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"I'll be there for you," they told us, and they weren't lying. This week marks 25 years since the US sitcom Friends first aired on UK television, although sometimes it seems as if no time has passed at all. Between 1995 and 2004, Friends was such a dominant presence on UK screens that it is difficult to remember what our nights in were like without the old gang. Even now, getting in some hang-time with Ross, Rachel, Chandler, Monica, Joey and Pheebs is as easy as firing up Netflix or switching to Channel 5.

US television has been waging a steady invasion campaign for decades, so while Friends was a turning point, it certainly wasn't the first American TV show to find a major audience on British screens. In the days of three channels and no streaming, Texas-set soap opera Dallas regularly attracted more than 20 million viewers to the BBC. In 1980, its "Who shot JR?" cliffhanger kept an entire nation in suspense for the eight months between the oil baron's attempted murder and the big reveal of the culprit. By that point, evidently, UK audiences could wait no longer and the BBC decided to compress the usual two-week delay between US and UK broadcast to just 18 hours.

Dallas had our attention, but did it have our respect? In his 2013 book, Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV, Professor Joe Moran details the extent to which British appreciation of the show was couched in mockery. Terry Wogan would often begin his Radio 2 morning show with a devilish takedown of the previous night's episode, and the soap was also a favourite subject of the legendarily wry Observer TV critic Clive James. "It was never embraced as quality television because, frankly, it wasn't," says Moran now. As such, Dallas's influence on the shows that came after was limited: "Part of its appeal was that it was very American and very different, so there would have been no point trying to replicate it. The appeal of Dallas was that it took itself seriously. Television drama has generally got higher quality since the 1980s."

This upgrade was already evident by the late 80s and pre-Friends 90s, when US imports such as the cop show Hill Street Blues and offbeat murder mystery Twin Peaks were impressing UK critics. These proto-prestige dramas, involving non-cliched narratives and complex characters, were forerunners for The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and other shows that would come to define US television's 00s "golden age". Screenwriter Mark Frost, who worked with David Lynch on the game-changing Twin Peaks, was describing his "Dickensian" ambitions for the humble TV drama long before David Simon started work on The Wire. Yet, despite Twin Peaks' subsequent influence, in UK ratings terms, it remained in the realm of "cult viewing", albeit cult viewing watched by the Queen of England herself (well, according to a secondhand Paul McCartney anecdote relayed in a Twin Peaks DVD extra).

In contrast, Friends was a near-instant hit in the UK, and while it was at first subject to the same sort of anti-US snobbery that afflicted Dallas, this surely said more about mid-90s British audiences than it did about mid-90s US television. Even as Seinfeld, "a show about nothing", innovated the sitcom form, the assumption lingered that British humour was somehow more sophisticated. "It's a common generalisation in Britain that Americans don't understand irony," wrote the standup Stewart Lee in a 1998 Guardian article. "This seems ironic, given that when the BBC tried to show The Simpsons, the cleverest, funniest, mainstream TV show ever, in the primetime slot it obviously deserves, they pulled it after a couple of weeks when the oh-so-clever British audience, who do understand irony, preferred to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch."

In Friends, though, Channel 4 found a show that could appeal equally to the Simpsons/Seinfeld crowd plus Sabrina's many young fans. Indeed, Friends originated out of the US networks' desire to skew younger, and arrived on UK TV during a period when home-grown sitcoms - One Foot in the Grave, Last of the Summer Wine - were looking particularly doddery. And that's without even taking the endless Dad's Army reruns into account.

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Steady, Eddie... Frasier. Photograph: NBC/Getty

Beyond any initial sniffiness, broadcasters proved willing to not only persist with US imports but also to put the full weight of primetime scheduling behind them. Friends arrived on Channel 4 as part of a formidable Friday night block, preceded by Ellen DeGeneres's groundbreaking sitcom Ellen at 9pm and followed by the Cheers spin-off Fra sier at 10pm. As the US sitcom writer-turned-Channel 4 acquisitions chief Rick Mitz explained in a 1995 missive from Los Angeles, the hunger for US content was near-insatiable: "Although US shows are getting more pricey, they're still much cheaper than producing home-grown UK shows. And if you hit it right, ad revenues go through the roof."

So confident was Channel 4 in its investment that in 1999 the broadcaster spent $200m (£124m) on a deal to poach from Sky the UK terrestrial and pay-TV rights to both Friends and the Chicago-set medical drama ER. And the Friends phenomenon wasn't a brief, caffeinated high. Its rerun-friendly package - with short episodes and a high gag-rate - helped usher in the era of global mass-syndication deals, which, in turn, funded the first headline-grabbing, $1m-per-episode cast salaries. From 2007 to 2019, with The Big Bang Theory, AKA "the new Friends", Channel 4 would pull off a similar trick, capturing the, by-then much geekier, youth zeitgeist and also airing each episode multiple times, sometimes in the same week.

Arguably, the invention of the gold-plated re-run was a much more appreciated thank-you gift to Friends' British supporters than their 1998 attempt to 'do London'. Having introduced Ross's British love interest, Emily (Helen Baxendale) at the beginning of season four, the main cast (minus heavily pregnant Phoebe) decamped to London for a season finale featuring Tom Conti and Jennifer Saunders (Absolutely Fabulous was big stateside). This inspired its own minor - and regrettable - US sitcom trend, with episodes of Parks and Recreation and Will & Grace also making the trip.

As the century ended and the golden era dawned - The Sopranos first aired on British television in the summer of 1999 - UK attitudes to US television were completely transformed from lazy derision of the likes of Dallas to breathless admiration. A wave of British imitations inevitably followed, initially the Friends-like Coupling, written by a pre- Doctor Who Steven Moffat, and later gritty antihero dramas such as Peaky Blinders. More recently, the trend for co-productions has established a kind of transatlantic hinterland where Sex Education and The End of the F***ing World combine an aesthetic that is glossily American with a cast that's mostly British, and the trade routes have reversed once again. Now it British shows, typically those which, like Fleabag, cling most doggedly to their own cultural identities, that are being talked up by "in-the-know" American viewers.

In 25 years, TV's version of the "special relationship" has had its ups and downs. It is an on-again-off-again, sometimes dysfunctional, always codependent affair but, importantly, it endures. Ross and Rachel could probably relate.
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Once upon a time from America: how US television took over our screens

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"I'll be there for you," they told us, and they weren't lying. This week marks 25 years since the US sitcom Friends first aired on UK television, although sometimes it seems as if no time has passed at all.

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Noughts & Crosses S1 | Full Trailer | Sci- Fi Series on Showmax

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Keir Starmer wants to put a suit on the Labour party, smarten it up and send it back out to face the electorate. But first he needs to persuade the membership to give him the top job. If recent polling is anything to go by, he's almost certainly going to cruise it.

I'd been promised an hour-long interview with Starmer, which shrank steadily as the date approached. First, it was whittled down to 45 minutes. Then, when I arrive at a community centre in Starmer's constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, a harried aide tells me that it might be more like half an hour.

When Starmer arrives at the venue, he's swiftly bundled into an International Women's Day event. I watch as he scans a briefing document, before delivering a speech without notes, name-checking the activists in the room. Afterwards, a gaggle of schoolgirls swamp him with the ardour you'd expect of a BTS meet-and-greet. His aide smiles apologetically. I watch Starmer disappear under a crush of glad-handers and think: 'He's not going anywhere soon.'

When it comes down to it, I shut down his friendly attempts to make small talk - no time for that - and get to it. Starmer is positioning himself as the person to consolidate the left and right wings of the party into a unified political force. He's been careful not to trash the Corbyn project too much on the campaign trail, partly out of self-protection - he served as Corbyn's shadow Brexit secretary - and also because Starmer needs left-wing votes. But many Momentum members believe that, if elected leader, Starmer would drag Labour to the centre-ground. How would Starmer reassure people on the left?

"I would ask people to look at my record, my track record over many, many years where I have fought for the powerless against the powerful," Starmer, 57, responds. After studying law at Leeds, Starmer worked at Doughty Street Chambers, becoming a QC in 2002. During that time, Starmer worked to abolish the death penalty in Commonwealth countries, represented the MI5 whistleblower David Shayler and the McLibel activists in the longest case in English legal history, and even persuaded a Salisbury court to let the druid Arthur Pendragon swear on his sword, Excalibur, in lieu of a Bible.

One of his cases involved a woman in Trinidad who was sentenced to death for poisoning her husband's curry. She was waiting to hang when Starmer took her on. "We managed to overturn the penalty of death on her and she was ultimately released from prison, at which point she wrote to me to thank me, and said she would cook me a meal next time I was in Trinidad," he laughs. "I haven't taken her up on that just yet."

After his human rights work, he was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 2008. His legacy as DPP can be read both ways: Starmer introduced a merits-based approach for rape cases and helped secure justice for the family of Stephen Lawrence, but he also prosecuted benefits cheats, a move some have criticised for feeding into a right-wing moral panic. When I ask him about it, he's defensive. "As DPP you don't personally pick the cases you want to do... I had 8,000 staff and we were making thousands of decisions."

So: in his 20s and 30s, Starmer was a bit of a social justice warrior. But the passage of time - and a big job like Director of Public Prosecutions - has a way of mellowing even the Robespierres amongst us. Starmer once edited a left-wing magazine Socialist Alternatives in his youth. (If you haven't heard of it, that's because no-one read it.) Does he still consider himself to be a socialist? "I still see myself as a socialist," he insists. "Whether I still agree with everything I did or said in my 20s is another matter... You gain experiences as you go along, but I would still call myself a socialist."

In person, Starmer projects a sort of high-functioning competence. He knows who I am before we meet and remembers personal details about me that have been mentioned to him by his team. Aides say that they never worry about sending him into interviews, because he doesn't come unstuck. The worst thing people will say about him is that he's earnest, a bit of a swot. Starmer once didn't notice he was being burgled, because he was engrossed in his books. ("I was living in a very grotty flat in north London where you could open the front door with a credit card," he says. "I was busily studying away, and my flatmate came back half an hour later having just met two people walking out with our telly.")

