Today we relaunched The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, with a new host: senior editor Hanna Rosin, a former Atlantic writer who went on to become the editorial director for audio at New York magazine. “There’s this phrase someone said to me recently: road-testing ideas, like you would road-test a car,” Hanna says in the trailer for the new podcast. “You run them through the dirt, see if they can stand up to actual real-world conditions.” I called Hanna to talk about what road-testing ideas will look like on Radio Atlantic, and what America’s national conversation is missing.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis DeSantis’s launch was not the only thing that crashed. Think about your death and live better. Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers Rules of Debate

Isabel Fattal: In the podcast trailer, you reflect on your past as a champion high-school debater, and how the experience shaped the way you scrutinize ideas. Explain.

Hanna Rosin: I have an extremely conflicted relationship with my debate past, because winning is fun, but over many years, I came to distance myself from that mercenary way of approaching ideas. The upside of debating is that it keeps you nimble—someone throws ideas at you, and you can look at them from every angle and find the opposing side. It keeps your mind flexible and not rigid, and it teaches you a rigorous discipline of picking things apart. The downside of it is, if you’re not careful, you can lose a sense of what you actually believe. It can seem like a game. If you go too far down that path, you lose a sense of what’s important, what the boundaries are.

Isabel: How do you approach debating now?

Hanna: I no longer think of debate as a game. The way debates are happening in our country right now, everything’s on the table. I feel very nervous about treating it as fun. There are a lot of things being brought back to the table that I thought were completely settled. And there are also forms of debate that used to be completely off the table. If we had made up facts when I was a high-school debater, we would have been kicked out of the league. The whole thing has gotten chaotic and reckless.

The good part of this new world of debate is that the doors are much more open for a lot more people to participate. The bad part of it is that we haven’t established any rules at all. We haven’t established rules about what’s true and not true, what is allowed to be up for debate and what isn’t, and what the tone can be that stays on the right side of respectful. Right now it’s just a free-for-all. That needs to be figured out.

Isabel: How does your thinking about the state of debate play into the new Radio Atlantic?

Hanna: This is a thinking-out-loud podcast. I’m very open to having people on the podcast change my mind in the moment. I like to enter a room and have a fixed idea about something, and then somebody changes my mind about the idea. I'm not especially attached to being the absolute authority on the thing. I know what the rules of journalism and facts are, but I don’t actually know what the rules of debate are. I don’t even know what my own new rules of debate are. So I would like to use this podcast to figure that out.

Isabel: How do you think about the exchange of ideas in podcasting, in particular? What might Radio Atlantic do differently?

Hanna: I think the podcast world divides into two categories. One category is clubby—you’re already in the club, we believe the same things and it’s affirming, and it’s nice to be in a space with people who you consider like-minded. And the other form is neutral: You yourself as the host are just letting the expert lay out their case.

With Radio Atlantic, I’m trying to do neither of those things. I definitely will come in with a position, and hopefully that position will be clear and I will articulate it. Sometimes that position will be aligned with the person I’m talking to, and sometimes it won’t. To me, the momentum of this particular podcast comes from movement—movement in my own position or ideas. You start in one place with an idea or an insight, and you have your curiosity drive you to some totally different place.

Isabel: What are some topics you’ll cover on the show?

Hanna: Our first episode is basically me trying to feel what Anne Applebaum and Jeff Goldberg feel in their Ukraine cover story, because I’m sort of sheepishly admitting that I’ve stopped paying attention. I’m not necessarily resistant—I’m just being honest about the fact that I don’t feel it in the way I did at the beginning of the war, which is probably true of a lot of people. I’m trying, in the studio, to see what they see and feel what they feel.

Another conversation we’re going to have is about social media and teens. There’s so much debate now about whether social media is causing the rise in teen depression. I feel like the conversation has, for almost 10 years, run back and forth from hysteria to “no big deal.” And so my aim in conversation is to actually understand, What do we know? What literally, specifically, do we know? What social media, which teens, how does it affect them, who exactly is vulnerable? And the show does have some narrative elements too, exploring the consequences of ideas on people’s lives.

Listen:

(Re)introducing Radio Atlantic The war is not here to entertain you. Today’s News Governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on Twitter Spaces crashed, delaying his announcement by almost half an hour yesterday. The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy on January 6th, 2021. The Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Water Act does not allow the EPA to regulate discharges into some wetlands, curtailing the agency’s ability to address water pollution. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf contemplates Ron DeSantis’s presidential candidacy.

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Evening Read Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Library of Congress; Getty.

The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme

By Ed Yong

Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.

Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.

Read the full article.

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Listen. To a collection of highlights from May’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

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P.S.

If you’re looking to sharpen your own debating muscles, last year, another debate champion recommended 10 books that taught him how to argue.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Somehow, America’s desire for Ozempic is only growing. The drug’s active ingredient, semaglutide, is sold as an obesity medication under the brand name Wegovy—and it has become so popular that its manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, recently limited shipments to the U.S. and paused advertising to prevent shortages. Its promise has enticed would-be patients and set off a pharmaceutical arms race to create more potent drugs.

