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A crowd carrying a model of Iran’s first-ever hypersonic missile, Fattah, past a mosque during a gathering to celebrate the IRGC UAV and missile attack against Israel, in Tehran, Iran, on April 15, 2024 | Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images Israel launched strikes in response to Iran’s retaliatory attack. Here’s what we know. Israel carried out a strike against Iran on Friday but, for now, appears to have averted opening a dangerous new phase of the wider conflict in the Middle East. Israeli drones reportedly struck near the central city of Isfahan Friday morning in retaliation for Iran’s assault on Israeli territory last week. Iran’s attack, which involved more than 300 drones and missiles, was itself a response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus, Syria, that killed several members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), including Gen. Mohammed Reza Zahedi. The scale of Friday’s attack is still becoming clear; the Iranian regime reported that the offensive involved small swarms of drones, potentially launched from inside Iran, which targeted both Isfahan and the northern city of Tabriz. Israel, for its part, does not typically confirm military operations, but the US, Israel’s staunch ally, commented on the attack Friday, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisting that the US military was not involved. The tit-for-tat attacks risked major escalation between the regional adversaries amid the war in Gaza, in which more than 33,000 people have been killed since October, and in which ceasefire talks continue to stumble. That conflict has raised the temperature across the region, with Iraqi and Syrian militias attacking US military outposts in those countries and Yemeni Houthis attacking vessels and disrupting trade in the Red Sea. Iran and Israel have long engaged in rhetorical — and physical — back-and-forth. But the direct attacks of the past few weeks have been different: Not only did they come amid a period of high tensions due to the war with Hamas, but both sides showed a willingness to cross lines they’ve shied away from previously, raising the limit of what’s acceptable in their decades-long conflict. For now, Iran is downplaying the extent of the damage from the attack, and both Iran’s attack last weekend and Israel’s Friday seem to indicate a willingness to keep the scope of this particular exchange limited. However, there’s no clear offramp to ongoing tension, either, especially as ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel continue to stall out. A new phase in 40 years of hostilities Israel and Iran once had close economic and strategic ties; Iran imported Israeli arms and Israel bought Iranian oil prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Both countries also had close ties with the US and prioritized fighting the Soviet Union and the spread of communism as part of their foreign policy, according to the US Institute for Peace. The Islamic Revolution changed all that, since Shia hardliners saw Israel as an interloper in Muslim lands and the US as its enabler. Now, “Israel and Iran have been engaged in a multidimensional cold war against one another for a long time,” Ali Vaez, Iran program director at the International Crisis Group, told Vox in October. In recent years, there’s been an escalation in military operations, though more on the Israeli side than from Iran. “In the past few years, if you look at the covert operations Israel has conducted against Iran — and overt operations that it has conducted against Iranian personnel and assets in Syria — it really hasn’t [been] that much of a tit-for-tat,” Vaez said. Israel has waged cyberattacks against Iranian infrastructure, like the massive Stuxnet attack against Iran’s Natanz nuclear material enrichment facility and targeted assassinations of military commanders and nuclear scientists. Groups affiliated with and to some degree directed by Iran — mostly Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and militant groups in Syria and Iraq — have engaged with both Israel and the US over the years, with Hezbollah trading rocket fire with Israel over the southern Lebanese border and Syrian and Iraqi militias targeting US military installations in those countries. A new and different phase of hostilities began after the April 1 assassination of Zahedi and six other IRGC personnel in Damascus. Zahedi had been an important leader in the Quds Force, which oversees the Iranian military’s coordination with Hezbollah, Syrian and Iraqi militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. Israel has targeted high-level Iranian officials before, but this attack was on an Iranian diplomatic site in the Syrian capital, which is supposed to be protected territory. Iran launched its retaliatory attack last week, sending more than 300 drones and missiles toward sites in the Golan Heights and the Negev Desert, where a major Israeli air base and nuclear research facility are located. That attack failed to do significant damage — US and UK air defenses, as well as the Israeli missile defense system and Jordanian forces, took out the vast majority of the projectiles. But it was notable for its scale and directness. Vaez told Vox last week, “The Iranians concluded that the risk of not responding outweighed the risk of responding.” Hardliners within the Iranian government — a group Iran’s leaders are heavily dependent on amid weakening public support for the government — had publicly criticized the lack of response to multiple previous assassinations and escalatory actions attributed to Israel. With respect to Israel’s latest attack, however, it seems as though there’s no immediate response planned on Iran’s part. Iranian official sources refused to even pin the attacks on Israel in an interview with Reuters. What happens now? Iran cannot afford a full-on war with Israel and the US — and it certainly couldn’t win one. “From what I’ve seen, Israel was trying to send a message without escalating,” Jon Alterman, Middle East director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. “And the message was, ‘You might be able to throw 300 missiles and drones at Israel, but we can shoot them all down, and we can penetrate all your air defenses, including some of your most sophisticated ones — and there’s nothing you can do about it.’” But even if Iran doesn’t decide to retaliate and escalate, the overall bar for this conflict is now set higher. Cyberattacks and assassinations are no longer the status quo; drone attacks might be. “We’ve crossed the line of direct attacks on each other’s territory but not consequential attacks on each other’s territory,” Alterman said. The increase in hostilities also increases the risk of miscalculation and misinterpretation, especially since Iran doesn’t have diplomatic ties with Israel or the US; those conversations go through intermediaries such as Oman, Qatar, and Switzerland. Though the US has cautioned Israel that it would not engage in any response to last weekend’s attacks and has reportedly been insistent that any retaliation be measured and proportional, that’s different from using meaningful leverage to encourage Israel to de-escalate, Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US program at the International Crisis Group, said. “If the US is interested in de-escalating and preventing a wider war — which it has said since October — then it needs to factor in not just deterring adversaries, but reining in its partners.”

Former President Donald Trump appears in Manhattan criminal court on April 19 for jury selection in his hush-money trial. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. | Curtis Means/Getty Images Trump insists that his jurors can’t be impartial. Don’t believe him. As the Manhattan district attorney’s case against Donald Trump got underway this week — with the former president accused of falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments — one question has so far haunted the proceedings: Can the court actually select an impartial jury for one of the most polarizing figures in American history? Over the past week, the judge, prosecution, and defense have been interrogating prospective jurors, asking them things like where they get their news, and sifting through their social media accounts to see whether they’ve ever publicly expressed their views on Trump. Potential jurors have been asked to read out or explain posts or memes they’ve shared, and at least one was dismissed for sharing a post that included the words “lock him up,” in reference to Trump. But by Friday, 12 jurors, and several alternate jurors — who sit through the trial in case a regular juror needs to be replaced at some point — were picked. As the trial goes on, questions about these jurors’ impartiality will surely linger, because Trump and his allies have continued to attack the cases against him as a kind of political persecution — trials with predetermined outcomes. And juries have become his frequent target. Trump, for example, quoted the Fox News host Jesse Waters in a social media post, claiming, “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury.” That’s despite the fact that there’s a gag order that prohibits Trump from publicly talking about the jurors. It’s just one window into how Trump plans to delegitimize the cases brought against him. In fact, since he was indicted, Trump has been preemptively undermining the legitimacy of his potential jury, arguing that it will be impossible to get a fair trial in jurisdictions where residents vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. In a recent Truth Social post, he called Manhattan — where he received 12 percent of the vote in 2020 — “the 2nd Worst Venue in the Country.” “Don’t worry, we have the First Worst also, as the Witch Hunt continues!” Trump continued. “ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” (The First Worst venue, naturally, is Washington, DC, a favorite Trump target where only 5 percent of voters cast their ballots for him in the last presidential election.) Regardless of what the former president says, the demographics of New York or Washington, DC, won’t determine whether or not he will receive a fair trial. That will depend on how the prosecution makes its case, and whether the jurors will take their jobs seriously and evaluate the case on its merits rather than on their views of the defendant — something that juries are more than capable of doing. That’s why Trump’s disingenuous attacks on the jury are dangerous: not because he’s questioning their potential fairness (juries can indeed be unfair, and defendants have the right to point that out), but because he’s broadly deeming some Americans — that is, anyone who doesn’t support him — as inherently illegitimate jurors. Who are the jurors who will determine Trump’s fate? Just before the close of business on Thursday, the judge in the case announced that a jury had been chosen. Twelve jurors had been officially sworn in, and the judge signaled that both the prosecution and defense should have their opening remarks ready to go by Monday morning. In a normal criminal trial, potential jurors who might have read about the case or know key actors could be viewed as a liability, because media reports could influence how they think about the charges. But this isn’t a normal case, and a jury pool that hasn’t heard of Donald Trump is not likely to be found anywhere. Even if it somehow was, that would present its own problems: After all, would someone who doesn’t know much about the polarizing former president, or someone who’s entirely avoided the major news events of the past eight years, make for a good juror? Probably not. As Joshua Steinglass, one of the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecutors, put it during the selection process, “No one is suggesting that you can’t be a fair juror because you’ve heard of Mr. Trump. We don’t expect you to have been living under a rock for the last eight years.” Ultimately, just like any other case, the jury will have to focus on one thing: not their politics, but the laws in question. The 12 jurors on the trial come from a range of backgrounds. They include financiers, litigators, retirees, tech workers, and a physical therapist. Some are married; some aren’t. Some have kids; some