Tom Steyer is skeptical of human kindness—at least as a means to positive global change. As he describes in his new book, Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War, the billionaire climate activist argues that to address an issue as “complex” and “rife with self-interest” as the transition away from fossil fuels, the world can’t rely on companies and organizations to act out of sheer altruism. “I’m skeptical of any solution that requires humanity’s collective heart to grow three sizes,” he writes.

Instead, he points to another tool: capitalism.

It’s a force he’s intimately familiar with, and one he has clearly benefited from. You may remember Steyer from his recent bid for president—or maybe you don’t, because he dropped out in early 2020 after earning just 11 percent of the Democratic vote in the South Carolina primaries—but before that, Steyer earned a fortune as the founder of Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that under his leadership he says grew from $6 million to more than $20 billion over two and a half decades.

In 2012, after some self-reflection and an especially impactful meet-up in the Adirondacks with environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, Steyer left Farallon to pursue climate advocacy. (McKibben had just published an article in Rolling Stone titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” and Steyer heard him on the radio. “I cold-called him,” Steyer recalls, “and said, ‘You want to go on a hike?'”) In 2021, Steyer co-founded Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate investment firm.

Still a “proud and committed” capitalist, he argues that “markets are the quickest way for human beings to change things at scale,” whether that applies to oil and tobacco or clean drinking water and vaccines. Markets, he writes, are amoral. And for a long time, fossil fuels ruled. But now, Steyer sees the world at a turning point. As he told me over Zoom in April, “cleaner is cheaper.” And for wealthy investors, himself included, doing the “right thing” by funding green solutions can also be profitable.

“Part business book, part climate manifesto, part memoir,” as his marketing team described it, Cheaper, Faster, Better reads as one long monologue in which Steyer argues that readers should become, like him, “climate people” and incorporate climate into “every big decision you make.” Throughout, he compares our fight against climate change to World War II: The question, “‘What are you doing to fight climate change?'” he writes, “is the ‘What did you do in the war?’ of our time.”

In a wide-ranging, 45-minute conversation, I asked Steyer about his views on carbon–footprint shaming, celebrities like Taylor Swift flying private, and what the super-wealthy owe the world. You can read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below.

You write about capitalism’s role in addressing the climate crisis. But capitalism is part of the reason we got into this mess. Why do you still trust it to work now?

When you think about capitalism’s role in society, capitalism scales. And the organizations that solve society’s needs and wants are profit-driven businesses. But it is absolutely essential that the rules be set up in society so that even self-interested individuals and organizations do what’s in society’s interest.

I think we’re at a point where the interest of business will be in providing sustainable answers, both because of the rules that government has put in, and the programs like the Inflation Reduction Act that are designed to say to people who are profit-oriented, “Build this. This is what our society needs.”

I think that business has to have frameworks from the government, and from, in effect, the will of the people to build the things that society needs. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s why I think the engine of getting this done will be capitalism, but it’s got to be within that framework. Carrots and sticks are critical.

If there are rules and incentives, and it’s in investors’ best interest to pay attention to climate change, as you argue in the book, why do so many still put their money into fossil fuels?

I think that it’s pretty simple. They’re betting on the status quo. They’re making money, a lot of money, from oil and gas right now. And they’re betting that that won’t change.

If something can’t go on forever, eventually, it must stop. And that’s where we are in fossil fuels. The status quo cannot keep going. In the last 10 months, every single [month] has been the hottest month in recorded history. We’re on a trajectory in terms of emissions and air temperature and ocean temperature that is absolutely unsustainable. We need to make this change. And now we’re at a place where, technologically, it’s to our advantage. Eighty-six percent of the new electricity generation in the world last year was renewable, for example.

There’s the old Hemingway quote, “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: slowly, and then all at once.” New technologies will slowly eat away at the status quo, until then, all of a sudden, they go vertical.

You write in the book, “I’m pretty sure I don’t just have a carbon-neutral footprint, I have a carbon-negative one.” Why do you think that? Have you ever tried to measure it?

