Javier Zarracina | Vox

Scientists weighed all the mass in the Milky Way galaxy. It’s mind-boggling.

2019-08-21T10:55:28-04:00

Something weird is happening in our galaxy: It’s spinning fast enough that stars ought to be flying off, but there’s something holding them together.

The substance that acts as a gravitational glue is dark matter. Yet it’s incredibly mysterious: Because it doesn’t emit light, no one has ever directly seen it. And no one knows what it’s made of, though there are plenty of wild hypotheses.

For our galaxy — and most others — to remain stable, physicists believe there’s much, much more dark matter in the universe than regular matter. But how much?

Recently astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia star map attempted to calculate the mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy.

It’s not an easy thing to do. For one, it’s difficult to measure the mass of something we’re inside of. The Milky Way galaxy measures some 258,000 light-years across. (Recall that one light-year equals 5.88 trillion miles. Yes, the galaxy is enormous.) And an abundance of stars and gas obscures our view of the galactic center. The team of astronomers essentially measured the speed of some objects moving in our galaxy and deduced the mass from there (the more massive the galaxy, the faster the objects should move.)

Their answer: The galaxy weighs around 1.5 trillion solar masses. This number helps put in perspective how very small we are.

Take, for instance, where stars in the Milky Way fit in.

If you’re lucky enough to get a completely dark, clear sky for stargazing, it’s possible to behold as many as 9,000 stars above you. That’s how many are visible to the naked eye. But another 100 billion stars (or more) are out there just in our own Milky Way galaxy — yet they’re just 4 percent of all the stuff, or matter, in the galaxy.

Another 12 percent of the mass in the universe is gas (planets, you, me, asteroids, all of that is negligible mass in the grand accounting of the galaxy). The remaining 84 percent of the matter in the galaxy is the dark matter, Laura Watkins, a research fellow at the European Southern Observatory, and a collaborator on the project, explains.

The enormity of the galaxy, and the enormity of the mystery of what it’s made of, is really hard to think through. So, here, using the recent ESA-Hubble findings, we’ve tried to visualize the scale of the galaxy and the scale of the dark matter mystery at the heart of it.

As a visual metaphor, we’ve constructed a tower of mass. You’ll see that all the stars in the galaxy just represent a searchlight at the top of the building. The vast majorities of the floors, well, no one knows what goes on in there.

The mass of the Milky Way, visualized

To visualize the mass of 1.5 trillion suns, let’s start small. This is the Earth. It has a mass of 5.972 × 10^24 kilograms.

This is the Earth compared to the sun. The sun is 333,000 times more massive than Earth.

Now let’s try to imagine the mass of the 100 billion stars (or more) stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

That’s enormous.

Another 12 percent** of the mass in the galaxy is just gas floating between stars (mostly hydrogen and helium).

Here’s what the gas looks like using this same visual scale.

What about black holes? “It’s a bit harder to put an exact number of how much they contribute to the total mass, as we don’t know how many there are, but it will be a very, very very small fraction,” Watkins explains. “The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is around 6 million solar masses,” which is really tiny on the scale of the entire mass of the galaxy.

And it’s tiny on the scale of the most abundant, mysterious matter in the galaxy: the dark stuff. Again: 84 percent of the galaxy is made up of dark matter.

Dark matter doesn’t seem to interact with normal matter at all, and it’s invisible. But our galaxy, and universe, would fall apart without it.

Scientists hypothesized its existence when they realized that galaxies spin too quickly to hold themselves together with the mass of stars alone. Think of a carnival ride that spins people around. If it spun fast enough, those riders would be ripped off the ride.

Accounting for “dark matter,” and the gravity it generates, made their models of galaxies stable again. There’s some other evidence for dark matter, too: It seems to produce the same gravitational lensing effect (meaning that it warps the fabric of spacetime) as regular matter.

Now let’s try to visualize the mass of dark matter, compared to the mass of stars and gas.

And remember: This is just our galaxy. There are some hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.

Also remember that dark matter isn’t even the biggest mystery in the universe, in terms of scale. Some 27 percent of the universe is dark matter, and a mere 5 percent is the matter and energy you and I see and interact with.

The remaining 68 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe is dark energy (which is accelerating the expansion of the universe). While dark matter keeps individual galaxies together, dark energy propels all the galaxies in the universe apart from one another.

What you can see in the night sky might seem enormous: the thousands of stars, and solar systems, to potentially explore. But it’s just a teeny-tiny slice of what’s really out there.

**(Clarification: Ari Maller, a physics professor at New York City College of Technology, wrote in, pointing out that the proportions in our graphic —4 percent of the matter in the galaxy being stars, 12 percent gas, and 84 percent dark matter — are a bit off. They do, he says, represent the overall proportions of each in the universe. But, he writes “we don’t live in an average place,” clarifying that instead ”the gas in the Milky Way is only about 10 percent of its mass.”)

This cartoon explains why predicting a mass shooting is impossible

2019-08-05T15:16:10-04:00

In the wake of mass shootings, many people wonder how they could have been prevented. Were there warning signs that should have been heeded? Was the person mentally ill? Did they hold extremist views?

It’s a question we’re bound to ask after awful attacks like the deadly shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio over the weekend. President Donald Trump’s response, in part, was to blame the deaths on mental health. “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun,” Trump said on the Monday. It wasn’t the first time Trump blamed mental health, and dismissed guns as a problem. After the school shooting in Parkland, Florida in 2018 he called for increased focus on mental health care to potentially prevent similar attacks.

The truth is: It’s largely a myth that poor mental health is associated with mass violence. “The share of America’s violence problem (excluding suicide) that is explainable by diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is tiny,” Vox’s Dylan Matthews writes. What’s more, there are serious mental health care shortages in America, and Trump and his Republican allies tried to push legislation for much of his early presidency that would have potentially limited it even further.

The only personal factors that reliably correlate with mass shooters are being young and being male. There are a lot of angsty young men in this country. That makes prediction hard.

But what makes prediction even harder is just how rare these instances of mass shooting are. Yes, America has a serious gun violence problem. But the vast majority of people will never commit such a crime. Even if we said one in a million people will become mass murderers, that would be too high an estimate. There are 323 million people in the United States.

