Close your eyes. Picture an environmentally friendly home. What do you see?

Maybe you see a remote cabin in the woods, totally off-grid, plastered with solar panels.

But, what if there was another way?

According to some experts, dense, urban living can actually be good for the planet — as long as you do it correctly.

“Density and climate are related in quite simple ways,” said Shlomo Angel, professor of city planning and leader of the New York University Urban Expansion Program. “Density, basically, is the number of people per acre, or per square kilometer or hectare, whatever.”

While increasing the number of people per acre might sound like it would only drive out plants and animals, it can sometimes have the opposite effect.

“The higher the density, in general, the less space the city takes up, so the less of nature is disturbed,” Angel said. “The smaller the city for a given population, the better it is for climate. First of all, because it leaves a lot of greenery for sequestration of carbon.”

There are other reasons, too, he said.

“The tighter the city, the shorter the distances between different locations, the less vehicle miles traveled to reach the same level of destinations,” Angel said.

Density also has an impact on transport.

“If you get to high enough densities, then public transport becomes viable and public transport uses less energy than cars,” Angel said. “Also, we get higher density, more people can walk, more people can take bicycles and less carbon.”

Density can also make buildings more energy efficient.

“Multi-story structures are better insulated than single-story structures; there’s less energy loss,” Angel said. “Higher density is associated with taller buildings that are more efficient in terms of their insulation, in terms of their use of energy.”

With density, “we’re able to reduce the energy needed to keep cool, because we have less windows that are facing the exterior; the heat transfer of the building is less,” said Jay Arehart, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder and co-author of a 2021 paper on density, tall buildings and carbon emissions.

However, density isn’t always a good thing. Tall buildings require different types of materials, some of which require lots of carbon emissions to make.

“It’s not only the energy that we generate in these buildings, but the energy that it takes to build them,” Angel said. “Up to a certain height, you can build with renewables.”

Tall buildings, he continued, especially ones that are taller than eight stories, require energy-intensive materials like steel, concrete and aluminum.

“If you start to use steel and concrete and aluminum, when you look at the amount of energy that it takes to produce these things, no density will cover for it,” Angel said. “If you just keep building in timber, it’s a lot more efficient, and you can still get a lot of density.”

Arehart also said building too tall can have adverse impacts. For example, tall buildings need larger columns to support them, and use more energy to bring water up to higher floors.

In addition, there can sometimes be a trade-off between urban green space and dense construction. Robert McDonald, a lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy, is also a co-author of a recent study about this that showed there is typically a trade-off between density and greenery. However, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, he said in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

“There are plenty of examples of bright spots that manage to be both,” McDonald said.

Angel said it’s usually worth it to build more densely. But, he warned there is a trade-off between lowering carbon emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change.

“Density is mostly about mitigating climate change. Green space is mostly about adapting and dealing with climate change. So what you need is to preserve enough area in greenery to absorb precipitation, for example,” he said.

Arehart said, in many cases, it’s worth it to build more densely at lower heights — usually six to eight stories.

“There’s no need for us to build more than six to eight stories,” he said.

So, while density has real environmental benefits, we also need to be wary of trade-offs in terms of tall buildings and green space.

There are certain lines that we don’t expect anyone in American public life to cross. Even the most radical, extreme and erratic personalities that inhabit our media sphere will avoid endorsing some ideas, out of a sense of self-preservation if nothing else.

One of those ideas is support for Adolf Hitler.

But Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, is used to crossing lines. And if like me, you’re a long-time fan of his music, and you’re used to cringing at his erratic statements, which are likely exacerbated but in no way excused by his mental health struggles. Ye truly reached a new low on Dec. 1.

On conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show, Ye declared, “I like Hitler.” This is just one part of his recent descent into blatant, disgusting antisemitism.

Of course, on Nov. 22 — and after his open anti-Semitism began — Ye had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with none other than former president Donald Trump. The Donald is no stranger to antisemitism but so far he’s managed to avoid praising the Führer of the Third Reich.

However, this was not true of another guest at Mar-a-Lago that night: a smug young man by the name of Nick Fuentes. In addition to palling around with members of Congress, Fuentes is known for denying the Holocaust, being racist and misogynistic and appearing at the infamous 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman died after a white supremacist hit her with his car.

To get a better idea of who Fuentes is and how he fits into the broader white nationalist movement, I talked to Daniel Harper. Harper co-hosts a podcast about white supremacy called “I Don’t Speak German.”

According to Harper, Fuentes got his start hosting a current events radio program at his high school. In college, Fuentes would go on to host a talk show on a right-wing, pro-Trump online network. However, he was fired after he attended the Charlottesville rally.

Harper said around the time Fuentes attended Unite the Right, he began co-hosting a show with James Allsup, another far-right commentator, which is how Harper first became aware of Fuentes.

Harper said the young fascist’s voice was deceiving. “I thought he was like, 45 years old,” he said.

Plus, Harper said that at the time, Fuentes didn’t seem like he was going to make waves. 

“Honestly, the thing I got the wrongest of anything that I’ve ever said on ‘I Don’t Speak German’ was when” he underestimated Fuentes, Harper said. “I’m like, Nick Fuentes is going to basically disappear because he’s not hardcore enough. And boy, that was a real failure on my part. Like, a failure of imagination. Because he’s just kind of kept his nose to the grindstone.”

But wait: isn’t this guy an actual fascist who denies the Holocaust and is constantly saying all kinds of blatantly racist and misogynistic stuff? This is the guy who’s not hardcore enough?

That’s because, while they agree with each other ideologically, the white nationalist movement is deeply divided on tactics.

Ben Lorber is a research analyst who studies white nationalism at Political Research Associates, a left-wing think tank. After Charlottesville, he said, “the movement kind of split into two camps.”

“At that point, it congealed into two separate tendencies,” Lorber said. On the one hand, you had radicals who “embraced either neo-Nazi imagery or accelerationist acts of terror. Basically, they were the ones who gave up all hope of transforming the GOP or working in mainstream politics.”

