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Filmmaker Juan Carlos Dávila’s new film for PBS, Farmers of the Sea, documents climate change’s threats to the fishing industry and food security in Vieques, Puerto Rico. For islands in the Caribbean, explains Dávila, “we are situated geographically in one of the frontlines of climate change. [We’re] not only facing stronger hurricanes now, [but] we could face food shortages, especially the islands that depend so much on the food that comes from the sea.”

Caregivers often don’t recognize how much time, energy and effort is dedicated to their nutrition-related responsibilities, and many feel unprepared for them.

A youth-led protest movement in India is demanding an end to the country’s status quo. Sparked by the leak of national exam questions, tens of thousands of young people have taken to the streets. They are protesting under the banner of the Cockroach Janta (People’s) Party — a new party named to reflect the words of India’s chief justice, who compared unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. The movement has only swelled in response to a violent crackdown on protesters. Although the protesters’ initial demands were for the resignation of the country’s education minister, “everything has shifted to directly attacking [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi,” says Indian writer Arundhati Roy, who joins us from New Delhi, the physical center of a movement that first found exponential success online. The erosion of democratic principles under Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party is being contested on a large scale for the first time, says Roy. “It’s really a generation whose parents and grandparents wore those Modi masks and chanted 'Modi, Modi, Modi,' and got him into power. It is their children now who are saying the emperor has no clothes.”

Hamideh Khaleghi Mohammadi, University of Sydney and Ali Abbasi, University of Sydney The Conversation Coverage of the conflict between Iran, Israel and the United States has largely focused on battlefield developments, political statements and international diplomacy. However, another story has been unfolding on the streets of Iran. Despite fears of further military escalation dominating daily life, residents continue take […]

Mehdi on the world's richest man just proudly copping to his anti-Muslim bigotry – and why it's so dangerous. Plus: a (rare) defeat for Donald Trump in his war on journalists.

There is nothing subtle about the way power moves at this stage of the Trump regime. True, such displays may be clumsy or pathetic. They may simply fail. But however weak the administration may appear, there is still benefit to be had from proximity to the shit show, including for those who would prefer to seek control more quietly. That’s the case with Alliance Defending Freedom, the once-fringe legal group founded as the Christian right’s response to the ACLU, whose influence in Washington has been on unusually prominent display. Over the past week or so, Senator Ted Cruz quizzed the nominee for attorney general about the Victorian obscenity laws Alliance Defending Freedom thinks are enforceable. Aggressively advancing ADF’s mission to ban medication abortion, Senator Josh Hawley demanded a criminal investigation into an abortion access group. And the speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, gave a speech at the group’s annual summit in San Diego, crediting it for shaping how he does his job to this day.The close bond between Washington and Alliance Defending Freedom was on full display in that speech. At the summit, themed to coincide with “America at 250” celebrations, Johnson was introduced as one of the faithful. “Before he ran for Congress, Speaker Johnson was one of us,” the host said. “ADF really is like home for us,” Johnson told attendees. “You’re like family.” It’s a “family” that Johnson first served more than 20 years ago. He was hired by ADF in 2002, and soon opened the group’s North Louisiana office. “ADF’s been so formative to us,” said Johnson, speaking of himself and his wife. “So much of what we do, we learned on the front lines of the culture war—keeping the door open for the spread of the gospel—and it informs still how we do our job today.” In his remarks, Johnson left out a key part of the group’s mission statement, one that seems to have been excised since he worked there: “to keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system.”Back when Johnson first worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, as a young Christian lawyer, the group had a much lower profile. Unless you followed the Christian right closely, you were unlikely to have heard of it. Today, however, the group wields considerable influence over the law, and considerable power over the lives of nearly anyone who is not a straight, white, cisgender man in the United States. The Supreme Court docket over the last two decades can feel like ADF’s greatest-hits list: Hobby Lobby (which threatened contraception coverage), Masterpiece Cakeshop (which undermined anti-gay discrimination law), Dobbs (which allowed states to ban abortion), and Skrmetti (which allowed states to ban gender-affirming care for youth).On its surface, ADF can sometimes resemble the reverse image of any number of progressive law projects focused on strategic litigation, but for the purpose of elevating cases on “the front lines of the culture war,” as Johnson put it. ADF is in near lockstep with the Trump administration in its efforts to end reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and gender justice. But ADF’s work goes further than what gets shorthanded and often diminished as “culture-war” issues: More than merely