The fact that there are so few mass shooters and so many more harmless people makes it actually mathematically impossible to predict who might become a mass shooter.

On Monday, Trump said he’s “directing the department of justice to work in partnership with local, state and federal agencies, as well as social media companies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.”

But this is likely to be an exercise in futility. few years ago, Sanjay Srivastava, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, walked us through a thought experiment to consider.

”Even with very good detection procedures, when you’re talking about rare events, [prediction models] do not work the way you might think,” he said.

Even a prediction model that’s 99 percent accurate would be of no use.

Let’s see why.

Imagine scientists invent a machine that can predict who will commit an act of terrorism or mass murder

This is science fiction, clearly. But if we could invent such a machine, we’d want it to analyze the intricate regions of a person’s brain and then determine his intent and willingness to commit a mass crime.

In addition to mind reading, we’d want it to track a person’s online behavior, social connections, and purchasing decisions and use that data to determine who is a would-be mass killer.

For the purposes of this example, let’s assume it works absurdly well.

This machine is 99 percent accurate

This 99 percent accuracy is also science fiction. We’re not even that good at predicting the weather, let alone the complexities of human behavior.

But you’d have faith in a system that was 99 percent accurate, wouldn’t you?

It would mean that it would correctly identify mass shooters 99 percent of the time and correctly identify peaceful citizens 99 percent of the time.

This sounds pretty good. Let’s see how well it analyzes 100,000 people.

Let’s assume that there’s actually one future mass shooter lurking in this group of 100,000 people.

The machine is 99 percent accurate, so it labels 99 percent of these “harmless” people correctly. Hooray!

More good news: The machine should also theoretically correctly identify the mass shooter.

So from our initial group of 100,000 people, we’re left with a list of 1,001 potential mass shooters

What? I thought this thing was 99 percent accurate! What junk!

Well, it is 99 percent accurate. But that means it will falsely label one out of every 100 people a mass shooter.

In a group of 100,000 people, we’d be left with 1,001 potential mass shooters: 1,000 false positives and one correct guess.

It’s likely the machine did correctly guess who the mass shooter will be. But he’s hidden among the false positives.

If we ran this machine on all US citizens, it would identify around 3.2 million people as mass shooters

What does the government do with this information? Monitor all 3.2 million potential killers? Wiretap all their homes?

This isn’t feasible.

In the wake of the horrendous shooting in Norway in 2011 that left more than 70 people dead, the Swedish Defense Research Agency looked into whether it would be possible to monitor social media to identify would-be mass shooters. Here’s what the agency wrote in a 2014 paper:

To produce fully automatic computer tools for detecting lone wolf terrorists on the Internet is, in our view, not possible, both due to the enormous amounts of data (which is only partly indexed by search engines) and due to the deep knowledge that is needed to really understand what is discussed or expressed in written text or other kinds of data available on the Internet, such as videos or images.

The lesson here is that it’s much easier to look backward and assume the warning signs were there and could have been spotted.

”But that’s going the wrong way — it’s hindsight, not prediction,” Srivastava said.

”Spend some time online and realize just how many young men there are saying angry things on the internet. Which ones are really dangerous, and which ones are just exercising their constitutional right to say angry things? The math just isn’t on your side.”

Prediction won’t work, so what will? Well, there’s an answer, but it’s not going to make a lot of people happy. Considering the mathematical hurdles of predicting killers, maybe stricter gun control is actually the easier option to reduce gun violence.

4 maps that show who’s being left behind in America’s wind-power boom

2019-06-14T14:46:55-04:00

Wind turbines have cropped up like dandelions across large areas of the US, and thousands more are coming. The US Department of Energy projects that we’ll have 404 gigawatts of wind energy capacity across the country by 2050, up from 90 GW today. Since overall electricity demand is expected to hold fairly steady, that would fulfill more than one-third of the country’s needs.

“Wind power is an important part of America’s energy strategy,” said Secretary of Energy Rick Perry in March, while announcing $28.1 million in new funding for wind R&D.

Texas alone, with 22.6 gigawatts installed, would rank sixth in the world today in total wind capacity if it were its own country.

But wind power isn’t exploding everywhere across this great land of ours. Vast swaths of the country have been left out of the wind energy revolution, as you can see in this map of installed wind capacity by state:

And when you look at how much wind we’ve built per state since 1999, you can see how quickly wind has boomed in some areas, while others are stuck in the doldrums:

Right next to wind king Texas, you have 11 states with little to no installed wind power, including Louisiana, Florida, and Georgia.

And when you map where the clusters of wind turbines are physically located, the hole in the southeastern US becomes even more stark:

The above map of 57,636 wind turbines across the US is drawn from a terrific interactive website launched in April 2018 by the US Geological Survey, the American Wind Energy Association, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And it pulls data from the US Wind Turbine Database, a years-long effort to map the gale of wind power sweeping the country.

It’s the best evidence we have that many parts of the US are being left behind in the wind power boom.

States don’t have equal wind resources or incentives

I wanted to understand what was going on here, so, naturally, I went looking for more maps. And it turns out there are several reasons states like Alabama and Georgia are so far apart from states like Nebraska and Wyoming, and why it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to close the gap anytime soon.

This map of average wind speeds at a height of 80 meters, or 262 feet — the height that matters for most commercial wind turbines — illustrates one big reason for America’s wind disparity:

The areas in purple and red — the Great Plains states — have the fastest wind speeds and therefore the most wind energy available for harvest. The Southeast, clearly, has a lot less wind.

“The main difference between the southeastern US and the rest of the country is the intensity of the resource,” said Paul Veers, chief engineer at the National Wind Technology Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Wind power is very sensitive to the wind speed, more than you might guess.”

The power you get from a wind turbine has a cubic relationship to the wind speed, he says. If you double the wind speed, you get eight times more power. So it makes sense that utilities are planting wind turbines in the places with the most wind.

Still, there are plenty of wind turbines in less breezy states out west like Idaho, which has 973 MW of capacity. So why else is the Southeast so devoid of wind power?

Policies are a big part of it.