Starmer is the clear favourite, projected to win an outright majority in the first round of voting. He lacks the wild charisma of a Blair or an Obama, and his public speaking can be lacklustre, although of late he's demonstrated more vim. (Starmer's performance in the Channel 4 leadership debate was noticeably peppier than his stiff 2019 conference speech.) But being dull isn't necessarily a bad thing: by 2024, the public may well have had enough of Johnson's crumpled bonhomie, and favour an officious bureaucrat who can knock things into shape. His campaign has been part-crab-walk between the right and left wings of the party, part masterclass in saying as little as possible other than the word "unity," which he utters approximately 8,000 times a day, at hustings across the country.

As the Tories demonstrated in 2019, keeping your head down and not saying much is better than belching new policies constantly. But the problem with glomming up on the campaign trail is that it makes people worried about all the things you aren't saying. Starmer wants to be all things to all people: the moderate voice of reason and the person to uphold Corbyn's legacy. His leadership pledges are pretty radical: abolishing tuition fees and Universal Credit, and renationalising rail, mail, energy and water. To further allay Momentum concerns, Starmer has recruited former Corbyn lieutenants Kat Fletcher and Simon Fletcher to work on his leadership team.

But when I ask him whether he'll commit to upholding Corbyn's policy commitments in a 2024 Labour manifesto, he equivocates. "What Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have brought to our country in the last few years is making us more comfortable with [a] radical vision," he says. "But the 2017 and 2019 manifestos were different under different leaders, because things change... Our movement has to forge that programme for 2024, and of course it will be different, because it's got to face the late 2020s and 2030s. [But] that doesn't mean it shouldn't be radical."

Some Corbynistas are reassured - in a major coup, Starmer was endorsed by Laura Parker, Momentum's former national coordinator. But most aren't. Some commentators speculate that the forthcoming EHRC report on antisemitism, due later this year, would give Starmer cover to purge Momentum figures from Labour's National Executive Committee, under the guise of cleaning house. Others believe that Starmer will shunt Labour to the centre ground if - when - he wins. They look at Starmer, and see another Blair in the making.

"I think bandying tags and descriptions around and dividing ourselves is a very bad thing," Starmer says. "People constantly ask me, 'Are you Ed Miliband, are you Tony Blair, are you Jeremy Corbyn, are you Gordon Brown?'... I don't want to be a past Labour leader, I want to be the next Labour leader, and I think that means putting some of those labels on one side and asking ourselves what somebody is saying, and where do they want to take us.

"In the last few years, too often we've said, 'What bit of the party are you from?', rather than, 'What are you saying? I think if we dropped the first question and said, 'What are you saying?', we'd make real progress."

Part of the problem is that, no matter what Starmer says and does, the optics aren't great. Labour has never had a female leader in its history; the Tories have had two. Starmer looks like the actor you'd pick to play the PM in a BBC primetime drama - if that drama was made in the 90s. (Of course, to many voters, the fact that he is a white middle-aged man may be a bonus.)

It doesn't get much more establishment than his knighthood, awarded in 2014 for services to law and criminal justice - no matter how much Starmer tries to play it down. When Starmer appeared on Good Morning Britain, Piers Morgan pointedly referred to him as "Sir Keir Starmer" throughout.

To many voters, Starmer is just another sharp-suited Remainer lawyer who doesn't understand the north, let alone know how to win it back. He has tried to counter this characterisation of himself as a metropolitan yuppie by carefully emphasising his working-class roots. (Starmer's father was a toolmaker and his mother worked for the NHS - both have now passed away.) When I ask him about the false impression many have of Starmer as the privately-educated son of middle-class professionals, he becomes more animated than at any other point during our interview.

"The idea that a person who's been in a professional career for years - in his 50s - now has to tell people what his mum and dad did, is odd," he says, leaning forward. "I stopped telling people what my mum and dad did when I left school! ...But I have to tell people my dad worked in a factory and my mum was a nurse, because otherwise people assume that I was probably the son of a judge or diplomat or something. It shouldn't be this way. Most other people don't do that. In other walks of life people don't go around telling each other what their mum and dad did, or feeling like they have to legitimise themselves."

The scale of challenge facing Labour at the next election is huge. No British political party has ever come back from this position to win an outright majority. Would Starmer consider making an electoral pact with the Lib Dems? "I don't believe in electoral pacts," he responds. "I think we need to stand Labour party candidates and fight the next general election as the Labour party."

Left-wing political parties have always faced an existential dilemma: head or heart? Support the candidate you believe in, or the one you think is electable? Many Labour voters will be pondering their ballot papers with something akin to dismay. They will be thinking that it would be nice to have a female leader or a more radical candidate - but not if it means another decade of Tory government. To many members, that may be reason enough to vote for Starmer.
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Keir Starmer: "I Still See Myself as a Socialist"

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Keir Starmer wants to put a suit on the Labour party, smarten it up and send it back out to face the electorate. But first he needs to persuade the membership to give him the top job. If recent polling is anything to go by, he's almost certainly going to cruise it.

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A new study that looks at lifespan in wild mammals shows that females live substantially longer than males.

The research finds that, on average, females live 18.6% longer than males from the same species.

This is much larger than the well-studied difference between men and women, which is around 8%.

The scientists say the differences in these other mammals are due to a combination of sex-specific traits and local environmental factors.

DNA may hold clues to extinct animal lifespan

New rules could spell end of 'throwaway culture'

Has life expectancy fallen in Britain?

In every human population, women live longer than men, so much so that nine out of 10 people who live to be 110 years old are female.

This pattern, researchers say, has been consistent since the first accurate birth records became available in the 18th Century.

While the same assumption has been held about animal species, large-scale data on mammals in the wild has been lacking,

Now, an international team of researchers has examined age-specific mortality estimates for a widely diverse group of 101 species.

In 60% of the analysed populations, the scientists found that females outlived the males - on average, they had a lifespan that's 18.6% longer than males.

"The magnitude of lifespan and ageing across species is probably an interaction between environmental conditions and sex-specific genetic variations," said lead author Dr Jean-Francois Lemaître, from the University of Lyon, France.

He gives the example of bighorn sheep for which the researchers had access to good data on different populations.

Where natural resources were consistently available there was little difference in lifespan. However, in one location where winters were particularly severe, the males lived much shorter lives.

"Male bighorn sheep use lots of resources towards sexual competition, towards the growth of a large body mass, and they might be more sensitive to environmental conditions," said Dr Lemaître.

"So clearly the magnitude of the difference in lifespan is due to the interaction of these sex-specific genetics, the fact that males devote more resources towards specific functions compared with females, and to the local environmental conditions."

Even if females lived longer than males, the team found that it did not mean that the risks of dying are increasing more in males than females as they get older. The expected male mortality is always higher, but the rate of mortality is about the same in both sexes as they age.

One recent study in this field suggested that the genetic differences between males and females were key.

In humans, our cells contain different chromosomes, depending on sex. Females have two X chromosomes while males have an X and a Y. The theory is that the extra X in women has a protective effect against harmful mutations and that this holds true in other species.

The author of the new study on mammals says that both pieces of research are complementary.

"They show that in XX or XY systems, the XX, or the female, lives longer, so clearly there is an effect of sex chromosomes," said Dr Lemaître.

"What we show in our paper is that the difference is very variable across species, meaning there are other factors that need to be considered to explain this variability."

The study has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Mammal study explains 'why females live longer'

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A new study that looks at lifespan in wild mammals shows that females live substantially longer than males. The research finds that, on average, females live 18.6% longer than males from the same species. This is much larger than the well-studied difference between men and women, which is around 8%.

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Priorities: what should be deemed essential in a crisis?

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Priorities: what should be deemed essential in a crisis?

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There were already women in the waiting room when the clinic's lawyers called to deliver the news: Until further notice, abortion was illegal in Texas.

They'd been hoping to find some way around Monday's executive order, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had been clear, the lawyers told Kathy Kleinfeld, the administrator at Houston Women's Reproductive Services: To better combat coronavirus, doctors "must immediately stop" performing procedures deemed "medically unnecessary," including abortion.

Kleinfeld began calling the women to the back of the clinic, one by one. She saw 20 patients throughout the day, all coming in either to take their abortion pill, or have the initial consultation required by the state of Texas. Most hadn't heard anything about the ban.

"We had women pleading, saying, 'Please, please give us the pill,' saying they promised they wouldn't tell anyone, trying to bargain with us.'"

Some women cried, Kleinfeld said. One told her that she was in a violent relationship.

"She said, 'You don't understand. If he finds out about this ... he cannot know.'"

In an effort to reallocate medical resources to coronavirus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that all nonessential and elective medical procedures should be postponed indefinitely. While the CDC pointed to a few examples - carpal tunnel release, cataract surgery, colonoscopy - they did not release an exhaustive list, leaving room for states to make their own interpretations.

On Friday, Ohio became the first state to explicitly include abortion on a list of "nonessential" procedures, announcing a temporary ban on abortions in the state, starting Wednesday. Texas and Mississippi made similar announcements on Sunday and Tuesday, respectively, with other states likely to follow soon.

"The truth is, abortion, for the most part, is an elective procedure that can be done later," Paxton said Wednesday during a Facebook Live interview.

Abortion providers have scrambled to determine exactly which procedures are still legal, said Molly Duane, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights. In Ohio, clinics are continuing to provide both surgical and medical abortions, capitalizing on the vague language used by Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, who ordered clinics "to immediately stop performing nonessential and elective surgical abortions." Clinic lawyers argue that most abortions are necessary.

But the Texas ban was more explicit. Paxton prohibited clinics from providing "any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother." Across the state, all abortion appointments have been canceled, including those for medical abortions, when the patient takes two different pills. Texas providers filed a lawsuit Wednesday night against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), hoping the courts will issue a stay, allowing abortions to continue during litigation. It's unclear whether Mississippi's only clinic will continue to perform abortions.

At Houston Women's Reproductive Services, everyone wanted to know when they could come back, Kleinfeld says. She didn't know what to tell them. The governor said something vague about late April, but with the way the pandemic has been progressing, she knows it could be a lot longer.

"We just told them, 'We are so sorry, our hands are tied, we need to follow the law. ... Hopefully we'll be able to take care of you in a couple of weeks,'" said Kleinfeld.

It's a particularly bad time to cut off access to abortion, said Kamyon Conner, the executive director of the Texas Equal Access Fund, which subsidizes abortion care for women in North Texas who can't afford it. With all the coronavirus-related layoffs, she said, women are especially likely to be financially unable to support a child. Others may worry about the consequences of being pregnant during a pandemic.