For a long time, we’ve been doing a huge experiment using rotational grazing and regenerative agriculture on a ranch [in the San Francisco Bay Area]. It’s a huge science experiment to see if there’s a different way of raising animals in a way that’s helpful to the soil, to the water, to the animals, and for CO2.

I believe that using techniques to put carbon back in the soil, in a substantial way, means I probably do have a negative carbon footprint. But I’m not sure. But as I said, carbon shaming is not the way to go. This is a societal answer. This is not something people can answer on their own.

[Editor’s note: Scientists say the jury is still out on how much carbon regenerative ranching can net-sequester on a global scale.]

Yes, you write in the book about carbon–footprint shaming, and how it can be unproductive to criticize public servants like [climate envoy] John Kerry who’ve flown on private planes for their work. What do you think about people on social media who track celebrities’ private plane trips? Like Taylor Swift?

I never fly on a private plane. I know what it looks like from an emissions standpoint, and it’s almost mind-blowing. And we live in a society where, basically, you’re allowed to pollute for free. For a long time, we didn’t realize that there are unintended consequences of burning fossil fuels. Now we know that, but we still don’t charge for it.

My feeling is, if you’re going to take a private plane, that means, by definition, you’re rich. Which means you can afford to pay for your pollution. And if you’re not paying for your pollution, you’re basically making us pay for your pollution. Not just people in the United States, but people all over the world who are much, much, much, much poorer than you. That doesn’t seem fair.

So if you want to fly on a private plane, you should make sure that you’re doing something to take away that cost, at a minimum.

[Editor’s note: Taylor Swift reportedly offsets her flights with carbon credits, though it’s unclear exactly how the offsets are applied and whether her offsets (or anyone’s, for that matter) are effective.]

What do you think is the single most impactful thing a billionaire could do to address climate change?

They should invest in solutions. We need to bring finance to bear, fast, to build these companies to solve these problems. If you have billions of dollars, you can invest billions of dollars. Let’s do it in a way that makes you a bunch of money, but let’s do it.

A lot of people say they want to do the right thing. Okay, do the right thing.

You and your wife plan to give away the majority of your wealth as part of the Giving Pledge. As some of my colleagues have reported, billionaires giving away large chunks of their fortunes sounds great on paper, but many are still making billions, potentially, in industries or in ventures that are not great for the climate or the world. How, if at all, can that process be better?

I think the point about the Giving Pledge is that you recognize that you didn’t earn all your money by yourself. That, in fact, all of society has conspired over a long period of time, with amazing sacrifices by people for hundreds of years, to produce an environment where people could make that much money.

I think it seems to me to be absolutely incumbent on everybody to realize that they didn’t earn that money by themselves. Millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of people sacrificed for hundreds of years to build that framework. And so they, in effect, own part of what you have.

From my standpoint, the idea of giving back to society and recognizing that we’re all part of this together, and always have been—that’s a big point about this book, is we need to do this together. That’s the point of the Giving Pledge to me. To recognize, you’re not separate. You didn’t do it. It’s not yours. It’s all of ours. We have a responsibility to each other. Everybody. Not just billionaires, but everybody.

You end the book with an anecdote about your adult daughter, who was worried about bringing children into a world plagued by climate change. You tell her that having kids is the “ultimate statement of optimism.” Can you tell me more about what you meant by that?

I think that having a kid means that you believe that we’re going to pass on a world that is not just habitable, but is wonderful. We’re saying, “Our kids and our grandkids are going to live in a world that’s better than the one we were born into.” And we’re gonna do it. I really believe it. We just have to apply ourselves.

People often think that there’s a conflict between being optimistic and knowing we have a real problem. We do have a real problem. Of course we do. But that doesn’t mean we can’t and won’t solve it.

Schedule I drugs, as my colleague Julia Métraux reported last week, by definition have a “high potential” for abuse without any “currently accepted medical use.” With the change to Schedule III, explains Harvard neuroscientist Staci Gruber, who studies the effect of marijuana on our brains, “We’re no longer saying ‘no accepted medical value.’ That’s a big difference. It is an acknowledgment that there is some accepted medical value.”