Part of the interest stems from its potential in teens: In December, the FDA approved Wegovy as a treatment for teenagers with obesity, which affects 22 percent of 12-to-19-year-olds in the United States. The drug’s ability to spur weight loss in adolescents has been described as “mind-blowing.” In January, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that doctors consider adding weight-loss drugs such as semaglutide as a treatment for some patients in its new childhood-obesity-treatment guidelines.

But although many doctors and obesity experts have embraced semaglutide as a treatment for adults, some are concerned that taking it at such a young age—and at such a precarious stage of life—could pose serious risks, especially because the long-term physical and mental-health effects of the medication are still unknown. Others, however, believe that not using this medication in adolescents is riskier, because obesity makes teens vulnerable to serious health conditions and premature death. In part because of the apprehension among doctors, prescriptions for semaglutide in teens are not taking off like they are for adults. At this point, whether these drugs will ever catch on as a treatment for teens remains deeply uncertain.

Semaglutide isn’t just effective for teens. It may be even more effective than it is in adults. In a large Novo Nordisk–funded study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, “the degree of weight reduction in adolescents was better than what was observed in the adult trials,” Aaron S. Kelly, the co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, told me.  In another Novo Nordisk–funded study published last week, a team led by Kelly showed that the drug, combined with counseling and exercise, nearly halved the number of teens with obesity after 68 weeks of treatment. Both for adolescents and adults, the weekly injection doesn’t “magically melt away body fat,” Kelly said, but instead works by triggering a sense of fullness and quieting hunger pangs.

Teenagers’ experience with obesity is different—in some ways more intense—than that of older people. Puberty is a time of lots of growth and development, so the body fights off attempts at weight loss “with every mechanism that it has,” Tamara Hannon, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine, told me. Teenagers may also have less control than adults over what they eat or how much activity they get, because these are largely circumscribed by their family and school, as well as social pressure to conform to how their peers eat. “Making good choices means doing something different than the majority of the other kids,” Hannon said. “At every corner, there’s something that is in direct opposition to losing weight.”

Because obesity is a chronic disease, developing it early can be devastating. In many cases it can result in illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and fatty liver at a young age. Children with obesity are five times more likely than their peers to have it in adulthood; as teens with obesity become adults with obesity, they can “develop very, very aggressive disease,” Fatima Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, told me. Weight-loss drugs give doctors the ability to intervene before the effects of obesity snowball, she said, which is why AAP’s new childhood-obesity guidelines advocate for using them as part of early, aggressive treatment—along with many hours of in-person health and lifestyle therapy. Used early enough, semaglutide or other medications could possibly reroute the trajectory of a teenager’s entire life.

But semaglutide could also possibly throw a teen’s trajectory off course. Because treatment is considered a lifelong endeavor—stopping usually leads to rapid weight regain—adolescents who start the medication will be taking it for many decades. “We have no way of knowing whether these drugs, used so early in life for so long, could have unanticipated adverse effects,” David Ludwig, an endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. Although adults face many of the same unknowns, the risks for teens could be more severe because their body and brain are in constant flux. Of particular concern are the drug’s potential impacts on physiological changes specific to adolescence. “We need to keep an eye on pubertal development and menstrual history for girls,” Hannon said. In addition, the drugs can lead to unsavory side effects such as gastrointestinal issues and may have other impacts, including significant muscle loss and rewiring of the brain’s reward circuitry. Scientists are just beginning to understand these effects; at this point, only two major studies have been conducted on semaglutide in teens, and neither have involved a long follow-up period.

The repercussions of semaglutide treatment on mental health, an important aspect of obesity care, are even less understood. Teens are “more likely than an adult to have intermittent access to medication,” Kathleen Miller, an adolescent-medicine specialist at Children’s Minnesota hospital, told me—and skipping several doses in a row could pose physical and well as psychological risks. Another concern is that the overall effect of taking semaglutide—a decreased appetite, which leads to eating less—is essentially the same as that of dieting. When teens go on very restrictive diets, whether or not they involve weight-loss medications, “we know that may be harmful to their mental health and promote disordered eating,” Hannon said. Because their brain is so plastic during puberty, “there’s a risk of ingraining those patterns in adolescence,” Miller said.

With so many unknowns, would teens with obesity be better off avoiding semaglutide? At least for now, many pediatricians are reluctant to prescribe it. “The idea of using anti-obesity pharmacotherapy was challenging even in adults a couple of years ago,” says Angela Fitch, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the president of the Obesity Medicine Association; acceptance of its role in pediatric care is even further behind. But denying teens the drug, she told me, is the biggest risk: Teens develop an unhealthy mentality about their body when they don’t get help losing weight, she argued. Explaining to a teen that obesity is not their fault, and correcting the underlying biological issue with medication or other treatment, helps them to develop “a better body image about themselves,” she said.

None of the experts I spoke with flat-out said that semaglutide should never be used in adolescent treatment. Even those who were wary of the drug acknowledged that it might be medically appropriate in teens who really struggle with their weight and have little success losing it through any other means. That argument may only strengthen as more convenient  drugs—or those with fewer side effects—are approved for use by teens. This week, both Novo Nordisk and Pfizer announced that pill versions of these medications were successful in early trials.