"Many of [the women seeking abortions] are the very people that we've deemed essential to holding Texas together: fast food workers, grocery store clerks, delivery food drivers, and other people doing that kind of work," said Marsha Jones, the executive director of the Afiya Center, a reproductive justice advocacy organization that serves black women and girls.

The ban will disproportionately affect low-income women, says Kleinfeld: While covid-19 has made it more difficult to leave the state, women who can afford to travel probably still will.

"We had quite a few patients - mostly professionals - already making plans to travel out of state," said Kleinfeld.

Clinics and abortion funds have already begun "triaging" patients, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Women's Health, prioritizing funds for women who are further along in their pregnancy, nearing the point when they can no longer receive abortion care in Texas or its surrounding states. Since the ban went into effect, Whole Woman's Health - with three clinic locations in the state - has turned over 150 women away, Hagstrom Miller said.

"There is a 20-week ban in the state of Texas, so anyone that is 16 weeks now would literally have to go somewhere else at the end of this mandate," said Conner. She worries about women who discover that their baby has a fetal abnormality, news typically delivered at an ultrasound scheduled around the 15 or 18-week mark.

Hagstrom Miller has been sending women to clinics in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Arkansas, she said in a Wednesday news conference, but as the pandemic continues, those options are becoming much harder to access. People are scared to leave their families, she said.

Abortion also becomes more expensive the longer you wait, Connor says: The pill, only available in Texas up to 10-weeks gestation, tends to be significantly less expensive than surgical options. After 16 weeks, abortions can run between $8,000 and $15,000. Typically, Texas Equal Access can only support 10 percent of the women who apply for funding. As the ban stretches on, Connor says, more low-income women will be financially cut off from the procedure.

No one knows how long abortion the Texas ban will last. It could lift tomorrow, if a judge issues a temporary restraining order in response to the clinics' lawsuit. It could also last months.

"It's hard to be reassuring when there is so much uncertainty in every aspect of everyone's lives," said Kleinfeld.

Kleinfeld has had to turn women away before. She worked at the clinic in 2015, when Texas passed a law requiring all abortion providers to have hospital admitting privileges, halting much of the abortion care across the state. That period was difficult, but in some ways, Kleinfeld says, the last few days have been even harder.

When patients cry, she can't reach over and give them a hug.

Caroline Kitchener

Caroline Kitchener is a staff writer at The Lily. Prior to joining The Washington Post in 2019, she was an associate editor at The Atlantic. She is the author of "Post Grad: Five Women and Their First Year Out of College."

'The fear is real,' says one expecting mother

We hope these make you smile

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'We had women pleading': Coronavirus abortion bans leave patients stranded

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There were already women in the waiting room when the clinic's lawyers called to deliver the news: Until further notice, abortion was illegal in Texas. They'd been hoping to find some way around Monday's executive order, but Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had been clear, the lawyers told Kathy Kleinfeld, the administrator at Houston Women's Reproductive Services: To better combat coronavirus, doctors "must immediately stop" performing procedures deemed "medically unnecessary," including abortion.

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The future of the controversial Dakota Access pipeline has been thrown into question after a federal court on Wednesday struck down its permits and ordered a comprehensive environmental review.

The US army corps of engineers was ordered to conduct a full environmental impact statement (EIS), after the Washington DC court ruled that existing permits violated the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa).

The ruling is a huge victory for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe of North Dakota, which rallied support from across the world and sued the US government in a campaign to stop the environmentally risky pipeline being built on tribal lands.

"After years of commitment to defending our water and earth, we welcome this news of a significant legal win," said the tribal chairman, Mike Faith. "It's humbling to see how actions we took to defend our ancestral homeland continue to inspire national conversations about how our choices ultimately affect this planet."

In December 2016, the Obama administration denied permits for the pipeline to cross the Missouri river and ordered a full EIS to analyze alternative routes and the impact on the tribe's treaty rights.

In his first week in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite construction. Construction of the 1,200-mile pipeline was completed in June 2017.

The tribe challenged the permits - and won. As a result, the corps was ordered to redo its environmental analysis, which it did without taking into consideration tribal concerns or expert analysis.

The pipeline continued to transport oil from North Dakota to Illinois. The tribe and EarthJustice, an environmental law not-for-profit group, sued again.

In his ruling on Wednesday, the federal judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said the environmental analysis by both the companies behind the pipeline and the corps was severely lacking.

The abysmal safety record of the pipeline parent company, Sunoco, "does not inspire confidence", he added.

The court-mandated EIS will be more in depth than the assessment already completed by the corps - and could take years. The court will next decide if the pipeline should be shut down until the EIS is done.

The corps did not respond to a request for comment.

"This validates everything the tribe has been saying all along about the risk of oil spills to the people of Standing Rock," said Jan Hasselman, an EarthJustice attorney. "The Obama administration had it right when it moved to deny the permits in 2016."

The setback for the pipeline comes as the Trump administration moves to severely curtail Nepa, the 1969 legislation which is widely considered the cornerstone of US environmental protection. Trump has repeatedly blamed Nepa for blocking fossil fuel projects.
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Dakota access pipeline: court strikes down permits in victory for Standing Rock Sioux

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The future of the controversial Dakota Access pipeline has been thrown into question after a federal court on Wednesday struck down its permits and ordered a comprehensive environmental review. The US army corps of engineers was ordered to conduct a full environmental impact statement (EIS), after the Washington DC court ruled that existing permits violated the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa).

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Hours after the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren ended her presidential campaign and all but assured the next American president would be a white man in his 70s, a group of influential Democratic women gathered for dinner at a Spanish restaurant in downtown Washington.

The timing was coincidental, but it underscored the urgency of their meeting.
Joe Biden's pledge to name a woman as running mate fires speculation
More than a hundred years after American women earned the right to vote; four years after the first female presidential nominee of a major party won the popular vote by 3 million votes and two years after the election of the most female congressional class in history, six diverse women had entered the 2020 Democratic race and didn't win a single nominating contest.

"Without a doubt, the secret to Democratic victories in the past three years has been women's leadership. The idea that that wouldn't translate into the first woman president was heartbreaking for many of us," said Heather McGhee, a distinguished senior fellow at the thinktank Demos, who supported Warren and helped organize the meeting.

Emotions still raw, the group of women decided to do something about it.

Over tapas, they drew up a list of demands for the party's next nominee: he would choose a female running mate; women would represent the "governing majority" of a Democratic administration; appointments would reflect "the diversity of our communities" and economic issues focused on issues such as paid family leave would be a priority in the first 100 days.

They compiled the principles into a letter that was signed by dozens of prominent party activists and leaders and sent to the Democratic National Committee.

Days later, at the 11th Democratic presidential debate, the first without a female candidate on stage, Joe Biden explicitly committed to picking a woman as vice-president.

"There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow," said Biden, who holds a nearly unassailable lead over his rival, the Vermont socialist senator Bernie Sanders. He also committed to nominating the first African American woman to the supreme court, a gesture that reflects his reliance on the support of black women, a crucial Democratic constituency.

Electing a woman as vice-president would be historic. Only two women have ever been chosen as running mates: the Alaska governor Sarah Palin in 2008 and the New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. Neither served in the White House.

Far from being a "consolation prize", McGhee hopes that putting a woman on the ticket will move the country closer to electing the first female president. She envisions an empowered lieutenant in the "Dick Cheney mold - but with very different values".

"This isn't just ticking a box," she said. "This is opening a door that has been closed for too long."

Biden's pledge was widely embraced by Democrats eager to elevate a qualified woman to the second-highest office in the land.

But it was also a stark acknowledgment that a party increasingly led by women rejected a historic field of female leaders.

Biden and Sanders, the last men standing, "don't look the way the party looks", said Jennifer Lawless, a professor at the University of Virginia and an expert on women in politics. "They don't even look the way the primary field looked."

Committing to putting a woman on the ticket directly addresses the "concern among some women that this party continues to marginalize women at the highest levels of leadership", said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at Rutgers University's Center for American Women and Politics. "This is among the least they could do to demonstrate their commitment to gender equality."

But Biden's commitment to limiting the prospective pool of candidates by half did not draw universal praise. In some conservative and progressive corners, he was accused by women of "tokenism" and prioritizing inclusion over achievement.

But researchers say reflecting diversity does not sacrifice quality. Studies have found that women often have more relevant experience than their male counterparts when they run for office.

We have more women who are qualified to be vice-president now than we ever have before

Jennifer Lawless

"We have more women who are qualified to be vice-president now than we ever have before," Lawless said.

There are strong political arguments for choosing a female running mate. The 2016 presidential election brought the widest gender gap in a half-century of polling and since then, women's rage has fueled Democratic victories in every corner of the country. They have led protests, launched political organizations, run for office and voted for Democrats in record numbers. And it is women, far more than men, who most viscerally disapprove of Trump and his policies.

While research suggests running mates do little to persuade undecided voters, putting a woman on the ticket could help generate enthusiasm among Democrats . It could also help draw a contrast with Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women.

Jennifer Epps-Addison, the network president of the Center for Popular Democracy, which endorsed Sanders and signed the letter, said Biden should consider his choice of running mate as an olive branch to progressives.

"If the next nominee wants our time and our energy, they have to be willing to negotiate the platform, the policies, the transition and what the future of the Democratic party looks like," she said.

For her part, Clinton said recently she would "love" to have a woman on the ticket, but said the nominee must consider the electoral implications: "What will help him win the electoral college?"

Biden's announcement has intensified speculation around who he might choose. On Tuesday, the former vice-president told the hosts of The View that he would start vetting a shortlist of candidates "soon" and that it was important his running mate is "simpatico with where I want to take the nation".

His former rivals, particularly Senators Kamala Harris, Warren and Amy Klobuchar, are seen as top contenders. As far back as last November, Biden floated four possible running mates and all were women, including Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018 and Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general fired by Trump after refusing to defend his administration's travel ban.

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Elizabeth Warren in Manchester, New Hampshire, on 8 February. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

While the vice-presidency is a priority, it's not the only one of many ways the next nominee must demonstrate his commitment to women's economic and political empowerment, said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants and another organizer of the meeting.