It may also be a blessing for researchers like Gruber. Studying a Schedule I substance’s medical uses is no trivial task, often involving the kind of extra paperwork, additional security measures, and slower approvals that experts tell me make it burdensome to conduct vital research and make it harder for new scholars to break into the field. A Schedule III designation would ease many of those requirements. And with the cannabis industry growing like, well, a weed, scientists hope the new classification will also mean more quality medical cannabis studies on ailments from pain to nausea to PTSD.

Under the current scheduling regime, the research obstacles are frankly absurd. Consider how pharmacologist and professor Ziva Cooper, who directs UCLA’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids, is required by the DEA to store the cannabis used in her studies: a 750-pound safe, bolted to the floor, with specific locks, and almost “round the clock security provisions.” Under a Schedule III designation, she says, the security requirements would be “much less.” Gruber told me that even non-intoxicating cannabis products used by her lab are stored in a safe that’s “as big as a Subaru.” Igor Grant, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, told me that at one point in his career, he and his colleagues planned to work out of a “permanent trailer” with cannabis stored in a safe. But because the trailer wasn’t bolted to the cement, Grant recalls, the DEA decided it “was not an adequate protection against diversion.” Meanwhile, Margaret Haney, neurobiologist and professor at Columbia University Medical Center, keeps her cannabis in a gun safe in a locked room that she opens with her fingerprint. “These are all very, very big hurdles for most clinical researchers,” she says. “It’s expensive.”

On top of that, researchers seeking to study the plant are required to obtain a DEA Schedule I research license, source their products from DEA-approved manufacturers, keep detailed records of how much cannabis is consumed by study participants, record how much is left at the end of the day, and then how it will be disposed of. For example, Haney explains, if she gives a study subject an 800-milligram cannabis cigarette, she has to collect the butt to report to the DEA “exactly how much of it was given” and ensure the entire substance is accounted for. “You treat it like heroin,” she says.

In most cases, study participants can’t take cannabis home with them. But large-scale, randomized controlled trials—the gold standard of clinical research—may require multiple doses per day. In one study, Haney tried a workaround: importing cannabis products from Canada, where it is legal—but even that required permits. “It’s just very hard and long and complicated,” she says, noting she hopes that a change to Schedule III will “lighten the load” for the field. Additionally, Grant explains, if researchers want to pivot from, say, investigating cannabis’s effect on pain in rheumatoid arthritis patients to pain in HIV patients, “you can’t transfer your DEA license to that study. You have to start all over again.” With a Schedule III drug, he says, that’s not the case. 

The hurdles don’t just exist at the federal level. In some states, like California, studies involving Schedule I substances require approval from a state review board, which can lengthen study timelines. “Having to have this body review our protocols,” says UCLA’s Cooper, “automatically adds six months to any approval of any study, if we’re lucky.” Universities can also slow researchers’ pace. For example, Grant says, at one UC campus which he asked not to be named, the university was initially “very reluctant” to approve human research on marijuana for fear of violating federal drug laws and jeopardizing the university’s funding. They eventually got on board, but “it took them a while to develop a comfort level,” he says. 

Fewer hurdles, experts hope, will mean more room for newbies. “There are many, many levels of regulatory requirements that you need to study Schedule I drugs,” Haney says. “That all leads to very few people doing it.” For researchers who aren’t part of big, well-funded research centers, Grant hopes the scheduling change will allow more scientists to “get into this research” and encourage researchers and institutions to take the field more seriously.

Which makes you wonder, what took the federal government so long? After all, 38 states and DC have approved marijuana for either recreational or medical use, so most Americans already have access to it. When I posed this question to researchers, some underscored that the federal designation hasn’t always been based on science. “I think there’s been a resistance to see the data, because of this kind of bias or attitude that it’s a dangerous thing,” Grant says. Or, as Haney adds, “So much about policy, both pro– and con-cannabis, is political and not science-based. Putting it on Schedule I was a political decision, not a scientific decision.”

