a century, the American right has preached the virtues of free markets and low taxes and deregulation. But a new wave of conservative thinkers are now arguing that Republicans have been wrong — or at the very least misguided — about the economy. This new economic thinking represents a break from what we've come to expect from the American right. Its proponents argue for a new strain of economic populism, one that departs from the GOP's past allegiance to big business and focuses instead on the working class. The question is, is it for real? Oren Cass is the founder of the think tank American Compass and the editor of a new book called The New Conservatives. He's also one of the most influential advocates of this conservative economic populism. Cass thinks the Republican Party has been too captive to corporate interests and market fundamentalism, and that conservatism needs a major reset, one that embraces American manufacturing and empowers workers. I invited him onto The Gray Area to talk about this new right-wing populism, what distinguishes it from the left, and whether the Republican Party is serious about adopting it. As always, there's much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Back in 2018, you wrote: 'Our political economy has relied upon the insidious metaphor of the economic pie, which measures success by the amount of GDP available to every American for consumption. … But the things America thought she wanted have not made her happy.' Let's start there: What did we think we wanted, and why hasn't it made us happy? You're very perceptive to start there. We were just putting together this new book called The New Conservatives, which is an anthology of everything we've been doing at American Compass over the last five years. And I actually went back and grabbed that essay and made it a prologue to the book. Because exactly as you said, it is a starting point for the way I think about a lot of this. In my mind, what we saw go wrong in our economics and our politics is that we did come to think of consumption as the end unto itself. And to be clear, I love consumption as much as the next guy. I'm not saying we should go back and live in log cabins, but I think we assumed that as long as we were increasing consumption, as long as material living standards were rising, everybody would be happy and we could declare success. And it's important to say that, from a formal perspective, that is in fact how our economic models operate. Economists will tell you their assumption is that the goal of the economic system is to maximize consumption. And so that's where that economic pie metaphor comes from. Something that was so widely embraced across the political spectrum, across the intellectual spectrum, was this idea that as long as you're growing the economy, you're growing GDP, you don't really have to worry too much about what's in the pie or where it's coming from. You can always then chop it up and make sure everybody has lots of pie. And I think it's important to say that — and this is the point, that we got what we thought we wanted — it's important to say that that worked. That for all of the problems we have in this country, if you're only looking at material living standards, if you're asking how much stuff people have, how big their houses are, whether they're air-conditioned, even how much health care they consume, at every socioeconomic level, consumption is up. We did that. And yet I think it's also very obvious that that did not achieve what we were trying to achieve, that [it] did not necessarily correspond to human flourishing, did not correspond to a strengthening economy over time, that it certainly did not correspond to strengthening families and communities. And ultimately, it didn't correspond to a strong and healthy political system or democracy. And so there's obviously a lot of talk of, Okay, well, why isn't that right? Why did it go wrong? What do you do about it? The strange thing for someone like me is that American conservatism, certainly in my lifetime, has largely existed to reinforce the ideology you're rejecting here. Why do you think the political right has been blind for so long to the things you're fighting for now? There's a very interesting pivot point that you see around the time of the Reagan revolution. The coalition that Reagan assembled had these different elements. It had the social conservatives, who I would say are most closely aligned to a fundamentally conservative outlook on a lot of these questions. But then it brought to that the very libertarian free-market folks on the economic side, and the quite aggressive interventionist foreign policy hawks. And what all these folks had in common was they really hated communism and really wanted to win the Cold War and saw that as the existential crisis. But what happened is, within that coalition, a very libertarian free-market mindset was then imposed on the economic policy of the right of center, even when that was very much in tension with a lot of other conservative values. And you saw people writing about that from both sides. From one side, Friedrich Hayek, who is one of the ultimate carriers of this pre-market ideology, has a very famous essay titled 'Why I Am Not a Conservative,' emphasizing that what he calls faith in markets to solve problems and self-regulate was very much at odds with how conservatives looked at the world. And from the flip side, you had a lot of conservatives, folks like Yuval Levin, who prefer markets as a way of ordering the economy to other options, but recognize that