"It's about being committed to hearing women, to actively listening to women, to lifting up the voices of women and recognizing that women are great leaders," she said. "We're making those demands but we're also not sitting back and waiting for those demands to be met."

In many ways, Biden's pledge reflects the dueling impulses of a Democratic party that prides itself on diversity and inclusion but remains deeply scarred by its loss to Donald Trump in 2016.

Early enthusiasm over the record number of barrier-breaking women and candidates of color in the race did not translate into support as the conversation gave way to concerns about electability.

On the campaign trail, voters who believed sexism played a role in Hillary Clinton's defeat feared that nominating another woman would deliver the same result. Many Democrats urged the male frontrunners to pick a female running mate, sometimes suggesting candidates like Klobuchar and Harris before they had exited the race.

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Kamala Harris and Joe Biden at a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan, on 9 March. Photograph: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

"Voters were so afraid to recreate anything that looked or felt like 2016 and that created a unique disadvantage for female candidates who wanted to take on Trump," Meredith Kelly, who was a top aide to the New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand's presidential campaign.

During a debate, Klobuchar said it was obvious that the women on stage were "held to a higher standard" than their male counterparts. Their mistakes, it seemed, were punished more harshly by a party that demonstrated a willingness to rally behind men whose success defied political odds.

Biden, who is running on his decades of experience, was first elected to the Senate in 1972, at 29. He has previously lost two presidential elections, and placed fourth and fifth in the first two nominating contests. Sanders fought his way back into contention after a heart attack. Pete Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, parlayed national media attention into a first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

"Women have to bring the receipts while men get judged by their potential for greatness," Kelly said. "That was extremely apparent in this presidential race."

There is no evidence to suggest that a woman would lose to Trump. After all, more Americans voted for Clinton than Trump. The women running attempted to address the issue of electability head-on, but the doubts persisted until last week, when the path for nominating a woman officially closed with the departure of the long-shot Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

"These were pretty remarkable women who were accomplished, who could raise money, who had national profiles and who were leaders in their own right," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, another organizer of the dinner. "So we have to ask: is there some misogyny, is there some sexism that serves as a barrier to women running for president?"

The degree to which gender played a role in 2020 will be debated for a long time. Warren herself hadn't fully grappled with the question when she was asked about it moments after announcing she was ending her campaign.

"Gender in this race?" Warren said, addressing reporters outside her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She described it as a "trap question" that forces female candidates to either acknowledge sexism and sound like a "whiner" or dismiss it and deny the experiences of "about a bazillion women" who would ask: "What planet do you live on?"
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'Opening a door that was closed too long': the hunt for a female vice-president

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Hours after the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren ended her presidential campaign and all but assured the next American president would be a white man in his 70s, a group of influential Democratic women gathered for dinner at a Spanish restaurant in downtown Washington. The timing was coincidental, but it underscored the urgency of their meeting.

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Mr. Yang championed putting money in the pockets of every American adult during his presidential campaign. Now, amid the coronavirus crisis, "This thing is going to pass," he says.

Andrew Yang in Washington Square Park in Manhattan last year. The central idea of his presidential campaign was a universal basic income of $1,000 per month. Credit... Christopher Lee for The New York Times

For more than two years, Andrew Yang traveled the country as a presidential candidate trying to convince voters that a crisis was coming. The economy was going to evolve, he warned, jobs would be automated away in droves and many Americans were going to find themselves at home without a paycheck.

"And now," Mr. Yang observed from inside his family's weekend home in upstate New York, "we've all been sent home at once."

To be sure, fear of an impending global pandemic resulting from a novel coronavirus was not the reason Mr. Yang spent months insisting the federal government provide American adults with a universal basic income of $1,000 per month. But a global pandemic has arrived. And the fallout from the outbreak has plunged the country into a grim and uncertain reality.

So only now - with millions of Americans facing the prospect of no work and wondering how they will pay the bills - have proposals similar to Mr. Yang's signature policy prescription gained wide, bipartisan approval. In the sort of political turnabout that may only be possible when society faces dire need, giving free money to Americans suddenly appears not only rational but critically necessary to many Democrats and key Republicans.

In a telephone interview Tuesday night, Mr. Yang expressed confidence that legislation would soon put some form of basic income or stimulus checks into Americans' bank accounts. "This thing is going to pass," he said. "And it's going to pass for a very obvious reason: Money in our hands is vital to prevent our economy from collapsing."

Over the past week, proposals to dole out direct payments to workers and their families while schools and businesses shut down have come from progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, moderate Democrats like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado and Republicans like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah.

Those calls for relief were bolstered by the White House, which got behind the idea of rapidly sending money to Americans. An outline of a Treasury Department proposal obtained Wednesday by The New York Times called for sending two rounds of checks directly to taxpayers on April 6 and May 18. Payments would be fixed and their sizes dependent on income and family size, according to the outline, which put the cost of each payment at $250 billion, part of a $1 trillion economic stabilization package.

Speaking to reporters at a White House briefing on Wednesday, President Trump said the exact amount of the checks was still "to be determined," while lauding the talks surrounding the payments as "very bipartisan."

Mr. Yang said he would recommend payments of $1,000 per adult and $500 per child in the near term with the hope that they could continue in perpetuity.

"My big concern is that we should make it consistent, and once a month so that if this crisis continues, people don't see their savings evaporate," he said. "If you were to have a lump sum in March, that money's not going to last until May or June."

"I hope this does become fixed policy," he added. "But we're in a crisis right now and the important thing is to just get money into Americans' hands."

Mr. Yang said he had harbored doubts about whether the federal government would consider giving money directly to citizens. But he repeatedly expressed "thrill" that ideas similar to his own were being discussed at the highest level of government.

"No one would wish this as a circumstance we'd ever face as a country," he said. "But I do feel some degree of pride in that I believe that my campaign - with the help of hundreds of thousands of supporters around the country - helped advance a set of solutions that it turns out the country needed in a time of crisis."

Throughout his presidential campaign, Mr. Yang called for a monthly basic income that would be provided to American adults from the time they turned 18 until their death. Though several lawmakers have suggested somewhat similar measures to address the coronavirus crisis, many of the plans call for sending a limited number of checks or providing other mechanisms for relief, some of which have been deployed during past downturns.

In other words, one person's temporary universal basic income is another person's stimulus check or tax rebate.

Mr. Romney, for instance, has suggested a one-time $1,000 check - not universal basic income - as a starting point; Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii has proposed $1,000 payments until the emergency has ended; and Representatives Tim Ryan of Ohio and Ro Khanna of California have proposed an emergency earned-income tax credit that they said would provide a check to Americans who earned less than $65,000 last year.

Mr. Sanders on Tuesday came out in favor of "$2,000 cash payments to every person in America every month for the duration of the crisis." And a group of Democratic senators - led by Mr. Bennet, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Sherrod Brown of Ohio - proposed sending as much as $4,500 to nearly every adult and child in installments this year.

In an interview, Mr. Khanna, a co-chair of Mr. Sanders's presidential campaign, said he would be willing to work with those who wanted to send checks quickly, but was concerned that under some plans, financial help would not be targeted to those who need it most.

"This can't just be a one-time thing," he said. "It's got to be more sustained, and when you're sustaining it, it would become far better to give more dramatic relief to the working families and those who are unemployed."

Indeed, the economic ripple effect of the virus is already being felt most acutely by service workers and hourly workers whose jobs have evaporated as Americans have been urged to practice "social distancing." With so many Americans forced to stay home, some experts said that sending them money was the best way to stimulate the economy.

"We're in a situation now where we're almost surely going to have a recession. And unlike most recessions, we don't want people going to work - we want a lot of people to stay at home and not be interacting socially," said N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former adviser to President George W. Bush. Direct payments, he said, would allow people to avoid putting their health at risk for a paycheck.

But Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor who advised President Barack Obama, noted that while universal basic income had "a lot of attractive features," it would be expensive to administer in the long run.

"Cash is very flexible and lets people make the choices that are best for them," Professor Furman said. "But as a large-scale permanent program it would be very difficult to finance."

Though Mr. Yang favors making payments permanent, he stressed the need to "take care of our people and then figure out what we're going to do" after the crisis recedes.

"I'm thrilled that common sense is prevailing," he said, before acknowledging that his idea may have been slightly ahead of its time.

He suspended his campaign in February, he noted, "and then we adopt universal basic income in March."

Reporting was contributed by Emily Cochrane, Nicholas Fandos, Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley.

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Andrew Yang's $1,000-a-Month Idea May Have Seemed Absurd Before. Not Now.

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Mr. Yang championed putting money in the pockets of every American adult during his presidential campaign. Now, amid the coronavirus crisis, "This thing is going to pass," he says. For more than two years, Andrew Yang traveled the country as a presidential candidate trying to convince voters that a crisis was coming.

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Tenants in a New York City apartment complex are fighting their landlord's effort to install a facial recognition system to access parts of the buildings, calling it an affront to their privacy rights.

The row, which the tenants believe could become an important test case, comes as concern about the spread of facial recognition systems has grown across the US and globally, with law enforcement agencies increasingly relying on the tool.

San Francisco this month became the first US city to ban city police and government agencies from using it. Private firms are also increasingly keen on the technology.

At Atlantic Plaza Towers in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, the landlord, Nelson Management Group, is moving to install a new system to control entry into the buildings. It would use facial recognition to open the front door for recognized tenants rather than traditional keys or electronic key fobs.

We do not want to be tagged like animals

Icemae Downes

More than 130 tenants have, however, filed a formal complaint with the state seeking to block the application.

"We do not want to be tagged like animals," said Icemae Downes, who has lived at Atlantic Plaza Towers since it opened 51 years ago. "We are not animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without you tracking every movement."

Some residents also fear the move reflects the spreading pressures of gentrification further into the east of Brooklyn, and a desire to attract white, higher-income residents in the buildings, whose tenants are mostly black. They say there is already a culture of surveillance and that if they are suspected of breaking one of the building's rules, they might find an image of themselves pushed under their doors.

The management firm insists the sole purpose of the changes would be to use the latest technology to make the buildings safer, and it described claims that it is trying to change the tenant makeup as baseless.

'Secrecy' in the private sector

While government agencies' use of facial recognition has been under the spotlight, much less is known about the extent of its use in the private sector, experts say, because freedom of information laws do not apply.