taking up Christian right political fights in the nation’s courts, it is engaged in a sweeping project to recast America as a Christian nation ruled by Christians. Days after Johnson’s speech at the ADF summit, Senator Josh Hawley appealed to the Department of Justice, essentially on the group’s behalf. In a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, released by Hawley on July 20, the senator wrote that he wanted the “entity called Plan C” investigated for a host of alleged crimes, all of which boil down to providing people with information about medication abortion and where to access pills. (Plan C is an informational resource for people seeking to self-manage abortion with pills.) Hawley’s claims are weak and not all that original: They expand on legal arguments made in a number of Alliance Defending Freedom cases, including one at the Supreme Court that was argued by Erin Hawley, the senator’s wife. (That case would have forced the FDA to reverse its guidance on mifepristone, substantially blocking access to medication abortion; ADF lost that one, and is now attempting to revive it.) Hawley has joined ADF’s broader anti–medication abortion campaign, searching for an avenue to marshal the law against people who send and receive pills through the mail; going after Plan C is just the latest avenue. In fact, Hawley is working on multiple ways to end mifepristone access. One plan is simply to have the Justice Department settle the suit because now the FDA could just do what the suit would force it to do.In Hawley, ADF has an ally willing to prod the Justice Department in its direction, as well as an opportunity to direct DOJ from the top. The senator has pushed acting Attorney General Blanche to investigate Plan C at a moment when Blanche needs Hawley’s vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to be confirmed as attorney general, making this Plan C “investigation” request, as Susan Rinkunas at independent news outlet Autonomy News writes, “nothing short of a shakedown.” Should Blanche be confirmed, it would be a victory not only for him but for ADF, as well, particularly if he takes up the group’s dubious legal argument that it’s already illegal to mail abortion pills. While Hawley appears focused on one particular abortion information group, another senator on the committee is using the confirmation hearings to elevate ADF’s broader legal argument against medication abortion. It was Senator Ted Cruz who brought this argument before Blanche around the time of Hawley’s demand. At a July 15 hearing, Cruz wanted to know if Blanche would toss out an opinion issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2022, affirming that the law “does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” The law in question is the Comstock Act, which until recently was regarded as a Victorian artifact but has enjoyed a resurgence thanks to Alliance Defending Freedom.ADF may have been able to get the Supreme Court to side with it on Dobbs, but the court has yet to bless its efforts to ban abortion pills. To fully block medication abortion access, the group is turning to an act of Congress so old it was signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant. It’s a wild reach, but not one fully unanticipated by the act’s namesake, Anthony Comstock, a Christian crusader who saw sex as a mortal threat to the United States and harnessed the power of the postal service to ban the circulation of “obscene” items, including information about or depicting sex, as well as any items that could be used for contraception or to have an abortion. Comstock has modern acolytes outside ADF, but so far, the group is the only one to get two Supreme Court justices on the record considering the application of Comstock in a modern American context. Comstock would not necessarily feel out of place in the twenty-first century, thanks to such pioneering legal minds. Whatever happens at the court, if, at Blanche’s direction, the Justice Department suddenly concludes that Comstock is still good law and federal prosecutors begin bringing Comstock cases over mailing abortion pills, ADF may have willed its national abortion ban into practice. Blanche has already said in hearings that he would review the existing Comstock opinion.It’s chilling when ADF legal theories get a hearing in Congress or at the Supreme Court. It isn’t just an anti-LGBTQ group or an anti-abortion group, fighting with and through the law on behalf of aggrieved Christians. As the Idaho Statesman headlined an opinion piece on ADF, when it was representing the state in anti-abortion and anti-trans cases, “Alliance Defending Freedom isn’t representing you, but Christian Nationalism broadly.” Is ADF doing for the federal government what it did for Idaho? At the ADF summit this month, Speaker Johnson made clear how close to “home” ADF really was for his family. His daughter, he said, had been part of the group’s legal training program, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship. “Now she’s one of the lawyers for the Oversight Committee in Congress,” the speaker said. “So, pray for her.” That’s not unusual; Blackstone was apparently founded to win ADF influence in government by placing its fellows in useful positions. Today, former Blackstone fellow Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court.All this is quite an accomplishment for a group that has built Supreme Court cases out of imagined grievances and may have gotten the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigated ADF and labeled it a hate group. Unlike in Idaho, ADF may not be offering its legal services to the government. The government doesn’t need it to—not when it’s already acting like ADF is a federal department.