As a result, with a kind of circular logic, the DEA’s Schedule I designation, which has for decades insisted there’s no medicinal benefit to cannabis, has made it more difficult for scientists to understand what the medical benefits of cannabis might be—and there are still plenty of questions to answer. We don’t know, Haney points out, what ratio of THC to CBD will be the most effective for a given treatment, for instance, or what route of administration is best. “Is it in pill form? Does it need to be vaped?” she asks. “All these very basic drug development questions we don’t have answers to.”

And as science lags, industry isn’t waiting. As Haney notes, thus far many claims about cannabis’s medical benefits have been determined by industry, anecdotes, and politicians, often “in lieu of science.” This new designation might begin the necessary process “to catch up and to understand what aspects of this plant might be useful, and useful for what.”

“I might be being a Pollyanna,” Haney adds, “but I feel like this is exactly a step in the right direction to start to get answers to the millions of questions we have.”

Egg Math is an internet concept that went viral late last year, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. As TikToker @vancouver.dieticians explains in a now-viral video, “Egg Math” means that the number of eggs someone can eat before they get grossed out depends on the form of the egg. So you might be able to easily eat a three-egg omelet, but not three whole hard-boiled eggs or three fried eggs. Baked goods, according to Egg Math, count as zero eggs. “You can have as many as you want.” Similarly, in part two of the series, they explain that deviled eggs also have no limit. It’s genius. The idea seems to have struck a chord; across the two videos, @vancouver.dieticians garnered more than a million likes. 

@vancouver.dietitians

I hope this finds the right egg audience #eggmath #girlmath #eggs

♬ original sound – Vancouver Dietitians

But Egg Math is not entirely random. For those of you not on TikTok, Egg Math is something of a spin-off of a pervasive and, in my opinion, infuriating cousin: “Girl Math.”

Girl Math, according to TikTok, primarily applies to shopping, clothing, personal hygiene, makeup, Starbucks, and other stereotypically “female” activities. As one TikTok user explained in a video that’s amassed more than 2.5 million likes, with Girl Math, if something is bought with cash, it’s free. “It’s never in my bank account, so I never got to see that money go down,” she explains. A similar logic (or lack thereof) applies to items returned to the store—that’s free money. Vacations paid for far enough in advance are “free.” Items that cost $24 are actually just $20, according to Girl Math, store credit is “free shopping,” and if your Starbucks app is loaded with money on Monday, then a latte paid for in-app on Tuesday is “free.”

Even as someone who loves to shop, applies makeup daily, and has been known to indulge in many a pumpkin spice latte, there are several reasons Girl Math infuriates me. First and foremost, it reinforces the stereotype that women are less financially capable than men. (A belief, that, for much of this nation’s history, prevented women from being able to own property or take out credit cards on our own.) Not many of TikTok’s Girl Mathletes are making financially savvy decisions. Second, it’s infantilizing (Why are we still calling grown women “girls”?) and it suggests that women’s activities are restricted to…buying stuff. I’m a woman who likes science, lifting weights, and reading. Are those not Girl Activities too?

Egg Math wasn’t a lone offshoot. After Girl Math came all sorts of “maths,” including Boy Math (which applies to drinking, sports, cars, etc.), Cat Math, Dog Math, Nurse Math, Teacher Math—the list goes on. Some of these are admittedly funny, if reductive (As one user posted, “Boy math is them wanting a prenup & they make 45k.”), and some don’t have much to do with math at all. (According to Dog Math, “If the doorbell rings, that means the house is on fire.”) Which leads me to conclude that Egg Math is the only TikTok math that is actually math-ing.

Anyway, that’s my Easter Sunday rant. Enjoy those eggs. And for the love of Sephora, please no more Girl Math.

“That’s right, it’s Easter, the time of year when I compare myself to Jesus Christ,” Trump says. “That’s just a thing I do now and people seem to be okay with it. I’m going to keep doing it. And if you think that this is a bad look, imagine how weird it would be if I started selling Bibles.” After a beat, he says, “Well, I’m selling Bibles.”