The major driver to invest in wind in many states is renewable portfolio standards, which mandate a minimum amount of electricity to come from renewable sources, like hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal power plants. While federal incentives like the production tax credit, which benefits wind energy installations, apply across the country, state-level programs make a major difference on the ground.

“The states that have stronger RPSs are the places where you see renewables being deployed more actively,” said Ian Baring-Gould, a technology deployment manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “In places that don’t have RPSs, the utilities don’t have as much motivation to develop renewables.”

Some states have voluntary RPSs while others have mandates backed by law. But take a wild guess which states don’t have RPSs at all:

States like Nebraska and Wyoming without RPSs still have an immense amount of wind available, so the economics of wind power still make sense even without a state mandate.

The South will rise eventually

The lack of an RPS doesn’t necessarily mean that a state is hostile to renewable energy. Every state in the country now has installed photovoltaic solar to some degree. But the upfront cost of building a turbine is much higher than it is for installing a PV panel, so every incentive counts when making the business case for deploying more wind energy.

Windier states allow for higher capacity factors from wind turbines, allowing them to sell more electricity and recuperate their upfront costs faster. Turning a profit gets much harder when there is less wind to begin with.

As a result, states like South Carolina, which has a renewable portfolio standard but limited wind resources, are meeting their goals with solar power.

Nonetheless, there are southeastern states without RPSs that do want wind energy, and there are ways for them to benefit from the massive growth of wind power.

For some utilities, the optimal strategy is to buy wind electricity from states where it is more abundant. Georgia Power, an investor-owned public utility serving most of Georgia, buys wind power Oklahoma via renewable energy certificates and long-term power sourcing contracts.

John Kraft, a Georgia Power spokesperson, told me in an email that the utility has a development initiative to add up to 1,600 megawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2021. But so far, solar energy has won out, with a power purchase agreement already signed in February to buy 510 megawatts in 2019.

“Under our [renewable energy request for proposals], the market has not offered us wind or biomass options that could compete with utility-scale solar projects in Georgia,” Kraft said.

So to get actual wind turbines to blossom in the Southeast, the generators themselves have to see their prices shrink further and get better at harnessing more marginal sources of wind. Here there’s some good news: The installed price for wind energy has fallen more than 90 percent since the 1980s and is continuing to drop as wind energy scales up. States like Georgia are also investigating their large potential for offshore wind.

The wind turbines themselves are also getting huge. Huuuuuuuge:

These larger turbines are better able to capture wind in less gusty areas, increasing the capacity factor. So as size goes up, costs come down, and utilities learn more about how to deploy wind energy, turbines will fill in more of the map.

“The trend across the entire country though has been the technology is adapting so that it can access lower and lower resource areas,” said Veers.

However, wind turbines will probably never be spread evenly across the country.

“It might change a little bit, but you are still going to be dealing with the fact that there are relatively inferior wind resources in those areas of the country,” said Ben Hoen, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who worked on the wind turbine database. “It’s not as if renewable energy is not being deployed there; it’s just that the choice is based on economics, largely.”

Vox’s predictions for Game of Thrones’ series finale

2019-05-17T16:01:28-04:00

Who do we think Tyrion is looking at here? | Helen Sloan/HBO

This is it: The end of Game of Thrones is upon us.

As we head into this weekend’s series finale — at the end of a polarizing final season, and in the aftermath of a King’s Landing siege that left many characters dead and many fans at each other’s throats — here are the Vox staff’s predictions as to who will end up on the Iron Throne … if the Iron Throne itself survives at all.

Jon and Daenerys both die, and a ruling council is installed in Westeros

I think Game of Thrones has inevitably set the table for a scenario in which Jon Snow must kill his girlfriend-aunt Daenerys Targaryen. In the show’s second-to-last episode, “The Bells,” Dany snapped and reduced King’s Landing to rubble and ash while Jon Snow watched in horror. There were several shots of Jon looking up at the sky and down at the carnage, seemingly coming to the realization that Dany needs to be stopped.

Given all that, here’s my prediction for how the story ends: Dany takes the Iron Throne and kills Tyrion for freeing Jaime Lannister. Jon knows he must kill Dany, but hesitates because he loves her; that will leave room for Grey Worm to step in and save his queen, and for both Dany and Jon to die, so that neither Targaryen can inherit the throne. By the end of the episode, I don’t believe the Iron Throne will exist; in its place, I imagine there will be a Westeros council comprised of all Game of Thrones’ remaining or would-be leaders — Sansa, Grey Worm, Davos, etc. — who collectively make decisions for the realm. — Alex Abad-Santos

Karma comes for Grey Worm after his actions in King’s Landing

I want to agree with the “Jon kills Dany” theory, as it makes the most sense with what we’ve seen so far. But then again, I thought the narrative logic of Game of Thrones meant that Jaime would kill Cersei, and that clearly didn’t work out. So I’m going to offer one of my more off-the-wall theories about another character who seems marked for death: Grey Worm.

The Unsullied leader precipitated the massacre of surrendering Lannister soldiers in Game of Thrones’ penultimate episode, a pretty awful crime that seems likely to be punished in the finale. My guess is that the show really sticks the emotional knife in on this one and has Arya assassinate him while wearing Missandei’s face as part of a broader Stark coup against Daenerys. — Zack Beauchamp

Jon kills Daenerys, inherits the Iron Throne, and plots a more democratic future

With Dany having committed an unforgivable act by burning King’s Landing, I expect Jon, Tyrion, and Arya will work together to take her down. My guess is that Tyrion hatches the plot, Arya kills the dragon, and Jon kills Dany. Contra Alex, my guess is that Jon survives and ends up on the Iron Throne himself, despite Game of Thrones not doing a remotely convincing job at explaining why he’d be any good at it.

Jon — or “Aegon” — will announce that he will take no wife and father no children, meaning that he will be the last Targaryen king of Westeros. After that, the leaders of each of the Seven Kingdoms (eight if you count the Iron Islands) will vote to choose a successor. (This is an idea Tyrion floated in season seven as an alternative to hereditary monarchy.)