On the other hand, you had those who tried to cultivate a friendlier image to mask their supremacist views. 

“Nick Fuentes was kind of, like, the leader of this tendency,” Lorber said. “They maintained hope in working within the Trump revolution, within the MAGA movement, to carve out a space for explicit white nationalist politics.”

Indeed, Fuentes was a key participant in the so-called “Groyper War,” in which he and other young far-right activists pestered more mainstream conservative figures with questions about antisemitic conspiracy theories. They cast themselves as agents of authentic conservatism against the “Conservatism Inc.” represented by figures like Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Their goal, Lorber said, was to “sidle up as close as they could to the mainstream. They knew that they weren’t going to be working for Mitch McConnell or anything like that…and so that’s why they’ve been really cultivating relationships with Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene. You know, people on the hard fringe of the MAGA movement, but who still have mainstream influence.”

Gosar and Greene both spoke at a conference put on by Fuentes earlier this year. During a speech by Fuentes at that conference, the crowd cheered for Vladimir Putin and Hitler. Greene has since denounced Fuentes. For his part, Trump has condemned neither Fuentes nor Ye, his other Hitler-loving dinner guest.

But there are also those within the white nationalist movement who view Fuentes as a contemptuous sellout. “The full-on Nazis hate this guy,” Harper said. “They hate him for being the optician, for being buddy-buddy with the Republican party.”

Matthew Feldman is a professor at the University of York in England who studies fascist ideology and has served as an expert witness in terrorism cases. The opposite of Fuentes’s attempts at all-American imagery, Feldman said, are the Nazis who say, “we will never be accepted by these people, no matter what.” 

The most extreme of these groups is the Order of Nine Angles, a theistic Satanist neo-Nazi ideology that promotes terrorism and pedophilia.

“They said, we are self-consciously evil, and we’re gonna give you evil, and we think that fits what Naizsm really is,” Feldman said. People linked to both the Order of Nine Angles and non-Satanist Nazi ideologies have committed murder and other heinous crimes.

These extremists have become depressingly relevant. Some of them murder, while others curry favor in the political system. Either way, they’re dangerous, and it’s important to understand what they’re doing.

“Now we’re cooking with gas.”

It’s an ubiquitous expression. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to “be cooking with gas” means “to be making very good progress or doing something very well.”

And it’s true there are many advantages to cooking with a gas stove. According to former journalist and current cooking YouTuber Adam Ragusea, a big advantage of gas stoves is their responsiveness. “You ignite them, and they’re instantly hot. You throttle them down, they instantly cool off,” Ragusea said in a 2021 YouTube video.

But, gas isn’t the only responsive cooking method. An increasingly popular option, according to Ragusea, is induction stoves, which use magnetism to cook food. Induction stoves only work with certain cookware. According to Consumer Reports, induction “cooks more quickly when you turn up the heat and responds faster when you dial it back down.” However, it lacks the “visual feedback” of a gas flame.

If you’ve come to this column for cooking advice, you’ve come to the wrong place. While the cooking experience is very important to anyone shopping for a stove, I’m here to discuss the environmental, health and policy implications of gas stoves and other cooking technologies.

“It’s a literal fire, right here in your home,” Ragusea said. “So it’s romantic in that way. The original cooking, over an open fire, right here in your home.”

But, burning a fire in your home has a lot of downsides.

“Burning a gas stove creates indoor air pollution that’s mostly invisible,” said Josiah Kephart, an environmental epidemiologist at Drexel University. “This is mostly nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide.”
The air pollution from gas stoves can have a wide range of impacts on your health, Kephart said.

“Most of what we know is around respiratory diseases,” Kephart said. “You breathe these indoor air pollutants and they create this inflammation within your lungs. Now, that inflammation can both have an immediate impact, so your lungs immediately become inflamed. And this is really problematic for somebody who has asthma, somebody who has COPD.”

There are longer-term health impacts as well.

“Being exposed on a daily basis to these indoor air pollutants from gas stoves can actually have these chronic impacts on your lungs and on your health,” Kephart said. “That constant inflammation that you’re being exposed to will actually increase your chance of developing respiratory diseases down the road.”

While this pollution takes place indoors, the U.S. has strict pollution standards for outdoor air pollution, said Vishnu Laalitha Surapaneni, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

For instance, Surapaneni said, one study found, especially in homes that are less than 1,000 square feet and have poor ventilation, “the nitrogen oxide levels exceed EPA standards 100% of the time if you’re cooking unventilated.”

These harms are not evenly distributed.

“Folks in older homes with lower economic status tend to have higher use of gas stoves,” Kephart said. “There are a bunch of studies of poor children in Baltimore that have shown that children with a similar racial and ethnic background and similar socioeconomic background have higher respiratory diseases if they have a gas stove.”

Outdoor air pollution data show communities of color and low income communities are often more exposed to air pollution as an impact of structural racism because they often live near highways and facilities with lots of pollution, Surapaneni said.

“This is like a double whammy impact,” Surapaneni said. “Also, I think the risks are disproportionate where you have restaurant workers who are on the front lines who are inhaling more of this gas and all of these pollutants.”

Gas stoves also have an effect on the climate.

“Natural gas, which is the most common gas fuel in the United States, is a fossil fuel,” Kephart said. “So, burning that produces carbon, produces methane, carbon dioxide, which are major contributors to greenhouse gasses and to global warming.”

In fact, a study from January indicates gas stoves leak methane even when they’re turned off.

“More than three quarters of the methane emissions were actually measured during the off state,” said Surapaneni. “They estimated, in a 20-year time frame, emissions from all of the gas stoves in the U.S., which is around 42 million homes … they could have a climate impact that’s comparable to 500,000 cars.”

But, stoves aren’t the only way people use natural gas in their homes.

“As far as the amount of gas that’s used for cooking, it’s way lower than what’s used for heating water or heating ventilation systems,” said Peter Raynor, a public health professor at the University. “The environmental benefits of switching from a gas stove to an electrical stove are pretty minimal in the scheme of things, probably.”