don’t. Some expressed having strong feelings about Trump; others said the opposite. One juror, who said she’s not a political person, said that she likes that Trump “speaks his mind, and I’d rather that than someone who’s in office who you don’t know what they’re thinking.” Yet all 12 said they can still be fair and impartial, and pledged to be as much. It’s certainly reasonable to be concerned that people’s political preferences and biases might influence how they view this trial. Two jurors, for example, have already been removed after they had been seated. One of them said that her friends and family had guessed she was one of the jurors based on media reports on her background, and said, “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision-making in the courtroom.” The jurors’ ability to be fair and impartial will largely depend on how the judge manages the trial. Ensuring their anonymity, as the judge has, will go a long way in allowing jurors to ignore any outside influence. As Julie Blackman, a social psychologist who has worked as a jury consultant, put in an essay in the New York Times, “In my experience, well-instructed juries have shown time and again that they can put aside what they have learned outside the courtroom and focus on the evidence presented inside the courtroom.” The Supreme Court has also ruled that trials can indeed be fair, even if the case or defendant has received widespread publicity. It might seem like Trump is pushing that boundary given his unique status as the only former US president to go on trial, but he is no different than any other defendant — he is accused of breaking the law and he can’t bypass a trial simply because he’s too famous. That’s why the judge has to ensure that the jury is as fair and impartial as possible: Trump shouldn’t get any special treatment, no matter how much he rails against the judge, prosecutors, or jurors. Why Trump’s attacks on jury impartiality are dangerous Trump and some of his Republican colleagues have insisted that the juries in New York or Washington, DC — where his Jan. 6 case will be tried — are far too biased against him, and that a fair trial is impossible. In doing so, Trump is essentially saying that the public should ultimately dismiss whatever verdict is delivered, just as he expected the public to dismiss the results of the 2020 election in jurisdictions he didn’t like, such as Atlanta, Philadelphia, or Detroit. Even if he is found guilty, he wants people to believe there is no way the trial will be fair (even though his lawyers played a role in selecting the jury). Trump’s accusation doesn’t just undermine his own trial’s legitimacy. It undermines a bedrock element of America’s justice system — that when someone is accused of breaking the law, they will be judged by a jury of their peers. By saying that certain jurisdictions, let alone his hometown, can’t be fair, the former president suggests that only some Americans can be legitimate jurors. That idea that some jurors are ill-suited for the task based on their background or where they live has racist roots that have long plagued the justice system and produced discriminatory outcomes. When Louisiana was barred from excluding Black people from its juries, it created a law in 1898 that intentionally undermined the legitimacy of Black jurors, specifically allowing nine white jurors to deliver a guilty verdict even if three Black jurors voted to acquit the defendant. It wasn’t until 2022 that the Supreme Court in Oregon, which had a similar law, ruled that any of the state’s prisoners who had received a non-unanimous verdict had invalid convictions. In Louisiana’s case, however, despite voters abolishing non-unanimous juries in 2018, the state’s supreme court maintained that all previous convictions would remain valid. While Trump hasn’t said that he won’t receive a fair trial because of the racial makeup of the jury, the jurisdictions he complains about are much more racially diverse than places his lawyers have suggested that he could receive a fair trial (like West Virginia, for example). Even if Trump’s attacks on the juries are strictly based on partisan lines, the criminal legal system does not rely on a defendant’s or jurors’ personal politics to mete out justice, despite what Trump says. Ultimately, it all boils down to one simple fact. “This case,” Steinglass said, “is about whether this man broke the law.” And that’s now for the jury to decide.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is facing a tenuous balancing act over Ukraine aid. | Bloomberg/Getty Images The House could soon pass Ukraine aid — along with a TikTok bill — in a new package that’s raised GOP ire. House Speaker Mike Johnson could be facing the most perilous threat to his leadership yet as Congress votes on a Ukraine aid package this weekend. Johnson has staunchly backed the decision to send more aid to Ukraine and endorsed a floor vote on the funding, which will take place on Saturday. That stance has infuriated far-right members like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has vocally opposed the provision of such funds. Greene’s dissent over Ukraine — along with conservative members’ dismay over bipartisan government funding deals — has prompted her to issue an open threat to Johnson’s job. “Mike Johnson is not working for Republicans, he’s not helping Republicans, he’s not even listening to Republicans. Mike Johnson is doing the Deep State’s dirty work,” Greene said in an X statement earlier this month. “We need a new Speaker of the House!” Mike Johnson is not working for Republicans, he’s not helping Republicans, he’s not even listening to Republicans.Mike Johnson is doing the Deep State’s dirty work.We need a new Speaker of the House!Watch my full segment on Steve Bannon’s War Room. pic.twitter.com/q5ac2OfIGg— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) April 2, 2024 Johnson’s fate isn’t sealed just yet: Greene hasn’t indicated whether she’ll trigger her motion to remove him. And just two other Republican members — Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) — have backed her so far. Other House Republicans appear wary of sparking a second battle over the speakership after last year’s left the House at a standstill. Plus, Johnson still has former President Donald Trump’s approval, which could help provide some insulation. Even if Greene attempts to depose him, some Democrats have suggested they’d step in to save him. Still, the fact that the threat is hanging over these proceedings underscores the competing pressures Johnson is fielding, ongoing GOP fracturing, and the dysfunction that’s plagued Republicans’ tenure in the majority. In practice, that’s meant they haven’t been able to get much done, even compared to prior Congresses with similar party breakdowns — leaving them with few achievements as they attempt to retain their hold on the House in November’s elections. It’s also meant that Ukraine aid, which could have a major impact on the country’s defenses against Russia, has been hanging in the balance. The far right is furious about Ukraine aid The new aid package includes roughly $60 billion for Ukraine, $26.5 billion for Israel, and $8.1 billion for countries in the Indo-Pacific. It also contains legislation some Republicans have supported related to Ukraine, including a bill that would allow the US to transfer Russian assets it’s seized. And it includes a bill that would ban TikTok if its China-based parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it. Though the package has garnered significant Republican pushback, it’s expected to pass the House with significant Democratic support. The Senate is then likely to approve it and send it to Biden, who has said he’ll sign it. Johnson has stood by the decision to advance Ukraine aid despite the outcry he’s faced from his right flank. In remarks this week, he emphasized that such support is needed to hold off Russia’s advances and to prevent that country from attempting further attacks in other parts of Europe. “This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different. But I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing,” Johnson said at a press conference. “I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland, or one of our NATO allies. His position has spurred a renewed wave of anger from far-right members, who’ve called for funds to be used domestically, at the southern border, instead. That opposition echoes isolationist stances held by former President Donald Trump, who’s similarly cautioned against more Ukraine funding given the national debt and an “America First” mentality. As of mid-January, the US has provided roughly $74 billion to Ukraine in security assistance, weapons, and humanitarian support. Republican pushback to such aid has only grown in the past few months: In May 2022, 57 House Republicans voted against an aid package for Ukraine. In September 2023, 117 did the same. “It’s absurd that overnighting more tax dollars to Ukraine is even a consideration. It should be totally off the table and replaced with a push for peace talks,” Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) told Fox News in April. Johnson has acknowledged these concerns and will hold individual House votes this weekend on both aid to Ukraine and aid to Israel in order to allow GOP members to express their opposition. Some changes to the Ukraine aid bill, including the decision to make $9 billion of the funds forgivable loans, were also made in response to Republican gripes. Despite these concessions, certain members on the right still aren’t pleased. “We need a speaker who puts America first rather than bending to the reckless demands of the warmongers, neocons and the military industrial complex making billions from a costly and endless war half a world away,” said Gosar in a statement regarding his reasons for a supporting a motion to vacate against Johnson. Their views aren’t indicative of the entire conference, however. Multiple centrist Republican leaders have stressed the importance of backing Ukraine as Russia’s invasion continues into its third year. “I am hopeful that the speaker will put the bill on the floor … so that we can once and for all ensure that our allies have the aid and support that they need,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) said in a CNN interview. Conservative dysfunction has real consequences The conflict over Ukraine aid and threats about Johnson’s leadership are just the latest chapter in Republican drama this term. Internal clashes — like the one that cost Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, his job — have impeded their ability to make progress on their priorities and Congress’s ability to govern. When they took power after the 2022 midterms, House Republicans had big plans on everything from bringing state-level battles over schools to the national stage to lowering the cost of prescription drugs. They made virtually no progress on any of those goals. And when it comes to must-pass legislation, far-right pushback on the debt ceiling, for example, pushed lawmakers down to the wire to get it done, rattling markets and leading to a downgrade of the country’s credit rating. In the case of Ukraine aid, Republican infighting has already delayed funds, a hold-up that’s contributed to supply shortages and potential losses on the battlefield. The delay of and uncertainty about this aid has also made it tougher for the US to coordinate with its allies when it comes to a cohesive strategy to support Ukraine, writes Dan Baer, a senior vice president of policy research at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. If Congress were unable to provide more aid, that could have even more serious consequences for the war, emboldening Russia and hurting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. According to Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Ukraine could face shortages of ammunition if US aid were to stall, likely increasing the casualties it experiences. And in the long term, the absence of this aid could have a decisive impact on its ability to fend off Russia completely. “Make no mistake: without US aid, Ukraine is likely to lose the war,” Boot writes. Update, April 19, 3:45 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 9 and has been updated to include information about a House floor vote.