It’s a funny premise, and Austin Johnson delivers, as usual, an uncannily good impression of the former president. (I chuckled at a line about the Bibles being “made from 100% Bible.”) But overall, the skit felt…flat? Despite poking fun at Trump’s distaste for fruit, his mounting legal fines, and the concept of mission trips (“You go to Mexico, you build a house, maybe you make out with someone on the last night.”), the skit felt familiar. Too familiar.

It’s hard to land a joke when we’ve already heard it. And in this case, the truth is funnier than satire.

Donald Trump is actually selling Bibles. Since leaving the White House, he’s also sold digital trading cards, “Victory” cologne, and “Never Surrender” sneakers for $399. Last week, he used a shell company to take his struggling social media platform, Truth Social, public, allowing MAGA devotees to buy stock in Trump’s business and wildly inflate its valuation to nearly $11 billion. (The legal fines and presidential bid won’t fund themselves!)

On the same day, Trump also announced his latest sales venture: spreading the word of God. In a 3-minute video posted to Truth Social, the real, living Trump truthed, “Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless The USA Bible.” “All Americans need a Bible in their home and I have many,” Trump says in the video, totally non-ironically for a guy who’s been found liable for sexual abuse and is set to go on trial for hush money payments to a porn star in April. “It’s my favorite book.” Just watch for yourself.

SNL, for its part, seems to recognize the limits of its own humor. “Sounds like a joke and in many ways it is,” Austin Johnson’s Trump says after making his sales pitch, “but it’s also very real.” 

Don’t get me wrong. SNL rocks. As I’ve written before, the show’s writers are pros. Often, their skits are surprisingly insightful. But this week, the team should have realized, no one can parody Donald Trump better than himself.

It’s difficult to underscore just how big a deal this is. For the first time since oral contraception was approved in 1960, it may mean an end to many of the difficulties that come with a doctor’s visit for the medication—taking time off of work, securing child care, paying appointment copays, and more—that particularly burden people of color, those who are disabled, young, or live in rural areas. As California Latinas for Reproductive Justice Communications Director Susy Chávez Herrera told me in 2022, an FDA approval would mark a “step forward in terms of expanding health care access, and folks in our community having bodily autonomy.”

To better understand the historical significance of an over-the-counter birth control option, I called Elaine Tyler May, a historian at the University of Minnesota and author of the 2010 book America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation. (As chance would have it, she was also a participant in some of the first trials for low-dose birth control pills.) In our nearly hour-long conversation, which happened ahead of the FDA’s decision, we covered a lot of ground, including how the Pill changed American sex lives and her own family’s history in helping people access contraception.

Now that the Pill is arriving in drugstores, I wanted to revisit our wide-ranging interview. You can read an edited and condensed version below:

Take me back to the 1960s. What did it look like when the Pill was made available? How did that change things for American women?

The Pill gave women power over birth control. A woman could control it without the participation of her sexual partner and without necessarily even his knowledge. That was a big change. It released women from needing a doctor’s assistance. You didn’t have to have a doctor fit you for a diaphragm. They needed a prescription, yes, but they didn’t need a doctor.

The Pill shifted control to women, but without the feminist movement, the Pill wouldn’t have really done anything to change women’s lives. Science doesn’t create social change. Innovations are not what drive social developments. It’s the reverse. The scientific and medical community has been active, of course, in developing various methods of contraception. But it’s really social and political activism that has made contraception and abortion life-changing for women. The Pill just enabled women to pursue their aspirations without being terrified that any minute they could get pregnant. 

Say I’m a wife in the 1960s, and I wanted to get on the Pill. What steps would I have to take?

Well, it depends on where you live. The pill was not legal, even if prescribed by a doctor, in many states. That changed because women agitated for it. And one by one, states fell into line.

I was surprised to learn, reading your book, what hopes people had about the Pill—in combating overpopulation, poverty, even communism. What was the thought there?

The pill came out around the peak of the Cold War. And so a lot of its promoters were saying, Look, this is one more tool in our arsenal against communism. Because in developing countries, they thought, overpopulation was a crisis, it was causing poverty and hunger. And they thought, If we can just go in there with birth control pills, then it will alleviate a lot of the suffering that leads some of these folks to be drawn to communism. It was a way in which the so-called free world tried to blunt the potential for overpopulation to [lead to] communism. 