Plus, he pointed out at least some of your electricity might be produced using natural gas.

“It’s kind of hard to comment on should we do this gas stove, versus the heating, which should we pick,” Surapaneni said. “I would say that overall, we need to be focused on electrification because both contribute to climate and health impacts.”

If we want to fight climate change and improve people’s respiratory health, gas stoves have got to go.

An assailant entered a home in the San Francisco Bay Area on Oct. 28 and beat an elderly man with a hammer.

The victim was Paul Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s husband. The attacker, David DePape, shouted, “Where’s Nancy?” according to reports. He told police he saw Nancy as the “‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party,” according to an affidavit.

But not everyone believed politics played a role in the attack. The comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore posted a video on Nov. 1 to his 1.1 million YouTube subscribers. Dore questioned in the video whether DePape actually held right-wing beliefs. Dore cited a tweet from climate change Pollyanna and failed gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger, who said DePape’s politics were left-wing “until recently.” Upon learning DePape sold hemp jewelry, Dore declared DePape “sounds like a crazy right-wing hippie” and scoffed. Dore also pointed out that DePape’s house had a pride flag outside.

But we don’t have to speculate about DePape’s views based on his hemp jewelry business or flags outside his house. DePape had a blog. On this blog, he displayed signs of delusional thinking. This included thinking an invisible fairy had attacked someone. It also included a wide variety of far-right conspiracy theories as well as bigotry against Jewish and transgender people. He referred to feminists as “feminazis,” according to a coworker. He also made a post questioning the reality of the Holocaust. On Facebook, DePape linked to anti-vaccine websites and claimed the 2020 election was stolen.

DePape’s journey from far left to far right is his own individual story, shaped by his life experiences and likely mental illness. But he is not alone in adopting fringe ideas from various parts of the political spectrum.

British sociologist Colin Campbell identified in 1972 something he called the “cultic milieu.” By “cult,” Campbell did not necessarily mean oppressive or dangerous groups. Instead, he meant any group that deviates from the dominant culture. This “milieu,” then, includes any kind of deviant idea, such as fringe religions or alternative medicine. It also includes their “associated practices” as well as the groups, people, institutions and modes of communication associated with them. Because all of these ideas share a common anti-mainstream orientation, Campbell argued, their adherents tend to be receptive to one another’s beliefs. Campbell claimed that this milieu is syncretic: it combines ideas from many disparate sources.

In recent years, Campbell has questioned whether this concept still has any relevance, given the increasing difficulty of separating the mainstream from the fringe. But, many other scholars have gotten good use from it, and I think it’s quite relevant.

Al Jones is part of the Q Origins Project, a group that studies QAnon. He spoke to the Daily using a pseudonym to avoid harassment from QAnon followers.

He explained the phenomenon of “crank magnetism,” when someone starts with just one fringe belief — for instance, that COVID-19 vaccines do not work. But, if the authorities are lying about that, what else could they be hiding? Gradually, they start subscribing to more and more wacky ideas.

“You’re going to need a narrative to explain why these very good ideas are being rejected,” Jones said. “Once you’re in that lifestyle, and once you’re deeply emotionally committed to that logic, it blooms.”

W.F. Thomas is a freelance researcher who studies extremism. At the beginning of the pandemic, he was living in Germany and caught COVID-19. He could not stay with his host family, so he rented a place to self-isolate. The owner was trying to talk to Thomas, so he told him not to come close so as not to catch the virus.

According to Thomas, “he said to me, in German, ‘Oh, if you’ve heard of the deep state, they’re making it seem more bad than it is.’”

The owner said “deep state” in English.

COVID-19 conspiracy theorists, Thomas said, made strange bedfellows. “These are a bunch of old hippies — people who are interested in natural health — that kind of pseudoscience health stuff. Why are they out marching with hardcore Neo-Nazis?”

John Bodner is a folklorist at Memorial University in Canada. He said part of what has driven disparate fringe groups together is a shared opposition to COVID-19 safety measures.

“Because of the pandemic, and because they shared an anti-lockdown aesthetic with all these other groups across the country, that was enough of a middle ground for everybody to stand on,” he said.

“I think it’s the whole anti-vax movement where you probably saw the closest connections in recent years,” David Voas, a social scientist at University College London, said.

Yet, those are the people who define themselves as against the mainstream. But, what happens when the mainstream gets things wrong? For instance, WMDs in Iraq, playing down COVID-19 or classifying homosexuality as a mental illness.

According to Northwestern sociologist Gary Alan Fine, conspiracy theories emerge when people “have an idea of who is operating in their own self-interest and are doing so in a way that it is difficult to discover them.”

Annie Kelly is an academic and journalist who studies conspiracy theories.

“Personally, I know I’ve fallen for stuff that I’ve read online which looks legitimate,” she said. “And it’s also pretty damning about someone I don’t really like anyway.”

Kelly said she’s not alone — and I know that’s happened to me as well. We’re all vulnerable to “those little instinctive moves towards information that both makes us feel better about ourselves and makes our opponents … look much worse,” she said.

In addition to looking at the facts, Kelly said we should also be mindful of why a narrative appeals to us.

“It’s also about listening to yourself and listening to why something appeals to you,” she said. “Try and maintain that slightly skeptical approach to your own feelings while you read it.”

Kelly also argued that mainstream institutions need to be able to prove they’re trustworthy.

“There also does need to be better processes, essentially, that means that when an institution loses that public trust, there is accountability,” she said.

Do not assume that seemingly disparate ideas are actually incompatible. Always pay attention to what you are reading lest you fall into irrational beliefs. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, hold institutions accountable when they screw up.

On Nov. 1, I pitched a column about effective altruism. I had no idea what was going to happen next.

One of effective altruism (EA)’s most prominent adherents is Sam Bankman-Fried. Last week, his net worth went from $16 billion to zero, and he stepped down as CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

FTX and Bankman-Fried are under investigation from the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as authorities in the Bahamas, where his companies are based. It’s a disaster.