Even without all of the answers on how this drug might affect teens in the long term, Fitch predicted that “the uptake of semaglutide and other anti-obesity medications in pediatric clinical care will be slow and gradual.” Eventually, they may come to be seen as just one of several weight-loss tools to help set up kids for healthier lives. Treating adolescent obesity shouldn’t be an “either-or” choice, Ludwig said. “It’s everything-and.” He has proposed that combining semaglutide with a low-carbohydrate diet, for example, could have synergistic effects on adolescent weight loss.

For the foreseeable future, semaglutide isn’t poised to take off for teens in the way that it has for adults. In spite of all the hype surrounding Ozempic, experts and their patients are left with a difficult choice based on different assessments of risk: what might happen if teens are treated with drugs, and what might happen if they’re not. Either way, teenagers have the most to benefit—and the most to lose.

President Vladimir Putin sustains his power on the promise to Russians that he has, as he put it in 2010, “everything under control.” This week’s attack on the southern Belgorod region, launched from Ukraine, would have been alarming under any circumstances, but Putin’s posture as the man in command makes it particularly hard to explain away.

A string of bad news that began earlier this month suggests to Russians that their security system is crumbling. First came the drone attack on the roof of Putin’s residence in the Kremlin on May 4. Now comes an incursion into Belgorod, demonstrating that a year and a half into the war, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which is in charge of the borders, does not have the manpower to protect against small units attacking from Ukraine. Russia was not even able to secure a nearby storage site for nuclear-weapons components, known as Belgorod-22—instead it reportedly moved the materiel away.

Russians in the border regions are beginning to realize that the war that has destroyed dozens of towns and villages in Ukraine is coming to their own land. Nobody seemed to be defending Belgorod, so on Tuesday, locals demanded answers from their governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a live chat on Vkontakte, a social-networking site.

Governor Gladkov read the questions aloud: “They said that everything was under control, that fortifications have been built, some pyramids and so on, but the enemy is coming to our regional center by tanks. Why is the border full of holes?” he read from one message. “And we are not mentioning the constant artillery and mortar fire, wounded residents—how come?”

[Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough  for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]

The complaint seemed valid enough. And the more information that emerged, the more the episode risked turning the entire nationalist rationale behind Russia’s war in Ukraine back on the Kremlin: The invaders were Russian nationalists serving in the Ukrainian armed forces who claimed that they were liberating Russia from Putin’s regime.

Somebody had to be honest with locals, and Governor Gladkov, surprisingly, was. “I agree with you,” he said, looking tired and grim. “I have many more questions for the Defense Ministry than you.” He called on his listeners to draw their own conclusions “from the mistakes that have been made.”

Russians have been drawing conclusions rather quickly this week. Thousands jumped into their vehicles and left their villages in the Belgorod region, without waiting for further explanation or assistance from the security services. One video shows local residents trying to break into an old Soviet bomb shelter, screaming at the top of their lungs.

Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of Russia’s Parliament now in exile. He acts as a spokesperson for the Freedom of Russia Legion, the anti-Kremlin group that crossed into the Belgorod region. Ponomarev told me that the legion’s soldiers were “just four kilometers away” from the Belgorod-22 nuclear-storage site, and that the group’s goal was to demonstrate to Russians that their border was unprotected.

The attack seems to have struck its psychological target. Tsargrad, a nationalist television channel in Russia, headlined a program with the question of whether, after a year of “bombs raining on … Russian regions,” the “special military operation” in Ukraine was coming to resemble the second Chechen war. The comparison jabbed at dark memories of fighting that killed thousands of civilians in the Northern Caucasus and created streams of internal migrants.

Now again, Russians have been internally displaced. “This is just a shock; there is no safe place in the south,” 72-year-old Nina Mikhailova, a pensioner from Russia’s  Krasnodar region, south of Belgorod, told me by phone on Tuesday. “There is no end to this war, to killings, and nobody tells us when or how it will end. The jokes and threats about nuclear mushrooms are not funny. If the only solution is to nuke America, we are all in real trouble.”

Boris Vishnevsky, a city-council member in St. Petersburg, is one of the very few opposition figures left in government in Russia. I spoke with him by phone yesterday. Russia’s generals, he observed, can “promise us to destroy everything alive coming our way”—but then they will come up against the problem that “the FSB, who are actually responsible for protecting the borders, are busy hunting down and imprisoning Russians for their posts on social media.”

This week, some of my Russian friends said they caught themselves walking around with their mouths open in absolute shock. “The border is supposed to be protected by the FSB, but it is not; they just look more and more like some dumb thugs,” a former Russian member of parliament, Gennady Gudkov, himself a veteran of the KGB, told me on Tuesday. Like many of his friends and colleagues in Moscow, he gasped at the news of tanks and armored vehicles rolling from Ukraine to Russia, unstopped. Nothing was under control.

Putin pretends to love history. While his security services were in Belgorod chasing armed invaders from Ukraine, he was staring at a French map, allegedly dated from the mid-17th century, with the word Ukraine on it, but still insisting that Ukraine did not exist before the Soviet times.

[Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire]

Meanwhile, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, is building political capital from every failure of the Russian military. When the attack began from Ukraine, and the legion took over village after village, Prigozhin took aim at the armed forces on his Telegram channel: “Instead of providing security for the state, some of them are dividing cash and the others make fools of themselves. There is no leadership, no desire and no personalities ready to defend their country.”  

Ukraine, however, is only getting stronger, according to Prigozhin:  “Ukraine had 500 tanks in the beginning of our special operation and now they have 5,000. If before, 20,000 of their men knew how to fight, now 400,000 men know how to fight. So it turns out we militarized them in a big way.”

Prigozhin has predicted an apocalyptic ending for Putin’s regime as a result of the attack on Belgorod. “People will come out with pitchforks to the streets,” he told Russian media. When that day arrives, he warns, he will be the one taking the situation under control: “And then we come.”

Ron DeSantis is the governor of one of the most scenic states in America. Reelected by eye-popping margins in 2022, he does not lack for superfans. And yet, instead of launching his presidential campaign in front of palm trees and adoring crowds, he did so last night on Twitter, in an awkward audio-only exchange with Elon Musk that took place only after 25 minutes of excruciating technical difficulties.

It might seem strange for a presidential candidate who is arguing that Republicans should not tie their fortunes to an impulsive, internet-poisoned millionaire to announce his campaign by wedding it to an impulsive, internet-poisoned billionaire. But DeSantis’s choice of venue makes sense in context: It is the latest in a series of appeals to his party’s most online activists, who idolize individuals such as Musk and monopolize Twitter, the social-media site that Musk owns. Cultivating the base and wealthy donors is smart politics, and DeSantis is a better politician than both his progressive and pro-Trump critics admit. But as the Twitter-launch fiasco demonstrated, his obsession with the online could seriously hamper his prospects offline. Campaigns that mistake social-media virality for electoral reality tend to end poorly.

One of the many misguided lessons that politicians learned from Donald Trump’s 2016 success was that Twitter wins elections. But in fact, Trump’s first victory owed little to social media and more to traditional media. His candidacy capitalized on a decades-old reputation for business acumen that he had built through reality TV and the tabloids. The telegenic Trump then overwhelmed his Republican primary opponents by garnering ample media coverage, with cable news channels racing to air his raucous rallies live.

By contrast, one of the few things that even Trump’s own supporters repeatedly told pollsters that they didn’t like about him was … his tweets. This shouldn’t surprise. Social-media sites—and Twitter in particular—are rife with conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and niche jargon that have little resonance in the real world. This is why when politicians start talking like Twitter feeds, they start losing voters—which is exactly what happened to many Democrats in 2020.

[David Frum: DeSantis’s launch was not the only thing that crashed]

Consider the case of “Defund the police.” That mantra, alongside its more radical cousin “Abolish the police,” emerged as a rallying cry during the 2020 protests after the killing of George Floyd, momentarily turning a previously marginal approach to policing into a mainstream one. Channeling righteous anger into a radical proposal, “Defund” quickly became an online litmus test, and many progressive politicians racked up retweets by embracing it. Judging by its online impact, the slogan was a smashing success.

It’s also not how anyone in the Democratic Party talks today. “I think allowing this moniker, ‘defund the police,’ to ever get out there, was not a good thing,” Keith Ellison, the progressive Minnesota attorney general, told the Washington Post reporter David Weigel in November 2021. “We should all agree that the answer is not to defund the police,” said President Joe Biden in his first State of the Union address, to a bipartisan standing ovation. “It’s to fund the police—fund them!” In late 2021, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams, a Black former cop who promised to invest more in law enforcement, not less. This month, Philadelphia’s Democratic primary voters picked Cherelle Parker, a Black city-council member with an uncompromising tough-on-crime platform, to be the city’s likely next mayor. Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson, the newly elected mayor of Chicago, backed away from his previous “Defund” position to secure his victory.

What happened? It turned out that although “Defund” was popular among the activists who disproportionately drive online progressive discourse, it was deeply unpopular with voters. Polls found that most Americans, including Black voters, overwhelmingly rejected defunding the police, and the slogan proved to be a millstone around the neck of many candidates, even in relatively progressive regions. The Democratic lawmakers and donors who echoed this rhetoric neglected one basic truth: Twitter is real life for the people who are on it, but most people are not on Twitter. According to the Pew Research Center, just 23 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and of those, “the most active 25% … produced 97% of all tweets.” Simply put, almost all tweets come from less than 6 percent of American adults—far from a representative slice of the broader public.

[Read: Twitter is a far-right social network]

But one Democrat didn’t fall into the Twitter trap. Not coincidentally, Joe Biden is now the president. In the 2020 Democratic primary, while his rivals competed to cater to the latest enthusiasms of the online left, the former vice president consolidated the party’s more moderate mainstream. In the general election, Biden’s aggressively offline campaign helped Democrats avoid the worst consequences of their 2020 Twitter excesses, as he was not implicated in them, and tended to treat social media as a place to be managed by staffers, not mirrored by the candidate. Trump, on the other hand, dove down every internet rabbit hole, ranting during speeches and debates about obscure bit players in online conspiracy theories at a time when a pandemic was ravaging the country. He lost by 7 million votes.

