Americans ditched veal. What replaced it may be just as bad.
Marina Bolotnikova spent months reporting this one, and it shows. Using drone footage captured over half a year by Direct Action Everywhere, she reveals an industry most Americans have never heard of: massive “calf nurseries,” where hundreds of thousands of dairy calves spend their first months of life confined in individual wooden hutches roughly one-tenth the size of a parking spot. The calves are shipped there as newborns — sometimes from over a thousand miles away, umbilical cords still attached. But what elevates this from disturbing to maddening is the legal story. California’s Proposition 12, one of the most celebrated animal welfare laws in the world, banned veal crates. But because the dairy industry has shifted those same calves toward beef production instead of veal, they fall through a loophole, confined in spaces nearly identical to the ones voters thought they’d banned. It’s the kind of piece that makes you realize the distance between what we think we’ve fixed and what we’ve actually fixed.
4 reasons why AI (probably) won’t take your job.
I’ll admit to having a personal stake in this one. I cover AI, and I’d prefer to keep doing so as an employed human being. But Eric Levitz’s piece is the most useful thing I’ve read on AI and the labor market in months. He doesn’t wave away the threat. What he does is actually look at the evidence, which turns out to be more ambiguous than the parade of apocalyptic CEO pronouncements would suggest. Unemployment has barely budged. Software developer job postings went up last year. And the benchmarks that everyone cites to prove exponential AI progress? Eric methodically takes apart their methodology — the unrealistic tasks, the small and unrepresentative human sample, the fact that the AI may have simply memorized answers to a third of the test questions. You’ll feel smarter after reading this. You might also feel less existentially threatened, which is a nice bonus.
More young women are dying from heart disease — and people are missing these warning signs.
Quick: What’s the leading killer of American women? If you said breast cancer, you’re in good company — and you’re wrong. Dylan Scott’s reporting on women and heart disease is the kind of public health journalism that can save lives. Heart disease kills more women than anything else, and the trend is getting worse among younger women. Yet, public awareness has actually fallen over the past decade. The reasons are systemic and infuriating: 72 percent of animal studies used only male mice; more than 70 percent of medical schools have no gender-specific heart content in their curricula. Cardiologists told Dylan they look at their oncologist colleagues — with the pink ribbon — with envy. Send this to the women in your life. Send it to their doctors, too.
🎧 The surprising gender gap at the heart of America’s baby bust
On The Gray Area, Sean Illing talks with our colleague Anna North about a finding that genuinely surprised me: Gen Z men are way more excited about having kids than Gen Z women. In a 2023 Pew poll, there was a 12-point gap. Male Trump voters rated having children as the single most important thing in a good life — above career, above money, above everything. Nobody else had it that high. Anna’s explanation for the women’s side of the gap is sharp and worth 33 minutes of your time. When you know you’ll bear most of the costs of parenthood — career penalties, physical recovery, a partner who probably won’t split things 50/50 — the math starts to look different. Listen to this one.
📹 How Britain became a starring role in romantic film adaptations
Finally, a palate cleanser. If you’ve seen Emerald Fennell’s "Wuthering Heights" — the Margot Robbie/Jacob Elordi bodice-ripper that has been steaming up both the box office and the discourse — our video team made the perfect companion piece. It’s a beautiful tour of the British landscapes and historic architecture that make stories like "Wuthering Heights" and Pride and Prejudice so impossibly romantic on film. Endless moors, massive estates, the kind of rain-soaked Yorkshire vistas that make you want to run dramatically toward someone you definitely should not be running toward. Whether you loved the Fennell film, hated it, or are still processing the leeches scene, this is a treat.