In your book, you share that your parents played a role in helping people access the Pill in the early days after it was first approved. Can you tell me a little more about that?

My father was a physician in the field of reproductive medicine. His private practice was an infertility clinic. So people who, for one reason or another, were not able to get pregnant, would come to his clinic for treatment. My mother helped found a few Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles, and my father served as the medical director.

My father was very interested in the science of it. People would ask him, “How come on the one hand, you’re trying to help people get pregnant, and on the other hand, you’re trying to help people not get pregnant?” And his motto was, “Every child should be a wanted child.” People who want children should be able to have every benefit of medical science to help them, and same thing for the people who don’t want children. People should determine their own reproductive goals. That was how he saw it.

What do you think your parents would think about the Pill being made available over the counter if they were still with us today?

It’s hard for me to know. But I’m guessing that if the Pill was shown to be effective and safe without [a doctor] follow-up, then I think they would be for it.

Are there any parallels that you’ve seen between the reproductive justice movement of the past and today?

Through most of the 19th century, abortion wasn’t a crime. Abortion was simply the most effective means of birth control, and it was widely practiced. In the late 19th century, when doctors started to develop medical schools, you began to see a shift in power dynamics in the medical profession, and men wanting to be the gatekeepers.

This is also the time when childbirth moved from mostly at home to mostly in hospitals. And again, doctors wanted to take control away from women and mothers and families by shifting childbirth to hospitals, which was initially a very dangerous thing: More women died when they were hospitalized because of [greater exposure to] germs. I know when I had my first child more than 50 years ago—yikes—fathers were only just beginning to be allowed into labor and delivery rooms. All of these practices around reproduction and birth, they’ve changed so dramatically over the years.

I don’t know where we’re headed. I’m just baffled by seeing things happening that I never, ever imagined I would see happening, like the overturning of Roe. Things that seemed to be resolved half a century ago, coming back into public policy debates. It’s just shocking to me. It’s like, Oh, my god, are we in a time machine going backward? What’s happening here?

And now, according to new research, we know it’s messing with moths.

In a study published in Science last month, researchers show that the nitrate radical NO3, an air pollutant linked to car exhaust and wildfires, can chemically alter the smell of flowers, making it harder for moths to locate their nectar. “These pollutants are removing certain compounds in the scent, and thereby making the scent unrecognizable,” says Jeff Riffell, a professor studying sensory neurobiology and ecology at the University of Washington and an author on the paper.

That’s bad news for us, too. As I wrote in December, about 75 percent of the world’s food relies on wild pollinators to grow. While moths may not have the same pizazz as butterflies, they are vital pollinators, particularly at night. (Moths may even be more efficient pollinators than bees, some research shows.)

The study, led by Jeremy Chan, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington at the time, focused on the close relationship between two species of hawk moths, the white-lined sphinx and tobacco hawk moth, and the nighttime-blooming pale evening primrose, which are relatively abundant in eastern Washington and have a “wonderful scent,” according to Riffell. The moths, which are about as wide as the palm of your hand and can hang in the air like a hummingbird, are such strong sniffers that they can detect a mate from miles away, Riffell says, putting their abilities on par with the sensitivity of bomb-sniffing dogs. They typically travel dozens of miles per night, stopping to slurp up flower fuel at least every 15 minutes. The flowers, meanwhile, rely on the moths for pollination. “There’s great mutualism,” Riffell tells me. And disrupting that mutualism, he says, “can have really strong impacts on both participants.”

Indeed, it did. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, the group showed exactly how air pollutants can make life harder for both moths and flowers: First, in the lab, the group performed a “forensic analysis” on the flowers to determine what blend of compounds make up its scent, explains Joel Thornton, an atmospheric chemist and professor at UW and an author on the study. By exposing the moths to each compound one by one, they identified which might be the most important to the moths, and then procured a sort of “dupe” floral scent. In lab experiments inside a 2-meter wind tunnel, the moths recognized the dupe just as well as they did real floral scents. 

