++The walls of psychedelic prohibition are crumbling. What comes next? +
++This week, I went to the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, Colorado, where more than 11,000 scientists, artists, investors, and uncategorizable members of the psychedelic community gathered to both celebrate and scrutinize as the “walls of prohibition start to crumble,” in the words of Bia Labate, executive director of the Chacruna Institute. It’s likely the biggest psychedelics conference in history. +
++“Welcome to the psychedelic ‘20s,” cheered Rick Doblin, founder of the conference’s host, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, at the welcome address — while sporting an all-white suit that may as well have been plucked from Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicler Tom Wolfe’s closet. +
++The psychedelic hype bubble is already concerning many in the community, so let’s not exaggerate the scale: Well over half a million people attended the recent parade celebrating the Denver Nuggets NBA finals victory over the Miami Heat. Comparatively, psychedelia remains relatively niche. But a sampling of 11,000 people from the psychedelic community punches above its weight in creating a palpable, colorful, and ever-surprising atmosphere. During Doblin’s opening address, a sort of collective effervescence buzzed through the auditorium. For many in the room, an above-ground psychedelic gathering of this size and stature was decades in the making. “I’m not tripping — culture is tipping,” said Doblin. +
++Psychedelic culture is back, but it looks a little different +
++It’s tempting to write about all the oddities that come along with a mass congregation of psychedelic-curious folks. And there were plenty: attendees wearing sparkling dragon outfits; a ukulele band stationed in the main hallway attracting a rotating cast of passers-by into a sort of ecstatic but strangely relaxing dance; a “Deep Space” exhibit room — a neon-lit warehouse, really — with tea ceremonies and real-time painting. Outside the convention center, hundreds of people sat upon the patches of turf in every sort of posture you can imagine, with circles of police officers dotting the perimeter. +
+ ++But the real story that strikes me is the sanity of it all. The conference logistics ran relatively smoothly. Audience members were mostly well-behaved. I haven’t been offered illicit substances even once (the press badge around my neck may have something to do with that). In part, that makes sense for a conference where the three-day tickets start at $805. For all the talk of inclusion, that’s a steep price of entry that surely screened out some of the fun. Nevertheless, this cross-section of psychedelia might optimistically suggest a synthesis between the bacchanalia of the ’60s and the straight-laced, bureaucratic vibe familiar to today’s conference culture. +
++During that ’60s era, psychedelia and government stood at odds. At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Doblin was followed by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, as well as current Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who voiced his support for pardoning all criminal convictions related to psychedelic drugs. +
++Next was Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Promising results from clinical trials are recruiting governmental allies across the aisle, something the hippies lacked. Psychedelics are still illegal at the federal level, but that’s not stopping states from passing legislation that ranges from decriminalizing the cultivation, possession, and sharing of psychedelic substances, to regulated access at certified clinics for anyone over the age of 21. +
++Spread across the long halls of the Colorado Convention Center, sessions were grouped into one of 11 different categories, ranging from science and business to society and community. I bopped into a crowded room where Hamilton Morris (the journalist and chemist behind Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia) chronicled 90 years of tryptamine chemistry. The handful of psychedelic drugs we’re familiar with today — which have already caused such a ruckus — hardly scratch the surface of the thousands of psychedelic compounds chemists are discovering. Earlier this year, Jason Wallach, a pharmacologist at St. John’s University, filed for a patent on 218 novel psychedelic drugs, which he hopes will help fill out the inventory of mental health treatment options. (At a later session on AI-assisted drug discovery, Michael Cunningham, a research scientist at Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, said that the number of potential small molecules yet to be discovered vastly outnumbers the quantity of stars in the observable universe). +
+ ++In the afternoon, I moseyed over to hear Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology and a leading researcher in the psychedelic science realm. At the moment of my entrance, he was describing how brain activity grows more “entropic” on psychedelics. You might recognize entropy as what the second law of thermodynamics tells us the universe is tending toward: disorder. In terms of the brain, you can think of it as the unpredictability of electrical activity. +
++Entropy is also a fitting theme for the conference at large, which otherwise resists being packaged into a tidy narrative. Everything from the outfits to the art installations is spiced with unpredictability. Even the weather, which delivered a quick bout of hail Thursday night, was surprising. In the brain, heightened entropy can help shake up harmful patterns of thought and behavior. As a culture, psychedelia — at its best — can serve a similar function: shaking up settled patterns, inviting opportunities for new ways of organizing ourselves, our institutions, and maybe even our academic conferences. +