Oh, and Bronn will end up getting a vote as Lord of Highgarden, because a Lannister always pays his debts. — Andrew Prokop

Daenerys lives, but leaves Westeros by choice — after destroying the Iron Throne

I think Daenerys will become Game of Thrones’ version of Watchmen’s Ozymandias — a character known for destroying a dystopian Manhattan to save humanity from a nuclear war — in a synergistic nod to HBO’s anticipated adaptation of the popular comic.

Here’s how: Right after the bells tolled in Game of Thrones’ penultimate episode, Dany realized that the only way to end the Game of Thrones was to destroy its prize: King’s Landing. Without a central city, there’s no need for a central king. So I expect that Dany will command Drogon to melt the Iron Throne before flying east to live among the Dothraki as the bloodiest, fiercest Khaleesi ever.

The backyard lords of Westeros will be able to live in peace in their small fiefdoms, there will be no superior ruler, and knowing that a mad Mother of Dragons lives just across the Narrow Sea will deter people from making any ill-advised power grabs.

Don’t get me wrong, Dany deserves to die for her war crimes. But Arya, Tyrion and Jon will surely realize that killing her would only perpetuate the eternal cycle of succession wars. And if she lives, I think she will succeed where Jon Snow failed in unifying the people against a common enemy. It’s just that said enemy will be herself. — Javier Zarracina

Tyrion is toast, Arya kills Daenerys, and Jon installs Sansa to rule what’s left of the Seven Kingdoms before exiling himself to the Wall

There’s a lot of evidence that Arya has supplanted Jon Snow as the character who’s driving the narrative direction of Game of Thrones’ final season, and I think after the carnage of “The Bells,” she’s going to be out for Daenerys’s blood. Dany, meanwhile, is going to be out for revenge against Tyrion once she learns that Tyrion freed his brother Jaime from her captivity. All signs point to Jon being unable to save Tyrion from Dany’s wrath, and I believe Tyrion’s execution will be the act that finally crosses the line for Jon: He’ll stand aside and let Arya assassinate Dany.

Meanwhile, Varys’s spreading of the news that Jon is a true Targaryen will enable Jon to establish Winterfell as the new capital of Westeros and Sansa as the ruler of (what’s left of) the Seven Kingdoms. (With Bran as wise counsel, of course.) But Jon clearly has no heart left for hanging around his old family, so — while I simultaneously feel it would be a weird move, given how much he always seemed to resent the Night’s Watch — I believe he’s going to exile himself to Castle Black, where Tormund was headed before him, possibly to rebuild the Night’s Watch and the Wall itself. At least hopefully he’ll have a lovely reunion with Ghost! — Aja Romano

Game of Thrones’ series finale. | Helen Sloan/HBO" data-portal-copyright="Helen Sloan/HBO" />

Game of Thrones ends with a dragon stomping on a human face — forever

I think Game of Thrones is heading in an Animal Farm-type direction, where the moral of the story is that the entire cycle of events kicked off by Robert’s Rebellion accomplished nothing at all and Daenerys Targaryen, first of her name, is simply installed as the head of a durable authoritarian regime.

Yes, she will kill Tyrion after she discovers he betrayed her.

Yes, Jon will turn against her after her atrocities. But he’s much too stupid and whiny to launch an effective anti-Daenerys plot so he’s just going to get caught and killed. Arya will have learned that the entire cycle of violence and vengeance is destructive and will ride north to Winterfell, where she’ll advise Sansa to simply bend the knee and acknowledge Daenerys as queen. Yes, Daenerys is a terrible person. But if Sansa is remotely serious about caring for the interests of the common people, she’ll see that the last thing the smallfolk need is for northern cities to be torched by dragonfire.

Winter is here and nobody knows how long it will last — remember that element of Game of Thrones’ worldbuilding? — and it’s time for responsible leaders to focus on supply-chain management.

At the end of the day it will turn out that massacring the civilian population of King’s Landing was not the work of a “Mad Queen” at all but rather a reasonable deterrent strategy. Given that her entire base of power rests on a single killable dragon, Daenerys can’t afford to subdue the Seven Kingdoms one castle at a time knowing that a single scorpion bolt could be the end of her regime. If everyone was allowed to play the game of “shoot at the dragon and then surrender once the dragon destroys your air defenses,” her luck would run out soon enough. But since everyone now knows there will be no mercy and that the odds are in her favor, they’ll see the light of day and surrender.

A grim peace will settle in, with everyone a bit unsettled by the lack of an heir, the new queen’s potential infertility, and the question of what new horrors will be visited on the realm when the inevitable succession crisis comes. — Matthew Yglesias

A just, farming-focused ending for the smallfolk

I would be vastly more satisfied with an authoritarian Dany victory than the “Jon/Arya/Sansa kill Dany and plot a just future” outcome that Game of Thrones’ writers are clearly gunning for. In that scenario, I suspect Dany kills Sansa and installs Grey Worm or another loyal ally as Warden of the North; there’s no reason for her to trust Sansa even after Sansa bends the knee. This story cannot end with the least violent party winning.

But my greatest hope for the series finale is that it somehow addresses the conditions of the smallfolk: the everyday peasants of Westeros, who should be the primary concern of policymakers in King’s Landing yet somehow never, ever are. George R.R. Martin famously criticized J.R.R. Tolkien for not exploring Aragorn’s tax policy as King of Gondor and Ardor. Well, let’s hear some economic policy, then! Lay out what the new regime will do for living standards!

So, what would that look like? In actual English history (the model for Westeros in several ways), the wages and living standards of common folk didn’t begin to increase until agricultural productivity began to rise, producing more crops with the same farm labor. There were a bunch of reasons for this, both political (new management/tenancy systems) and technological (crop rotation, especially) but the result was an improvement in living standards that was further accelerated by the Industrial Revolution.

Ideally, Game of Thrones will end with Dany, having killed off the Starks and secured her rule for the time being, embarking on a crash R&D program in which the Citadel (preferably run by someone other than Stark sympathizer and Son-of-Dragon-Food Samwell Tarly) gets all the wealth and resources of the Seven Kingdoms to improve agricultural productivity. Dany’s army could be used as infrastructure workers to create a better road system, enabling the creation of a national market in wheat, barley, and other high-yield crops.