markets are very much in tension with other values like family and community. And in some cases, markets even actively can undermine or erode the strength of those other institutions. Markets are also dependent on institutions. If you want markets to work well, you actually need constraints. You need institutional supports. And so that tension was always present. I think that the coalition made a lot of sense in the context of winning the Cold War. It made a lot of sense when markets in the middle of the late 20th century really did seem to be delivering on a lot of the things that conservatives really cared about. But I think it reached its expiration date and just lived on by inertia into the 2000s, into this era of radical embrace of free trade even with communist China and cutting taxes even in the face of big deficits. I can imagine a skeptical leftist hearing all of this and thinking it's just a rebranded democratic socialism. Why is that wrong? What makes this conservative? There's a real disconnect both on the ends and on the means. I think there's a very healthy contestation over what are the appropriate ends that we're actually building toward. And what you're seeing conservatives coming back to articulating a set of actual value judgments about, what do we think the good life consists of? I think there is a set of value judgments and preferences for, in many respects, quite traditional formations at the family level, at the community level. [For] saying that it is not merely a value-neutral choice — 'Would you rather get married and have kids or spend more money on vacations in Greece?' — that it is actually appropriate and necessary for the good society to say, No, one of these things is better than the other and more important and should be valued more highly. At the national level, you're also seeing a much more robust nationalism on the right of center. Conservatives recognize the importance of the nation and solidarity within the nation to functioning markets, to a functioning society, in a way that at least the modern left tends to resist in a lot of cases. Part of the case you're making is that there's an ongoing paradigm shift within American conservatism. When you look at what this administration is doing on the policy front, when you look at what the Republican Party is doing, do you see them moving in your direction? We're definitely moving in the right direction. On tariffs alone, [we could] spend a tremendous amount of time emphasizing the ways I think the problems that they're addressing, the direction they're trying to go, is the right one. On the specifics of how things are timed and what the levels are and so forth, what legal authorities you use for what, I have all sorts of thoughts on how it might be done better. But broadly speaking, to your question about the direction that things are headed, I think it's extraordinarily clear to me that the Republican Party and the conservative movement are shifting quite dramatically in this direction. One way to look at that is in terms of personnel. Trump has obviously been something of a constant over the last decade in Republican politics, but the distance from Mike Pence to JD Vance is pretty dramatic. The distance from [Secretaries of State] Rex Tillerson to Marco Rubio is pretty dramatic. The distance from the various secretaries of labor in the first term to a secretary of labor recommended by the Teamsters is pretty dramatic. Is it really, though? Rhetorically, yes. But substantively? If you want to know why I can't take this iteration of the GOP seriously, look at the domestic policy they just passed in the House. It's the same Republican Party. It's jammed up with a bunch of stuff that reflects conventional conservative priorities. It's not doing a whole lot to help working-class people. It's more tax cuts offset by more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, which low-income people depend on. And the net result, as always, will be more upward redistribution of wealth. And on top of that, another $3 or $4 or $5 trillion tacked onto the deficit just for good measure. How can you look at that and feel like the GOP is genuinely pivoting in your direction? I've been extremely critical of the 'big, beautiful bill' — particularly of the deficit element — because I think if one is going to be a fiscal conservative, one has to not be adding to deficits right now. But a lot of the efforts to argue that things are not changing in the Republican Party strike me as a real disservice to people who are trying to understand where things are going. Elected political leaders are always going to be the lagging indicator of what's happening in any political party or political movement. They are by definition going to be the oldest, the ones who have been around the longest, the ones who have built their careers and ideologies and relationships around what was happening 20 or 30 years ago. And so if one wants to know what is passing in Congress today, then yes, you count the votes of the people in Congress today. If you want to know what's actually moving within a party or what's going to happen over a 10- or 15-year period, counting the votes today is just not what someone in good faith trying to understand the direction would do. The tariff regime, the trade war — that is a genuine shift. No doubt about it. It's not entirely clear to me how that helps poor and working-class people at the moment, but maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture. There's a very interesting economic debate to be had about whether it