No politician can or should ignore social media, which still drives a lot of public discourse and engages many activists. The sweet spot is rather to be aware of the internet but not consumed by it. My colleague Derek Thompson refers to this as being “optimally online.” And for a while, it looked like Ron DeSantis had mastered this maneuver. He hired an army of pugilistic spokespeople, most notably his former press secretary Christina Pushaw, who reveled in trolling reporters and liberals on Twitter, including labeling Democratic politicians as “groomers.” By delegating this operation to staff, DeSantis was able to appeal to his party’s most rabid Twitterati while maintaining distance and deniability from their actions, preserving his appeal to everyday voters even as he provided virtual red meat to the online base.

But it’s starting to look like this wasn’t a strategy but rather just the first stage of internet poisoning that now threatens to overwhelm DeSantis’s presidential campaign. In recent months, the governor has sounded less like a populist politician and more like an instantiation of his party’s worst Twitter talkers. Take DeSantis’s hard turn against transgender rights. “Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” declared The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who has nearly 1 million followers on Twitter, in March. His colleague Matt Walsh regularly dubs transition care for minors as “abuse” and “mutilation” to his 1.8 million followers. But what excites reactionary Twitter doesn’t move voters: Most Americans oppose discrimination against transgender people, even as they express apprehension over medical transition for minors or the participation of trans athletes in women’s sports. And yet, earlier this month, DeSantis signed and celebrated a bill that, in his words, “permanently outlawed the mutilation of minors.”

In other words, the ill-fated launch event with Musk wasn’t a one-off miscalculation. It was the latest instance of DeSantis losing sight of the electorate in favor of online obsessions. Tellingly, in his 67-minute appearance last night, the governor repeatedly derided the “woke” left but never mentioned Trump—the candidate DeSantis must dethrone if he is to claim the nomination.

Jason Roy is set to end his England contract in order to play in the inaugural season of Major League Cricket in the United States.

Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.

Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.

The common names of almost 150 North American birds are eponyms—that is, they derive from people. A disproportionate number of these names were assigned in the early 19th century by the soldier-scientists who traveled westward across the U.S. Bestowing eponyms to honor commanders, benefactors, family members, and one another, they turned the continent’s avifauna into tributes to “conquest and colonization,” as Hampton wrote. Many birders are now pushing to remove these eponyms, arguing that too many of them tie nature’s beauty and the pure joy of seeing a new species to humanity’s worst grotesqueries. “I didn’t ask for any of this information; I was just trying to bird,” Tykee James, the president of D.C. Audubon Society, told me. But now “we should do better because we know better—that’s the scientific process.”

Similar sentiments have spread in other countries and animal groups. Many animals whose names had included ethnic and racial slurs now have new names, including a moth in North America and several birds in Sweden and South Africa. In the U.S., at least one bird with an eponym has been renamed, and the American Ornithological Society is developing a process for renaming more.

These discussions have pushed many biologists and wildlife enthusiasts to reconsider the very act of naming—the people who get to do it, and the responsibilities they ought to shoulder. Whether common ones such as giraffe or scientific ones such as Giraffa camelopardalis, names act first as labels, allowing people to identify and classify living things. But names are also value-laden, reflecting the worldviews of the people who choose them. And some have come to believe that honoring any person, no matter their sins or virtues, reflects the wrong values. In this view, the practice of affixing an entire life-form with the name of a single individual must end entirely.

When the ornithologist Robert Driver petitioned the American Ornithological Society in 2018 to rebrand McCown’s longspur, his proposal was rejected. This species was named after an Army officer who accidentally shot one of the birds, and who also waged campaigns against Indigenous tribes before joining the Confederacy; members of an AOS committee, which maintains an official list of common names for North American birds, variously said that “judging historical figures by current moral standards is problematic,” and that they were “concerned about where we would draw the line.”

But the tide of opinion turned in May 2020. On the same day that a police officer murdered George Floyd, a white woman in New York City’s Central Park falsely told the cops that she was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a Black birder who had asked that she leash her dog. A video of that incident went viral, drawing the birding world into the debates over race and justice that were sweeping America. As Confederate statues and monuments fell nationwide, many birders argued that problematic eponyms also needed to be toppled. In June that year, Jordan Rutter and Gabriel Foley founded Bird Names for Birds, a campaign to rename all American birds that have eponyms. In July, the AOS reconsidered Driver’s proposal because of “heightened awareness of racial issues,” and the following month announced that the newly christened thick-billed longspur would be McCown’s no longer.