But when the researchers added a pollutant, like NO3, to the wind tunnel, it threw the moths off. The bugs struggled to find both the real scent and the dupe. To prove why this was happening—Was the pollutant changing the scent? Overwhelming the moths? Or something else?—the team would have to get creative: They designed a “degraded” dupe to mimic the odor of a flower that had already been exposed to NO3. When they swapped the “degraded” scent into the wind tunnel—without any pollutant—it too confused the moths. This was a key discovery: It meant that the pollutant likely wasn’t changing anything about the moths; it was changing the chemical makeup of the flowers’ smell.

“We could have published probably there,” Thornton jokes. But Chan pushed for replicating the lab results in nature, which he did with real and paper flowers at a field site in eastern Washington. When NO3 was present, Chan clocked 70 percent fewer flower visits by the hawk moths, which the group estimates could lead to about 20 or 30 percent fewer fruits on the plants. “It’s having a really negative effect,” Riffell says. And given moths’ role in pollinating our food, that’s not just an environmental concern, Thornton adds, it’s an economic one.

Moths aren’t the only critters vulnerable to pollution. Human activities and the waste they produce are messing with animals’ senses in many ways. Studies show that diesel exhaust can disrupt honeybee pollination; traffic noise can stifle bird calls (and as a result, mating!); boat noise distracts hermit crabs; right whales raise the volume of their calls in noisy environments; insects flutter to death chasing the draw of streetlights; and bats struggle to hunt the closer they are to the din of highways.

But it’s not all bad news, at least not for the pale evening primrose and the hawk moths. Thanks to smog-reducing regulations like tailpipe standards, Thornton says, the United States and other countries have made “really great progress” over the past few decades to reduce nitrogen oxides emissions by more than half. If we keep policies that benefit human health in place, he adds, it’ll probably also benefit plants, pollinators, and farmers. “There is a bit of optimism to be had here,” he says. 

In a powerful four-minute speech, Sikorski offered a “useful” correction of the record. “Ambassador [Vasily] Nebenzya has called Kyiv the clients of the West,” Sikorski said. “Actually, Kyiv is fighting to be independent of anybody. He calls them a criminal Kyiv regime. In fact, Ukraine has a democratically elected government. He calls them Nazis. Well, the president is Jewish. The defense minister is Muslim, and they have no political prisoners. He said that Ukraine was wallowing in corruption. Well, Aleksei Navalny documented how honest and full of probity his own country is.”

That sardonic beat about Navalny was especially poignant after the Russian opposition leader’s death in a Russian prison in mid-February, for which the Biden administration blames the Kremlin.

Sikorski went on: “He said that we are prisoners of Russophobia,” Sikorski continued. “‘Phobia’ means irrational fear. Yet we are being threatened almost every day by the former president of Russia and by Putin propagandists with nuclear annihilation. I put to you that it’s not irrational. When Russia threatens us, we trust it.”

He concluded with a challenge to Russia’s military prowess: “[Nebenzya] is saying that we, the West, are somehow trying to persuade that Russia can never be beaten. Well, Russia didn’t win the Crimean War, it didn’t win the Russo-Japanese war, it didn’t win World War I, it didn’t win the Battle of Warsaw, it didn’t win in Afghanistan, and it didn’t win the Cold War.”

“They failed to subjugate us then. They will fail to subjugate Ukraine, and us, now.”

The full speech is worth your time. Watch it below: 

Just hours after the South Carolina polls closed, Saturday Night Live’s opener capitalized on this long-running dynamic. The skit features four Republican senators: Graham, Scott, James Risch of Idaho, and Marco Rubio of Florida, who share a table at a Trump victory party in Washington, DC. Over tater-tots and pigs-in-a-blanket, the senators dish on their awkward interactions with the former president in a gossip-session-turned-support group—all while emphasizing their endless adoration for Trump.

Rubio (played by Marcello Hernandez) shares that the nickname “Little Marco,” bestowed by Trump, just won’t go away: “I’ve never been able to shake it,” he says. “People still yell it at me in airports. He kind of made my life hell.”

“And you endorsed him, right?” asks Risch (Mikey Day).