Taylor Swift performs during the Eras tour at the National Stadium in Singapore on March 2, 2024. | Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management The Tortured Poets Department sees Swift tormented by her boyfriends, her haters, and even her fans. Taylor Swift has spent the past two years on top of the world. Her worldwide Eras tour is the highest-grossing music tour of all time. It’s made her a billionaire. Her 2022 album, Midnights, won Album of the Year at the Grammys, making Swift the solo artist with the most wins of all time in that category. Her high-profile romance with football star Travis Kelce has delighted her fans while keeping her in the spotlight. She’s defeated all her haters; her fans are legion; practically everyone admits, now, that she’s very good at the job of being a pop star. Right now, Taylor Swift exists at a pinnacle of fame and success that few can ever even dream of reaching. Yet Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, leaves listeners with the distinct impression that Swift is not entirely content with her current high status. The album suggests nothing so much as Swift chafing furiously against the limits of the image that’s taken her so far — and even, perhaps, her beloved fanbase. Decoding the storyline of The Tortured Poets Department The Tortured Poets Department sees its central character reeling from two breakups: one with a long-term lover whose depression has begun to drag the narrator down (“So Long, London”), and one a brief fling with a tortured bad boy who no one seems to approve of (“Fortnight”). As the album goes on, the narrator veers between teenage infatuation with her new bad boy (“Down Bad”), resentment with everyone who tells her they shouldn’t be together (“But Daddy I Love Him”), the slow, grudging realization that perhaps there are some problems with the relationship (“I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”), and fury when he eventually leaves her (“The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”). The narrator’s despair over her love for the lost depressed boyfriend threads its way through the whole album (“loml,” “The Black Dog”). Sometimes, imagery associated with him ends up in a song about the bad boy (“Fresh out the Slammer,” which ends on an ambivalent line about “imaginary rings”), like an intrusive thought. At times, her heartbreak over both breakups is so intertwined it becomes impossible to tell who, exactly, she’s singing about (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”). Albums aren’t autobiographies, but Swift tends to play with the blurry line between song and fact, and that tendency is on full display here. Famously, she writes songs about her real life and encourages her fans to make connections between her lyrics and her biography. Here, the depressed ex-boyfriend lines up with actor Joe Alwyn, who Swift dated for six years, and the tortured bad boy seems to mirror 1975 frontman Matt Healy, who Swift dated for a controversial few weeks shortly after her breakup with Alwyn. It’s the controversy that gets particular airtime in The Tortured Poets Department. The very brief but very controversial story of Taylor Swift and Matt Healy In terms of public image, edgelord Healy was always an odd match for good girl Swift. He’s the kind of provocateur who comments on the far right by doing ironic Nazi salutes onstage, while Swift apparently has to fight her team to make any political statement at all, provocative or otherwise. In February 2023, before news of their relationship broke, Healy appeared on a podcast where he laughed through a series of racist jokes from the host and cracked one of his own about watching violent, racist, and misogynistic porn. Swift’s fans were outraged. They launched a hashtag, #SpeakUpNow, under which they begged her to break up with Healy and not to tarnish her name and her brand by associating with someone who would make such racist jokes. How, they demanded, could she show such poor judgment? How could she use her platform to elevate someone who has said and done such hurtful things? Was she simply lashing out after her breakup with Alwyn? What was she thinking? In The Tortured Poets Department, Swift suggests that she did not particularly care for the outrage or the concern about her dating choices. “I’ll tell you something about my good name,” she sings in “But Daddy I Love Him:” It’s mine alone to disgrace I don’t cater to all these vipers dressed in empath’s clothing God save the most judgmental creeps who say they want what’s best for meSanctimoniously performing soliloquies I’ll never seeThinking it can change the beat of my heart when he touches meAnd counteract the chemistry and undo the destiny There’s a certain layer of irony to the lyrics here. This is the section of the album in which the narrator is feeling particularly defensive about her relationship with her tortured poet, and the tongue-in-cheek song title and over-the-top hysterics of the chorus suggest that she shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously. In later songs, the narrator will conclude that her tortured poet was bad news after all — that he is “the smallest man who ever lived” and that her desire for him stemmed from self-destructive urges. Still, at no point does the narrator suggest that all the people who warned her about her boyfriend were correct, or that she’s glad they spoke up, or that she feels she should have listened to them, or that she shouldn’t have taken the brand hit for dating him. By the end of the album, she still seems fairly annoyed with the people who thought they got a say in her love life, even if they think they want what’s best for her. What happens if Taylor Swift decides she’s tired of being her fans’ best friend? Swift built a not-insignificant amount of her fame on bringing her fans into the story of her romantic choices. Her most potent artistic weapon is her ability to write lyrics about her own life that read as totally vulnerable and totally honest. Then she seeds Easter eggs into the liner notes, inviting her fans to match the heartbreak of each song with a real-life ex. She invites her fans over to her house for homemade cookies and secret album-listening sessions. She sends them Christmas packages. Swift’s star image is built around the trope of the best friend, the girl who lives next door to you and tells you everything about her life. In The Tortured Poets Department, it’s starting to sound as though Swift is not completely satisfied with living out that image anymore. She resents that her fans begged her to dump her boyfriend. She resents that dating a bad boy put unsustainable stress on her good girl image. She seems to resent, to a certain degree, that she feels compelled to keep existing at the pinnacle of pop perfection she has finally achieved. “I’m miserable, and no one even knows!” she crows in a spoken interlude at the end of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” the song where she brags about being able to smile her way successfully through the Eras tour while dealing with her breakups. As the song fades out, she adds, “Try and come for my job,” with an exhausted sigh. Swift seems proud of reaching the top of the world, but all the same, she doesn’t exactly seem to be enjoying her time there. Throughout Poets, she ruminates obsessively on the past. The surprise second half of the album features songs about that old Kim and Kanye feud (“Cassandra”) and even Swift’s middle school bully (“thanK you aIMee”) (unless that’s just Kim Kardashian again — see those capital letters?). In “The Manuscript,” she goes back over a tortured affair she had in her 20s with an older man (referring plausibly to either Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer or both) and realizes, with a sweet wonder, that turning the story into art can redeem it. “Looking backwards might be the only way to move forward,” she sings. Sure, but if Swift keeps looking backward at her old betrayals, when does the moving forward part start? There are other signs that Swift might feel stuck. Sonically, Poets does not move significantly forward from the dreamy synth pop of Lover and Midnights, with Swift’s primary collaborator Jack Antonoff going back once again to the sound he developed for Lana Del Ray’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019. Swift used to make a point of developing a new sound with different albums, but Poets is treading the same musical ground she’s been exploring for a while. Swift’s clothes, too, have been static lately, although she used to switch up her looks dramatically as she moved between album eras. The Cut’s fashion critic Cathy Horyn recently described Swift’s style as “self-conscious” and suggested that the many vocal critics of Swift’s fashion choices are “probably bored” with her college-girl-next-door outfits, which are beginning to come off as a little disingenuous on 34-year-old Swift. “It’s worth remembering that Taylor Swift has always been older and wiser than her years,” Horyn noted. “The girl can’t be discovering herself forever.” Swift has discovered herself and rediscovered herself in tones of girlish wonder in albums for over 20 years now. She’s taken that girl-next-door image as far as she can take it, farther than almost anyone ever has before, to the very tip top of where mainstream pop can carry her. She capped that portion of her career off with the Eras tour, and now, it seems as though she’s in search of something new. When Swift won that record-setting Grammy for Album of the Year in February, she said something unusual in her speech. Historically, Swift has made no secret of how much award recognition means to her and how much she craves it. This time, however, she suggested she was ready to move past that desire. “I would love to tell you that this is the best moment of my life,” Swift said, “but I feel this happy when I finish a song or when I crack the code to a bridge that I love or when I’m shotlisting a music video or when I’m rehearsing with my dancers or my band or getting ready to go to Tokyo to play a show. For me, the award is the work.” One way to think about The Tortured Poets Department is as an announcement that Swift is no longer so interested in the people-pleasing, high-achieving, best-friend image she has spent her whole career thus far perfecting. In which case, the big question becomes: What next?