++Balancing the chemistry and neuroscience, the keynote stage featured speakers like football star Aaron Rodgers and the rapper/artist Jaden Smith (like psychedelics, he’s a little difficult to place). Asked about his first psychedelic experience, Smith shared that he did literally hug a tree, and in that moment, thought: “Oh, wow, there’s a lot going on inside of here.” +
+ ++Does psychedelic experience have broader political implications? +
++High-entropy psychedelic states that shake up settled patterns, alone, do not offer reliable pathways to making anything better. That’s why psychedelics are now often paired with therapy, which provides a structured experience to guide one toward beneficial outcomes. Is it possible to structure the cultural impact of psychedelics so that, this time around, it doesn’t plummet into moral panic and prohibition as it did in the ’60s? +
++The metaphor often deployed here is integration. For individuals taking psychedelics through clinical or legalized adult-use formats, a session with a therapist usually follows the day after the trip to integrate the experience. Across a number of panel discussions, participants have suggested that integrating psychedelic experience at the cultural scale requires wholesale systemic change. +
++Often, this sort of thing is usually followed by a few vague critiques of capitalism or the profit motive. “Don’t forget,” said Jamie Wheal, a writer and co-founder of the Flow Genome Project, “the set and setting of the psychedelic renaissance is free-market capitalism.” +
++Quibbles over the imprecision of calling the present economic paradigm free-market capitalism aside, the political implications of psychedelics are a rich and unsettled area of debate. “Our minds shape our social structures, and our social structures shape our minds,” said Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana, during a talk titled “Rebuilding society in the light of mystical insight.” +
++There was no disagreement in the crowd when it comes to ending the prohibition on psychedelic drugs (though how that should be done is another story). The political interests of psychedelic discourse, though, tend toward far larger spheres. “If we’re going to have a conversation about drug policy endgame, the endgame is complete social transformation,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. What does that mean in practice? +
++The hippies also held a famously antagonistic view toward prevailing economic structures. But their engagement with policy discourse wasn’t up to the task of achieving meaningful change. +
++If the conference was any indication, this new iteration of psychedelic culture is more willing to speak the language of decision-making institutions (another source of polarized debate). There is a new dose of prudence in the air. Panelists discussed the absolute importance of informed consent, the slim-but-real risks of psychosis (particularly for those with a family history), and the value of clinical research. A keynote conversation between Michael Pollan and Bob Jesse (a behind-the-scenes driver of the movement for decades) was titled “Tempering psychedelics,” in which Pollan reflected on the virtues of opening conversations around psychedelics with their risks. But if psychedelic culture is an unpredictable force of entropy, you never know what turns it may take next. +
++Where is abortion legal? How has Dobbs affected abortion access? And is Roe ever coming back? +
++It’s been one year since the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that there was no constitutional right to an abortion in the US — a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and 49 years of precedent. +
++Since then, states have moved to restrict abortion rights. People seeking to end pregnancies across a wide geographic swath of America have wholly or nearly lost the right to do so. Doctors have said that the restrictions endanger their ability to care for patients. New battlegrounds have emerged over medication abortion, the most common form of abortion in the United States. And abortion, always a contentious political and social issue, has become a defining issue in national politics. +
++The 2022 Dobbs decision and subsequent court cases have also generated enormous confusion across the country about abortion and the legal status of abortion access. That uncertainty isn’t surprising, since abortion laws vary widely and are still changing as bans and other restrictions work their way through state and federal courts. +
++Here are some common questions people might have about abortion and the state of abortion access, and their actions. +
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+- What is abortion?
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++Medically speaking, this might seem like a basic question. Abortion occurs when a pregnancy ends before the birth of a baby. +
++But the reality is a lot more complicated than that. While abortions, and the right to choose them, are closely associated with unwanted pregnancies, not all abortions happen for that reason. The same procedure is also part of how health care providers treat pregnancy complications, and it’s often done when a pregnancy threatens the life of a pregnant person, or when there is little chance that a pregnancy will end in a living baby. And it can be initiated by the body all by itself — in fact, the medical term for a miscarriage is “spontaneous abortion.” +
++Abortion is also less separate from other medical procedures than you might think. Many of the medications, tools, and techniques used in the course of performing abortions are also used to treat other medical conditions. The drugs used to perform medication abortions also treat uterine fibroids and stomach bleeding, for example, and there’s a lot of overlap between in-clinic abortion procedures and the treatment of uterine bleeding and certain uterine cancers. —Keren Landman +
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+- How do people get abortions?