Many other eponyms present similar cases for change, although none have been altered yet. John Kirk Townsend, whose name still graces two birds and almost a dozen mammals, dug up the graves of Native Americans and sent their skulls to the physician Samuel George Morton, who wanted to prove that Caucasians had bigger brains than other people; those remains are still undergoing a lengthy process toward burial or repatriation. John Bachman was a practitioner and defender of slavery, reasoning that Black people, whom he compared to domesticated animals, were so intellectually inferior to Caucasians as to be “incapable of self-government”; Bachman’s sparrow was named by his friend, John James Audubon. And Audubon, the most renowned—and, more recently, notorious—figure in American ornithology and the namesake of an oriole, a warbler, and a shearwater, also robbed Native American graves for Morton’s skull studies, while casually buying and selling slaves. “People have been singing his praises for 150 years, but in the last 15 years, he has turned out to be quite a monster,” says Matthew Halley, an ornithologist and historian, who has also found evidence that Audubon committed scientific fraud by fabricating a fake species of eagle that helped launch his career. In light of Audubon’s actions, several local chapters of the National Audubon Society have renamed themselves, as has the society’s union. In March, though, the national society’s board of directors voted to keep the name, on the grounds that it would allow the organization to “direct key resources and focus towards enacting the organization’s mission.”

The drive to change these eponyms has faced the same now-familiar criticisms as the push to remove Confederate monuments. Proponents have been charged with erasing history but counter that they are clarifying it: People tend to assume that an eponym represents the individual who actually described the species, when it’s usually an honorific, sometimes exalting people with no connection to birds at all. (Anna’s hummingbird, for instance, was named after Anna Masséna, a French courtier and naturalist’s wife.) Halley also rejects the AOS’s original argument that modern birders are inappropriately judging the past using today’s standards. Townsend, for example, who came from a Quaker family and had an abolitionist for a sister, “was going against the moral teachings of his own community,” Halley told me. Meanwhile, Black people have always rejected slavery, just as Natives have always opposed ethnic cleansing, Hampton said. What’s changed is their presence in communities that typically decide what animals are called.

Critics have also argued that names are meant to be stable, and changing them sows confusion. But there’s precedent in the bird world for updating them: In 1957, the AOS revised 188 common bird names to achieve better trans-Atlantic consistency, and it has changed dozens more since 1998. Names change all the time, for scientific and cultural reasons, and given a choice between stability and respect for people whose ancestors were harmed by early ornithologists, “I come down on the side of respect,” David Allen Sibley, a renowned author and illustrator of bird field guides, said in 2021.

For some scientists, the eponym problem is about more than the egregious misdeeds of a few individuals. As Europeans spread to other continents, they brought not only invasive species that displaced native ones but also invasive nomenclature that ousted long-standing native terms for plants and animals. In Africa, the scientific names of a quarter of local birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are eponyms, mostly from Europe. On the biodiverse Pacific island of New Caledonia, more than 60 percent of plant eponyms honor French citizens. Countless species around the world have been named after European scientists whose travels were made possible by imperial ventures aimed at expanding territories or extracting natural resources. “We have romantic ideas of these explorers going around the world, seeing beautiful things, and naming them, and we forgot how they got there to begin with,” Natalia Piland, an ecologist at Florida International University, told me.

Such naming patterns still continue. Piland and her colleagues found that since 1950, 183 newly identified birds have been given eponyms, and although 96 percent of these species live in the global South, 68 percent of their names honor people from the global North. In 2018, the Rainforest Trust, an American conservation nonprofit, auctioned off the rights to name 12 newly discovered South American species, leading to a frog named after Greta Thunberg and a caecilian named after Donald Trump. (A similar auction in 2005 landed a Bolivian monkey with the name of the internet casino GoldenPalace.com.) The beloved British naturalist David Attenborough has more than 50 species named after him, most of which live in Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. That is not to begrudge Attenborough, Thunberg, or Trump; having a species named after you is widely considered a great honor, but globally, such honorees are still disproportionately people of European descent—a perpetuation of colonialism through taxonomy.

Some scientists have proposed reinstating Indigenous names for animals wherever possible. But many species live across the territories of different Indigenous groups, or migrate across national or continental divides, making it hard to know whose names to prioritize. And if native names are applied without native consultation, the result can smack of cultural appropriation. Emma Carroll from the University of Auckland took on both challenges in naming a recently identified species of beaked whale. Carroll spent a year consulting Indigenous groups in countries where the new whale’s specimens had been found. In South Africa, the Khoisan Council suggested using the word //eu//’eu, which means “big fish” and is now immortalized in the scientific name Mesoplodon eueu. For the common name, Carroll asked a Māori cultural expert in New Zealand to draw up a shortlist, which she then ran past a local council. She eventually named the creature “Ramari’s beaked whale” after Ramari Stewart—a Māori whale expert whose work was pivotal in identifying the new species, and who has been “working to bridge Western science and mātauranga [Maori knowledge] for decades,” Carroll told me. Fittingly, ramari also means “a rare event” in the Māori language, and beaked whales are famously elusive.  

Inspired by Carroll’s example, Eric Archer of the NOAA used a similar approach when describing a new species of bottlenose dolphin. He initially wanted to name it after Jim Mead—a respected scientist to whom Archer owes his career. But after feeling that this pattern of honoring close colleagues was too insular, he consulted the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation, whose ancestors lived in the lands where the first specimen of the dolphin was found. Eventually, he named it Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin after an iconic 17th-century chief.