“Absolutely,” Rubio says emphatically. “Big time. That guy’s just the best.”

It only gets better and more pointed from there. Watch the full skit below:

“This was a little sooner than we anticipated,” Trump said at the outset of his victory speech Saturday night, speaking from Columbia, South Carolina. “An even bigger win than we anticipated.” Haley, for her part, vowed to stay in the race, at least for now. “I’m a woman of my word,” she said, “I’m not giving up this fight when a majority of Americans disapprove of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.”

Even in the state where she once served as governor, few people expected Haley to win. (Most networks called the race for Trump shortly after the polls closed.) But nevertheless, the race had a few surprising—and deeply troubling—moments. We’ve rounded up a few here, including the latest racist comments from the candidate expected to be the GOP’s 2024 nominee:

Trump says “the Black people are so much on my side now”

Speaking at an event hosted on Friday by the Black Conservative Federation in South Carolina, Trump made reference to his multiple indictments”: “I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now. Because they see what’s happening to me happens to them. Does that make sense?” “The mugshot, we’ve all seen the mugshot. And you know who embraced it more than anyone else? The Black population. It’s incredible.” At another point in the speech, Trump also said the lights were so bright that he could only see Black attendees in the crowd.

Trump on languages spoken by immigrants: “a very horrible thing”

During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, Trump spoke of his plans for immigration policy: “It will be the largest deportation in the history of our country and we have no choice,” he said, adding, “We have languages coming into our country… They have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.” Trump then imitated Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, replete with his attempt at a Mexican accent.

Sen. Lindsey Graham gets booed at Trump’s victory speech

In welcoming Graham to the podium, Trump introduced the Republican South Carolina senator as someone who “happens to be a little bit further left than some of the people on this stage.” When met with boos from the crowd, Trump, appearing genuinely surprised by the reaction, said, “No no, remember—I love him. He’s a good man.” (Graham sure has come a long way from once declaring that the GOP would be “destroyed” if it chose Trump.)

A strong majority of South Carolina GOP voters think Biden didn’t win in 2020

In exit surveys conducted by NBC, 62 percent of GOP primary voters in South Carolina told pollsters—incorrectly—that they don’t think Joe Biden legitimately won the presidential election in 2020. “Haley managed to win 81 percent of voters who believe President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election,” according to NBC, “but they only made up a third of the electorate.”

On Tuesday, Trump and Haley will face off in another GOP primary, in Michigan.

The first time I can remember seeing “Pale Blue Dot” was in high school. I’d won a print of the photo, appropriately, in a science fair competition. In the image, the Earth is about a pixel wide, a minuscule fleck in a grainy sea of nothingness. And that was the point: In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, famed scientist Carl Sagan, whose idea it was to capture Earth from such an immense distance, famously described the image in a way that never fails to make me tear up:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Although the “Pale Blue Dot” may have looked static, in 1990, the planet, of course, was as alive and bustling as ever. At the time, the world celebrated the freshly fallen Berlin Wall; scientists had just created the World Wide Web and launched the Human Genome Project, an initiative to map the human genome for the first time; Ghost, Pretty Woman, and Home Alone topped domestic box office sales; Ralph Nader, then in his 50s, graced the cover of Mother Jones.

Thirty-four minutes after “Pale Blue Dot” was taken, Voyager 1 shut off its cameras, as it was designed to do, and continued its journey. In 2012, the craft crossed the “heliopause,” which NASA describes as “the boundary between our solar bubble and the matter ejected by explosions of other stars,” into interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager is still operating, but on its last legs, and is expected to have fully shut off its key science instruments sometime around 2025, NASA says.

It’s fitting that “Pale Blue Dot” was taken on Valentine’s Day. It was, in its most basic form, an act of love. Even 34 years later, it serves as a paradoxical reminder of our insignificance—and our singular source of life. It is, quite literally, our everything. And today, as our planet is plagued by violent wars, a climate crisis, and the fallout of a devastating pandemic, and in a critical election year no less, that message feels more important than ever.

Happy Valentine’s Day, dot. (And also to my boyfriend.)