Last, and perhaps most important, is land reform. While regional lords should retain their castles, their arable land should be redistributed to the peasants farming it, a process which analysts like Joe Studwell have argued was key to fast economic growth in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It’s the kind of populist policy that will play well in the Westerosi heartland, and lives up to Dany’s name as the breaker of chains. She may be a tyrant, but she should be a left-agrarian revolutionary tyrant, at least. — Dylan Matthews

Game of Thrones’ series finale airs Sunday, May 19 at 9 pm on HBO.
Learn more about Game of Thrones’ lasting impact, on the May 17 episode of Today, Explained.

The Mueller report redactions, explained in 4 charts

2019-04-19T12:20:03-04:00

The report from FBI special counsel Robert Mueller was released to the public Thursday — and, as expected, large chunks of his findings are redacted.

In theory, the government has to release as much as it possibly can. But as former White House lawyer Andy Wright told Vox’s Alex Ward, “A redaction is sort of a compromise between withholding a document entirely versus releasing the full document.” For what it’s worth, Attorney General William Barr said the White House did not play a part in the redaction process — and that instead, it was DOJ lawyers, Mueller’s team, and members of the intelligence community.

So what was redacted?

We can’t see behind the black bars. But we can learn some things from where they’re placed — and how many there are.

The most redacted sections were on Russia’s hacking and election interference

One way to see which sections are blacked out most is by just looking at the pages.

But to get a little more insight, we tried to approximate how much each page was redacted by section.

We wrote a computer program to look at the millions of pixels on each page and find how many of them were black. (More about methodology at the bottom.) This analysis found that about 7 percent of the entire report was redacted — but some sections were withheld much more than others.

In the chart below, the full length of the bar represents how long each section is. The black portion is how much each section was redacted.

Here, it’s pretty clear that the section titled “Russian ‘Active Measures’ Social Media Campaign” was among the most redacted. From the unredacted portions, we can tell that it’s about Mueller’s findings on Russia’s efforts to sow discord around the election using social media.

Another heavily redacted section is the one called “Russian Hacking and Dumping Operations,” which explains Mueller’s findings on Russia’s role in hacking top Democrats’ emails and releasing them to the public.

The primary reason for these redactions was that it could cause a “harm to ongoing matter,” with a faraway second being information that would reveal investigative techniques. One of these matters is likely the trial of Roger Stone, the Trump associate who allegedly sought out those emails and lied to Congress about it. It also appears the details of investigations into Russian election interference have been withheld. For example, a section describing the structure of the Internet Research Agency, which tried to sow political discord on social media, was almost entirely redacted.

Why parts of the Trump-Russia collusion section were redacted

There are four reasons Barr gave for why certain sections would be redacted, and good reasons for them:

Revealing it would harm an ongoing matter. Ward writes, “Some redactions in the report will exist mainly to allow other related cases to continue unimpeded.”
It reveals investigative techniques. Ward writes that “it’s highly likely the US government had to use sensitive spying methods — like, say, an undercover agent or top-secret surveillance technology — to investigate.”
It reveals private information of third-party individuals. Ward writes the “Justice Department has long had a policy of not divulging people’s names during an investigation unless they are indicted.”
It was obtained via grand jury testimony. This is secret by law.

We ran a similar pixel analysis (and double-checked it manually) to see what kind of redaction rationale was most common in each section.

This reveals that most of the ongoing matter redactions were in sections about Russian election interference and hacking.

There’s also a decent portion of material redacted because the “Justice Department has long had a policy of not divulging people’s names during an investigation unless they are indicted,” Ward writes.

But when it came to the section on the Trump campaign’s links and contacts with Russia, the primary redaction rationale was because the information was obtained through grand jury testimony.

Many of these redactions hide details about Trump associates’ interaction with Russian officials, like the section about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russia lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

There’s a decent amount of redactions, but we can read enough to know Trump and his associates were open to Russia’s help

Barr, the Trump-nominated attorney general, initially released a summary of Mueller’s findings. And then he tried to characterize the report as one that says Trump did not “collude” with Russia.

But it turns out Barr left out some crucial information.

Vox’s Zack Beauchamp lays out some of the damning things the report reveals about Trump’s action during the election. This includes Trump directing an adviser to find the hacked Hillary Clinton emails, and approving another adviser’s efforts to set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. And there may well be more under these black bars.

It’s easy to joke about entire pages that are redacted. After all, 40 percent of pages have redactions!

But that shouldn’t be the focus of this report. Much of it — including 96 percent of the section on Trump and his associates’ connection to Russia — is unredacted. From what we can gather from surrounding context, there don’t appear to be any egregious, politically motivated redactions. (House Democrats have subpoenaed the unredacted report.) But even if there were, there is more than enough information to see that Trump and his associates knew about Russia’s attempts to help him win the election — and were willing to receive that help.

Methodology: We wrote a computer program to turn each page of the report into an image. Then we analyzed each pixel of the image to see whether it was black. Obviously, both the text and the redactions are black, which makes this exercise a bit hard. But we found that a page that is unredacted but full of text is about 3.5 percent black, and a page that is entirely redacted is about 34.5 percent black (because of border and imperfections in the redaction). So we were able to use these baselines to estimate how much each page was redacted. To determine the rationale for redactions, we used a similar method to count the number of times each rationale was used by counting pixel colors — and then double-checked it by going to each page by hand and recounting.

By the numbers: how 2 years of Trump’s policies have affected immigrants

2019-02-05T16:38:45-05:00

US Border Patrol officers in Tijuana, Mexico, on December 2, 2018. | Photo illustration by Javier Zarracina/Vox; Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

As Donald Trump gives his 2019 State of the Union speech, marking the completion of two years of his term, he’s done more to crack down on immigrants — both those seeking to come and those already here — than most presidents have done in four or eight.

Trump’s bombastic rhetoric on immigration and his stubborn insistence on building barriers along the US-Mexico border has distinguished him from his predecessors and led to a political realignment.

But the Trump administration’s impact on immigrants’ lives goes far beyond rhetoric and political fights.