Plastic covers the exterior of the fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX on January 7, 2024, in Portland, Oregon.  | Getty Images Noticing more problems with Boeing planes doesn’t mean there are actually more problems with aviation safety. Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of bad things keep happening to Boeing airplanes lately? Ever since the shocking January 5 incident in which a door plug fell out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 in midair, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the plane, many fliers have been jumpy. Their fears have been fueled by news sites that have been serving up incident after incident: a Boeing 737 Max 8 sliding off the runway in Houston, another 737 in Houston making an emergency return after flames were spotted spewing out of an engine, yet another in Newark reporting stuck rudder pedals, a Boeing 777 losing a tire shortly after takeoff from San Francisco, a 777 making an emergency landing in Los Angeles with a suspected mechanical issue. And so on and so on. So what’s actually happening? Are more planes having incidents than ever before? Or are we just hearing about more incidents? It’s mostly the latter. Minor aviation incidents with few or no injuries — like those listed above — happen constantly. They just don’t make the news. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which investigates aviation incidents and accidents, lists 12 incidents on commercial aircraft in the United States so far this year. Last year, during the same time period, there were 13 such incidents. From 2010 to 2023, there were on average 36 incidents a year. We’re about a third of the way through the year, so we’re having a more or less totally mundane year, as far as the rate of incidents serious enough to warrant an NTSB investigation goes. For journalists, is the customer always right? So things aren’t going wrong on planes at an unusual rate — you’re hearing about it at an unusual rate because, ever since the January incident, journalists are paying much more attention and writing stories about relatively minor plane incidents, and people are nervous about planes and are eager to read stories about such incidents. Various minor issues, from engine trouble to maintenance issues, were always happening under the radar but weren’t newsworthy; now, the same incidents are news, especially if they happen on a Boeing (and given that almost half of the US commercial fleet is made by Boeing, they often do). Here’s the question I struggle with as a journalist: Do we have some responsibility not to write such stories? Journalists take accuracy very seriously. Every journalist I know works very hard not to publish a story that’s wrong — and if they did, they’d feel obliged to issue a correction. But it’s much less clear what our obligations are with stories that are completely true, and about a subject readers want to read about, but that paint for those readers a misleading picture of the world. I think most people would agree it would be unethical to systematically report only on lurid crimes committed by one racial group and ignore those same crimes when the perpetrator is of a different background, or to report the evidence for a claim and not bother reporting the similarly credible evidence that it’s false. But journalism intrinsically involves judgments about what is newsworthy. Do minor incidents become newsworthy simply because we’re all on the lookout for major ones? Is it reasonable to expect everyone to wait months until the data is in on whether there’s a trend, when readers want information sooner than that — and will reward media sites that provide it? I tend to think that journalists (and, for that matter, all people) have a duty not just to tell the truth but to provide enough context with the truth that readers overall come away more informed, not less informed. And I think that a sudden surge in reporting on minor airplane incidents can paradoxically end up leaving readers less informed. Their misconceptions aren’t free of consequences, either — when people choose to drive instead of fly because they fear flying, they are probably more likely to die. So I think that, ideally, coverage would steer away from writing about routine, boring aviation events — or would at least give readers context on how routine and boring these events are. An accurate aviation story “Three million people flew in and out of US airports today, and none of them died except of natural causes” isn’t a conventional news story, but it’s factual — and worth keeping in mind. Planes sometimes lose a tire and still land safely with no injuries. They sometimes get a puzzling computer warning and have to land at the nearest airport — safely. An engine goes out sometimes, and the plane still lands — safely. Every once in a while, you have an incident like the one last December in which two American Airlines airplanes had emergencies over Phoenix at the exact same time, one suffering a failure of its flaps system and one a problem with its engine — and everyone involved arrives safely, with no injuries. And while the January door plug incident revealed some genuine and glaring failures in processes at Boeing, it’s really hard to overstate how safe aviation is. In all of the incidents involving regularly scheduled US commercial aircraft over the 15 years from 2010 to 2024, there have been two passenger fatalities — in about 8.75 trillion revenue passenger miles. That’s a safety record of about one or two passenger fatalities per light-year traveled. There are plenty of stories to be reported about the state of the US aviation industry: how it got that breathtaking safety record, whether Boeing is now endangering it (as my colleague Whizy Kim wrote this week), and whether we’ve learned the lessons of previous eras when shoddy maintenance practices and cost-cutting really did bring down planes regularly in the US. But writers should stop writing — and you should stop clicking — stories about minor things going wrong on individual 737s. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour in Singapore. | Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management The Tortured Poets Department and the broken way we talk about pop music. Taylor Swift has always been a pop culture Rorschach test. Every song Swift releases, every single she performs or awards show she attends, every candid photo of her is up for everyone’s interpretation. What people see depends on how they feel about her. To some, she’s a ruthless capitalist who crisscrosses the Earth on her private jet, yells at her sweet professional football player boyfriend, and doesn’t have the integrity to take a side in the upcoming election. Plus, she might have ignored Celine Dion at the Grammys. To others, she’s the greatest songwriter of her generation, a feminist who isn’t afraid to be successful or even misunderstood — because everything she does is for her fans. Extreme interpretations could never fully capture the totality of Taylor Swift, but they offer a portrait of her gravitational pull on pop culture. The clearest thing about Taylor Swift is that no one can stop talking about her, and that when it comes to the pop star, it’s impossible to remain neutral. Ahead of her album release — The Tortured Poets Department on April 19 — Swift has become exceptionally famous, and in doing so she has maybe broken all of us. She’s always been successful and thrived in the spotlight, but over the last few years she’s seemingly achieved a rare level of celebrity that makes her and the attention swirling around her feel inescapable, even for Swift. “Whatever’s happening and whatever she’s doing, it’s working. Her persona and cultural dominance feel more saturated than ever,” DJ Louie XIV, a fan of Swift and host of the podcast Pop Pantheon, told me. Louie has adored the star since 2008’s Fearless but says he could do without the constant debates surrounding her. “As the biggest star of the moment, it can feel like Taylor Swift devours 80 percent of our entire pop cultural discourse. But there’s also an element of that dominance that is not even necessarily her fault,” he added. It’s impossible to avoid everyone’s feelings, ideas, criticisms against and adoration for her, and even more difficult to remain impartial on Swift. Like a Rorschach, some of that’s by design. But some of it is a peek into how efficient social media has become at crushing any kind of nuance. Taylor Swift has become inevitable What makes being Switzerland on Swift so difficult is that the discourse that follows her — her fans and her critics fighting with each other — is omnipresent. After releasing three new albums in as many years (Tortured Poets will be four since 2020) she embarked on the record-setting worldwide Eras stadium tour, created a box office smash movie about said tour, and found the time to announce that she would be directing her first feature film. She also started dating professional NFL player Travis Kelce and went on to attend not just a handful of his games but also his Super Bowl win. Amid all these events, Gannett, which publishes USA Today, announced that it was hiring a Taylor Swift reporter to keep up with everything Swift. Because she’s so famous, Swift pulls focus. These things that she does become less about the things themselves and more about Swift. A Variety feature like Directors on Directors is usually inside baseball for film dorks, but when Swift talks to The Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh about the short film for her song “All Too Well,” it becomes another part of Swiftie lore. Now when she attends an awards show, she isn’t just a guest but the guest, with the camera frequently cutting to her as she dances and gasps in the audience. Ahead of this past year’s Grammys, Swift and her team changed the profile photo on her Instagram account, sending the public into a frenzy trying to decipher the meaning. That meaning was revealed during her Album of the Year acceptance speech, when she announced Tortured Poets. Ethan Miller/Getty Images Taylor Swift and her friends went to a football game and became one of the biggest stories of the Super Bowl. This focus-pulling phenomenon became almost painfully clear when she started going to Kelce’s football games. Her week-to-week attendance at America’s most favorite televised sport became a story on its own, which devolved into male fans chastising networks’ decisions to devote (even minimal) camera time to her. Unfortunately, some critiques dipped into misogyny. At the same time, her attendance at games upped the ratings and brought new fans, primarily women, to the NFL. Swift-Kelce became such big news that former President Donald Trump weighed in on their relationship. Swift’s impact on the NFL is just a microcosm of the Taylor Swift effect. Even if you don’t have a direct opinion on Taylor Swift or her music, a conversation about sports or movies eventually becomes directly about her. Why people