"The vast majority of commercial deployments are secret," said Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

"This turns people's expectations upside down about their privacy. In 2019, most people expect that when they log online, they're going to be tracked in some way," he said. "In public, in real life, most people still think they can be a face in the crowd. And up until the deployment of facial recognition technology, they were right ... This lets people be tracked in the real world like they are online, and I think that is a pretty basic invasion into our lives."

The Brooklyn tenants believe their challenge could have a wider impact as more landlords begin to experiment with facial recognition at residential buildings.

Facial recognition will soon be everywhere. Are we prepared? | Dylan Curran

"We're not going to stand for it, and we're asking other renters in the state, not just in the city, to join us - because it's coming to your house next," Downes said.

The two brick high-rises in Brownsville already have security cameras watching the grounds, doorways, elevators and halls. They are also staffed by security guards, and residents must use key fobs to get inside - so tenants are dubious of the landlord's explanation that facial recognition is necessary to improve security.

"There's cameras at every inch of this place," said Tranae Moran, 27. "It's endless. They have every piece of data we own. With that equipment, they will have every piece of information that is associated with us, and that's not necessary."

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One of the two key fobs currently needed in order to enter the Atlantic Plaza Towers apartments complex in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman/The Guardian

She is afraid that the biometric information collected for the new system would be abused. "I'm afraid of it being shared with third-party agencies. I'm afraid of it being shared with the police. I'm afraid of it being shared with anyone - advertising companies, just everyone. It's just very sensitive information that I feel our landlord should not have," she said.

Already, tenants say that security camera footage is carefully monitored. Residents who walk their dogs in the wrong place or enter the building with a box that looks like it contains a forbidden appliance say they might get an image of the alleged transgression slid under their doors, with a warning notice or a fine.

So the residents fighting the application suspect the proposal has less to do with improving their own security, and more with attracting new tenants to the buildings in an area of Brooklyn primed for gentrification. "He doesn't want Spanish. He doesn't want black. He wants white people to come into the neighborhood," Moran said.

The tenants' complaint, in addition to privacy concerns, cites research that has found that facial recognition algorithms are less accurate when used on black people and women, as compared with white people and men.

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Tranae Moran at the entrance of the Atlantic Plaza Towers apartments complex in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman/The Guardian

The Nelson Management Group spokesman Chris Santarelli said claims the group wanted to change the demographics in the towers are "baseless and don't correspond with facts", adding that tenant turnover has fallen since the group bought the towers.

Santarelli said the company was pursuing "cutting-edge technology at all our properties to create a safer environment for tenants and provide the highest-quality housing in the rent-stabilized market. "The sole goal of implementing this technology is to advance that priority and support the safety and security of residents," he said.

"We have yet to install anything having to do with a facial recognition system. We have engaged a leading provider of security technology for proposed upgrades, which has assured ownership that data collected is never exposed to third parties and is fully encrypted."

Santarelli said the complex already has extensive security and the
"proposed new technology would compliment those safety amenities."

Don't look now: why you should be worried about machines reading your emotions

The buildings are governed by New York's rent stabilization laws, so a change like the one Nelson Management Group is proposing must be approved by the state department of homes and community renewal (HCR). It is the first application for a facial recognition system the agency has received and it is currently"under review", said the HCR spokeswoman Charni Sochet.

In New York, buildings including Knickerbocker Village in Manhattan and the Morris Avenue Apartments in the Bronx have implemented facial recognition systems. But their installation has not yet been put to the legal or regulatory test.

"The field is so unregulated," said Mona Patel, an attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services, which is representing the tenants. "There aren't any rules that would govern it, because there aren't any laws on facial recognition entry systems."

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One of the surveillance cameras on the property at the Atlantic Plaza Towers apartments complex in Brooklyn, New York. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman/The Guardian

The group argues that rent stabilization law requires a landlord to give a tenant a new lease on the same terms as their old lease - and that requiring tenants to turn over their biometric information is a violation of those terms. The residents have only the landlord's "pinky promise" that he will not share the data with police, immigration authorities, or advertisers, the legal papers say.

"A state agency should not require state residents to surrender their confidential information to their landlord, who can use it however he wishes," Patel said.

Residents are right to be concerned, said Bedoya. Tracking when a resident enters and leaves their building can reveal all kinds of information, he said, from the job they work to what religious services they attend to whether they're cheating on their spouse.

"Your work life, your love life, your family life, your religious life - all of that is opened up for display to people using facial recognition to track your comings and goings from the building," he said.
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New York tenants fight as landlords embrace facial recognition cameras

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Tenants in a New York City apartment complex are fighting their landlord's effort to install a facial recognition system to access parts of the buildings, calling it an affront to their privacy rights.

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Electing a US President in Plain English

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US healthcare & 2020 presidential election

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US healthcare & 2020 presidential election

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"Medicare For All" is probably the best-known plank in Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign platform. He wants the federal government to take over private health care insurance and replace it with a comprehensive, single-payer program. Under this plan, every U.S. resident would automatically be insured for nearly every contingency-hospital stays, dental care, mental health, ambulance services and long-term care, among other things-with nearly no copays or deductibles. Grandma needs a nursing home? That's covered. Your son needs counseling for a drug addiction? Covered. No surprise bills, no copays.

Critics slam the plan as too expensive; Sanders insists it would save money overall. Everyone agrees, however, that Medicare for All would amount to a massive transfer of spending from the private sector to the U.S. government. And there lies the rub. Can the U.S. government be trusted to manage a complex, fast-moving industry in which innovation and efficiency-qualities more often associated with the private sector than a government bureaucracy-are matters of life and death for so many Americans? The question makes many people nervous and puts Sanders' supporters on the defensive.

What goes largely unappreciated in this debate is that the U.S. government already owns and runs one of the most successful health care operations in the world. It's taken on the care of millions of some of America's most challenging patients, including residents of isolated rural communities and older patients who need long-term care. It does so while eliminating many of the racial disparities that haunt American health care. It trains most of America's doctors. It is a leader in telehealth, electronic health care records, precision medicine and many other important, forward-looking technologies. It earns quality-of-care ratings that most hospitals would envy. It keeps costs generally below average and charges most patients little or nothing.

The system is the Veterans Health Administration-commonly referred to as the VA, after the broader agency that runs it, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs-along with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, operated by the Defense Department. Walter Reed serves about a million active-duty military personnel, military retirees and others. The VA serves about 9 million patients, the vast majority of whom are U.S. military veterans. It provides government health care on an enormous scale, entirely administered, delivered and paid for by the U.S. government. If that's not socialism, what is?

The VA is, in fact, more of a socialist enterprise than anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. His Medicare for All would be an insurance program-patients would use private doctors, hospitals and clinics, who would then be reimbursed by Uncle Sam. (Much like Medicare, except Sanders' plan would pay the costs of health care received by nearly all Americans.) The VA, by contrast, directly employs 11,000 doctors and owns its 1,200 hospitals.

The VA has become something of a darling among the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Sanders' plan would not only preserve the VA intact, it would increase funding to fill vacancies left open by the Trump administration. Veterans "know they can get high-quality care at the VA," says his campaign website. "It's our job to make it easier-not harder-for them to get that high-quality care."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive representative from New York, has also vehemently defended the VA against calls for privatization. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," she admonished critics in a town hall in April 2019. "Who are they trying to fix it for is the question we've got to ask. They're trying to fix the VA for pharmaceutical companies, they're trying to fix the VA for insurance corporations, and ultimately, they're trying to fix the VA for a for-profit health care industry that does not put people or veterans first."

Opponents of national health care point to recent scandals that paint the VA as a troubled bureaucracy that fails to serve its constituents adequately. In recent years, there have been stories of fatally long waits for surgeries, filthy facilities, sexual assault and suspicious deaths. That creates an image of the VA as a cold, clueless, lumbering, third-rate bureaucracy-the kind that awaits Americans if plans to increase the government's role in health care are enacted. "Every one of these plans involves rationing care, restricting access, denying coverage, slashing quality and massively raising taxes," said President Donald Trump in October.

To be sure, the VA is neither perfect nor immune from the challenges of providing health care at a time of rising costs and aging populations. But by focusing on the problems, critics ignore the contrary evidence: by most measures, the VA and its DOD counterpart, Walter Reed, make up arguably the best-run health care operation in the United States.
Comparison Tests
Scrutiny can have an upside. As a public institution, the VA has been subject to many in-depth, independent studies that show how well it stacks up against both private and public health care systems in the U.S.

Quality of care, these studies show, is high in VA hospitals and clinics. In 2018, researchers at Dartmouth College's Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice concluded that VA hospitals "outperform private hospitals in most health care markets throughout the country" when it comes to quality of care. The study's lead author, Dartmouth Institute Professor and physician William Weeks, added at the time that "the VA generally provides truly excellent care."

The Rand Corporation, a respected think tank, came to the same conclusion in 2018. And in a second study, Rand analyzed previous studies of the VA and determined that the VA compares favorably with the private sector. "When you see consistent findings like these, it gives us confidence that they're real," says Rebecca Anhang Price, the senior policy researcher at Rand who led the studies.

Perhaps that's why Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell chose a government hospital-the Bethesda National Naval Medical Center, now known as Walter Reed-in which to have a triple-bypass operation in 2003. That hasn't stopped McConnell from referring to government-sponsored care as a "far-left social experiment" and vowing that legislation to enlarge government's role in health care would never pass while he was speaker.

Comparing VA health care directly against Medicare-Medicaid and private insurance is difficult because the systems are so different. Where comparisons can be made, the results usually suggest that the VA is as good or better than private care, private health insurance and Medicare-Medicaid. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 78 percent of those receiving VA care were satisfied with how the health care system worked, compared to 75 percent of those insured by Medicare, and 69 percent of those insured through their employers. Dartmouth's 2018 study concluded that VA hospitals on average performed better than other hospitals in their regions in key measures of care quality. VA hospital patients had lower rates of readmissions within 30 days and suffered fewer complications from infections, falls and blood clots when they were in the hospital, the study found.