Bankman-Fried’s parents are law professors who studied utilitarianism, a branch of moral philosophy that argues moral action is the action that will lead to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. After college, Bankman-Fried pursued “earning to give,” in which you make as much money as possible to donate it. In April, Bankman-Fried pledged to give away 99% of his then-fortune.

EA is a movement built around the goal of being thoughtful about what the best way to do good in the world is. Most, but not all, effective altruists are utilitarians. The movement also entails some pretty radical ideas about what people should be donating to. For instance, one EA organization, GiveWell, doesn’t recommend any charities based in the United States.

The most controversial part of EA, though, doesn’t have anything to do with the charities GiveWell recommends, which do things like distributing vitamin A supplements and anti-malaria medicine.

This controversial idea is longtermism. If everyone is equally valuable, longtermists say, we should care about people in the future as well as people in the present, and there might be a lot of people in the future. Longtermists say 99% of humans dying is nowhere near as bad as 100%, because the remaining 1% will still be able to rebuild. So, they focus on existential risks that could kill 100% of people, rather than, say, climate change, which according to longtermists, will kill lots of people but probably not everybody. Although, some scientists think climate extinction is under-studied.

There are some longtermist causes that I like, such as preventing nuclear war and preparing for pandemics. I wouldn’t have written my own column on pandemics if not for EA.

But where I disagree is artificial intelligence (AI), which “has been a dominant focus in EA over the last decade,” according to Vox. While longtermists are worried about some shorter-term risks, such as discrimination and privacy violations, a big focus is the idea that runaway AI could kill or enslave all humans. A research analyst at the EA organization 80,000 Hours wrote, “I think there’s something like a 10% chance of an existential catastrophe resulting from power-seeking AI systems this century.”

“Personally, I am not worried about it, even though it’s possible,” Maria Gini, an AI expert at the University of Minnesota said of existential AI risk.

What she is concerned about, however, is poorly designed AI.

“I’m kind of concerned there will be a lot of bad AI software that will claim to do things, but in fact, that is buggy, that makes mistakes.” For instance, she said, if the power grid relied on faulty AI, that could be very bad.

While AI is nothing to sneeze at, it’s also not a massive existential risk that could justify redirecting resources from, say, alleviating global poverty.

Fighting global poverty is the EA cause that appeals to me most, and EA has influenced my past writing on the subject. Among the highest-quality evidence on anti-poverty programs prized by effective altruists are randomized controlled trials. According to Jason Kerwin, an applied economist at the University, they owe this to the “Randomista” movement, which pioneered “the widespread adoption of randomized controlled trials to study development interventions.”

If your movement claims to care about everyone in the world equally, it helps if it’s actually representative of that world. According to one member of the EA community, who counted staff profiles on public websites of longtermist organizations, they are overwhelmingly white.

This member, who works at an EA organization and spoke to the Minnesota Daily on condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, said while they haven’t researched it, their impression is that the staff tend to be more diverse at non-longtermist EA groups working on things like animal welfare and global poverty.

This member also said for EA and especially longtermist organizations, “founder effects” are a problem.

“Having been a part of EA for a long time, being trusted by EA leaders, being viewed as ‘part of the EA community’ all contribute to someone’s likelihood of being hired, all of which make it more likely for employees to ‘look like’ the people who were originally in EA,” they said.

“The recent failure of FTX is an egregious example of drawbacks of … utilitarianism,” Lia Harris, an employee at a medical NGO in Yemen, wrote to the Daily via private message on an online EA forum. Harris’ view is her own and not necessarily that of her employer.

Focusing on longtermism, Harris said, also illustrated these drawbacks. “Current people existing now are dying of poverty while EA is funding distant future people,” she wrote.

One thing I do admire about EA is many of its adherents make concrete personal sacrifices.

I talked to Max Gehred, president of Effective Altruism University of Wisconsin-Madison and an intern at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He said because of EA, he changed his career plans from teaching physics to working on public policy. He’s also signed the Giving What We Can pledge, a secular tithe in which people give 10% of their income to effective charities.

“I went vegetarian as a result of some of the ideas I encountered through EA,” he said. At the most extreme end, some EAs have even donated their kidneys to strangers.

Another thing I appreciate is EA’s attention to neglected causes. One way to ensure you’re making the biggest impact is to pick something few others are working on.

So where does EA stand? Certainly, Bankman-Fried’s downfall removes a big source of funding and may cause some in EA to reconsider some things.

“Sam and FTX had a lot of good will — and some of that good will was the result of association with ideas I have spent my career promoting,” wrote EA philosopher Will MacAskill. “If that good will laundered fraud, I am ashamed.”

But, there’s a lot more to EA than cryptocurrency and killer robots. Thanks in large part to GiveWell, the Against Malaria Foundation has raised hundreds of millions of dollars.

I hope, going into the future, effective altruism can focus more on helping the world’s most vulnerable people and animals, as well as preventing real risks that we know exist. This might not be as fun for crypto hucksters, but it will be more effectively altruistic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people around the world. Work, school, politics and the rest of our lives have been upended. Most horrifyingly, 6.5 million people died. All, or at least most of us, can agree that this has been a catastrophe of world-historical proportions.

COVID-19 has also served as a stress test of our country’s, and the world’s, capacity to respond to pandemics. And we can’t rest on our laurels, either. According to one study, there’s typically a 1 in 50 chance of a COVID-like pandemic in any given year. This means, over the course of your life, there is a 38% chance you’ll experience a COVID-like pandemic.

Given the non-negligible probability of another pandemic, we need to be doing everything we can to prepare. Are we?

Craig Hedberg, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota who studies infectious diseases, pointed out that the American Rescue Plan allocated $7 billion toward the public health workforce. However, he said he was worried this is just another step in the boom-and-bust cycle that has afflicted American public health for decades.

