Future Perfect podcast: a how-to list for a better future

In February 2021, a group of scientists announced a major breakthrough in conservation: they had cloned a black-footed ferret, an endangered species native to the American West.

Elizabeth Ann, the clone, was delivered via C-section on December 10, 2020, and as of this writing is still thriving thanks to the work of nonprofit Revive & Restore, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and other partners. She is the first successful clone of an endangered species, and the culmination of years of cutting-edge work attempting to use cloning to rescue vulnerable populations.

On September 24, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was known, to the extent he was known at all, as a scrappy 26-year-old Harvard dropout and tech company founder. The theatrical release of The Social Network was still a week away, and controversies over Zuckerberg’s handling of fake news, racist harassment, abuse of contractors, Cambridge Analytica, the Rohingya genocide, and much more were still years in the future.

So when he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was donating $100 million of his fortune to the public schools in Newark, New Jersey, the reaction was rapturous applause, not tired cynicism.

Most charity is focused on the near term — it goes to universities educating people now, or arts organizations putting on shows and exhibits now, or food pantries helping the hungry now.

So what happens when you try to only give to charities that will help humans a long time from now — not just in 100 years, but in a million years?

If you’ve ever used Skype or shared files on Kazaa back in the early ’00s, you’ve encountered the work of Jaan Tallinn.

And if humans wind up creating machines that surpass our own intelligence, and we live to tell about it — we might have Tallinn’s philanthropy, in small part, to thank.

We don’t let dead people vote.

We don’t let dead people run for political office.

If anyone’s in charge in Beloit, Wisconsin, it’s Diane Hendricks.

A billionaire and chair of the ABC Supply Company in Beloit, Hendricks has also distinguished herself as a philanthropist, pouring her fortune into remaking her adopted hometown. She has beautified it and brought jobs through new restaurants and a renovated office park for tech companies. But she’s also courted controversy as the biggest single donor to Scott Walker, the Republican governor of the state in 2011-’19, and as an outside adviser to President Donald Trump.

Diane Hendricks is not one of America’s better-known billionaires. But she is, according to Forbes, the richest self-made woman in the country, with a fortune estimated at around $7.2 billion. Her wealth swamps that of better-known billionaires like eBay veteran Meg Whitman, Oprah Winfrey, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Kylie Jenner.

Hendricks founded and grew the ABC Supply wholesaling company (which sells roofing, siding, windows, and gutters) with her husband, Ken, who died in 2007. In recent years, though, she’s focused on philanthropy, particularly on causes in her adopted hometown of Beloit, Wisconsin, a small postindustrial city near the border with Illinois.

In the 1960s and 1970s, amid decolonization and the Cold War battle for hearts and minds in newly independent countries, world elites became obsessed with a new danger: overpopulation.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich pronounced in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. The world simply had too many people already, and famines killing hundreds of millions of people would break out in the 1970s. He specifically forecast, the New York Times’ Clyde Haberman recalls, that 65 million Americans would starve, and that by 2000, “England will not exist.”

If you follow the Supreme Court at all, you’ve likely heard of the Federalist Society.

The group, begun as a discussion society for conservative and libertarian law students, has grown to become the single most important right-leaning legal institution in the country. Its founders have gone on to become celebrated law professors, members of Congress, and Cabinet officials. It has close ties to five of the nine justices of the Supreme Court and directly provides shortlists of judges that President Trump uses to make appointments.

Ideas have consequences.

That’s the title of a recent paper by economists Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu, and depending on your political beliefs, the consequences they’re talking about are either heartening or deeply disturbing.

John M. Olin isn’t exactly a household name. Neither is the Olin Corporation, the gunpowder and chemical company he inherited from his father. But he played a crucial role in funding the rightward turn of American politics, and particularly American courts, in the past few decades.

If you’ve been to law school, you might notice that his name pops up a lot.

In his 2017 book The Republic for Which It Stands, Stanford historian Richard White describes America’s Gilded Age, spanning from the late 19th to early 20th century, as an era of great wealth, greater poverty, and all-around excess.

America then, he writes, was a country “transformed by immigration, urbanization, environmental crisis, political stalemate, new technologies, the creation of powerful corporations, income inequality, failures of governance, mounting class conflict, and increasing social, cultural, and religious diversity.”

I really like being a journalist; it’s one of the few jobs where you’re actively encouraged to call up people who are experts in their fields and ask them anything you want, which is an incredible privilege.

And I get to write about topics I think are really important, like why I think more people ought to consider donating their kidney. If I’m lucky, that writing has a real-world impact — more people actually do donate their kidneys, for instance, or donate to effective charities.

This past July, Andrew Tsui, a lawyer living in suburban Maryland, invited me and Vox podcast producer Byrd Pinkerton to his house to kill some fish.

Andrew had caught several (maybe seven or eight) white perch, a common small fish in the mid-Atlantic US. They were silver, maybe as long as my hand or a bit longer, and swimming in a cramped cooler that Andrew had placed them in post-catch. He’d done the actual fishing, and now it was our job to do the actual killing.

A victory for Democrats this midterms, President Donald Trump warned before the election, is a victory for a terrible, dangerous idea: open borders.

Trump is entirely making this up, to be clear, but he’s hammered this point repeatedly. “The Democrat platform is a 2018 socialism, open borders edict,” he declared at a rally in Cleveland the night before the election. In October, he informed a Kansas crowd that “Every single Democrat in the U.S. Senate has signed up for the open borders, and it’s a bill, it’s called the ‘open borders bill.’” (No, they haven’t, and there’s no such bill.) Democrats, he tweeted in June, “want Open Borders and Unlimited Crime.” (While “Unlimited Crime” is a cool band name, it’s not a real proposal.)

Nature has a method of cooling the planet very rapidly: volcanos.

Volcanic eruptions have, historically, caused sudden (but temporary) changes to global climate. The sulfur particles they shoot into the atmosphere reflect sunlight back at the sun, reducing temperatures back on the ground. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines caused a reduction in Northern Hemisphere temperatures of about 0.6 degrees Celsius; for comparison, man-made global warming has heated the planet by about 1 degree Celsius so far, and a United Nations report this fall urged policymakers to limit total warming to 1.5 degrees.

Lithium is a potent psychiatric drug, one of the primary prescribed medications for bipolar disorder. But it’s also an element that occurs naturally all over the Earth’s crust — including in bodies of water. That means that small quantities of lithium wind up in the tap water you consume every day. Just how much is in the water varies quite a bit from place to place.

Naturally, that made researchers curious: Are places with more lithium in the water healthier, mentally? Do places with more lithium have less depression or bipolar or — most importantly of all — fewer suicides?

Karianne Jackson was working for the North Dakota prison system in 2015 when a trip to Norway changed her life.

There, she saw a prison with no bars and no uniformed guards. Instead, prisoners lived in small cottages with common areas, private bedrooms, even kitchens with real cups, real dishes, and real knives. Compare that to US prisons, which feature next to no privacy and frequent use and abuse of solitary confinement. Norway found that treating prisoners like human beings, and ensuring a fine life for them, aided their rehabilitation and reduced their odds of returning. Jackson started thinking: What if I could make the US prison system a bit more like that?