Under Trump, the departments of Homeland Security (which oversees Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement), Justice, and State have all taken steps to reduce the number of immigrants coming to the US — and make the lives of those who are already here more precarious.

Refugee admissions have plummeted, while rejections of asylum applications have increased. Arrests of immigrants without criminal records have returned to the levels of the first term of the Obama administration, while Trump works to make hundreds of thousands more immigrants vulnerable to deportation, by stripping them of protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program or Temporary Protected Status. And the travel ban quietly churns on.

We can’t do a full accounting of the lives that have been touched by Trump’s immigration crackdown. But here’s an attempt to start.

Enforcement: Immigration arrests per day have soared since 2016

“If you’re here illegally,” Trump’s first head of ICE, Tom Homan, told Congress in 2017, “you should be afraid.”

The Trump administration hasn’t engaged in the mass deportations Trump recklessly promised as a presidential candidate. It’s still working to reverse the de-escalation of the last two years of the Obama administration, and return to the “deporter-in-chief” levels of President Obama’s first term. But its policy of arresting and detaining as many unauthorized immigrants as possible is making its mark. Any way you slice it, more immigrants are more at risk than they were the day before Trump arrived.

436: The average number of daily immigration arrests under Trump between February 2017 and September 2018, including immigrants with and without criminal records, up from 300 in 2016, according to ICE statistics. Of that 436, an average of 139 arrests were of immigrants without criminal records, up from 47 in 2016.

44,631: The average daily population of people in ICE custody, as of October 20, an apparent record. It’s also about 4,000 more people than Congress has authorized ICE to keep at a time under current funding levels. That’s up from 34,376 in fiscal year 2016 (October 2015-September 2016), the pre-Trump record for detention.

2,737: The official count of children separated from their families under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, who were in government custody as of July 2018. Of that number, 131 were still in government custody as of December 12. An unknown number of children — possibly thousands — were separated from their parents but released to a sponsor (or otherwise released from custody) before July.
14,056: The number of unaccompanied minors in government custody as of November 16, a record. In 2016, the monthly average topped out at 9,000. The change isn’t due to family separation — the explosion in the number of children in custody came after the government stopped separating families as a matter of practice — but the increased time that children are being kept in custody before being placed with sponsors.
59: the average length of stay in custody for an unaccompanied minor before being placed with a sponsor as of September 14. In 2016, the average was 35 days. The Department of Health and Human Services has made several policy changes that both make officials less likely to release children quickly to sponsors, and put unauthorized-immigrant relatives at risk of deportation if they step forward to sponsor a child.

DACA: Hundreds of thousands of immigrants could have their protections stripped away

America has never had a generation of unauthorized immigrants as socially integrated into the nation as the immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, instituted by Obama in 2012 to protect people who’d come to the US as children from deportation and allow them to work legally in the US.

Trump is seeking to strip them of those protections, putting families and communities in limbo. Trump’s third year could see the end of DACA, as the Supreme Court is widely expected to take up a lawsuit over Trump’s actions and to side with the president. The question for Congress and the executive branch will be what happens next.

699,350: People with temporary protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as of August 31, 2018, whose protections and work permits depend on the outcome of a court battle expected to arrive at the Supreme Court in spring 2019. The Trump administration attempted to sunset DACA in fall 2017, which would have resulted in several hundred thousand people losing legal protections by the end of 2018, but was stopped by court rulings in January 2018. (Source: USCIS.)
200,000: The estimated number of US citizen children with at least one “DACAmented” parent — a parent protected by the DACA program.

Temporary Protected Status: Trump is trying to strip protections from long-settled immigrants

“Temporary means temporary,” former Trump Homeland Security Secretary (and chief of staff) John Kelly used to say. And Temporary Protected Status, in theory, is supposed to be temporary too — a way to allow people whose home countries are suffering from war or natural disaster to stay safe and work in the US until the disaster has subsided.

But when Trump came into office, hundreds of thousands of immigrants had held TPS protections for years or decades, bought houses, and raised US citizen children. The Trump administration’s efforts to put the “Temporary” back in Temporary Protected Status have been put on hold by another lawsuit — but TPS holders’ precariousness and anxiety remain.

328,386: The number of immigrants whose legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program (TPS) is dependent on the outcome of an ongoing court case. The Trump administration has attempted to end TPS for people from Sudan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti, but those decisions were put on hold by a federal judge in 2018.

263,282: the number of TPS holders from El Salvador, all of whom have been in the US since March 2001 or earlier, originally set to lose their legal status in September 2019.
58,706: the number of TPS holders from Haiti, all of whom have been in the US since January 2011 or earlier, originally set to lose their legal status in July 2019.
Approximately 57,000: the number of TPS holders from Honduras whose TPS is currently set to expire on January 5, 2020. Honduran TPS holders are not affected by the lawsuit. All have been living in the US since 1999.
273,000: estimated number of US citizen children with at least one parent with TPS from Honduras, El Salvador, or Haiti.

Legal immigration: Denials of visa applications are increasing

It’s hard to see the Trump administration’s impact on legal immigration to the United States, because you can’t see an absence.

Under Trump — the rare Republican who’s often expressed as much skepticism of legal immigration as unauthorized immigration — applications for visas or green cards have often been held up or denied under tighter standards, while rejected applications from immigrants currently in the US are now automatically referred to ICE for potential deportation.

Thanks to a 2018 Supreme Court decision, the administration continues to bar nearly all people from several (mostly Muslim-majority) countries from coming to the US. And the resettlement of refugees — something that America has been a global leader in for decades — has been all but dismantled, with official resettlement targets slashed to under half of 2016 levels and actual resettlements far below that.

620,311: Applications for green cards/visas/other legal immigrant status rejected in fiscal year 2018 (projected based on the first nine months), up 37 percent from fiscal year 2016.

86 percent: Drop in immigrant visas given to people from countries covered by the Trump administration’s travel ban (which applies to applicants for immigrant visas from Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) from March-June 2017 (when the first version was on hold in court) to the same months of 2018, when the third version was fully in effect before being permanently upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018. In theory, there are exceptions and waivers for the travel ban, but in practice those are rarely given — and the process is opaque and arguably arbitrary.