Public health funding went up dramatically after 9/11 raised fears about bioterrorism, followed by a drastic decrease after the 2008 financial crisis, and then another increase during the current pandemic. This inconsistency, he said, is “disruptive to the system.” Hedberg said he’d rather see “long-term stability of the funding that allows people to plan and build systems.”

“When public health works, it’s invisible,” said Melanie Firestone, an assistant professor in environmental health at the University. “And so we have a marketing problem, in one sense, because having a big problem creates that need for the funding, but it’s largely silent or unseen the rest of the time.”

“I’ll take less money, but give it to me on a regular basis,” Hedberg said.

“Give me more money consistently,” said JP Leider, senior fellow at the School of Public Health at the University. Leider characterized the cycle of funding as “panic, neglect, repeat.”

So we’ve established that we need to keep our investments in pandemic preparedness over time so that we don’t get caught off guard. But what should we be doing, specifically?

Multiple experts cited the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccine development.

“The vaccines have really been a remarkable achievement that we’ve been able to develop these things and get them out to as many people as we did,” Peter Raynor, a professor in the School of Public Health said. “That said, being able to do it even faster and more consistently is important, and not to lose the capability that we’ve developed.”

Jake Eberts is communications director at 1Day Sooner, an organization that advocates for high-risk “challenge” trials as well as other policies related to medicine and public health. He also praised the effectiveness of Operation Warp Speed (OWS), a U.S. government effort to develop vaccines under the Trump administration. Eberts said OWS identified regulatory hurdles that stood in the way of vaccine development and was able to use the military’s massive logistics network to aid in the pandemic response effort.

The U.S. military delivered “equipment and raw materials from all over the world,” according to health news site Stat. “There are quite honestly certain logistical elements of this that the CDC has never, ever been asked to do, and why not bring the best logisticians in the world into the equation?” Paul Mango, then deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, told Stat.

Eberts also discussed the idea of a “pandemic insurance fund.” This would be an attempted solution to vaccine inequity, in which rich countries can afford to buy up supply while poorer countries go without. Rich countries would donate a certain percentage of their GDP to this fund. “In the event of another pandemic, low- and middle-income countries … can pull from that pool to compete in bids for vaccines,” he said.

Audrey Dorélien is a professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs who is also affiliated with the Applied Economics Department, the School of Public Health and the Minnesota Population Center. She raised the idea of human challenge trials, in which healthy human subjects are deliberately infected with the disease that’s being researched.

While such trials are “very risky,” Dorélien said if they had been used more during this pandemic, they “would have given us more accurate results sooner and could have potentially averted a lot of the deaths.”

Rebecca Wurtz is a professor in the School of Public Health. She said public health “requires consensus and relationship-building.”

However, this can’t be done on the fly. “It’s too late to make those relationships after the emergency starts,” she said. Instead, public health institutions should work on that relationship-building with the community even in times when there isn’t a pressing emergency.

“One of the crises that we’ve had in our public health system is that everybody’s getting old,” Hedberg said. “We haven’t been rebuilding the flow of new, younger, well-trained people to take over all these responsibilities.

Another way to improve our pandemic preparedness is through indoor air treatment. Raynor has researched this topic extensively. He said “good indoor air quality has benefits not just during the pandemic but just in regular transmission of cold viruses, influenza … and other issues like smoke particles.” This can be done through engineering as well as government guidelines and regulations that encourage a certain level of air quality, he said.

Something else that experts said is that pandemics don’t affect everyone equally, and COVID-19 is no exception. Integrating the social and natural sciences will be critical to fighting future pandemics.

“What all this stuff, I think, has been lacking, once again, is that social, behavioral aspect,” Dorélien said. She said other countries, particularly in Europe, had collected social and behavioral data, such as how age groups mix, that would be critical for understanding disease spread. The U.S., however, was behind the curve.

Dorélien also explained how race can affect someone’s likelihood of COVID-19 exposure. One of the main sources of inequality in COVID-19 exposure “is different exposures in the workplace,” she said. For instance, “not every single group was equally likely able to work from home.”

Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a professor of sociology at the University and works with Leider to study COVID-19 mortality in Minnesota. In addition to praising vaccines and calling for more air treatment, she advocated for paid sick leave, increased hazard pay, mask mandates and community outreach efforts to get more people vaccinated.

COVID-19 has given us a good trial run. We know what has worked. We also know more needs to be done to prepare for future pandemics. We can’t rest on our laurels, and we need to make sure we don’t leave anyone out.

“Do these people actually think they’re getting any money?”

On Oct. 12, Alex Jones was defiant. He had just been found liable for nearly a billion dollars in damages in a default judgment after being sued by families of mass shooting victims for falsely claiming the massacre in which their loved ones died was a hoax.

Jones is probably right that he doesn’t have a billion dollars. But he’s got quite a bit. According to testimony from a financial expert, he and his company are worth $135–270 million. And, according to court documents, the Infowars store made $165 million from 2015–2018 by selling dietary supplements, prepper gear and other items.

Jones’s supplements have bombastic names and prices to match. Think “Super Male Vitality” ($34.95), “Alpha Power” ($41.95), “Survival Shield X-3” ($19.95) or “DNA Force Plus” ($74.95).

In 2017, BuzzFeed News sent several of Jones’s supplements to a lab. They mostly contained the same ingredients they advertised, although the marketing for some supplements made misleading claims. For instance, most of the listed ingredients in a supplement called “Joint Formula” had no scientific basis for helping joint health. Plus, many of the supplements were wildly overpriced and could be found in stores for much cheaper.

In the realm of label accuracy, Jones might actually be outperforming the competition. In a study published in August in the journal JAMA Network Open, researchers found 17 out of 30 immune supplements they bought from Amazon had inaccurate labels.

On the other hand, many supplement vendors are perfectly reputable. Richard Kingston is a professor at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy and has consulted for supplement companies as well as other industries. He is the president of SafetyCall, a company that helps clients in adverse event reporting like dealing with medical side effects.

Kingston said he’s worked with supplement companies that are well respected by doctors and pharmacists. “If you look at the actual safety profile of dietary supplements … it’s probably one of the safest classes of products in the marketplace,” he said.