will work. I obviously have one very strong view. But it seems pretty clear to me that what they are trying to do is quite explicitly focused on the economic interests of workers. Another very interesting area — I mentioned some of the things that are going on on the labor front. One really interesting effort that's underway, and [Sen.] Josh Hawley is the leader of it, but Bernie Moreno, the new senator from Ohio, is the co-sponsor of it — they've taken the [proposed] PRO Act, which is the ultimate Democratic wish list of labor reforms, and they've chopped it up. And they've said, Look, some of these are perfectly legitimate and good ideas. Others of these we don't agree with. And we're going to start advancing the ones we think are good ideas. That's a dramatic shift in how you would see the Republican Party. I think you're seeing the same thing in the financial sector. There was a great example recently where a private equity firm that had bought out a bunch of paper plants was trying to shut down a paper plant in Ohio. And you literally had the Republican politicians out there at the rally with the union leaders, forcing a change and a commitment to at least keep the plant open for the rest of the year and try to find a transaction that would keep it open afterward. On family policy, in 2017 you had [then-Sens.] Marco Rubio and Mike Lee threatening to tank the entire tax cut bill to get an expanded child tax credit in it. Now it is an uncontroversial top priority that the child tax credit is not only kept at that level, but expanded further. And so even at the level of what is happening in legislation, it's clear that this is a very different party from 2017. If you look at who Trump has appointed, it's a very different set of appointments. If you look at the critical mass and sometimes center of gravity among the younger elected officials, the people coming into the Senate, it's a completely different set of priorities and policies from those who have been there for a long time. Like I said, I'm not convinced that the DNA of the party has changed, but I will grant that there are indications of a shift. I don't know what it's going to amount to, materially, but this is not the party of Mitt Romney. I think Trump has cultivated a very unique coalition, certainly much more working-class than the pre-Trump Republican Party. I don't know how much of that coalition is a function of Trump and how much of that coalition will fade when he fades. If the Republican Party does prove an unreliable vehicle for your movement, can you see a world in which you're working with Democrats? We do work with some Democrats. I think there are Democrats who are doing very good and interesting work. We recently had [Rep.] Jared Golden from Maine on the American Compass Podcast because he is the sponsor of the 10 percent global tariff legislation in Congress. One thing I always emphasize is that I think a healthy American politics is not one where one party gets everything right and dominates and the other one collapses into irrelevance. It's one where we actually have two healthy political parties that are both focused on the concerns and priorities of the typical American and are then contesting a lot of these very legitimate disagreements about ends and means. But based on what is happening in American politics today and the fundamental differences between conservatism and progressivism, I would expect that this is going to have the most success and salience and overlap in thinking on the right of center.
Vox
21-06-2025
- General
- Vox
5 reasons to be grateful for air conditioning
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. A You're Hot, Stay Cool sign with an AC unit and fan posted to a street light during a heat wave on 86th Street in Manhattan, New York. Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Lee Kuan Yew, the iron-willed founder of modern Singapore, was once asked what the most important invention of the 20th century was. He didn't say penicillin, which has saved over 500 million lives, or the nuclear bomb, which has shaped geopolitics like nothing before. He didn't even say TV! Instead, Lee had a simple two-word answer: 'Air conditioning.' Without air conditioning, Singapore, where temperatures regularly reach into the 90s with tropical humidity levels, would never have developed from a tiny city-state with a per-capita GDP that was a third of Western Europe's in 1960 to one of the most prosperous countries in the world. Air conditioning is as essential to the modern world as the internet itself. But like the internet, A/C gets a bad rap. Cooling already eats up 10 percent of global electricity, and demand from air conditioners is expected to triple by 2050 without tougher energy efficiency standards. Many units still use refrigerant gases that produce a planetary warming effect that is thousands of times that of a similar amount of CO2. Air conditioning is also a physical manifestation of the energy gap between the rich who can afford it, and the poor who must sweat. It has enabled the development of energy-intensive cities in places where humans just shouldn't live, like Phoenix. Fundamentally, A/C is seen by some as an unnecessary luxury, a prime example of a 'harmful habit of consumption,' as Pope Francis once put it. I get the point. It seems morally wrong for so many of us to use a device that contributes about 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — only so we can escape the effects of that warming. Related The air conditioning paradox But 'seems' is not the same as 