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++There are two types of abortion: medication abortion and in-clinic abortion (which is also called “surgical” abortion, although it doesn’t typically involve cutting tissue or getting stitches). Medication abortion, which is the most common, can be done at home any time within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Typically, patients take two different medicines, mifepristone and misoprostol. As of 2022, more than half of all abortions in the US — about 54 percent — were medication abortions. These medications are currently only available by prescription (although some health care providers think they should be available over the counter). +
++Abortion pills can also be shipped through the mail through a range of telehealth services. US telehealth providers are subject to some of the same restrictions that brick-and-mortar providers are: Online pharmacies won’t mail pills to addresses in states where the procedure is not legal. That means this form of access has not made abortions easier to get in states with abortion bans. +
++But that may be changing soon: A New York state law passed this week would allow the state’s abortion providers to prescribe and mail the pills to people in states with abortion bans. (As of June 22, the law was awaiting signature by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.) And some providers ship to all 50 states anyway, such as the overseas provider Aid Access; Plan C and Mayday Health provide additional information on how people in the US access medication abortion online. +
++In-clinic abortions usually involve a procedure that’s done in a medical facility. The procedures themselves typically take around 5 to 10 minutes. These methods can be used at any time until the beginning of the 24th week of pregnancy. They generally involve having a health care provider remove the pregnancy tissue from the uterus through the cervix, which is the opening to the uterus that sits at the end of the vagina. This is usually done by inserting a thin tube into the cervix and sucking out the contents of the uterus through it (aspiration abortion), although sometimes, providers need to use medical tools to take out the pregnancy tissue (dilation and evacuation, D&E, sometimes called dilation and curettage, D&C). +
++Most states prohibit abortion after 24 weeks, and few abortion providers offer abortions in this later stage of pregnancy. +
++Crisis pregnancy centers are facilities that market themselves as offering reproductive health care but that actually try to dissuade people from getting abortions. These facilities often obscure the fact that they do not provide abortion care, but resources like the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map can help abortion seekers identify them. —KL +
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+- Is abortion safe?
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++Abortion — for which safety has been closely scrutinized for decades — is an extraordinarily low-risk procedure. It’s safer than giving birth or getting a colonoscopy. +
++An extensive 2018 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that complications of abortion are extremely rare. When they do happen, they take place in less than 1 percent of people who get abortions: In medication abortions, prolonged heavy bleeding happens in only one to three of every 1,000 people, and infection in one to five of every 10,000 people. Rarely — in about 2 percent of cases — people who get a medication abortion need to have an in-clinic procedure to complete the abortion. +
++In-clinic abortions are also very safe. Complications that lead to hospital admission, surgery, or blood transfusions happen in only one to two of every 1,000 aspiration procedures. +
++Death due to abortion is extraordinarily rare. Fewer than one of every 100,000 people who get an abortion die of a complication of the procedure — lower than the number who die from giving birth, getting a colonoscopy, or having some plastic surgery procedures. +
++The safety consequences of denying abortion, meanwhile, are dire. In the Turnaway Study, which followed 1,000 women from around the US over five years, those who gave birth after being denied abortions had higher rates of life-threatening pregnancy complications and more economic hardship than those who received abortions. They were likelier to stay in contact with a violent partner, and their children were more likely to grow up in poverty with developmental challenges. Notably, despite some claims from anti-abortion groups, the mental health of women who had abortions was no worse than that of women who didn’t. —KL +
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+- Where is abortion legal?