Perhaps most important, vets themselves tend to speak highly of the system. A 2019 Veterans of Foreign Wars survey of thousands of vets found that 91 percent of respondents recommend VA care to other vets, and most chose the VA for their own health care even though 98 percent of them had other options. One of them is Christine Griffin, a Boston-area army veteran and a lawyer who is partially paralyzed, has top-notch private health care insurance. She also lives within shouting distance of some of America's most revered private hospitals. For her own care, however, she chooses the local VA, including the tests and treatments she needed after she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "Everything is accessible here, and the women's imaging center is almost like a spa," she says. "They're just so good at so many things."

A common criticism of government-run health care is that wait times can be oppressive. In Australia, for example, wait times are twice as high in public hospitals as in private facilities. In 2016 the GAO found that wait times for a third of the VA's primary-care visits were longer than a month, and last year the agency said some vets who were referred to health care providers outside the VA had to wait as long 70 days for treatment. By most accounts, wait times have improved since then. Studies have shown that the VA's wait times for care turn out to be shorter on average than those in the private sector for all types of treatments, with the one exception of elective orthopedic procedures such as knee surgery, where delays usually pose little risk to the patient. According to that 2019 VFW survey, 84 percent of vets said they were able to get care "in a timely manner."

"Government health care" conjures images of a cumbersome bureaucracy. Compared to the Byzantine rules and requirements of the private health care insurance industry, however, the VA has less bureaucratic overhead, says Neil Evans, a physician who runs the VA's Office of Connected Care. VA doctors don't have to get pre-authorization from insurance companies or anyone else. "I struggle to think of a single time when I felt an intervention was in the best interests of a patient and I couldn't get that done- even if it was expensive," he says. The need for patients in the private health care system to get insurance-company approval can wreak havoc on care.

The result, as too many in the U.S. know all too well, is private-sector care that tends to be fragmented and frequently inadequate. And it's almost always costly, which often translates to no care at all. Studies show that a third of Americans report they avoided getting care within the past year because of costs, more than any other industrialized nation.
An Edge in Innovation
The VA has managed to be at the forefront of virtually every medical trend that experts say is crucial to improving care and reducing costs. For one, it offers an alternative to "fee-for-service" reimbursement, in which hospitals are paid more for providing more treatments, a perverse incentive that contributes to high costs and lack of preventative care. The VA, by contrast, practices value-based care, under which health care providers are financially incentivized to keep patients healthier. The private-health care industry, which has thrived on fee-for-service, is in no hurry to make the switch even while health care costs have soared to more than $11,500 per person, a 30 percent rise in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2003.

Under value-based care, the healthier patients stay, the less the VA has to dig into its budget to provide more treatment. Does this save on costs? It's nearly impossible to compare costs in such health care systems. The VA, for instance, doesn't even bill patients for the care it provides. Its patients tend to have more health challenges than other patients, which include ordinary back injuries as well as exposure to Agent Orange and traumatic brain injury from combat. And they tend to stay with the VA longer because it provides nursing-home and end-of-life care. Studies have shown that many of the VA's patients would be turned away by most private health care insurance companies. "About a third of Americans have chronic, non-cancer pain," says Carolyn Clancy, a physician and the deputy under secretary for discovery, education and affiliate networks at the VA. "For vets it's about 60 percent."

Still, studies suggest that where comparisons can be made, care in the VA costs about 10 percent less than Medicare, even though Medicare pays about half as much as private insurance does for similar treatments, according to another Rand study. That's because the VA is constantly hunting for ways to eliminate inefficiencies, including tests and treatments that don't offer much benefit for patients, says Ryan Vega, a physician who heads the VA's health care innovation efforts. "If we can do something for a vet that will make their lives better, we'll do it, even if it costs more," insists Vega. "But if it doesn't provide better care, we look to reduce it."

Vega says the VA regularly "de-prescribes" medicines that haven't ended up producing the hoped-for benefits, eliminates tests that aren't leading to better outcomes and constantly hunts down cheaper ways to get good results. For example, the VA has pioneered a drive to increase the rate of toothbrushing among patients at its hospitals, after discovering it reduced by 90 percent the number of cases of nonventilator, hospital-acquired pneumonia, an illness that costs the U.S. $35 billion a year. "It's reasonable to expect that an institution that isn't being paid more to do more will avoid unnecessary costs," says Rand's Anhang Price. "You might worry that they have an incentive to undertreat patients, but we can't find evidence of that in the VA."

Another critical area where the VA has leapt far out in front of most of the rest of health care is in addressing the "social determinants of health"-that is, life challenges such as inadequate housing, poverty and joblessness, as well as lifestyle and mental health issues such as poor diet, loneliness, stress and depression, that can have a big impact on health and well-being. Social determinants have about four times the impact on a patient's health as the medical care they receive. Other industrialized nations spend twice as much on such social problems as they do on health care; the U.S. spends half as much, and the U.S. health care system by and large ignores them.

Through the VA, vets have access to professionals who can help them cope with their life challenges, including social workers, counselors, behavioral coaches, acupuncturists and tai chi instructors. In many cases, after meeting with a patient, a VA doctor will simply walk the patient down the hall to meet a counselor or a coach. "We want to offer a big repertoire of tools for dealing with stress, chronic pain and other whole-health problems," says Ben Kliger, a physician who runs the VA's "integrative health" and "cultural transformation" initiatives. "Once a vet gets involved in these other services, their overall costs tend to go down."

"We've changed the conversation here so it's not just about disease," he says.
High-Tech Medicine
The VA frequently jumps ahead of the rest of health care in adopting new technology. Back in 2010, Eric Dusseux, CEO of medical-tech company Bionik, went looking for hospitals willing to experimentally deploy the company's groundbreaking robots, designed to exercise the arms of stroke victims. He soon found a willing partner in the VA. Ultimately, it deployed the robots in 12 of its hospitals, leading to the largest study ever of robotic patient rehabilitation-a study so successful that robots are now part of standard stroke-care guidelines due to the improved outcomes and lowered overall costs from the technology. "They were very receptive and forward-thinking," says Dusseux of the hospital system.

The VA is also pioneering the use of 3D printers to create highly accurate models of the internal organs of individual patients who are scheduled for complex surgeries, so that surgeons can better prepare for the operations by examining the models. In one of the most ambitious health-data projects in the world, it is analyzing the complete service histories and medical records, along with DNA samples, of nearly 800,000 veterans in order to find links between their genes; environments; habits such as diet, medications and diseases, with an eye to spotting new strategies for improving long-term health. And it has launched an institute entirely dedicated to applying artificial intelligence approaches to health care.

The VA has also established a system for automatically analyzing electronic health care records throughout the system in order to spot improvements in patient outcomes at any of its facilities, to see if there are any innovations underlying an improvement that can be quickly shared throughout all VA facilities. "We send teams to learn from those sites that are doing well with outcomes, and then deploy them to any sites that might be having trouble," says Joe Francis, a physician and chief improvement and analytics officer at the VA. "You can't do that sort of thing in the private sector, because there are too many competitive and time pressures." To dig out even more innovation, the VA sponsors a Shark-Tank-style competition for all its employees, the most recent of which inspired some 500 promising ideas aimed at improving care or lowering costs.

The VA's telehealth capabilities, too, are years ahead of most other health care organizations. Some 100,000 vets have logged more than a million videoconference visits with VA clinicians, all of which were entirely free. That's a critical service for the 30 percent of VA patients who live in rural areas. And many of those who can't or don't want to conduct the video visit from their homes, perhaps because of privacy concerns during an exam, will soon be able to do so from one of a network of telehealth exam "pods" the VA is setting up at Walmarts and at American Legion and VFW sites. The first such pod has already opened up in Eureka, Montana, serving some 300 vets.

Tele-visits return large benefits both in reduced costs and patient outcomes for chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, which afflict 60 percent of adult Americans. They require frequent monitoring and check-ins to avoid the sorts of sudden health crises that can send a patient to the emergency room and an in-patient stay, easily costing a health care system tens of thousands of dollars. "Patients who try it, like it," says Leonie Heyworth, the physician who heads the VA's telehealth efforts. "If they have to fight traffic to get here they can be a mess by the time they come into my office." That's why the VA's video patients have 28 percent fewer missed appointments than in-person patients.

The VA's telehealth practices go beyond convenience. Videoconferencing gives both patients and their doctors fast access to advanced specialty consults available in a handful of leading hospitals. "We use virtual care to match patients to the best specialist for their needs across the entire system, wherever they are," says the VA's Evans. "Just because you're at one of our smaller hospitals or clinics doesn't mean you can't benefit from the resources you'd have if you were at a top-notch medical center."

That tele-specialty capability is one way that the VA is moving to the forefront of so-called precision medicine, an effort to develop treatments that are custom-tailored to a patient's genes and other characteristics. Precision medicine is especially promising in cancer, where doctors use it to tell ahead of time whether a patient will respond to a specific treatment.

In the U.S., only a tenth of cancer patients get precision-medicine testing. At the VA, half of lung cancer patients now get it, as do a quarter of those with prostate cancer-the two most common types of cancer among vets. Unlike most rural patients, who don't have access to precision medicine, vets who live in rural areas are getting tested at the same rates as those near cities. The VA "telegenomics" hub in Salt Lake City services the entire VA system; any physician in the VA can access it on behalf of a patient. "Now we're working to provide rural vets with access to experimental cancer drugs, too," says Michael Kelley, a physician who directs the VA's national oncology program. He notes the VA has also been looking at bringing artificial intelligence software to bear on analyzing vets' tumors.
Answering the Critics
To be sure, the VA has had its share of well-publicized problems. In January, the VA demanded a co-pay on replacement prosthetic limbs from a vet when the prostheses were stolen from his room at a VA long-term-care home. VA officials allegedly tried to discredit a legislative aide who reported being groped by another patient at a VA facility. A Federal grand jury is currently looking into whether a former nursing assistant at a VA hospital in West Virginia may have killed 11 patients with insulin overdoses.

In one of the more sensational scandals, in 2014 some VA employees were reportedly falsifying records of how long patients had to wait for appointments and as many as 40 vets died while waiting. Further investigation suggested that the problem wasn't unusually long wait times, but rather that the VA had been given a target by government officials of limiting wait times to under 14 days-a system-wide goal that few private health care systems could meet. A report later that year from the VA inspector general found that six of the deaths might have been related to wait times, and that the other deaths were consistent with the condition of the patients in question, most of whom had complex health challenges.