However, Kingston said existing regulations around supplements are not enforced adequately. “The biggest problem that I see that we’ve got is … that there’s simply not enough enforcement of the existing regulations,” he said.

According to Ralph Hall, professor emeritus at the University’s law school, supplements are subject to several types of regulation. This involves both the Food and Drug Administration, which also regulates over-the-counter (OTC) and prescription medications, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, which is also responsible for regulating businesses in other industries.

Lisa Harnack is a professor in the University’s School of Public Health and directs the Nutrition Coordinating Center. She said while supplement manufacturers cannot claim their product treats or prevents a specific condition, they are allowed to make what are called structure/function claims. For instance, they couldn’t claim their supplement reduces blood pressure, but they could say it improves blood circulation.

“It’s pretty easy for manufacturers to indicate what they’re intending for the product to do without outright saying it,” she said.

Harnack also said because of the number of products on the market and the limitations of the FDA’s resources, it is difficult to monitor false claims.

According to Harnack, manufacturers “do not need to prove the product is safe before putting it in the marketplace.” However, there are certain ingredients the FDA has banned because they definitely aren’t safe, like the stimulant ephedra.

In comparison to over-the-counter medications, regulation of supplements is lax, Harnack said. OTC meds “have standards around proof of safety and efficacy before putting [them] in the marketplace,” she said. Additionally, OTC meds have standards around purity and ensuring they contain the listed ingredients.

Harnack said she would like to see some changes not in enforcement, but in the actual regulations themselves. She suggested certain amounts of substances that are known to be safe should be allowed without pre-approval, but manufacturers of other substances should have to prove they are safe and effective before going to market.

Kingston disagreed. While he expressed support for additional enforcement, he didn’t think new laws were necessary. He said issues like pre-approval “are already covered in the current laws, whether it be the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act or the subsequent additions to it.”

Kingston said some OTC drugs were grandfathered in, and therefore never approved by the FDA. He said many supplement ingredients were grandfathered in in a similar way, while new ingredients actually do have to go through a pre-approval process.

To make determinations about whether supplements are safe, first we need good data on them. Kingston’s company works on this, as do Rui Zhang and Rubina Rizvi of the University’s medical school. They said many existing datasets, including those created by the government, are not adequate. They’re using artificial intelligence to analyze data from multiple sources, and they hope to create a chat bot that can answer consumers’ questions about whether particular supplements are right for them.

While Harnack and Kingston disagree about what exactly is needed, they both suggested something needs to change, whether that’s beefed-up enforcement of existing rules or creating stronger ones.

In the meantime, how can we tell if a supplement is safe and effective?

Harnack suggested using Operation Supplement Safety, a resource created by the military to help service members get the facts about supplements. Kingston said he has worked with the military to help them make sure service members receive appropriate supplements.

Kingston suggested people look into the American Botanical Council, where he was previously on the board of directors.

“They’re an education-based organization [who] share factual scientific information related to herbs and other botanicals,” he said. Additionally, Kingston said searching for an ingredient in PubMed, a database of scientific papers, could be useful.

Supplements can be helpful. But be sure to do your research first.

This summer, headlines blared with shocking news: Americans’ belief in God had hit a “new low!” Surely, the atheist hordes will overrun God-fearing Christians any day now.

If you had actually clicked on the article instead of just reading the headline (a rarity these days), you would’ve found out that the “new low” was: 81%. According to polling company Gallup, four out of five Americans believe in God.

Nonetheless, it is true that there has been a notable decline in Americans’ belief in God, and this is significant. I think many Americans have a sense that our country is becoming less religious. While that’s definitely true, it’s also a bit more complicated than that.

To get a fuller picture of Americans’ religious views, it’s important to go beyond this one metric. After all, not everyone who believes in God considers themselves to be religious. Plus, belief is only one of the “three B’s” of religion, according to Evan Stewart, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. The other two are behavior — people’s religious practices — and belonging — their sense of being part of a religious group.

“All three measures, our common survey measures of religious engagement, have been declining, depending on how you ask the measure and depending on the survey,” Stewart said.

We can see this decline illustrated in this graph from Pew Research Center.

“In the 1970s, if you asked, ‘what religious group do you belong to?’ Most Americans would give you some kind of answer. And the ones who would say, ‘Well, I’m none of the above’ on the General Social Survey, that was only about 7% of the population. Today, it’s up to 25%, or even 30%,” Stewart said.

“Religious non-affiliation has really gone up. There’s also been declines in religious belief,” he continued, noting that belief has seen a significant drop in recent years, with 14% saying they didn’t believe in God in 2014, versus 19% in 2022.

Behavior, the third B, is also on the decline.

“There has also been declining church membership and declining rates of church attendance in the United States, although that’s a little tougher to measure because we know that people aren’t always forthcoming with survey researchers about whether or not they actually went to church,” Stewart said.

Researchers like Stewart hypothesize that a substantial number of people tell researchers they go to church when they actually don’t. This could mean that the decline is even greater than the data show.

Religious belief, behavior and belonging are all on the decline. That is undeniable. But, while these metrics are important and meaningful, they don’t always tell the full story.

Jacqui Frost is a sociologist at Purdue University. She and Stewart both went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota and have co-published papers together.

“The consensus in sociology is that we’re sort of seeing a bottoming out of the middle, but we’re seeing a lot on the extreme. So people are leaving religion, yes. But there are a contingent of people that are, sort of, becoming more religious,” Frost said. “We’re seeing much more polarization, rather than just straight decline.”

While there is more nuance to this picture than outright decline, Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University, said that decline is still the main story.

“It's important not to downplay that or to indicate that people are ‘really more religious’ than the numbers indicate,” she said in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

Stewart highlighted that the three B’s don’t encapsulate everyone’s relationship to faith.

“There are lots of people who are deeply committed to their religion who never go to church,” he said. In addition, for example, some may fall into the “none of the above” category but also identify as born again.