react to Taylor Swift the way they do The polarized reaction Taylor Swift creates among her critics and devoted fans isn’t accidental. Like other ultra-successful pop stars — Madonna, Beyoncé, Britney Spears — Swift has created a persona that people respond passionately to. Swift’s persona has always been one of all-American relatability and perceived accessibility. Primarily, Taylor Swift has always publicly positioned herself as a good friend. The 1989 album and tour, Instagram posts about her famed Fourth of July parties, paparazzi shots, and awards show cutaways entirely devoted to Swift’s friends, including Selena Gomez, Gigi Hadid, and Blake Lively. She’s a bestie who just so happens to be the biggest pop star in the world. Adding to that lore, Swift’s songs are peppered with Easter eggs, inside jokes, and tidbits that only fans who truly know her — her best friends — would understand. If you really know her music, you really know who Swift is and her friendship seems as obtainable as it is fantastically desirable. Swift has also long presented herself as the industry’s underdog. This part of her persona goes back to the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye interrupted her speech to tell her that she did not in fact have the best video of the year. It continued with her response to the jokes made at her expense and the lazy reductionist reviews of her music being about the men she’s dated. There have also been moments where Swift has spoken up and addressed concerns like sexual harassment, artists getting paid for their music, and the music business’s misogyny in which men (Kanye West specifically, Scooter Braun obliquely) try to undercut women’s success. That message trickled down to her fans, who are quick to point out when they feel like she’s been slighted, particularly by men. People want to protect underdogs. Friends want to defend their friends. The thing about these personas is that in order to be successful, they need something to push back against. You can’t be friends with everyone. You can’t be an underdog if no one is dragging you down. Swift’s personas need criticism as much as they need loyalty. Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Taylor Swift’s genius is the ability to be supernaturally relatable and give her fans a sense of what friendship with her would be like. Can one like Swift’s music but not the Easter egg accouterments that accompany every album? Is it possible to like the positive things Swift inspires in young girls but not like her music? Can you be annoyed at the conversation that surrounds Swift but actually like her as an artist? Is it possible to like none of it but keep that fact to yourself? Maybe once upon a time it was. But on social media, where stan culture dominates the conversation, all different types of Swift criticism and praise get flattened into very simple and caustic pro or anti arguments. “There are so many people out there participating in the discourse where anything less than sheer adoration is grounds for an attack,” pop culture expert DJ Louie told me. “How are we supposed to have any sort of nuanced, critical discourse about any of this? Taylor and Beyoncé and all pop stars are all worthy of praise and criticism — we should want that to exist in our culture. But I feel like we’re just getting into a situation right now where it’s nearly impossible to have any sort of nuanced cultural debate.” To that point, a Reddit forum called SwiftlyNetural exists where fans and critics are encouraged to voice their opinions but keep the conversation civil and respectful. There, criticism isn’t seen as an attack and praise isn’t the only belief. One can also find discussions about the aesthetics of her new album and the changes in her musicality. Perhaps the silliest thing about all this chatter is that it doesn’t affect Taylor Swift herself. All the things we feel about Taylor Swift end up saying more about us — our hangups, our desires, what we like and don’t like about ourselves — than anything about her. This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

President Joe Biden visits the groundbreaking of a new Intel semiconductor plant on September 9, 2022, in Johnstown, Ohio.  | Andrew Spear/Getty Images Exaggerating the harms of inflation doesn’t help working people. American workers’ wages have been rising faster than prices for more than a year now. Their nation’s economy, meanwhile, is the envy of the wealthy world: Since the Covid recession, the United States has seen nearly twice as much growth as any other major rich country without suffering significantly higher inflation. And economic analysts expect that America will continue to grow at double the rate of its peers for the rest of 2024. This growth will enhance an already robust economy. The nation’s unemployment rate has sat below 4 percent for more than two years now, the longest such streak since the 1960s. With labor markets persistently tight, low-income workers have finally secured some leverage over their employers, and wage inequality has fallen as a result. Nevertheless, US voters give their nation’s economy poor marks in surveys. In the latest polling from Civiqs, 61 percent of respondents rate the “national economy” as “fairly bad” or “very bad” — with 39 percent choosing the latter description. Other polls indicate that this widespread pessimism is preventing the public from ascertaining basic economic facts. For example, 74 percent of swing-state voters in a recent Wall Street Journal poll said that inflation had moved in the wrong direction over the past year, a statement that is straightforwardly untrue. Liberal pundits are generally keen to correct popular misperceptions of economic statistics, and they are ideologically invested in Joe Biden’s reelection. For these reasons, many have spent the past few months touting the economy’s objective virtues and bemoaning the public’s misguided discontent. Such commentary can make liberals sound complacent about the American people’s myriad economic challenges. And yet, although commentators should not ignore those difficulties, they also shouldn’t exaggerate them. Affirming the working class’s misperceptions of the Biden economy does it no favors. To the contrary, validating the public’s economic pessimism risks shifting American macroeconomic policy in an anti-labor direction. But this hazard is lost on many in the commentariat. In recent months, several pundits and influencers have sought to portray the contemporary economy’s champions as cosseted elites who’ve lost touch with reality. And their argument boasts superficial plausibility. After all, the Paul Krugmans of this world enjoy an exalted place in America’s socioeconomic hierarchy. The Democratic economists who sing the Biden economy’s praises in prestigious publications are generally much wealthier than the voters who lament runaway inflation in opinion polls. And sometimes, the former really do gloss over the more unfortunate aspects of Biden’s economic record. If you zero in on these omissions, the posture of these Democratic economists can appear unseemly: Where do these rich liberals find the nerve to tell working-class Americans that they should stop worrying about rising food prices and start loving the Biden economy? Countless self-styled populists have made versions of this argument in recent months. This X post from the author Carol Roth is a crude, but not atypical, example: “Paul Krugman doesn’t know any regular Americans, and so he and the rest of the corporate press mock and gaslight you while you struggle with your rent or mortgage, food and other living costs. Absolutely zero compassion or connection to reality.” And yet, although this brand of commentary is populist in affect, it may be contrary to workers’ best interests in practice. The signature strengths and weaknesses of the Biden economy — its low unemployment and elevated prices — are byproducts of one fundamental policy decision: Faced with the Covid recession, the US government chose to prioritize poverty reduction and full employment over minimizing the risk of inflation. Put differently, instead of forcing the nation’s most vulnerable workers to pay the inescapable economic costs of the pandemic through prolonged periods of material deprivation and joblessness, we spread those costs across the entire population through a temporary period of high inflation. This is not how the US government has traditionally responded to recessions. And it is an approach to macroeconomic policy that simultaneously centers the interests of the working class and promotes economic growth. Yet it is also politically vulnerable due to widespread misconceptions about how the economy works. If those misconceptions lead the electorate to punish lawmakers for prioritizing full employment, then macroeconomic policy will likely shift rightward in the future, and the next recession will take a needlessly large toll on America’s most vulnerable. What critics of the Biden economy get right To appreciate the pitfalls of anti-inflation populism, we need to first grapple with the strongest arguments for that outlook. The Atlantic’s Michael Powell helpfully assembles these in his most recent column, titled “What the Upper-Middle-Class Left Doesn’t Get About Inflation.” Powell argues that liberal commentators’ enthusiasm for the Biden economy betrays their class privilege. “The modern Democratic Party, and liberalism itself,” Powell writes, “is to a substantial extent a bastion of college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals, people for whom Biden-era inflation is unpleasant but rarely calamitous.” But “poor, working-class, and lower-middle-class” Americans aren’t so insulated from the harms of rising prices. Telling them that the economy is actually strong is both incorrect, in Powell’s view, and politically counterproductive. In making this case, Powell makes several strong points. First, and most compellingly, he notes that measures of “real wages” don’t take account of rising borrowing costs. Inflation has fallen sharply since 2022, but interest rates have risen. And since Americans finance many of their purchases through debt, higher interest rates dampen the impact of slowing price growth. As he notes, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that when you account for borrowing costs, the public’s mood about the economy comes much closer to tracking objective changes in the cost of living. Second, Powell correctly observes that low-income Americans are much more vulnerable to sudden increases in the cost of food and energy than are more affluent Americans. The inflationary spike of 2021 and 2022 was indeed deeply bruising for a large swath of the US population: Most US workers suffered from declining real wages for nearly all of Biden’s first two years in office. Things have turned around since then, but many workers still have less purchasing power now than they did when Biden was inaugurated. And it’s understandable that others would have