30,000: The maximum number of refugees the US is agreeing to settle in FY 2019.
22,491: The number of refugees resettled in the US in FY 2018 — not even half of the 44,000 cap the US set for the year.
73.5%: The drop in refugee resettlement from FY 2016 to FY 2018.
260,000: The number of refugees who had applied for resettlement in the US and were awaiting processing as of summer 2018, according to a US Department of State briefing with congressional officials.

Spreading fear: Latino immigrants feel they’re losing their place in America

Beyond each one of the immigrant lives counted here is a ripple effect of fear — to family members, community peers, or simply people who look like that person and wonder if they could be next. We’ll never be able to quantify the effects of the Trump administration on making immigrants (and Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Muslims who are citizens) feel more afraid and less American than they did before Donald Trump arrived in office. But it’s difficult to deny that they are.

55%: Hispanics who say they worry a lot or some that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported (up from 47 percent in January 2017).

78%: Share of Hispanics who are not citizens or legal permanent residents who worry (up from 67 percent in January 2017).

46%: Latinos who said they were confident in their place in America (down from 54 percent in January 2017).
49%: Latinos who said they had “serious concerns” about their place in America (up from 41 percent in January 2017).
24%: Latinos who reported being treated in a discriminatory way in last year.
22%: Latinos who were criticized for speaking Spanish in public in last year.
22%: Latinos told to go back to their home country in last year (including 25 percent of second-generation Latinos and 10 percent of third-or-later-generation Latinos).

3 tips to walk on ice: walk like a penguin

2019-01-30T14:01:50-05:00

With a polar vortex looming over the Midwest, it’s a good time to stay inside. But if you have to go outside, keep in mind that walking on icy surfaces requires special attention to avoid slipping and falling.

Falls are the third-leading cause of unintentional deaths. With snow and ice affecting the North East for the next several days, it’s good to have a plan to stay upright. And it’s an easy plan, too: Walk like a penguin.

Does it look silly to waddle down the street? Absolutely. But give it a shot — penguins, after all, have a decent amount of experience holding their own on ice and might have a thing or two to teach us.

Keep your knees loose. Extend arms to the side to keep your balance and lower your gravity center. Keep your hands out of your pockets, so you can break your fall with your hands if you start to slip. Spreading your feet out slightly— like a penguin— while walking on ice increases your stability.

When we walk, our legs’ ability to support our weight is split mid-stride. To walk on ice, keep your center of gravity over your front leg. Take short steps or shuffle for stability.

If you fall backwards, make an effort to tuck your chin, so your head won’t hit the ground. Also, try to form a ball and relax the muscles. You will injure yourself less if you are relaxed. Also wearing a heavy, bulky coat will cushion you if you should fail.

The keys to the penguin walk are simple: Extend your arms (er, wings) out to your side, bend your knees, and shuffle side to side as you move forward (rather than taking big steps). All of this will help maintain your center of gravity in a treacherous climate — the type of environment that penguins have existed in for centuries.

The astonishing effects of the shutdown, in 8 charts

2019-02-26T16:51:52-05:00

It’s now Day 24 of the partial government shutdown, and it’s officially the longest one ever.

While President Donald Trump and Democrats continue to duke it out over the politics of a border wall, the impact of the stalemate has already become very, very real for hundreds of thousands of federal workers, many of whom missed their first paycheck on Friday.

The National Parks Service, the Transportation Security Administration, and the IRS are just a few of the government agencies that have been affected by the impasse, which is expected to cause serious economic fallout as well.

Here are eight charts that illustrate what exactly the costs of the shutdown are.

The current shutdown is only a partial one, as Congress has already funded 75 percent of the federal government until September. Right now, there are still seven outstanding spending bills that have yet to be passed, which affect nine federal departments including Agriculture, Transportation, and the Interior.

Because of the way funding is doled out across agencies, certain services are affected even though they may technically fall under departments that have already been covered. The FDA, for example, is under the Department of Health and Human Services, but receives funding from USDA as well, a gap in funds that’s led to a pause in some food safety operations.

Nine of 15 federal departments are impacted by the shutdown

Each federal agency has its own contingency plan in the case of a shutdown, meaning they are all affected in slightly different ways. Every agency determines which employees are “essential” and “nonessential” — “essential” employees must keep reporting to work even though they won’t receive immediate pay, while “nonessential” employees are furloughed and told to stay home until the shutdown ends.

These plans vary significantly by agency. In some departments like Homeland Security, an overwhelming majority of its employees are considered “essential,” while in agencies like the IRS, for example, a majority have been deemed “nonessential” and furloughed.

Furlough rates at different departments

Approximately 380,000 federal employees are currently furloughed and 420,000 are expected to work without pay, according to a fact sheet released by the Democratic staff of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

That’s more people than the total population of Washington, DC.

Many of the workers affected by the partial shutdown live in the DC area, but its effects will be felt well beyond the district: According to an analysis by the Washington Post, there are many other states with large numbers of workers in the Agriculture and Interior departments who are suffering as well.

The National Park Service is among the agencies hit by the partial shutdown, and all of its parks are affected to different degrees. Many have opted to remain open, though they’re doing so with limited staffing and access to facilities.

There are closure alerts for 388 of the 737 parks and historic sites, which means that some areas are closed or inaccessible to the public. On an average day, national parks are expected to collect $400,000 in fee revenue. Since the start of the shutdown, the National Park Conservation Association estimates that the Park Service has lost more than $6 million in fee revenue.

In DC, all Smithsonian museums and galleries are closed, along with the National Zoo. More than 20 days into the shutdown, they may have potentially lost almost 2 million visitors.

The Zoo’s live animal cams, including the beloved Panda Cam, are also deemed nonessential and will not stream video until the government reopens.

Aside from its effects on workers and local businesses, the shutdown will also reverberate across the US economy. According to S&P Global Ratings, the shutdown could shave approximately $1.2 billion off real GDP for each week that the government is partially closed.

By Friday, January 11, the shutdown has cost the US Economy $3.6 billion, and the costs will soon exceed the figure that Trump demanded to fund his proposed border wall.