'is.' Air conditioning has become far more than a luxury. So on this, the second day of summer, when the East Coast is about to be enveloped by a truly suffocating wave of heat and humidity, I offer five reasons why we should be grateful for air conditioning. It saves lives Heat isn't just uncomfortable. It's dangerous, killing more Americans in a typical year than any other form of extreme weather. Access to air conditioning can mean the difference between life and death. Seven hundred and thirty-nine people died in the great Chicago heat wave of 1995, but having a working air conditioner reduced the risk of death by 80 percent. Another study looked at cities in multiple countries between 1972 and 2009 and found that more air conditioning helped reduce excess heat deaths. As a 2021 review in the Lancet explained it, air conditioning 'is set to become the most prevalent strategy worldwide for coping with hot weather and heat extremes.' And while only about 8 percent of the 2.8 billion people living in the world's hottest regions have A/C at home, that's an argument for closing the A/C gap — not an argument against the very real value of air conditioning. It keeps us working If you struggle to concentrate when the heat and humidity is high, you're not alone. One study looked at office work and found that productivity begins to decline around 73 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, while at 86°F, performance falls by almost 9 percent. Another study found that every 1 degree increase in average classroom temperature over a school year corresponded to a roughly 1 percent loss in students' expected learning — but installing air conditioning eliminates about three-quarters of that effect. As temperatures continue to increase, the importance of air conditioning in schools and businesses will only grow. A 2016 working paper finds that widespread adoption of air conditioning — especially by the most productive plants — substantially offsets the heat-induced drop in US manufacturing output, making cooling a critical adaptation tool. It helps us sleep The more we learn about sleep, the more important it appears to be — and keeping cool is a key part of a decent night's sleep. Humans fall asleep fastest around 64–68°F, while temperatures above 75°F cause vital deep sleep and REM sleep to crater. A 2024 review of more than 50 lab and field studies found that bedroom cooling increased total sleep time 15 to 20 minutes and cut the total amount of time people spent awake after falling asleep by a third. It's given us everything from the movies to microchips Do you like going to the movie theater to catch a summer blockbuster? Well, you can thank air conditioning — before its invention, movie attendance always dropped during the hot summer months. It's no coincidence that the first public air conditioner was installed in a cinema, New York's Rivoli Theater, in 1925. But maybe you prefer to take in your movies in the comfort of your own home? Well, producing the microchips that go into your streaming TV or smartphone requires total precision in temperature control and humidity. In short: no A/C, no microchips. It lets millions live and travel where they want Look, my negative feelings about living in red-hot metros like Phoenix are a matter of public record. But I am clearly in the minority: Americans love to live in hot places. Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, added 1.2 million people between 2013 and 2023, more than any other county — and 96 percent of the new housing built to absorb those new residents comes with A/C. What US cities like Phoenix or Houston or Atlanta have in common with Singapore and Hong Kong is that none of them would exist as anything like they are today without the widespread use of air conditioning. Before A/C, the American South was mired in poverty, far behind the rest of the country. After A/C, the South more than caught up, and the otherwise uninhabitable Southwest became a magnet for people. If you think it's good that people can choose from a wider spectrum of places — and I do — A/C is one of the main reasons why that's possible. Air conditioning as it exists today is far from perfect. But it's also necessary, especially in an ever-warming world. What we need is not less air conditioning — unless you happen to work at an office where they keep the temperature at 60°F — but better air conditioning, with more efficient units powered by cleaner electricity. If you want to go without A/C, go right ahead (though I probably won't be visiting your house in the summer anytime soon). But either way, it should be a choice. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Vox
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Vox
The stunning reversal of humanity's oldest bias