The VA doesn't offer excuses for the falsifications. The VA's Clancy points out that as a large government agency the VA has to accept a greater level of scrutiny than its counterparts in the private sector. Its flaws are more readily decried in the national press and it is more directly answerable to the public. In the end, she argues, that closer, less-forgiving, more visible oversight ultimately leads to more accountability and improvement. The VA's overall record seems to bear that claim out.

The VA's foibles also become political weapons in the ongoing debate over the virtues of private versus government-run health care. One of the biggest VA-health-care-related complaints coming out of Washington recently doesn't concern the VA's poor performance but rather the push toward privatization. Veterans' advocates complain that the Trump administration seems to be pushing more vets toward private health care, in part by not filling some VA health care positions that are currently open. "The administration is setting us up to fail so they can dismantle veterans' preferred health care provider," Alma Lee, National Veterans Affairs council president for the American Federation of Government Employees, told the Military Times.

If the VA does in fact provide a better health care system than what most Americans have access to, then vets have surely earned that privilege. Nobody is proposing a similar health care system for all Americans. But Sanders' Medicare for All plan would establish universal coverage, and it would almost certainly be a tougher negotiator of prices than private insurers are. It would likely force private hospitals to focus on care that delivers the best health results at the lowest cost, as the VA does today.

In those respects, Medicare for All could remake the U.S. health care system in the VA's image. To hear most vets tell it, that would be an improvement.

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Is Bernie Sanders right about Medicare for All? U.S. government-run health care works pretty well

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"Medicare For All" is probably the best-known plank in Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign platform. He wants the federal government to take over private health care insurance and replace it with a comprehensive, single-payer program. Under this plan, every U.S.

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"OK, Boomer" is what younger people say when they want to dismiss boomers as being out of touch or stuck in our boomer ways, sort of this generation's version of "If you say so, old-timer." It's not exactly an ageist insult, but it sure ain't a compliment.

Fine. OK. We get it. Have fun. But remember one thing before slinging insults: The world, according to Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker (and many others), is better off now than it's been at any time in history. That's right. Ever. And I contend it's because of boomers. Boomers are the greatest generation the world has ever known. The most innovative. The most caring. The hardest-working. That may seem a bit much, but to quote the pitcher Dizzy Dean, "It ain't bragging if you can back it up."

Millennials seem to think their challenges are greater than those any other generation has faced. Not really. The Great Recession? Nothing compared with the Great Depression (although the way the markets have been behaving lately, you may get there yet). The wealth gap? Today it's actually pretty close to historical averages, and nowhere near the peak that occurred at the end of the 1800s, research shows. Student loans? Student loan debt is $1.6 trillion. Over the next 30 years, boomers will pass down $68 trillion as part of the "Great Wealth Transfer." That should cover it for many borrowers (the timing may suck, though).

There's more. Opioids? We had heroin and crack. Good jobs? They weren't that easy to come by for us either. We were the population pig-in-the-economic-python. Competition was fierce. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell? We had Richard Nixon, George Wallace, Lester Maddox and Richard Daley. What about the fact that boomers get an outsized proportion of government benefits such as Social Security and Medicare, what some call boomer socialism? Well, that's true-but would millennials rather we went back to the old system where the older generation lived with their adult kids who cared for them? Didn't think so. Oh yeah, we also had the Vietnam War and the draft.

This is not to say that your generation doesn't face problems or that they're not important. Some, like artificial intelligence (AI), climate change and the redux of autocracy, rise to the level of existential. The hard truth: Every generation faces existential crises. You think the bubonic plague and AIDS weren't existential crises? How about Hitler? Or communism? Boomers lived under the very real threat of a nuclear war that would have killed everything and turned the planet into a ball of ice. In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring about the global poisoning caused by pesticides. In 1968, professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford wrote The Population Bomb, which predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. And in 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, which predicted that the world would begin running out of resources by 2008.

of those happened. Know why? Because we dealt with them, that's why. During the century before Ehrlich's book, almost a million people starved each year. Since? About 200,000 a year. That's still too many, but it's a huge improvement. We dealt with those crises and cleaned up some of the messes previous generations had left us, like depletion of the ozone layer and the nicotine epidemic. And here's another insight. You will too. You will manage it because you are the smartest, healthiest, best-educated, most enabled generation in human history. You are what evolution has been working hard for 200,000 years to produce.

And it's a good thing you're so well prepped, because it's your turn now. Last year, millennials passed boomers to become the population's largest segment, the Pew Research Center says. About half of boomers have already retired. It's time for us to step off the stage and for you to step up.

Let's see how we did and what you'll have to live up to, using 1969 as a benchmark, when leading-edge boomers were 23, the same age as the youngest millennials are now. Spoiler alert: The world we're leaving you is way better off than the one we got.
Wealth & Income
Millennials are justifiably outraged over the growing wealth gap. Here's what gets lost, though. While the average person may be slipping further behind the wealthy, they are still better off in absolute terms than they were 50 years ago, in income and net worth. Median household income in 1969 was about $68,000 in today's dollars (adjusted for inflation). Today, it's slightly lower, $64,000, even though there's been a rise in two-income families. But households were larger then. Per person, each of us has about 20 percent more income than a typical person did in 1969.

Taxes are much lower now than they were in 1969. Overall, things are cheaper. While health care and education costs have risen faster than inflation, many everyday items have become much less expensive. A round trip New York-London air ticket cost $550 back then, about what it costs now. But once inflation is considered, that $550 ticket would cost over $3,700 in today's dollars. The cheapest color TVs cost the equivalent of $3,000, which is why only one in three homes owned one.

Best of all is phone usage. In 1969, according to Federal Communications Commission data, rates varied by location, distance, time of day and type of call (business vs. residence). A typical 10-minute chat cost about $15 in today's dollars, and much more if the location was more than a few miles away. These days, the average person spends almost three hours a day on their phone-calling, texting, browsing, etc.-so your cellphone bill would be about $8,000 a month if you were paying the usage rates we paid. You may still be broke, but you're surrounded by better stuff.
Security & Safety
There's a large industry out there working hard to scare you. News media looking for clicks. Burglar alarm companies looking for business. Politicians looking for votes. And it's working. According to Pew, most Americans feel the world is getting more dangerous each year. But it's not. It's actually getting safer, FBI data show. In 1969, the murder rate was about 70 people per million vs. 50 now. The burglary rate was 9,841 vs. 3,760 now, a 62 percent drop.

The only number that's really up is rape, which has more than doubled to 420 per million. But that jump needs some context. Back in 1969, less than one-third of rapes perpetrated by people known to the victim were reported. Now that number has more than doubled. Survivors may also be better able to identify assaults as crimes due to cultural changes like the #MeToo movement, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center has noted. So at least some of the increase may be because we're counting better.

Crimes of violence are horrible but not common. What's really dangerous: cars. A typical person is four times likelier to die in a car than be murdered. Car deaths have been plummeting: In 1969, over 50,000 people died in car accidents, one for every 1 billion miles driven. In 2018, even with the added danger of texting while driving, the number was 36,560, or one for every 3 billion miles. That's due to both safer roads and safer vehicles, as well as mandatory seat belt laws.
Health & Longevity
The average person today lives to be 79 years old, eight years longer than in 1969. Some of that is because smoking has declined. About 40 percent of the population smoked back then; it's down to 15 percent now. Some of the gain is because of better health care. Many of the diseases that affected us, like polio, are no longer an issue because of vaccinations. Five-year cancer survival rates are up too, from around half to over two-thirds.

And although it's harder to quantify, it's also almost certainly a better-quality life because lifestyles and nutrition are better. To millennials, for whom Orangetheory and SoulCycle are a way of life, it probably seems strange, but people didn't really bother to stay fit back in 1969. Running didn't take off until the early '70s. Nike wasn't even making running shoes in 1969. Fitness classes didn't become popular until the 1980s. To be fair, although boomers have taken fitness to where it is today, we didn't start it. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson launched the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, which resulted in millions of boomers running laps around playgrounds and seeing who could throw a softball the farthest. Those good habits stuck with us.

But those extra eight years of life have come at a cost, helping to drive up health care expenses. Old people require a disproportionate amount of care, and medical costs have risen about twice as fast as inflation. Add it all up and health care was about 7 percent of gross domestic product in 1970. Now, it's 18 percent.
Human Rights & Inclusivity
Not to put too fine a point on it, but in 1969 life for a gay, black, young woman (or any of the above) was pretty tough.

The baseline has moved so far, so fast that it's hard to explain what it was like in 1969, particularly outside major metropolitan areas and in the South. Until 1967, some states had laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races. Before enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, many towns had sundown laws where blacks were subject to arrest if they were out after dark. In 1981, a young black man was lynched in Mobile, Alabama, by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1969, women earned 59 cents on the dollar vs. men. Now it's 82 cents. Not great, but better. But before 1963, employers didn't even have to pretend to pay men and women equally for the same work. Until 1973, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder by the psychiatric profession. Before Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion was a crime in many states.

We are far from living in a fair and equal world, but it is decidedly fairer and more equal than it was in 1969 and much of that is due to boomers. We voted. We marched-at our schools and in our hometowns, and after piling into beat-up old cars and driving through the night to Washington. We agitated and demonstrated. Sometimes we even rioted-as in Chicago in 1968 and New York City in 1969 (Stonewall). Sometimes we paid a heavy price-people went to jail, and at Kent State University in 1970, students were killed by the National Guard. Today, there is at least some measure of indignation when we see unfairness. And there is redress, both legally and in public shaming. We have not eliminated bias, but we have delegitimized it.
The Environment & Climate
Millennials face some very serious environmental issues-the two warmest years in history are 2016 and 2019; there are 330 billion pounds of plastic garbage floating in our oceans; and an estimated 200 species go extinct every single day. Very little is being done about it because of politics. But we had some pollution issues of our own. On June 22, 1969, the Cuyahoga River, a nasty, black, oozing, bubbly waterway that wound through Cleveland, caught on fire. Really on fire, with huge, billowing plumes of smoke. According to Smithsonian magazine, it had caught on fire a dozen times before. Air pollution caused by cars in American cities was so bad that pedestrians wore gas masks. Visibility would sometimes drop to two blocks. According to journalist Rian Dundon, they called L.A. (Los Angeles) "Smell-A." Tens of thousands of Americans died from pollution-related disorders. (Of course, it could have been worse. In five days in 1952, 4,000 people in London died from smog caused by coal used to heat homes.)