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++Broadly, the legal landscape around abortion in America now breaks down into a few categories: states where abortion is prohibited (generally with exceptions to save the life of the pregnant person, and sometimes for rape or incest), states where access is limited (for example, by a 12-week ban), and states where abortion is legal with few restrictions. +
++People living in states where abortion is banned can still travel to another state for the procedure; no bans currently criminalize crossing state lines for an abortion (though Idaho has made it a crime to help a minor leave the state for the procedure without a parent’s consent). In his concurring opinion in Dobbs, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh stated that he believed banning interstate travel for the purpose of abortion would be unconstitutional. +
++Someone who is actively seeking abortion care can visit INeedAnA.com or AbortionFinder.org to learn about options in their area, said Elisabeth Smith, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. For people who want to understand the larger legal landscape, the center maintains an interactive map of state laws. The New York Times, KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), and the Guttmacher Institute also maintain trackers that list current abortion laws in each state. +
++Two states, South Carolina and Nevada, explicitly ban self-managed abortion, in which people take pills at home using medication ordered online. In other states, prosecutors have used laws against mishandling human remains and other crimes to prosecute people suspected of self-managing abortions. “The important thing for people to consider is who they are sharing information with, how they are sharing information,” Smith said. “Information about self-managed abortion that is shared with law enforcement is the way that those prosecutions have happened.” +
++People with legal questions about self-managed abortion can contact the If/When/How legal helpline or the Abortion Defense Network. —Anna North +
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+- Who gets abortions in America?
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++Historically, abortion has been a very common procedure in America. According to a 2017 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, nearly one in four women in the US (23.7 percent) will have an abortion by age 45. +
++Pre-Dobbs research can give us some basic information about who is most likely to get an abortion. The majority of abortion patients are already parents — 60 percent have at least one child, according to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “One of the main reasons people report wanting to have an abortion is so they can be a better parent to the kids they already have,” Ushma Upadhyay, a professor at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California San Francisco, told the New York Times. +
++Most are also in their first trimester of pregnancy, with 43 percent of abortions taking place within the first six weeks, shortly after most people find out they’re pregnant, and 92 percent occurring in the first 13 weeks. However, abortion rights advocates say they are concerned that the increasing number of bans and other restrictions will force more patients to delay their procedures until later in pregnancy, when they can carry a higher risk of severe side effects. +
++Most people who get abortions are in their 20s — 57 percent, according to the CDC, compared with just 9 percent who are in their teens and about 35 percent who are over 30. They are also disproportionately likely to be low-income and to be women of color, largely because of inequities in access to birth control. +
++Low-income patients and people of color are also most likely to be affected by abortion bans. Black women, in particular, are likely to face multiple overlapping impacts, because they are disproportionately likely to have unintended pregnancies and to live in states with bans, and are less likely to be able to afford travel to states where the procedure is legal, as Vox’s Fabiola Cineas has reported. Black women are also three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes; one 2021 study found that a nationwide abortion ban could increase Black maternal deaths by 33 percent. —AN +
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+- What do Americans think about abortion?
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++Unpacking public opinion on abortion can be tricky, especially post-Roe, as Americans continue to learn more about the non-hypothetical consequences of losing access to abortion. Sometimes views Americans express in surveys appear to be contradictory, and there’s also a fundamental difference between support for abortion and support for abortion rights. Many people who identify as pro-choice, meaning they believe people should have the right to make the choice for themselves, say they personally are against the procedure. +
++Polls conducted over the past few months indicate that voters seem to have grown even more supportive of abortion rights than they were before Dobbs. Experts say it will be important to continue tracking public opinion in the coming months and years to see how the loss of Roe informs public sentiment, and that so far we don’t have a clear picture. +
++Broadly speaking, though, most Americans tell researchers that they support access to legal abortion, though they also support some restrictions on its availability. Americans are most supportive of abortion for women who have been raped or who face a serious health concern if they continue their pregnancy. Americans are also more supportive of abortion during the first trimester. +
++But pollsters also find respondents are generally opposed to politicians passing abortion bans, and say pregnant women should be able to make decisions about abortion in consultation with their doctor. —Rachel M. Cohen +
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+- What do we know about the prevalence of abortion since Roe was overturned?