But these names, too, sit uneasily with Steve Hampton, the birder and Cherokee Nation citizen, who told me that many Indigenous communities would see them as recapitulating “colonizer practices.” If the intent is to symbolize a connection between the animals and the people who share its land, “then take the apostrophe-s off,” Hampton said. Those two characters invoke ownership, as if an individual could lay claim to an entire species—a fundamentally colonial way of thinking, no matter whether the honoree is an Indigenous woman or a European man. By that logic, the issue with eponyms isn’t that some of them honor people who did vile things. It’s that animals shouldn’t be named after people at all.

Doing away with all eponyms avoids, if nothing else, the problem of judging who, exactly, is objectionable enough to have their name stripped away from a species. Kevin Thiele, a botanist and director of Taxonomy Australia, argues, for instance, that the scientific community can easily expunge eponyms that honor “history’s monsters” without jettisoning the practice altogether; he told me that “a good cutoff might be if a person had influence, and thus has an eponym, as a result of egregious acts.” For example, the Australian flowers that he studies—Hibbertia—are named after George Hibbert, an 18th-century Englishman and amateur botanist whose fortunes and status derived almost entirely from the transatlantic slave trade. By contrast, hundreds of species are named after Charles Darwin, who certainly had racist views and benefited from colonialism, but who is honored because he profoundly shaped our understanding of nature. (Darwin also staunchly opposed slavery.) Hibbertia should go, but Darwin’s eponyms can stay, Thiele says.

But Halley, the historian, suspects that people “who want to go in with a scalpel don’t know the full extent of the improprieties in the historical records,” he told me, and a clean slate would be preferable. Carlos Daniel Cadena, a Colombian ornithologist, agrees. “There’s a lot of potential to make these discussions ugly if we start going name by name and trying to decide which person was good or bad,” he told me. “And in 200 years, will we all be despicable because we trashed the planet or ate meat?”

Others argue that, more importantly, the act of honoring a person through an organism’s name dishonors the organism itself. It treats animals and plants as inanimate objects like buildings or streets, constructed and owned by humans, instead of beings with their own lives and histories. “It doesn’t sit well with me to think of an individual human becoming the signifier of an entire species,” Piland said. A more descriptive name, meanwhile, is a chance to tell a creature’s story. Joseph Pitawanakwat, an Anishinaabe educator, notes that many of his people’s bird names are layered with meaning—onomatopoeias that mimic calls, and descriptions of habitat and behavior, all embedded in a single word that could have been coined only through a deep understanding of the animals. English names could be similarly descriptive: Thick-billed longspur tells you something about the bird that might help you recognize it in a way that McCown’s longspur does not.

These arguments are gaining traction. This March, Patrícia Guedes from the University of Porto and an international group of 10 colleagues published a commentary saying that “naming a biological species after a human was and is never right—regardless of good intentions.” But even if the scientific community as a whole agreed with this principle, the logistics of changing or banning eponyms are not simple. Many people who have animals named after them are still alive; changing those names would effectively strip them of an honor. And Cadena said that many Latin American researchers bristle when they’re told that they shouldn’t name animals after their colleagues. “North Americans and Europeans have named things after themselves for centuries, and now we cannot do it?” Cadena told me.

Changing the scientific names of animals is especially tricky because such names are formally governed by the International Commission for Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN)—a group of 26 scientists who volunteer time outside their main jobs. They simply lack the person-power to oversee changes to even a fraction of the tens of thousands of scientific eponyms, Thomas Pape, the ICZN president, told me—and it’s not in their remit to change even one. Consider Anophthalmus hitleri, a rare Slovenian beetle that was named after Adolf Hitler in 1933 and is now threatened by enthusiastic Nazi-memorabilia hunters. The ICZN still won’t change its name, because “we stand absolutely firm on not regulating based on ethics,” Pape told me. “It’s not our mandate.”

But, though he argues that set names are important for allowing scientists to unambiguously communicate about the organisms they study, Pape also admits that “it’s strange that we keep talking about stability when we keep changing names.” Scientific names change frequently, when a species is reclassified or split into several new ones. They can also change because scientists uncover an alternative name that was assigned first and then forgotten, or because they violate Latin grammar. There are also routes for changing scientific names through societal force of will. Pape cites the case of Raymond Hoser, an Australian amateur herpetologist who has assigned hundreds of new names to questionably defined species and genera of reptiles—often on shaky scientific grounds, usually in his own self-published journal, and in many cases honoring his family members and pets. Other taxonomists are simply refusing to use his names; if that continues, “it might be possible for the ICZN to rule that those names should not be used,” Pape told me.

Common names are even easier to shift, because there’s typically no formal process for doing so. In 1993, a zoologist decided to name a predatory marine worm with scissorlike jaws the “Bobbit worm,” referencing the incident in which Lorena Gallo (then Bobbitt) cut off her husband’s penis. Other biologists, who noted that the name mocks a woman who survived repeated domestic and sexual abuse, have just started calling the worm “sand striker” instead. In this vein, common names that are deemed offensive enough could change organically as people stop using them, Eric Archer, the NOAA biologist, told me. “I don’t think it’s necessarily something that should be done by fiat,” he said.