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million the oldest, most pernicious form of human bias is that of men toward women. It often started at the moment of birth. In ancient Athens, at a public ceremony called the amphidromia, fathers would inspect a newborn and decide whether it would be part of the family, or be cast away. One often socially acceptable reason for abandoning the baby: It was a girl. Female infanticide has been distressingly common in many societies — and its practice is not just ancient history. In 1990, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen looked at birth ratios in Asia, North Africa, and China and calculated that more than 100 million women were essentially 'missing' — meaning that, based on the normal ratio of boys to girls at birth and the longevity of both genders, there was a huge missing number of girls who should have been born, but weren't. Sen's estimate came before the truly widespread adoption of ultrasound tests that could determine the sex of a fetus in utero — which actually made the problem worse, leading to a wave of sex-selective abortions. These were especially common in countries like India and China; the latter's one-child policy and old biases made families desperate for their one child to be a boy. The Economist has estimated that since 1980 alone, there have been approximately 50 million fewer girls born worldwide than would naturally be expected, which almost certainly means that roughly that nearly all of those girls were aborted for no other reason than their sex. The preference for boys was a bias that killed in mass numbers. But in one of the most important social shifts of our time, that bias is changing. In a great cover story earlier this month, The Economist reported that the number of annual excess male births has fallen from a peak of 1.7 million in 2000 to around 200,000, which puts it back within the biologically standard birth ratio of 105 boys for every 100 girls. Countries that once had highly skewed sex ratios — like South Korea, which saw almost 116 boys born for every 100 girls in 1990 — now have normal or near-normal ratios. Altogether, The Economist estimated that the decline in sex preference at birth in the past 25 years has saved the equivalent of 7 million girls. That's comparable to the number of lives saved by anti-smoking efforts in the US. So how, exactly, have we overcome a prejudice that seemed so embedded in human society? Related The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies Success in school and the workplace For one, we have relaxed discrimination against girls and women in other ways — in school and in the workplace. With fewer limits, girls are outperforming boys in the classroom. In the most recent international PISA tests, considered the gold standard for evaluating student performance around the world, 15-year-old girls beat their male counterparts in reading in 79 out of 81 participating countries or economies, while the historic male advantage in math scores has fallen to single digits. Girls are also dominating in higher education, with 113 female students at that level for every 100 male students. While women continue to earn less than men, the gender pay gap has been shrinking, and in a number of urban areas in the US, young women have actually been outearning young men. Government policies have helped accelerate that shift, in part because they have come to recognize the serious social problems that eventually result from decades of anti-girl discrimination. In countries like South Korea and China, which have long had some of the most skewed gender ratios at birth, governments have cracked down on technologies that enable sex-selective abortion. In India, where female infanticide and neglect have been particularly horrific, slogans like 'Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter' have helped change opinions. A changing preference The shift is being seen not just in birth sex ratios, but in opinion polls — and in the actions of would-be parents. Between 1983 and 2003, The Economist reported, the proportion of South Korean women who said it was 'necessary' to have a son fell from 48 percent to 6 percent, while nearly half of women now say they want daughters. In Japan, the shift has gone even further — as far back as 2002, 75 percent of couples who wanted only one child said they hoped for a daughter. In the US, which allows sex selection for couples doing in-vitro fertilization, there is growing evidence that would-be parents prefer girls, as do potential adoptive parents. While in the past, parents who had a girl first were more likely to keep trying to have children in an effort to have a boy, the opposite is now true — couples who have a girl first are less likely to keep trying. A more equal future There's still more progress to be made. In northwest of India, for instance, birth ratios that overly skew toward boys are still the norm. In regions of sub-Saharan Africa, birth sex ratios may be relatively normal, but post-birth discrimination in the form of poorer nutrition and worse medical care still lingers. And course, women around the world are still subject to unacceptable levels of violence and discrimination from men. And some of the reasons for this shift may not be as high-minded as we'd like to think. Boys around the world are struggling in the modern era. They increasingly underperform in education, are more likely to be involved in violent crime, and in general, are failing to launch into adulthood. In the US, 20 percent of American men between 25 and 34 still live with their parents, compared to 15 percent of similarly aged women. It also seems to be the case that at least some of the increasing preference for girls is rooted in sexist stereotypes. Parents around the world may now prefer girls partly because they see them as more likely to take care of them in their old age — meaning a different kind of bias against women, that they are more natural caretakers, may be paradoxically driving the decline in prejudice against girls at birth. But make no mistake — the decline of boy preference is a clear mark of social progress, one measured in millions of girls' lives saved. And maybe one Father's Day, not too long from now, we'll reach the point where daughters and sons are simply children: equally loved and equally welcomed.