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++No one knows exactly how many fewer abortions occurred after the Dobbs decision because self-managed abortions are not tracked in the same way as abortions obtained through the formal US health care system. +
++In other words, while a woman living in Arkansas might have ended her pregnancy in 2021 at a local abortion clinic, in 2023, with that option no longer available to her, she may have ordered or obtained pills internationally, from activist networks in Mexico, the European-based organization Aid Access, or some of the other online suppliers based in India. Researchers who track incidences of abortion generally do not have great access to that data, and even if someone orders pills online, it’s not clear if they actually took the medication. And some people order pills as an insurance policy, to store at home in case they, or a friend, need them for an unwanted pregnancy in the future, complicating counts further. +
++There is data, however, that suggests abortions done in US clinics and hospitals, or with pills taken at home prescribed by a US doctor, declined since Dobbs. The Society of Family Planning, a group that supports abortion rights, launched a national reporting effort to try to evaluate changes in abortion access and estimated these kinds of abortions declined by more than 24,200 between July 2022 and March 2023, compared to a pre-Dobbs baseline. Some states’ data also shows an increase in out-of-state abortions in the last year, meaning more people are traveling across state lines to get their care. For example, there were 38 percent more non-Floridians who ended pregnancies in Florida in 2022 compared to 2021. +
++There has also been some anecdotal reporting of women who wanted to end their pregnancies in states where it’s now banned but couldn’t afford the cost of traveling to a state where it’s legal, and so ended up giving birth instead. It will be important for researchers to try and gather more information about how many people fall into this category. —RC +
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+- Does Europe really restrict abortion more than the United States?
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++In the Dobbs Supreme Court hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts claimed a 15-week ban on abortion mirrors “the standard that the vast majority of other countries have.” In his majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cited a study published by a leading anti-abortion group that argued the US was out of step with the rest of the world in terms of abortion after 20 weeks. +
++The study, published by the think tank arm of the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said 47 out of 50 European nations limit “elective” abortion before 15 weeks, meaning before then doctors are not required to attest to a particular justification for the abortion. +
++But differences between the US and European countries are more complex than that simple comparison suggests. In practice, abortion limits in the United States are far more restrictive than what exists in most of the Western world, including in nations with gestational age limits at 12 weeks, like Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Italy. +
++Moreover, European countries that have 12-week limits on “elective” abortions still make it fairly easy for women to get abortions later on, with relatively broad exceptions for mental health or socioeconomic circumstances. Republicans have aggressively fought similar exceptions, and in particular have worked to bar consideration of mental health risk — even the risk of suicide if a pregnancy continues — as a factor. +
++And in other ways, European countries make it easier to get an abortion than in even relatively permissive jurisdictions in the United States. Across Europe, abortion services are covered under national health insurance, meaning the cost of accessing care is a far lower barrier for pregnant people facing time constraints. +
++By contrast, in the US, cost is one of the biggest hurdles to ending a pregnancy. Even though more than 90 percent of abortions occur within the first 13 weeks, roughly 75 percent of all US abortion patients are low-income, according to 2014 numbers, and researchers find Americans needing abortion care in the second trimester tend to be those with less education, Black women, and women who have experienced “multiple disruptive events” in the past year, such as losing a job. +
++Across the globe, the clear trend has been to expand access to abortion, decriminalize the procedure, and loosen restrictions. While restrictive policies, including earlier gestational limits, still present barriers for international abortion care, per the Center for Reproductive Rights, nearly 60 countries have liberalized their laws and policies on abortion since 1994. Only four — the US, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland — have further restricted rights. +
++Even with earlier gestational limits, abortion in Europe is broadly affordable and accessible. This is not the paradigm Republicans are proposing in the United States. They are fighting to keep abortion expensive, particularly for low-income patients who rely on Medicaid; to limit the reasons, like mental health, for which patients can access legal abortion; and to restrict access to care, all while imposing bans on telemedicine, ramping up criminal penalties for providers, and shortening the legal timeline for pregnant people to raise funds, arrange travel, and book mandatory medical appointments. —RC +
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+- What happens next? Is Roe v. Wade ever coming back?