lingering resentments. Third, Powell rightly notes that the American economy remains riven by structural inequalities. Many households have never fully recovered from the 2008 foreclosure crisis. And the nation’s skimpy welfare state keeps many workers perpetually on the brink of financial crisis. Fourth, America is suffering from a housing shortage that makes homeownership unaffordable for the middle class and rent burdensome for many workers. But none of these points refute the core claims of the so-called “upper-middle-class left” — namely, 1) that national economic conditions are significantly better than most voters recognize and 2) that America’s Covid-era macroeconomic policies, while imperfect, were remarkably successful in mitigating the inescapable economic damages wrought by the pandemic. Powell never engages with the second point. Rather, his piece focuses on portraying the first claim as a delusion of the privileged. Yet his argument suffers from a fundamental flaw: When analyzing the impact of inflation on Americans’ finances, he repeatedly ignores the inextricable and countervailing impact of wage growth. Ironically, this exact error likely explains a considerable portion of the public’s economic discontent. Americans’ real wages are higher now than they were before the pandemic Early in his column, Powell writes that since 2019, America’s working-class has “weathered 20 percent inflation and now rising interest rates—which means they’ve lost more than a fifth of their purchasing power.” This is simply false. You cannot measure a trend in workers’ purchasing power over time by looking exclusively at changes in their costs. Since 1947, the consumer price index has risen by roughly 1,400 percent. If we applied Powell’s logic to that data point, we would conclude that Americans’ purchasing power had apocalyptically collapsed since the Truman administration. But of course, Americans are not poorer today than they were in 1947 — because since that year, the median US household income has increased by roughly 2,400 percent. Similarly, although consumer prices have risen 20 percent since 2019, the average hourly wage among nonmanagerial workers in the US has grown by 25 percent over the same period. Put differently, at least for Americans who don’t debt-finance their expenditures, purchasing power is higher today than it was in 2019. It’s difficult to say exactly how one should factor interest rate increases into this equation, since exposure to elevated borrowing costs varies so widely across the population. But it’s safe to say that, even considering the impact of higher rates, Americans have not lost anything close to one-fifth of their buying power since 2019, if they’ve lost any at all. Were that actually the case, inflation would be minimal because consumers would not be able to afford to bid up the prices of goods and services, and the economy would likely be in recession. Powell does eventually acknowledge that wages have been rising faster than inflation for a while now. But he minimizes this fact by suggesting that it is only true if you ignore food and energy prices. As an example of liberals’ out-of-touch optimism, he links to a report from the Center for American Progress (CAP), which found that nearly 60 percent of US workers enjoyed higher inflation-adjusted earnings in 2023 than in 2022. In Powell’s telling, the upshot of that report is “that median wage growth has nudged ahead of the core inflation rate.” He then suggests that this is a trivial fact because“core inflation” — which is to say a version of the consumer-price index that excludes volatile food and energy prices — is a poor gauge of household costs. After all, Powell notes, grocery and gas prices are “economic indicators that affect Americans’ daily lives.” Yet this whole line of argument is a non sequitur: The CAP report that Powell cites includes food and energy prices when calculating real wages. It does not argue that wage growth has “nudged ahead of the core inflation rate.” Rather, the report shows that wage growth has outpaced inflation, full stop. (When I asked Powell about this discrepancy, he told me that he had not intended to link to the CAP report. I know from personal experience that adding the wrong hyperlink to a piece is an easy mistake to make — yet Powell’s column does not cite or link to any other example of liberal economists measuring real wages using core inflation.) It is true that macroeconomists tend to focus on “core inflation” when analyzing monetary policy. But this is merely because food and energy are globally traded commodities, the prices of which are influenced by myriad factors that have little to do with consumer demand in the United States, such as outbreaks of bird flu or geopolitical conflicts. In other words: Powell is right that core inflation is a poor gauge of the public’s cost burdens. But I’m not aware of any commentator who has used it for that purpose. The economy has real problems, but it’s still stronger than voters realize When you recognize that real wages are higher today than they were in 2019 — a year when Americans gave their nation’s economy historically high marks — it becomes clear that Powell’s strongest arguments don’t add up to a rebuttal of the Biden economy’s boosters. Yes, low-income Americans have suffered the most from inflation. But they also benefited the most from the ultra-tight labor market of the early Biden presidency. Between 2020 and 2022, real wages grew by 5.7 percent for those at the very bottom of America’s income ladder. Yes, rising rents and home prices constitute a national crisis. But even taking housing into account, life has been getting more affordable for Americans over the past year as their real incomes have risen. And in any event, the primary target of Powell’s critique — the New York Times’s Paul Krugman — is well aware of the housing crisis and has called for policymakers to relax restrictions on apartment construction in order to address it. Yes, the US economy is profoundly unequal and unjust. But this was also the case in 2019, when wage inequality was even higher than it is now, and Americans strongly approved of the economy five years ago. So the existence of such inequities cannot by themselves explain the public’s mood. Finally, it is absolutely true that measures of real wages do not account for changes in borrowing costs. This is a significant limitation. And Powell is totally right that many liberal commentators have given it short shrift. But even the National Bureau of Economic Research paper that he cites notes that fully incorporating borrowing costs into the consumer price index still doesn’t fully explain the gap between objective economic conditions and consumer sentiment. More basically: If borrowing costs were completely nullifying the impact of real wage increases — and Americans’ purchasing power was actually falling — then we would not expect to see US consumers increasing their spending. Yet retail sales rose sharply during the first quarter of this year. Notably, if Americans’ spending habits suggest that they are doing reasonably well financially, their survey responses often indicate the same. In recent polls of Michigan and Pennsylvania voters, roughly 60 percent said their personal finances were in “good” or “excellent” shape, even as a similar percentage declared the national economy “bad” or “not so good.” In the wake of the Covid crisis, inflation was the price of a pro-worker macroeconomic policy Economic commentators have no obligation to abet Joe Biden’s reelection. But they do have a responsibility not to exaggerate the contemporary economy’s weaknesses. And this is especially true if they wish their commentary to advance the interests of working people. The past four years witnessed a historic experiment in fiscal policy. Traditionally, recessions have brought increases in poverty and prolonged periods of elevated unemployment. But during the Covid downturn, poverty in the United States actually declined. After the Great Recession of the late 2000s, it took more than nine years for America’s unemployment rate to return to its pre-crisis level. After the Covid downturn, it took just over two years. These triumphs of economic management — and the elevated prices of the past three years — are inextricably linked. The pandemic simultaneously reduced the economy’s productive capacity and induced a sudden shift in consumer preferences: All across the wealthy world, socially distanced households shifted their disposable income away from in-person services and toward manufactured goods. Even in the absence of a public health emergency, the global economy would have struggled to accommodate this abrupt change in consumer demand. Add in pandemic-induced factory closures, and a gap inevitably opened up between demand for goods and their supply. We could have brought supply and demand into balance by throttling the purchasing power of the most vulnerable working-class households: If you condemn 10 percent of the workforce to unemployment and 20 percent of households to poverty, you’ll alleviate inflationary pressure, since fewer people will have the money necessary for bidding up prices. Instead, we chose to minimize the recession’s impact on the vulnerable to a historically unprecedented degree. A painful, but fleeting, period of high inflation proved to be the price of this decision. Unfortunately, most voters do not recognize the connection between the Biden era’s inflation and its low unemployment or strong wage growth. A new analysis of survey data by the Harvard economist Stefanie Stantcheva lends credence to an old hypothesis: People tend to attribute wage gains to their own efforts or their employers’ largesse — rather than to market dynamics — even as they blame price increases on government mismanagement. This is a potential problem for progressive macroeconomic policy. If voters will punish elected officials for presiding over inflation but won’t necessarily give them credit for engineering real wage gains, then Congress will have an incentive to err on the side of understimulating the economy during the next recession. Powell never explicitly criticizes Biden’s fiscal policies. The main upshot of his piece is that Democratic politicians should not try to persuade voters that the economy is good but should instead embrace populist rhetoric and deflect blame for high prices onto greedy corporations. This is reasonable advice for Biden and Kamala Harris. But public intellectuals serve a different function than politicians. Trying to make voters appreciate the connection between inflation and wage growth — or the fact that the United States has done a superlative job of navigating a worldwide economic crisis — may be a quixotic task. But it is not an inherently classist or condescending one. To the contrary, such commentary ultimately aims to help workers make more informed choices at the ballot box so that they can better preserve their leverage in the labor market.

Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors fights for a rebound during the game between the Raptors and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Toronto, Canada, March 22, 2024. | Zou Zheng/Xinhua/Getty Images It’s a case that underscores how betting could continue to threaten the game. The NBA has banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter for life after an internal investigation found that he placed bets on basketball and gave information to a bettor to improve their odds. The Porter fracas is the latest involving athletes and sports betting as the gambling industry has exploded in recent years and as such transactions have become increasingly accessible. It also follows a recent scandal centered on baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, who has been charged with taking $16 million from the athlete to cover gambling debts. Porter’s gambling practices — including a willingness to change his gameplay to assist with certain bets — ultimately spotlight the ethical quandaries that sports betting poses for athletes and leagues as it becomes more popular. The betting industry has grown significantly since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a policy barring many states from allowing commercial sports betting. In the years since, the majority of states have legalized both in-person and online sports betting, making the practice available to far more people. In 2023, sports betting raked in a record $10.92 billion in revenue, bringing in roughly 45 percent more as an industry than the year before. As Porter’s case illustrates, a central question raised by the prevalence of sports betting is how sports leagues and athletes can maintain the integrity of their games as betting becomes more common and lucrative. “The recent case of the NBA’s Jontay Porter is, I am afraid, just the tip of the iceberg,” Sean McKeever, a Davidson College professor who teaches a course on sports and philosophy, told Vox. “The corrupting forces are powerful ones. … And bettors stand to make significant sums if they can extract valuable information and behavior from players and those around them.” The Porter scandal and its mechanics, explained Porter, a 24-year-old now-former power forward for the Raptors, had been playing in the NBA for four seasons. His penalty for gambling was announced by the league earlier this week and has been viewed by sports observers as a warning shot to other players who might be tempted to try similar practices. “There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport, which is why Jontay Porter’s blatant violations of our gaming rules are being met with the most severe punishment,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. Porter wound up getting caught after a bet that was placed on his performance got flagged as suspicious by licensed sports betting operators and an organization that monitors gambling markets, the NBA says. The NBA found Porter did three things wrong. Firstly, Porter bet on NBA games himself, which is strictly banned for players in the league. The NBA found that he had used someone else’s online betting account to place 13 bets that amounted to $54,094 total on multiple games. These bets did not include games that Porter played in, though they did include bets on Raptors games that he did not play in. Secondly, Porter gave a sports bettor information about his health status ahead of a March 20 game, inside information that could have helped that bettor place wagers and potentially make money. And thirdly, Porter altered his own actions in a game in order to help fulfill a wager that a bettor had made. In sports betting, people can bet on everything from who will score the most points to whether a player commits a foul. These are known as proposition bets, or prop bets, which focus more on developments in a game than just the outcome of a game. In Porter’s case, a bettor had placed a prop bet for $80,000 on the fact that he would underperform in a March 20 game. The payout for that bet would have been $1.1 million. In that game, Porter stopped playing after just three minutes, claiming that he felt sick. This bet, however, was flagged by betting operators and frozen. Following its investigation, the NBA has concluded that Porter claimed illness so that this wager would be successful. Porter’s actions highlight longstanding fears about how athletes could not only affect game outcomes for their own benefit but also take smaller actions to help bettors. The most aggressive version of such behavior would be to throw a game completely, but there is a range of other factors to manipulate, too, since bets can be placed on who scores the first basket, for example, or who has the most rebounds. The league’s penalty for Porter is the harshest that’s available, and it marks the first time the NBA has banned a player for gambling-related offenses since 1954. It is intended to indicate both its lack of tolerance for such activities and suggest that there are safeguards in place to catch this behavior while the league continues to collaborate with sports betting businesses. Sports leagues — including the NBA, NFL, and NHL — actively work with licensed betting platforms to promote sports betting in exchange for a significant cut of the revenue. The NBA, for example, works with FanDuel and DraftKings as its sports betting partners and has integrated live betting during games into its app. The NFL, similarly, has formal sports betting partnerships; the Washington Commanders even host a sports betting hub in their stadium. “It is everywhere around us in any sports programming we watch,” says Villanova University sports law professor Andrew Brandt. Porter’s case allows the NBA to argue that it can catch bad actors, despite being an active participant in boosting this industry itself. “The Jontay Porter bets were flagged by one of the ‘integrity’ companies used by these leagues to note irregular betting,” Brandt told Vox. “Now Porter is banished, and the NBA can claim integrity and simply remove a rogue player that transgressed.” This is a growing problem that isn’t going away The sports betting market is only expected to get bigger in the coming years, with Goldman Sachs predicting that it will eventually go from a $10 billion industry to a $45 billion one. For now, 38 states and DC have legalized the practice, with more likely to do so given the hefty tax revenues that come along with it. The prevalence and accessibility of sports betting are likely to expose more people — including athletes — to it, increasing the potential likelihood of addiction, exploitation, and situations like Porter’s. “As the proportion of the population who gambles grows, so will the proportion of athletes who gamble and who develop problems,” says Lia Nower, the head of the gambling studies center at Rutgers University. Nower notes that athletes in particular are more susceptible to developing problem gambling habits because they have a higher likelihood of betting on sports, which is tied to more problem gambling. Additionally, she says athletes as a group are more open to risk-taking and competitiveness, and they might believe they’re better at making wagers because of their background. Such concerns underscore the awkward line sports leagues have tried to tread as they seek to make money from sports betting while also attempting to ensure that their players don’t get caught up in it.

Asna Tabassum, a graduating senior at the University of Southern California majoring in biomedical engineering, is at the center of the latest firestorm on college campuses after the university named her valedictorian, then barred her from speaking at graduation. | Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images As the school year winds down, colleges are still grappling with student speech. Campus tensions over Israel’s war on Gaza have flared up again, this time at the University of Southern California, which this week barred its valedictorian from speaking at next month’s commencement ceremony. The school cited potential campus safety risks if Asna Tabassum delivered a speech. Provost Andrew T. Guzman said in an email to students and staff on Monday that public discussion had “taken on an alarming tenor” after the school announced its choice for valedictorian. “The intensity of feelings, fueled by both social media and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, has grown to include many voices outside of USC and has escalated to the point of creating substantial risks relating to security and disruption at commencement,” he wrote. Tabassum, a South Asian American biomedical engineering major who is Muslim and wears a hijab, says that she, along with other critics of the decision, believes the school canceled her speech because of her public support for the human rights of Palestinians. Pro-Israel USC student groups, including Trojans for Israel and the Chabad Jewish Student Center, had complained online about Tabassum’s views, calling them antisemitic. The provost explained in the email that the decision “has nothing to do with freedom of speech” and made no mention of Tabassum’s political views. His email did not state whether USC had already received specific threats of violence or disruption. Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, campuses have been embroiled in controversy as student protests test the boundaries of freedom of expression. Many college and university leaders have struggled to make satisfactory public statements about the conflict and balance safety with speech protections. In the attack, Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostage. Since then, Israel has killed 33,899 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Though schools have vowed to keep their students safe, some have reported facing violence and harassment. After failing to adequately condemn antisemitism in congressional testimony late last year, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard resigned. A congressional hearing on Wednesday also brought Columbia University’s president before lawmakers to answer questions about the school’s response to antisemitism, showing that the quandary is far from over. The USC provost referenced the broader turmoil on US campuses in his email: “We cannot ignore the fact that similar risks have led to harassment and even violence at other campuses.” Pro-Israel groups are celebrating USC’s decision, claiming that Tabassum’s speech, which she said she had not yet written, could have made Jewish students feel uncomfortable. Tabassum told Inside Edition that she hoped to share a message of hope in her speech. Meanwhile, critics say that it undermines free speech and is a signal that universities are caving to pro-Israel pressures. “USC cannot hide its cowardly decision behind a disingenuous concern for ‘security,” said Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles. “The university can, should and must ensure a safe environment for graduation rather than taking the unprecedented step of canceling a valedictorian’s speech.” Student groups and outlets including the LA Times and the Guardian have defended Tabassum and condemned USC. As the academic year comes to a close, the country is watching how similar situations might unfold on other campuses. It’s customary for students to make political statements during commencement speeches, but this year’s campus controversies could lead schools to keep buckling under pressure, raising concerns about students’ freedom of expression in the process. USC chose its valedictorian — then silenced her USC announced that Tabassum would be the university’s valedictorian on April 2, based on her grade point average, which topped 3.98, contributions to the campus community, essay submission, and performance in interviews. Tabassum, who also minors in resistance to genocide — studies about conflicts including the war in Ukraine, genocide in Darfur, and the Holocaust — was selected from more than 200 students who qualified for the award, and was slated to deliver the customary valedictory speech at the May 10 commencement. Then, Tabassum was notified that she wouldn’t deliver the address at commencement after all because of safety concerns. Critics began to speculate that USC was kowtowing to pro-Israel groups and people who complained about Tabassum being selected as valedictorian. The right-wing pro-Israel organization organization End Jew Hatred welcomed USC’s decision, stating, “Ms. Tabassum’s speech as valedictorian was anticipated to be harmful to Jewish students and even potentially agitate anti-Jewish activists.” The USC campus group Trojans for Israel wrote that Tabassum “openly traffics in antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” Tabassum told CNN that she received “hate and vitriol” for including a link to the website “Free-Palestine.Carrd.Co” on her Instagram profile. The homepage of the website contains the image of a woman holding up a Palestinian flag and a peace sign rising above flames and smoke, and links to help visitors “learn about what’s happening in Palestine.” USC’s Chabad argued that the linked website called for the “abolishment of the state of Israel” and called the words on the website, which Tabassum did not create, “antisemitic and hate speech.” Tabassum said in a statement that she believes there was a “campaign” of “racist hatred” on the part of “anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian voices” to prevent her from addressing her peers at commencement due to her “uncompromising belief in human rights for all.” “I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university — my home for four years — has abandoned me,” Tabassum said, adding that the school denied her request for more information about their threat assessment. Pro-Palestinian students and groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have faced discipline, sanctions, and campus suspensions and bans over protest activity since October 7 — part of a long history silencing student activism for Palestine. Meanwhile, students advocating for Palestine have been labeled antisemitic for chanting phrases such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada.” Student protesters say the phrases don’t advocate for harm to Israelis, while critics say the phrases are threatening and call for violence. School leadership has often said the groups were reprimanded for violating school policies amid a rise in antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. On Thursday, police in riot gear arrested more than 100 pro-Palestinian Columbia students at President Minouche Shafik’s direction, while administrators suspended three Barnard students, including Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), for setting up “unauthorized” protest encampments on campus. USC has not responded to requests for further information about any specific threats to Tabassum or anyone else in the USC community. USC has not yet responded to Vox’s request for comment. “If anti-Palestinian groups are threatening violence, then USC needs to say what they’ve threatened and why it is so dangerous that it has led to such a drastic action, instead of disingenuously claiming that it isn’t engaging in censorship,” said Radhika Sainath, an attorney at Palestine Legal, an organization that defends people who speak out in support of Palestine. “The fact that Palestinians and their allies are being punished and canceled in this way — while Israel is committing an ongoing genocide in Gaza — speaks to the McCarthyite moment we’re in.” USC’s decision raises questions about free speech on campus USC is a private school that makes First Amendment-like free speech promises, Alex Morey, an attorney at Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that advocates for free speech, told Vox. The school is also required to provide students First Amendment rights in certain situations under California’s Leonard Law, a 1992 statute that extended free speech protections to students at private colleges and universities in the state. The school’s decision to cancel Tabassum’s speech, Morey said, “does implicate campus expression in an important way.” “For those of us watching the campus speech space on the regular, canceling controversial speeches or events due to vague, unspecified ‘safety concerns’ is one of the oldest tricks in the book,” Morey said. “USC appears to have made a calculated move that this was the way to avoid the most criticism. Yanking the student’s valedictorian status or canceling the speech for viewpoint-based reasons would have pleased the students’ critics but angered her supporters. By citing ‘safety,’ however, USC’s doing their best to look like the good guy and suggest this isn’t about viewpoint at all.” Morey told Vox the school should have done everything in its power to ensure that the event would go on, and that if threats remained, it should have been transparent about what those threats are. If USC did in fact cancel the speech due to pressure from pro-Israel critics, now they know “that with the right amount of pressure, they can silence certain views at USC,” Morey said. The USC decision has also introduced bigger questions about whether students who have publicly expressed any views on Palestine or Israel will be passed over for honors in the future. These decisions might lead students to self-censor. “If USC will only honor students with certain views, are they really living up to their lofty free expression promises?” Morey said. Ironically, Morey pointed out, Tabassum minored in “resistance to genocide” and is effectively getting dinged for saying “precisely the kind of things you’d imagine one would hear in Resistance to Genocide 101 at a school like USC.”