We can see these types of trends in the overall data. The number of people who Pew found to be unaffiliated, 29%, is significantly greater than the number who told Gallup they didn’t believe in God — 19%.

According to Frost, the “nothing in particular” group is both diverse and understudied.

“Some of them are still Christian, but just don’t attend church. Some of them have moved into New Age-type spiritualities,” she said.

Lately, it’s become more acceptable to pick and choose aspects of different traditions that speak to you.

“So, we have people who are both Jewish and Buddhist,” she said. “People who are piecing together different beliefs that they grab onto but from different traditions.”

Frost also said while there has been an increase in non-Christian religions, that’s mainly because of immigration — not people changing their beliefs.

Atheists, according to Pew, made up 4% of the population in 2021, double the number in 2011. So, what are the implications of this shift from traditional religion to nothing in particular?

Many worry a decline in religion will make Americans’ lives worse. According to Gallup, there’s “a long line of studies” showing religious people typically do better on a variety of measures of well-being.

But Frost urged caution, both about measures of well-being and other studies that have found religious people to be more civically involved. After all, the category of not religious is heterogeneous. And someone’s life right after they leave religion, she said, often looks very different than it does five years down the line.

“It depends on the type of non-religious person; it depends on a lot of other factors,” she said.

Stewart recently co-authored a paper, which found the association between religious practice and political engagement was about the same as the association between spiritual practice and political engagement, he said.

Some of Frost’s research focuses on secular congregations, like the Sunday Assembly.

“Non-religious people are, sort of, replicating church-like institutions to sort of celebrate being non-religious, to ritualize being non-religious, to build community around being non-religious,” she said.

Religion is on the decline in America. But that doesn’t always mean people lack faith, and hopefully it doesn’t have to mean people are worse off.

Imagine you come across an article. Maybe a friend or family member posted it on social media, or maybe you came across it in a Google search. You don’t recognize the website it’s posted on, but it looks trustworthy. The name sounds like it could be a small local publication: St. Paul Reporter or North Hennepin News. These sites offer articles on local events, but also some more controversial topics, like critical race theory in schools.

Both of these sites are part of the Metric Media network. According to Priyanjana Bengani, the Tow computational journalism fellow at the Columbia Journalism School, this network contains 1200 sites. And, while Metric Media is by far the largest, there are similar networks of sites covering all 50 states and Washington D.C.

This is “pink slime” journalism. Ryan Zickgraf, the freelance journalist who coined the term, says he got the idea from a CBS report on cheap meat that had been treated with ammonia.

“They took just, like, you know, this low-grade gristle bone kind of thing and put it into what we would regularly think of as, like, hamburger,” he said.

For the record, I don’t know if pink slime is actually bad for you. ABC settled a lawsuit with a meat processing company that alleged their depiction of pink slime was defamatory. Settling a lawsuit usually isn’t an indication of guilt – but it’s not usually an indication of innocence, either. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that it’s OK to label pink slime as “ground beef.” On the other hand, ammonia-treated meat is banned in Canada. Regardless, this column is about journalism, not meat, so I’ll continue to use the metaphor.

Back in 2012, around the time of those original news reports, Zickgraf was working for a company called Journatic. “The biggest expense in journalism is the labor that’s used to create it,” he said. “So this company Journatic came in and were like, ‘We’re gonna disrupt the industry.’”

But, what Journatic wasn’t saying was this disruption would be done by paying freelancers like Zickgraf and writers abroad low wages for poor work. “Often plagiarized word-for-word from press releases, that kind of thing,” he said.

So, the poor-quality writing produced by underpaid workers was the pink slime in this metaphor. It was then mixed into the high-grade meat: local newspapers. Zickgraf became a whistleblower and was interviewed on the public radio program This American Life.

Today, a new type of pink slime has emerged. “How it’s evolved is that, you know, in local journalism, the money isn’t really there anymore,” Zickgraf said. “Well, where’s the money? It’s in politics. So the new form of [pink slime] is partisan.”

Instead of sneaking low-quality articles by underpaid workers into local newspapers, the new pink slime sneaks partisan messaging into a package that’s disguised as trustworthy local news.

In fact, the founder of Journatic, Brian Timpone, oversees Metric Media, the operator of the two fake sites I highlighted at the beginning.

Bengani, the computational journalism fellow, said many of these sites cut and paste the same stories while filling in the locally relevant information. “One of the things that these folks have been doing has been using tabular data and writing template stories,” she said.

She used COVID-19 as an example. “The CDC was publishing data fairly frequently. They were publishing data once a day. Each day, you could break up the data into a million different formats and publish each of those million formats as a different independent story.”

You can see how this works on the two Twin Cities-area sites I highlighted. For example, very similar stories about homes that were sold in a particular week last September were published on each site, but one was for St. Paul and one for Orono.

Having local data points in their stories gives these sites a boost of credibility, Bengani said.

She also said Metric Media is by far the largest network, with the second-largest having about 50 sites.

These deceptive sites are proliferating on both sides of the political aisle. Bengani and Zickgraf both said left-leaning outlets have been getting in on the pink slime action as well.

Bengani said “it’s very hard” for someone who hasn’t spent time researching this to identify pink slime in the wild. “I think a little transparency on their side would go a really long way.”

One way to identify pink slime is to do a “gut check.” Bengani said news readers should “get a sense and feel, are they showing you the kinds of content your community wants to see?” She used the example of the Miami building collapse, which was an important story but one that got sparse coverage on pink slime sites.

“[Columbia Journalism Review] and the New York Times have spent a lot of time and effort to figure out how these sites are organized and the funding because it’s intentionally obscured,” Zickgraf said. Bengani worked on that research for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Pink slime doesn’t spread in a vacuum. The rise of this shady industry has everything to do with the decline in local news. As the business models of traditional local media become increasingly unworkable, partisan hacks are trying to fill the void.

Thankfully, in addition to the traditional newspapers that are still hanging on, new business models have helped legitimate local journalism stay alive.