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++Dobbs is not the end of the road on abortion in America — opponents of the procedure continue to work toward more and broader restrictions, while reproductive rights advocates are backing efforts to shore up access in states where it remains legal, as well as keeping options open for patients in states with bans. +
++On the anti-abortion side, advocates are working to restrict the use of abortion medication. A federal lawsuit by the anti-abortion Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine seeks to rescind Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs most commonly used in abortions in the US. However, mifepristone remains available as the case works its way through the courts. Abortion opponents are also working on legislation targeting websites that offer abortion medication, out-of-state doctors who prescribe the pills, and private citizens who help people obtain them. +
++Dobbs also opens up the possibility of a nationwide ban on abortion, and in September 2022, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced a bill that would ban the procedure across the country after 15 weeks. However, Republican leaders in the House as well as Republican presidential candidates have declined to endorse a nationwide ban, likely a reflection of the fact that such legislation would be both difficult to pass and politically unpopular. +
++Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates are working on ways to maintain or expand access. At least 15 states and the District of Columbia have passed “shield” laws that protect abortion providers and patients from investigation or prosecution by authorities in states with bans; an increasing number of states specifically shield doctors who prescribe abortion medication by telehealth to patients in states where the procedure is banned. Authorities in several states, including Washington, have also amassed stockpiles of mifepristone in case it becomes unavailable. Other states and localities are expanding funding or insurance coverage for abortion. +
++At the federal level, Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to codify the right to an abortion in law, though it has so far been unable to pass. Some reproductive rights advocates believe Dobbs could one day be reversed by the Supreme Court. “The text of the decision is really an outlier, and so some future court would really easily be able to overrule Dobbs and distinguish it from the history of liberty and privacy rights that the court has decided,” Smith said. However, that would most likely require a liberal majority on the Court — something that would require Democrats to win several presidential elections in a row and hold on to the Senate, as Vox’s Ian Millhiser has written. +
++Some abortion rights advocates remain optimistic for the long term, even while expressing deep concern for the coming months and years. “There will be a new federal right, either through statute or a future court decision,” Smith said. “The question is really how much pain and suffering and loss will occur in the states that have banned abortion between now and then.” —AN +
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++The search for the Titan captivated the US for nearly a week. Why are we so gripped by people facing death? +
++Plenty of digital ink has been spilled over the past 24 hours about the media coverage of the Titan, the submersible that went missing on a trip to visit the site of the Titanic. Five people, including the CEO of the submersibles company OceanGate, are now declared dead after days of frequent live updates. Was the media attention overkill? Did many of the comments on platforms like Twitter and TikTok seem callous? +
++Yes and yes. An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday was typical, describing the coverage of the doomed trek to the Titanic as a “bizarre media feeding frenzy that we have become accustomed to in the 21st century.” The writer went on to characterize the coverage as “exploitative” and lamented the “terror unfolding in real time.” A writer in Australia complained, “Online, people seem to be ignoring that people have died and instead are concentrating on what their deaths and privilege say about modern society.” +
++We shouldn’t pretend like any of this is new. There’s over a century of mass media events in the US that prove the public’s insatiable thirst for the sensational and using new technology to consume that news. All the better if you have a very tangible countdown to disaster — a detail that became instrumental to the story when we learned the sub was capable of providing oxygen for just 96 hours. +
++But we’ve experienced this same kind of real-time media event countless times, all thanks to old-school media technologies like newspapers, radio, and TV. Reporters become our eyes and our ears on the ground, turning every news consumer into a kind of high-tech voyeur, even if we don’t think of platforms like radio as particularly cutting-edge these days. It’s funny how something as simple as a vacuum tube can turn miles into seconds. The technology to potentially save lives also becomes integral to the story, as we saw back in 2018 when a youth soccer team and their coach got stuck in a cave in Thailand and the entire world seemed to have ideas on what particular gadget could be used to help get them out. We saw the same thing again in the North Atlantic this week, as planes, ships, and robots swarmed the scene above the shipwreck. +
++And if you think people of the past were more empathetic and dignified in the face of tragedy, I’ve got some bad news for you. Not only are you romanticizing a version of America that never really existed; you’re also overlooking the argument that the news we consume is sanitized compared to the days of tabloid spreads, which were once regularly filled with graphic depictions of death. +
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Kentucky National Guard