Due to security concerns, the Chinese-owned video app TikTok has already been banned from US government devices. | Matt Cardy/Getty Images The House is trying to pass a TikTok ban again. But it’s not over yet. House lawmakers are planning to attach a ban on the social media app TikTok to a broader package providing aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that will be put to a vote as early as Saturday. The proposed ban has generated furor on Capitol Hill — and online — since it first passed the House as a standalone bill last month. President Joe Biden has called on the House to pass the package and for the Senate to follow suit ahead of a congressional recess next week, indicating that he would sign it. The bill would require TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the app within nine months, with the possibility of a three-month extension, or else it will be removed from US app stores. TikTok, however, has not actively pursued any buyers (despite former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, among others, having expressed interest) and has indicated that it would challenge any such legislation in court. At least one key Democrat leading the divestment charge in the Senate, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), has endorsed the bill. But other lawmakers have expressed concerns about the bill’s constitutionality: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) previously told the Washington Post that he would oppose any measure that violates the Constitution and that Congress should not be “trying to take away the First Amendment rights of [170] million Americans.” There has already been a revolt from users over First Amendment concerns. Last month, the social media app told its users to call their members of Congress in protest of the new bipartisan bill, arguing that a ban would infringe on their constitutional right to free expression and harm businesses and creators across the country. Teens and older people alike reportedly pleaded with congressional staff, saying they spend all day on the app. Creators posted on TikTok urging their followers to do the same. Some offices decided to temporarily shut down their phone lines as a result, which meant that they couldn’t field calls from their constituents about other issues either. Lawmakers in both parties didn’t take kindly to the impromptu lobbying frenzy. Some characterized it as confirmation of their fears that the Chinese-owned app — which is already banned on government devices — is brainwashing America. The overrun phone lines were merely “making the case” for the bill, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X. The White House has backed the bill from the beginning, reportedly providing technical support to legislators when they were drafting it (even as Biden’s reelection campaign has started using TikTok for voter outreach). Though the bill now has momentum, there’s the crucial question of whether it would survive legal scrutiny even if passed. A federal court recently overturned a Montana law that sought to ban TikTok. Though legislators sponsoring the US House bill argue that it is narrow in scope and would not amount to a total ban on TikTok that would violate the First Amendment, some legal experts believe otherwise. “In my view, this loaded gun is a ban in all but name, and banning TikTok is obviously unconstitutional,” said Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “This ban on TikTok is materially the same [as the Montana ban] in all the ways that matter.” Can Congress ban TikTok? The constitutional law here appears straightforward: Congress can’t outright ban TikTok or any social media platform unless it can prove that it poses legitimate and serious privacy and national security concerns that can’t be addressed by any other means. The bar for such a justification is necessarily very high in order to protect Americans’ First Amendment rights, Krishnan said. Lawmakers argue that the bill under consideration isn’t actually a total ban. Rather, it would enact a new authority to ban apps in “narrowly defined situations” when they are controlled by a foreign adversary, New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, the ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, said before the committee in March. He compared the bill to historical efforts to prevent foreign ownership of US airwaves due to national security concerns. “It is no different here, and I take the concerns raised by the intelligence community very seriously,” he said. Other House lawmakers have criticized TikTok for attempting to portray the bill as a total ban. But legal experts say that an indirect ban may still be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Civil society groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) wrote in a recent letter to federal lawmakers that jeopardizing access to TikTok — “home to massive amounts of protected speech and association” — also “jeopardizes access to free expression.” There are also arguably less restrictive and more effective means of protecting any national security interests at stake in this bill, they asserted, considering the Chinese government could continue to access Americans’ data in other ways. “This bill would functionally ban the distribution of TikTok in the United States, and would grant the President broad new powers to ban other social media platforms based on their country of origin,” they said in the letter. Many experts believe it is unlikely that the government will be able to meet the high standard to prove that TikTok poses privacy and national security concerns that can’t otherwise be resolved, said Kate Ruane, director of CDT’s Free Expression Project. Lawmakers have publicly cited concerns about the Chinese government using the app to spy on Americans and to spread propaganda that could be used to influence the 2024 presidential election. Though TikTok has repeatedly insisted that it has never shared user data with the Chinese government nor been asked to do so, a former employee of ByteDance has alleged in court that the government had nevertheless accessed such data on a widespread basis for political purposes during the 2018 protests in Hong Kong. And in December, TikTok parent company ByteDance acknowledged it had fired four employees who accessed the data of two journalists while trying to track down an internal leaker. “TikTok is Communist Chinese malware that is poisoning the minds of our next generation and giving the CCP unfettered access to troves of Americans’ data,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said in a statement. “We cannot allow the CCP to continue to harness this digital weapon.” However, national security experts have also questioned the rationale behind a ban. Mike German, a former FBI special agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Al Jazeera that, like many American apps, TikTok collects data on its users that a foreign government could theoretically use for its own hostile purposes. But those governments could just as well buy Americans’ data on a legitimate open market, where the sale of that data remains unrestricted. And even if lawmakers did provide more evidence of national security concerns, it’s still not clear that the ban would pass legal muster. Courts have already applied strict scrutiny to previous attempts to ban TikTok. A federal judge blocked the Montana TikTok ban — which also imposed a financial penalty on TikTok and any app store hosting it each time a user accesses or is offered the ability to access the app — before it was scheduled to go into effect in November. Montana lawmakers justified the ban as a means of protecting the privacy interests of consumers in the state. But US District Judge Donald Molloy wrote in his ruling that the law overstepped the Montana legislature’s powers and left “little doubt that Montana’s legislature and Attorney General were more interested in targeting China’s ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting Montana consumers.” Former President Donald Trump also twice tried to ban TikTok via executive action, only for courts to strike down his proposal both times. However, he recently changed his tune, arguing that banning TikTok would benefit Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, which he referred to in a post on his social media platform Truth Social as a “true enemy of the people.” What lawmakers could do instead of banning TikTok If lawmakers are serious about protecting privacy and national security, Ruane said, they should instead pass comprehensive digital privacy legislation. “That would be a better path forward,” she said. Her organization, the Center for Democracy and Technology, has supported a bipartisan bill that passed a committee vote in 2022: the American Data Privacy and Protection Act. It included provisions requiring companies to allow consumers to consent to or reject the collection of their data, to allow consumers to download and delete the data being collected on them, to require consumers’ affirmative consent to share that data with a third party, and more. It was the culmination of a decades-long effort to regulate the collection, use, and sale of consumer data, similar to the European Union’s regulatory efforts. It would have tasked the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general with enforcing the law and preempted the patchwork of privacy laws that have been enacted at the state level in the absence of comprehensive federal legislation. However, the privacy bill stalled in Congress and was not reintroduced; Ruane said it’s unclear why. Now lawmakers are moving forward instead with the bill that could ban TikTok — without solving the underlying privacy concerns. “This bill would fail to protect us from the many threats to our digital privacy posed by criminals, private companies, and foreign actors,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Comprehensive data privacy legislation is the solution we need — not bans of certain categories of apps.” Update, April 18, 3:45 pm ET: This story, originally published March 9, has been updated multiple times, most recently with additional reporting on the bill’s progression in the House and Senate.