One summer, Rachel Aviv went away to sleepaway camp in Maine while her mother rented a house some hours away for a self-imposed writing retreat. In a scene that could be a playbook for Annie Baker’s film Janet Planet, the writer recounts calling her mother a few days into her time at camp to say she “was considering jumping into the lake and drowning.” Her mother picks her up, and the two spend the summer together, doing some writing, and some not writing. Her mother’s plans to conceive groundbreaking fiction are foiled, but being together feels natural for the two of them. They were, after all, attached at the hip, in a kind of “overwhelming and exhausting fusion.”When exactly does this fusion end? Or does it simply never? These are the animating questions at the heart of Aviv’s new essay collection, You Won’t Get Free of It, which tells the stories of mothers and daughters whose relationships are complicated, yet inexorable: from a nanny who leaves her family in the Philippines only to become attached to new, surrogate children, to a young schoolteacher who goes missing for long stretches of time, her mother left searching for her for years on end. They are the kind of slippery and ambiguous stories to which only a writer like Aviv, so committed to interpreting and explaining her subjects, could give form.There is, of course, a rich literature on mother-daughter inextricability, from Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987) to Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? (2012). A slate of more recent motherhood memoirs have also taken on similar quandaries of tumult and transference, such as Lena Dunham’s Famesick (2026), which plumbs her ever-shifting relationship with her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, after Dunham’s fame begins to lap her mother’s, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025), which explores what happens when our relationships with our mothers begin to feel barbarous and distant. “For years, Arundhati was estranged from her mother,” the critic Rebecca Mead writes in a recent review of Roy’s memoir. “Yet she was never free of her.”But You Won’t Get Free of It is a different kind of book; one far less claustrophobic than many mother-daughter memoirs, wherein the reader often walks away with an understanding of one—or maybe two, if we’re lucky—unique perspectives on a particular relationship. In this collection, Aviv excavates her own relationships and experience, in order to open up and illuminate others’ stories. In her hands motherhood is a tight bond, but also one perpetually remade by distance, memory, and reexamination. It is not so much an endless struggle to be escaped as it is an infinitely complex starting point for larger stories.Since the beginning of her career, Rachel Aviv has been writing about people whose experiences can’t be easily explained by preconceived rules and definitions, whether that’s in the world of medicine or law. Her first book, Strangers to Ourselves, was about Aviv’s own hospitalization for anorexia at the ripe age of six: an outlier of a situation in the world of psychiatry, since anorexia, some researchers believe, is a “reading disorder”—that is, as Aviv puts it, a condition “brought on by uncritical consumption of texts that present thinness as the feminine ideal”—and at six years old, Aviv could barely read. This personal anecdote, as well as that of a girl she met on the floor of her hospital ward, foreshadows the rest of the book, which examines the stories of other patients whose afflictions don’t fit neatly into the restricting confines of a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders definition, but who have at times felt hemmed in by those definitions nonetheless. For avid readers of Aviv’s deeply researched narrative reporting in The New Yorker, where she’s been writing since 2011, Strangers to Ourselves was a fascinating unveiling of her motivations as a journalist. You Won’t Get Free of It serves a similar purpose, sharing bits of biography that inform the rest of the collection. The book’s preface is a previously unpublished personal piece, while the remaining six reported essays first appeared in some shape or form in The New Yorker. Those essays, some of which Aviv revised for this book, are not just her typical tales of confounding mental illnesses and cognitive dissonance, but rather stories that Aviv reframes as reflections on motherhood; as she reexamines them, she brings to the surface details that she had once overlooked, but which now seem to reveal new emotional and psychological dimensions.This collection brings to the surface details that she had once overlooked, but which now seem to