It was common for factories to simply dump waste onto the ground or into waterways. In 1953, Hooker Chemical sold the Love Canal, one of the most polluted sites in America, to the city of Niagara Falls. They built a school. In Athens, Georgia, barrels of radium waste from an old watch factory (it was used to make the watch hands and numerals glow in the dark) sat rusting in an unfenced yard behind the closed factory. Many of the women who'd worked there died from jaw cancer caused by licking their paint brushes to make the tips sharp. In all, 40,000 sites across America were identified as dumping grounds, 1,600 of which were considered priorities. And before 1972, the accepted way to get rid of the nuclear waste from power plants was to just take it out into the ocean and throw it over the side of the boat. In 1982, scientists found that huge holes were appearing in the ozone layer, the part of the atmosphere that protects us from solar radiation.

Today, people fish in the Cuyahoga River. L.A. still has air pollution, but it's about 40 percent of what it was, even though 3 million additional people live there. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "Between 1970 and 2018, the combined emissions of six key [air] pollutants dropped by 74 percent, while the U.S. economy grew 275 percent." Even Mexico City has breathable air now. Many of the most polluted dump sites have been cleaned up, and there's no more ocean dumping of nuclear waste. In 2019, the "hole" in the ozone layer was the smallest ever measured. It's expected to close by 2075. It's considered one of the most successful environmental interventions in history.

It's taken a lot of work. The EPA's founding in 1970. 1972's Clean Water Act. The Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter in 1972. 1980's Superfund law. 1987's Montreal Protocol (banning chlorofluorocarbons). New technologies making vehicles and industries more efficient and cleaner. Activist organizations like the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and Greenpeace. New levels of public awareness, responsibility and commitment. Large-scale deployment of technologies like electric cars, home solar, solar power from photovoltaics and wind power, which now supplies around 7 percent of America's power. That sort of broad, sustained effort is what it takes to fix an environmental problem. It's now time to apply what we've learned over the past 50 years to plastics and global warming.
Culture
They call the 1950s the Golden Age of Television. Pish. This is the Golden Age of Television. And movies. And music. And books. And probably just about every other cultural vector you can think of. This is the Golden Age of Culture. Better creative output. Better performers. But you have all that because of us.

Before the 1970s, culture in the U.S. was tightly controlled and highly commercialized. The big music labels determined what you heard, the big publishers what you read, the big studios what you saw. The control was both informal and formal, from radio stations refusing to play "Negro" music and black artists to censorship of movies, albums and television programs. In 1952, the National Association of Broadcasters established the Television Code, which among other things prohibited profanity, sex, realistic violence, irreverence about God and religion, or the negative portrayal of law enforcement or family life.

We boomers don't like rules. Especially dumb ones. We broke down the soft barriers between genres, mixing rock and folk and blues and classical. We showed sex in movies-real sex, not just heavy breathing and passionate stares. And most of all, we refused to take anything as sacrosanct or untouchable. We created National Lampoon (1970) and Saturday Night Live in 1975. Hill Street Blues (1981) broke the police procedural mold with its intertwined storylines, multi-episode arcs and mix of personal and workplace stories-devices still used today. We poked and pushed at that censorship envelope until it finally broke. The Television Code ended in 1983, although music is still censored on TV and on the radio (the "radio edit" of CeeLo Green's song F**K You has the lyrics as "Forget You), along with movie content rating codes. Because of us and the abetting technologies of digitalization and the internet, we now have the most exciting and vibrant cultural environment ever.

It's worth noting that it's not just entertainment where we have more choice. In 1970, a typical grocery store had 6,000 items. Today, a regular grocery store has about 40,000 items, and a Walmart supercenter has 120,000. Amazon had over half a billion products for sale in 2017 and was adding a million products a day. In every category-electronics, airlines, hotels, clothes, furniture, you name it-the number of available items is growing at what feels like an exponential rate. All that choice can feel like a burden-until, of course, you don't have it.
Technology
Technology has exploded over the past 50 years, driven by boomers. Electronics. Pharmaceuticals. Digitalization. Materials. Nanotech. In 1969, around 72,000 patents were granted. In 2018, almost five times as many were approved, roughly one every 90 seconds, day and night, weekends and holidays. According to a brilliant 1997 essay by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, a century ago major innovations like the car, electricity and the telephone took about 50 years to become mass market items. Midcentury, the time to reach the mass market had dropped to about 25 years-for example the radio, TV, VCR and microwave. The latest wave of innovations-the PC, cellphone, antidepressants and the internet-took 10 years or less. What that means is that we are the first generation with "unrecognizable" technology. That is, if we magically transported someone from 1919 to 1969, they'd recognize every single device in a home except for the microwave. But if we transported someone from 1969 to today, they wouldn't recognize half of our devices-laptop, Alexa, Kindle, the cat's laser pointer, DVD player, router, etc.

It's no small matter to handle that much innovation. We consumers have trouble keeping up-in little ways, like having to replace still-functioning devices, and in big ways, like falling behind in workplace skills. Business models become obsolete very quickly. In 1998, a Motorola-backed company called Iridium began launching satellites into space with the idea of providing a worldwide communication service for business people and travelers. Problem was, by the time it finished launching the 66 satellites three years later, cellular technology had gotten so good and was so widespread that it made Iridium obsolete.

We boomers were the ones who sped up technology, and we are the ones who slowed it down. We realized any technology powerful enough to save the world is powerful enough to destroy it. We questioned technology and pushed for things like natural and organic products, curbs on the use of X-rays and radiation, new regulations for chemical producers and chemicals, and a hiatus in new nuclear plant construction after the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, in which a nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania partially melted down and leaked radiation.

Consumers in Europe and California are now moving to establish tighter rules around identity protection. And we are keeping a wary eye on AI and genetic modification. Sometimes our boomer techno-skepticism goes too far, as with the anti-vaxxing and anti-genetically-modified-organism movements. Still, it's reasonable to be at least somewhat paranoid. In 1938, X-ray machines were used to measure children's feet in shoe stores. Technology is wonderful but dangerous. It could've destroyed our world already in any number of ways-nuclear, chemical, genetic modifications. But it hasn't, because we haven't let it.
The Bigger World Outside America
There is a big world beyond the wall, and while much of it still lags behind the U.S. and Europe in terms of economic development and human rights, it's a lot better now than it was in 1969. The website Our World in Data has become the go-to resource for measuring global progress. It's showing improvement across almost all measures of human progress. Here are a handful of metrics, out of hundreds. In 1969, 449 people out of every 100,000 died from an infectious disease. Now, it's 140, a drop of 69 percent. Over the decade of the '60s, almost a million people died in wars. Over the most recent decade, it was around 567,000. That's twice as many people on earth and half as many deaths. But the real progress has been on poverty and hunger. In 1969, 36 percent of the world's population lived in what the United Nations terms "extreme poverty." Now it's 8 percent. On average, 4,600 people starved to death each day during the '60s. Now, it's one-fifth of that, despite a larger population.

And here's another way we're better off. In the '60s, the most common form of government on earth was dictatorships. There were 119 autocracies and only 36 democracies. Today, there are 99 democracies in the world. Yay freedom!

Of course, averages deceive. The fact that people, on average, are better off isn't very comforting to people in Syria, Central America or the South Sudan. Nor does this address the elephant in the room, climate change, which is likely to adversely affect developing nations far more than developed ones, which can just turn down the thermostat.

None of this is to say the world is as it should be. We said better, not perfect. There are new problems, like AI and the loss of privacy; old problems that we didn't solve completely, like environmental degradation; and old problems where we made progress but are now sliding backward, like civil rights, with over-incarceration and resegregation. As frustrating as those things are, we shouldn't lose sight of the progress that's been made. Generations solve the problems they are presented with. The generation before us took on autocracy and dictatorships. We took on social change. Your turn.

You are ready. You're bigger than we were, by about an inch; smarter, by about 10 IQ points; much better educated-far more people are completing high school and college than ever before. You have extraordinary technology. And though it's hard to quantify, you have another advantage we didn't-you're woke. We understood we needed to account for things like bias and privilege, but we didn't really know how. You have a much better understanding of the world around you and how it works.

Here's one last piece of advice. Aim higher. Your passion for change seems to be mostly for yourselves-health insurance, child care, student loans, paid family leave. Our passion was often to help others: civil rights, apartheid and famines in places like Bangladesh, Biafra and Ethiopia. Yes, it was naïve to think that a few concerts like Live Aid could save millions, but it was rooted in good intentions. Our generation may have failed in the execution, but we did not fail in ambition.

You're right to be scared by the enormity of the tasks before you. It could be very bad if you don't do something. But you will do something. And as you do, do your best to avoid our mistakes-but don't lose sight of what we did right. Good luck.

OK, millennial? OK.

→ Sam Hill is a Newsweek contributor, consultant and best-selling author. Thanks to the following for the statistics used, beyond those already cited: Statista, Census Bureau, NOAA, NBER, National Institute of Justice, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, CDC, National Committee on Pay Equity, U.N., professor Guido Alfani, the Sentencing Project, the Disaster Center, Timeline, Paycor, Leftronic, NomadWallet, 123 Test, Live Science and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Corrections 3/10/20, 3:28 p.m. E.T.: A previous version of the story compared median household income from 1969 with average HHI from 2019; the updated version uses median income to compare households in both periods. It also overstated the extent to which income per person is higher; it is 20 percent, not 50 percent. The word "billion" was also omitted from a comparison of car death rates; the updated version notes that one person died in a car accident for every 1 billion miles driven in 1969 (not every 1,000 miles) vs. one death per 3 billion miles driven in 2018 (not 3,000). We regret the errors.

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OK, millennial: boomers are the greatest generation in history

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"OK, Boomer" is what younger people say when they want to dismiss boomers as being out of touch or stuck in our boomer ways, sort of this generation's version of "If you say so, old-timer." It's not exactly an ageist insult, but it sure ain't a compliment. Fine. OK.

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All Things Considered for October 11, 2023

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Hear the All Things Considered program for October 11, 2023

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Watch the latest news summary from BBC World News. International news updated 24 hours a day.