Scott Libin used to be the news director for WCCO and is now a fellow at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.

“Television has developed some new revenue streams, including something called retransmission consent, or retransmission fees, that have grown dramatically over the last decade or so and made up for a lot of this lost advertising,” Libin said. According to CNBC, retransmission fees have grown thanks to deals with cable providers as well as providers of live TV via the internet, such as YouTube or Hulu.

Written journalism has also sought out new ways of doing business. Zickgraf highlighted the Chicago Sun-Times recently went nonprofit and merged with WBEZ public radio. Here in Minnesota, we have multiple nonprofit online outlets, such as MinnPost and Sahan Journal.

In addition, there are some brave souls trying to make for-profit local news work. After the collapse of City Pages, four writers for that alt-weekly co-founded Racket, which shares a web developer with fellow startup Defector and makes money from subscriptions and ads, according to co-owner Jay Boller.

I hope these new ideas and business models can keep local journalism alive. But for now, be careful not to step in pink slime.

Do you have strong feelings about zoning regulations?

Odds are, probably not. This area of public policy can be arcane. But that doesn’t make it any less consequential, as an ongoing lawsuit shows.

The centerpiece of this lawsuit is Minneapolis 2040, an update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan. According to a city website, the Comprehensive Plan is “an important citywide policy document that provides direction for Minneapolis’ built, economic and natural environment.” The plan is updated every 10 years.

In addition to many other changes, the centerpiece of the plan is the abolition of single-family zoning citywide. This means duplexes and triplexes can now be constructed anywhere in the city that was previously only zoned for single-family homes.

But, a coalition of groups—including the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis, Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds and Smart Growth Minneapolis—says this plan will be harmful to the environment. According to Smart Growth’s website, they sued the city under the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act. The suit alleges the plan has the potential to, among other things, cause pollution, flooding and erosion, and reduce air quality, habitat and biodiversity.

Supporters of the plan say this assessment is incorrect. David Zoll teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. He is also an attorney at a private law firm and helped submit a brief supporting the 2040 Plan on behalf of the organization Neighbors for More Neighbors, which advocates for loosening zoning regulations.

According to Zoll, the organizations who filed the lawsuit “didn’t demonstrate that there was a likelihood that the alleged harms would occur because they didn’t demonstrate there was a likelihood that there would be full build-out of the multifamily development that’s ostensibly authorized under the new comprehensive plan.”

Although, to be honest, this argument doesn’t quite sit right with me. While I agree that it’s unlikely every single-family home in Minneapolis will be converted into a triplex, it’s also the case that, the closer we get to that point, the greater the potential benefits of the plan are. Isn’t building denser housing the whole point?

Zoll also said that should projects authorized under the plan require environmental review, this will occur on a per-project basis. He said this could include a stormwater discharge permit, for example. “So, there’s a variety of approvals that a project goes through that would address whatever the potential environmental impacts. And a big enough project might trigger its own deed for a separate environmental impact statement,” Zoll said.

The lawsuit has been met with mixed success by the courts. In June, a Hennepin County judge put the 2040 Plan on hold. However, in July, that same judge decided to allow the implementation of the plan to continue.

To be frank, I don’t know nearly enough about the applicable laws here to render a judgment on this suit. Even the judge appears to be confused.

But I do feel comfortable saying that adding more housing, if it happens, will be extremely good for helping people afford a place to live. According to a 2018 paper published by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, “adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families.” A 2021 paper published by the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies at UCLA found this holds true at the neighborhood level, but the evidence base is much smaller.

Single-family zoning also has a long history of exacerbating segregation. These rules were first developed as a way to get around the prohibition of explicitly racist zoning rules, and they have continued to serve a similar purpose. In the Twin Cities today, the “metro’s Black population is concentrated in these areas zoned for multifamily housing,” according to a 2021 article from the Star Tribune.

As for the environment, it’s not as clear-cut. And it’s important to differentiate between effects on climate change and effects on conservation – whether denser housing emits more greenhouse gasses is a different question from what impact it would have on the local ecosystem. For their part, the Minnesota chapter of the Sierra Club supports the 2040 Plan. The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, on the other hand, isn’t taking a public position on the lawsuit, climate policy analyst Melissa Partin told me in an email.

According to a 2021 study published in the journal Buildings & Cities, there is strong consensus that those who live in denser areas emit fewer greenhouse gasses per person from transportation, heating and cooling. However, overall emissions are higher because there are more people, and there can be less capacity to address those emissions thanks to lower carbon sequestration.

A 2021 study published in the journal npj Urban Sustainability cautions that, while building denser housing doesn’t increase greenhouse gas emissions, building taller buildings does. So, from a climate perspective, it could be best to prioritize building housing that is dense, but not tall. It is worth noting, however, the 2040 Plan also increased some height minimums.

And then there’s conservation. The Buildings & Cities paper found density harms biodiversity, the local climate and other “ecological conditions.”

But this isn’t the whole story. Conrad Zbikowski is a communications strategist who works with Democratic candidates and volunteers with Neighbors for More Neighbors. “Having denser housing in Minneapolis in the urban core helps reduce the number of green acres that are redeveloped into housing in places like, you know, Maple Grove and Rogers, places like that, that destroy habitat for animals,” Zbikowski said.

A 2010 study of beetles in Canada suggested “building at a high density over a small area, rather than at a low density over a large area, minimizes the impacts of a given human population on carabid beetles.” A 2018 study in Australia found the optimal distribution of people for preserving the diversity of native bird species was somewhere between high-density and low-density, but more similar to high-density.

Of course, this is all assuming people actually build the new, denser housing that’s allowed under the 2040 Plan. Zbikowski was quick to point out various new developments. However, according to the Minneapolis branch of the Federal Reserve, permits for new multifamily units are down in comparison to what would’ve happened without the 2040 Plan, which is based on data from other cities.

Ultimately, I still support eliminating single-family zoning. We need to make sure that denser housing actually gets built and that it’s as affordable and environmentally friendly as possible.