reveal new emotional and psychological dimensions.The first essay, for which Aviv mined her mother’s diaries as well as her own childhood journals, begins with some biography of Aviv’s mother, who could only have dreamed of the kind of career her daughter has today. She always wanted to be a writer, Aviv tells us, submitting her short fiction time and time again to The New Yorker, never getting anything published, but trying again and again anyway. Her mother’s life, as the lives of mother-artists usually are, was defined by a constant battle between the priorities of parenting and art-making, which Aviv’s clingy nature didn’t make any easier. But her mother was proud of her, and throughout Aviv’s adolescence and into her adulthood, she was happy to be her close collaborator and at times, her editor. Aviv shared her college essays with her mother, who would reply “like an English teacher,” offering constructive feedback here and there. But even after Aviv became a professional journalist, her mother would continue to weigh in on her published work, unable to let go of the image of Aviv scribbling in her notebook as a would-be camper. On the heels of Aviv’s longform investigation into the short story writer Alice Munro—which is included in this collection—Aviv’s mother wrote to her with worry that “she was sure that she, too, must have failed to protect [Aviv] from sexual abuse.” It’s an outrageous, if overly simplified assumption for her mother to make, but it’s also not impossible to understand: If Aviv began to investigate stories of elusive illness due to her own experience of a childhood eating disorder, is it so unreasonable to infer that she might have been interested in a story of sexual assault out of an affinity too? Aviv views her mother’s “delusion of reference” as an indication that she is still hovering over her like she did when Aviv was a child. Aviv’s increased interest in Munro’s story, and other mother-daughter dyads, comes, however, from her own experience of becoming a mother. Perhaps it’s a truism to say that becoming a mother changes you: It’s one that Aviv herself tried to resist, reading court records in bed for a story she was working on almost immediately after giving birth to her first child. But she takes pains to emphasize how this change was not only inevitable, but also directly shaped her work. Before she was a mother, she tells us, she “had somehow thought [she] was writing from the daughter’s perspective.” But years later, reexamining that work for this book, she realizes “how many stories were also about the mother, waiting for messages she thought were hers to understand.”The best example of this shift in perspective is the story of Hannah Upp, about whom Aviv originally wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. Upp was the closeted daughter of two ministers—each with differing opinions on homosexuality—who, after graduating from Bryn Mawr, moved to New York City to work as a schoolteacher. She disappeared on what was supposed to be her first day of class and was found three weeks later bobbing in the New York harbor, with seemingly no memory of where she had been since the day she vanished. Over the next few years, Upp suffered at least one more “dissociative fugue” before she went missing amid Hurricane Irma on the island of St. Thomas, where she had moved to teach at a Montessori school. Her mother, Barbara, flew out as soon as she could and stayed on the island for months, searching to no avail. She eventually made peace with the idea that she would never completely understand what had happened to her daughter or why.At the time Aviv reported this story, Barbara requested that she let her daughter’s fugues “stay a mystery.” While Aviv alluded in her original piece to the complicated relationships and split loyalties Upp had with her parents, she didn’t push too hard to connect her upbringing to her dissociative episodes. But seven years later, during the writing of You Won’t Get Free of It, Aviv—now a mother of two—has arrived at a new perspective. When she wrote the original story, she was around the same age as Upp, and “maybe … had been inclined to imagine that, in her early adulthood, Hannah had achieved more psychological separation from her family dynamics than she actually had.” Meanwhile, reading through her notes, Aviv realizes that she had left out a detail she wouldn’t have now: Before Upp was born, Barbara had another baby who died shortly after birth. Her mother, in other words, had been mourning a missing child, but “at the time I resisted a detail that seemed too symbolic, even if it was true.”Aviv found a similar pattern of newly revealing details upon reviewing the