For North American birds, there is a standardized list of common names, maintained by the AOS. It has no legal standing but is widely followed by birders, conservationists, and, notably, the federal government. Name changes would carry far more clout if the AOS ratified them. It has traditionally been unwilling to, but after the events of 2020, it formed a committee to develop a process for identifying and changing “harmful or exclusionary English bird names.” Hampton and James are part of that 11-person committee, which Cadena co-chairs. They wouldn’t reveal specifics of their recommendations, which they’re set to present on June 15, but at least some of them have come around to the idea that all eponyms should go. And they stressed that they wanted to unite the birding world rather than divide it.

Any changes, they imagine, would mean that rookie and veteran birders alike would have something new to learn, while the entire community could be involved in concocting new monikers—a practice that could generate more excitement about birds at a time when many species desperately need to be protected. Hampton acknowledged that community involvement can be risky—“we have talked about ‘Birdy McBirdface’ many times,” he said, referencing the crowdsourced boat-naming campaign from 2016 that yielded Boaty McBoatface—but he and other committee members think it’d be worth it to open up the right to name nature to a much broader swath of society than the one that has long held it. Wildlife doesn’t belong to it, or to anyone, and shouldn’t be named as if it does.

That’s the view of every birder under 40 whom Hampton talks to, and every person of color—demographics that will have a growing say over our custodianship of the natural world. “Everyone in our committee knows that 20 or 30 years from now, the next generation will be changing all of these names if we don’t,” Hampton said. To him, it feels inevitable. Perhaps future generations will also look upon this moment and see our own historical foibles embedded in the names we now choose. Or perhaps they’ll see a turning point when people stopped seeing animals as vessels for human legacies but as entities with their own worth and stories, reflected in their very names.

Many of America’s most strategic assets are in places increasingly threatened by extreme weather events, rising seas and other consequences of climate change.

You can pick virtually any Tina Turner hit to tidily emblematize her career—a career filled with rivers deep and mountains high, a career of rolling on churning waters, a career that was simply, well, you know. But today’s news of her death at age 83 also brings to mind a song that wasn’t itself as big of a hit: a squelchy artifact of 1980s production techniques called “I Might Have Been Queen.”

At the time Turner released the song, in 1984, she did not feel like a queen. She had been struggling to secure success as a solo artist after the dissolution of her abusive marriage and creative partnership with Ike Turner. She did not know that the album she was working on, Private Dancer, would help launch her into eternal legend. But her Buddhist faith gave her comfort, as did the advice of a psychic who told her she’d been a pharaoh in a past life. So the songwriters Jeannette Obstoj, Rupert Hine, and Jamie West-Oram wrote her an anthem about reincarnation: “I look down and I’m there in history,” went one line that Turner delivered in her majestically strange sing-growl. “I’m a soul survivor.”

Turner’s life had a cosmic dimension to it, spanning disparate eras and places, and suggesting the primordial struggle for safety out of chaos. She was born in 1939 on a Tennessee sharecropping farm, and had early memories of picking cotton. She would endure one of the most notorious marriages and artistic arrangements in history. But she spent nearly the last three decades of her life in Switzerland, calmly ensconced away from both the turbulence and the acclaim she’d experienced in America. And of course, she was responsible for some of the biggest songs of all time—big in terms of popularity but also in emotional scale, owing to a voice that stretched human expression to its fraying limits.

Working with the pioneering bandleader Ike starting in the late ’50s, Turner used her voice as a bridge to the future. In the hit “A Fool in Love,” she wailed in a manner that was part gospel and partly a premonition of heavy metal, scraping rudely against a politely shuffling arrangement. Ike tried to dominate her both emotionally and musically, but her assertions of autonomy produced some of the pair’s most important work. Against Ike’s wishes, she recorded Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” and without Ike’s direct involvement, she collaborated with Phil Spector to create “River Deep—Mountain High.” On both of those songs, the combination of trancelike rhythms and frenzied vocals feels ritualistic and ravelike, and utterly specific to the singer herself.

Ike never denied Tina’s highly publicized claims that he’d abused her, only how much and how badly. But in the great 2021 documentary Tina, Turner made clear that the media’s interest in portraying her as a victim exasperated her. This perhaps explains why, in the ’80s and ’90s, she found solo success with songs that had a kind of hard-won chillness to them. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “The Best” are, of course, enormously passionate songs, but they steamroll you gently, dignifiedly, making them apt for all sorts of commercial environments. Around this time, Turner’s lion-mane hair and imperious stage presence lent her the air of a superhero, a perception she embraced with her memorable turn in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

[Read: The final word on Tina Turner]

She could have kept going, running victory-lap tours and lending her voice to big-tent projects like she did with her 1995 James Bond theme. But she announced her retirement in 2000 and mostly stuck to it—save one last tour in 2008 and 2009. Her legacy only continued to grow while she watched from her château in Switzerland, where she lived with her husband, Erwin Bach, a former music executive. In pop music, her spirit—a combination of exertion, excellence, vulnerability, and spectacle—has been carried forward by apostles such as Beyoncé. In culture more broadly, her story has become a kind of folktale, told and retold in books and TV shows and on Broadway. By the end of her life, that queen title she dreamed about may have become an understatement. If anyone is a rock god, it’s Tina Turner.