Vox
07-06-2025
- Health
- Vox
We're secretly winning the war on cancer
is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox's Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. Thousands of people gather on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on September 26, 1998, to demand that the cause, the care, and the cure of cancer be made top research and healthcare priorities in the US. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images On November 4, 2003, a doctor gave Jon Gluck some of the worst news imaginable: He had cancer — one that later tests would reveal as multiple myeloma, a severe blood and bone marrow cancer. Jon was told he might have as little as 18 months to live. He was 38, a thriving magazine editor in New York with a 7-month-old daughter whose third birthday, he suddenly realized, he might never see. 'The moment after I was told I had cancer, I just said 'no, no, no,'' Jon told me in an interview just last week. 'This cannot be true.' Living in remission The fact that Jon is still here, talking to me in 2025, tells you that things didn't go the way the medical data would have predicted on that November morning. He has lived with his cancer, through waves of remission and recurrence, for more than 20 years, an experience he chronicles with grace and wit in his new book An Exercise in Uncertainty. That 7-month-old daughter is now in college. You could say Jon has beaten the odds, and he's well aware that chance played some role in his survival. ('Did you know that 'Glück' is German for 'luck'?' he writes in the book, noting his good fortune that a random spill on the ice is what sent him to the doctor in the first place, enabling them to catch his cancer early.) Cancer is still a terrible health threat, one that is responsible for 1 in 6 deaths around the world, killing nearly 10 million people a year globally and over 600,000 people a year in the US. But Jon's story and his survival demonstrate something that is too often missed: We've turned the tide in the war against cancer. The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago. That adds up to over 4 million fewer cancer deaths over that time period. Thanks to breakthroughs in treatments like autologous stem-cell harvesting and CAR-T therapy — breakthroughs Jon himself benefited from, often just in time — cancer isn't the death sentence it once was. Our World in Data Getting better all the time There's no doubt that just as the rise of smoking in the 20th century led to a major increase in cancer deaths, the equally sharp decline of tobacco use eventually led to a delayed decrease. Smoking is one of the most potent carcinogens in the world, and at the peak in the early 1960s, around 12 cigarettes were being sold per adult per day in the US. Take away the cigarettes and — after a delay of a couple of decades — lung cancer deaths drop in turn along with other non-cancer smoking-related deaths. But as Saloni Dattani wrote in a great piece earlier this year, even before the decline of smoking, death rates from non-lung cancers in the stomach and colon had begun to fall. Just as notably, death rates for childhood cancers — which for obvious reasons are not connected to smoking and tend to be caused by genetic mutations — have fallen significantly as well, declining sixfold since 1950. In the 1960s, for example, only around 10 percent of children diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia survived more than five years. Today it's more than 90 percent. And the five-year survival rate for all cancers has risen from 49 percent in the mid-1970s to 69 percent in 2019. We've made strikes against the toughest of cancers, like Jon's multiple myeloma. Around when Jon was diagnosed, the five-year survival rate was just 34 percent. Today it's as high as 62 percent, and more and more people like Jon are living for decades. 'There has been a revolution in cancer survival,' Jon told me. 'Some illnesses now have far more successful therapies than others, but the gains are real.' Three cancer revolutions The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn't happen by accident — it's the compound interest of three revolutions. While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people's cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. A study last year found that death rates of cervical cancer — which can be caused by HPV infections — in US women ages 20–39 had dropped 62 percent from 2012 to 2021, thanks largely to the spread of the vaccine. Other cancers have been linked to infections, and there is strong research indicating that vaccination can have positive effects on reducing cancer incidence. The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It's generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival, as Jon's own story shows. According to one study, incidences of late-stage colorectal cancer in Americans over 50 declined by a third between 2000 and 2010 in large part because rates of colonoscopies almost tripled in that same time period. And newer screening methods, often employing AI or using blood-based tests, could make preliminary screening simpler, less invasive and therefore more readily available. If 20th-century screening was about finding physical evidence of something wrong — the lump in the breast — 21st-century screening aims to find cancer before symptoms even arise. Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer, much of which can be tracked through Jon's own experience. From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people's lives — not just by months, but years. Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient's own T-cells into guided missiles. In a recent study of 97 patients with multiple myeloma, many of whom were facing hospice care, a third of those who received CAR-T therapy had no detectable cancer five years later. It was the kind of result that doctors rarely see. 'CAR-T is mind-blowing — very science-fiction futuristic,' Jon told me. He underwent his own course of treatment with it in mid-2023 and writes that the experience, which put his cancer into a remission he's still in, left him feeling 'physically and metaphysically new.' A welcome uncertainty While there are still more battles to be won in the war on cancer, and there are certain areas — like the rising rates of gastrointestinal cancers among younger people — where the story isn't getting better, the future of cancer treatment is improving. For cancer patients like Jon, that can mean a new challenge — enduring the essential uncertainty that comes with living under a disease that's controllable but which could always come back. But it sure beats the alternative. 'I've come to trust so completely in my doctors and in these new developments,' he said. 'I try to remain cautiously optimistic that my future will be much like the last 20 years.' And that's more than he or anyone else could have hoped for nearly 22 years ago. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