first piece she ever wrote for The New Yorker. The story was about a woman named Linda Bishop, who, like “nearly half of people given a diagnosis of psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, say that they are not mentally ill,” and thus refuse to take medication, inadvertently alienating family and friends in the process. After leaving a psychiatric hospital her family coaxed her into, Bishop went out on her own, eventually coming across a vacant house for sale where she lived eating only apples until she died of starvation. Bishop, a God-fearing woman in her state of psychosis, believed she was waiting for a lover—a man who, in reality, she had only met a few times—to show up and save her. In Aviv’s original piece for The New Yorker, the story of Linda Bishop highlights the many limitations of psychiatry. In addition to observing that it is “the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish,” Aviv also positions Bishop as someone whose illness was the central, devastating difficulty in an otherwise happy life. Bishop was educated, well adjusted, and came from a family with “loving and supportive parents”; she was a good student who had a bright future, her parents thought perhaps she’d even become a professor. Aviv is also sympathetic to the ways in which families have contended with stigma around mental illness, including hurtful assumptions that they are in some way to blame for their loved one’s condition, noting that a prominent theory in the 1970s held that “the root of schizophrenia was a ‘schizophrenogenic mother,’ incapable of communicating her love.” Aviv was 28 when she reported the original story: “Apparently, at the time I did not think losing a child was a biographical fact relevant enough to mention. I had not even asked a follow-up question.”The new version of this story in You Won’t Get Free of It offers a very different portrayal of Bishop. The reference to the “schizophrenogenic mother” is gone, perhaps because even mentioning that it has been debunked still gives it room in the text, and could lead to unwanted inferences. Meanwhile, Bishop appears here as a woman with significant familial and personal trauma—which does not entirely explain her illness, but does seem to provide important context for her experience. When Aviv went back through her interview transcripts and spoke again to Bishop’s sister for this book, she learned that Bishop and her sister were both adopted after her mother had lost two young children to illnesses, a fact that their parents never discussed with their children. (The fact of adoption is significant, as schizophrenia is thought to be largely hereditary, though Aviv does not note this; Bishop may have understood her condition more readily if she had known her family medical history.)Bishop herself had also lost a child. Right after high school, Aviv learns, she got pregnant and her parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers, where she was forced to give birth and put her own baby up for adoption. “I don’t think anyone was with her when she gave birth,” her sister tells Aviv. A teenage girl giving birth alone and then deprived of her child: It must have been a terrifying, emotionally shattering, and unmooring experience, and it was something Bishop rarely spoke about as an adult. Aviv was 28 when she reported the original story and did not yet have children: “Apparently, at the time I did not think losing a child was a biographical fact relevant enough to mention. I had not even asked a follow-up question.”Reading Aviv’s reassessment of her reporting and re-reporting, one has to admire her dedication to doing justice to someone else’s story, or “getting things right,” as much as one can. But equally admirable is her admission of just how much her own shifting perspective has directly shaped how she tells those stories.When Aviv thinks back to when her mother picked her up from camp, she reflects that “now, if my daughter were to call from camp crying, I’m not sure I would so quickly and selflessly set aside my plans.” In fact, Aviv thinks that when it comes to the camp story, both she and her mother “made the wrong choice.” Who is to say that is the right judgment? Just as a daughter’s perspective is partial, so is a mother’s. As Aviv so compellingly suggests in this book, the bond between the mother and her daughter is profound, perpetual, and deeply ingrained. We cannot get free of it, as hard as we may try. But we can acknowledge it. And that should do us some good.

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Flix’s André Schwämmlein and Daniel Krauss say Europeans can’t blame their governments for a shortage of startups with global reach.