++Take the case of 37-year-old W. Floyd Collins, who was exploring caves in his home state of Kentucky in 1925. Hoping to find a new tourist attraction, Collins ventured into Sand Cave in early February of that year when his foot became trapped by a large boulder. The following day, his family came looking for him, and word of his ordeal soon got out through newspapers and radio. +
++Each passing day brought new people to Sand Cave to come gawk at the scene. By the ninth day, one newspaper estimated the crowd had surged to 5,000 people, and there were reportedly cars from Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia sitting in a makeshift parking lot near the cave. Others put the number closer to 2,000, but whatever the real number, it had become quite the circus. Vendors showed up to sell everything from hamburgers to balloons. Radio, still a relatively new broadcasting medium, allowed journalists to report directly from the scene. And newspaper reporters came from all over the country to give readers the latest, at a time when there were nearly 15,000 papers in the US, compared to fewer than 6,500 today. The local railroad service even added additional passenger cars to deal with the influx of people. +
++And the media coverage wasn’t always nice. The cover of the February 9, 1925, edition of the Pensacola Journal in Florida speculated that Collins might be faking the accident, suggesting he wasn’t really trapped at all and just wanted the attention. The sub-headline declared that he was a “shiftless fellow,” according to his neighbors. The Daily News Leader in Staunton, Virginia, made allusions in its February 12, 1925, edition that a crime had been committed, but didn’t elaborate. The paper also quoted a local minister as saying there was “evidence of drinking” in the area — a damning indictment when you remember this was during the era of Prohibition. (The one-liners about the hubris of billionaires stuck in a tube trying to catch a glimpse of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean were their own kind of drive-by moralizing that struck a lot of people as too harsh in a time of potential tragedy.) +
+ ++Collins died after 14 days, but those trying to rescue him wouldn’t reach the body until three more days had passed. A fake photo of Collins’s dead body circulated, though his body wasn’t removed from where he’d been trapped until two months later. +
++Director Billy Wilder would draw inspiration from the media reaction to Collins for the 1951 film Ace in the Hole, starring Kirk Douglas as an unscrupulous newspaper reporter who’s the first to learn about a man trapped in a cave. Douglas’s character manipulates the local authorities into a rescue plan that takes more time than necessary, drawing out the story and allowing him to create a media circus not unlike the one that happened when Collins was trapped a quarter of a century earlier. Just like in real life, the man at the heart of the story dies. +
++Another example of a gruesome, real-time news frenzy comes from 1938, when 26-year-old John Warde threatened to jump off a narrow ledge from the 17th floor of the Gotham Hotel in New York. While Warde spent over 11 hours contemplating his future, newspapers rushed out editions, radio announcers narrated the event, and some of the earliest TV broadcast cameras were trained on Warde. Poor Warde eventually made good on his threat, and the Associated Press sent out a particularly cold assessment of the man, whose body was unclaimed at the morgue and “alone in death” but who “thrilled tens of thousands of spectators.” +
++Even the magazines, on a much longer production schedule than the newspapers, were fascinated with Warde’s unusually long perch on the hotel ledge. The headline from a 1938 issue of Radio-Craft magazine read “SUICIDE NO. 2 TELEVISED!” and included a reprint of the TV image with Warde circled for good measure. Warde’s story was also made into a movie: 1951’s Fourteen Hours. But the Hollywood version didn’t kill Warde. +
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Linh Pham/Getty Images
++Fast forward to the summer of 2018, and you’ll find a similar circus unfolded in Thailand — this time fueled not only by newspapers and live TV but also by social media. There, 12 boys and their soccer coach were trapped in a cave, and the entire internet descended on the event, watching each day as the amount of time left to rescue the team alive dwindled. Elon Musk even tried to play the hero, visiting the outside of the cave and declaring that a 5-foot-long “mini-sub” of his design could extract the kids safely. When an expert cave explorer explained publicly how terrible Musk’s idea was, the billionaire baselessly called the expert a “pedo” on Twitter. Like so many search-and-rescue efforts, the Thai cave event ended with a mixture of tragedy and triumph. A former Thai Navy SEAL died after he lost consciousness during the prolonged rescue effort, but ultimately, the trapped kids were rescued alive. +
++And what about the death countdown for that submersible this week? NewsNation got heat for its countdown clock, but like it or not, the idea of having a ticking clock is basically what TV was invented for. Fox News recently featured a countdown in its lower right-hand corner for the end of Title 42, the pandemic-era rule that allowed US Customs and Border Protection to turn away asylum seekers at the border. Most forms of popular media, but especially TV, love a countdown, no matter how grim or how dire the human stakes. +
++The long and the short of it is that American media has always been obsessed with the darker elements of humanity. And while it might feel like people are gawking through their smartphones at imminent tragedy, there’s no question that people are simply drawn to a compelling narrative with life-or-death stakes. A basketball shot clock where human lives hang in the balance might make some people feel queasy, but it’s probably worth remembering what the five people who lost their lives this week were doing down there in the first place. At the end of the day, they were on a tourist trip to the bottom of the sea, there to gawk at a tragedy, albeit one that happened in 1912. +
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