The case against luxury gyms like SoulCycle

2019-01-04T09:37:34-05:00

This exercise gap is widening at a time when 45 percent of American youth don’t have parks, playground areas, community centers, or sidewalks and trails in their neighborhood. | Yue Wu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Early on weekday mornings, I often find myself panting and sweating beside strangers in a dark room. Riding stationary bicycles with nightclub music blaring in my ears isn’t my idea of fun. But I turned to Flywheel’s spinning classes after the YMCA next to my office shut down, and now I’m hooked.

The draws for me are the ruthless efficiency of 45 minutes of grinding interval work and the fitness returns — running is a lot easier since I started spinning. The studio is also just a short walk from my house.

Yet I’ve been questioning my reliance on this luxury studio, and wondering what exclusive gyms like Flywheel and SoulCycle mean for America’s epidemic of physical inactivity.

These questions have forced me to reckon with two diverging trends in American exercise. On the one hand, new cycling, spinning, yoga, barre, and CrossFit facilities are popping up in cities all over the US, and now make up about 35 percent of the US exercise market, according to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA). The fitness industry overall generated $25.8 billion in revenue in 2015, up from $20.3 billion in 2010. Much of that growth is coming from these newer boutique facilities: membership at studios like Flywheel and SoulCycle exploded by 70 percent.

But here’s the rub: Higher-income Americans who can afford to join these places are not the group that most needs more exercise opportunities. According to the American Time Use Survey from 2015, the poorest quartile of the population gets about half the exercise of the wealthiest quartile:

If you look at the trends over time, that gap is at best persistent, and at worst widening:

This entrenched exercise inequality — the rich getting fitter, the poor falling behind — also points to how exercise in America should be evolving: We need to make physical activity more accessible, not more expensive and exclusive.

“We privatize physical activity,” Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me, “instead of investing in good public spaces where everyone can run safely or community centers with free yoga.”

Boutique fitness chains play into exercise inequality

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal of boutique gyms. A trip to Flywheel or CorePower Yoga can seem like a visit to the spa: There may be bowls piled with fruit. Gleaming white bathrooms with fluffy towels. $10 cold-press juices and racks filled with chic leggings and T-shirts.

These gyms have also figured out convenience for many people in metropolitan areas. From my home in central DC, I can walk less than 15 minutes in any direction and hit a boutique gym. The same is true in New York, Boston, and other major American cities.

These places appeal to our social desires, too. According to Meredith Poppler, a spokesperson for IHRSA, “[Boutique gyms and studios] cater to a very specific, specialized, and passionate segment who are very willing to pay more for being part of a ‘tribe.’” She added: “It’s the sense of belonging where everyone is like them versus a traditional club which caters to many different types of exercisers.” Acolytes like the specialization, she said, and enjoy working out alongside other dedicated spinning/yoga/Pilates/fill-in-the-blank fanatics like themselves.

But let’s be clear: A defining characteristic of the tribe using these workout spaces is affluence. It’s people with a good deal of disposable income — and an interest in fitness — who can pay to use these facilities. According to Vogue, they’ve even been relegated to the sphere of status symbol. “It’s become very much a brand in itself, the kind of sport and exercise you do,” Candice Fragis, the buying and merchandising director at Farfetch.com, told the magazine. Another spinning enthusiast said, “It’s like the only acceptable lifestyle brag.”

Many Americans don't have access to safe and cheap workout spaces

This exercise gap is widening at a time when 45 percent of American youth don’t have parks, playground areas, community centers, or sidewalks and trails in their neighborhood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (That average hides a lot of inequality and variation at the state and neighborhood level.) Less than forty percent of adults live within half a mile of a park.

There’s also been a decline in public investments in city parks during much of the 20th century, and some recent revivals in enthusiasm for green spaces in cities have been threatened by local government budget crises.

So many Americans don’t have access to basic spaces for physical activity — and the government is not investing enough in low-cost exercise options.

Public parks and YMCAs are spaces that theoretically welcome everyone. I have been a YMCA member in almost every city I’ve lived in, and I took yoga and swimming classes with people from every corner of society, age group, and fitness level.

The people in my Flywheel classes tend to skew young, well-heeled, fit, and white. I know I’ve certainly benefited from these boutique facilities, but I worry about the message they send of what fitness has to look like.

Make it easy to stay healthy and hard to get sick

There’s a pretty simple adage public health officials stick to: Make it easy for people to stay healthy, and make it hard for them to get sick. More specifically, as David Hemenway, a health policy professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, puts it, “Make it easy to get good food and hard to get lousy food, and make it easy to exercise.”

In America, we often do the opposite: “We make it harder and harder for people to get exercise and easier and easier to eat crummy food,” he said. Seven of the top 10 causes of death in America are chronic diseases — preventable conditions like diabetes and heart disease that slowly kill us because of the lifestyle choices we make.

How could we make exercise easier? We can remind people that simply walking more — while commuting, running errands, or even strolling around the mall — counts for a lot, health-wise. Exercise doesn’t need to be grueling, and it doesn’t have to cost anything.

We can make our communities more walkable or bikable. Imagine if more cities made their streets pedestrian-friendly and invested in spaces that everyone could access, such as community yoga studios, public parks, or even programs like Sunday San Francisco Streets or the Ciclovía in Bogota, Colombia, which involve closing down streets for walking and biking on the weekend. Researchers have found putting traffic-free cycling and walking routes in place increases physical activity levels for the people who live near them.

These public places also offer the most cost-effective forms of exercise, and they’re available to everybody, regardless of income. In this 2011 economic analysis, the researchers found Sunday San Francisco Streets cost only $1.35 per week. Meanwhile, they estimated, using pedestrian trails in Nebraska cost 81 cents, and the weekly cost of private fitness centers in cities like San Francisco runs about $20. Compare that with using a boutique spinning or Pilates studio two or three times per week, for which you can shell out more than $90.

To address this disparity, some boutique gyms are now trying to broaden their reach. SoulCycle offers free “community rides” each week and a two-month scholarship program for underserved adolescents, both efforts to “give the gift of fitness and movement to those who may not have access as well as connect with our community,” a company spokesperson told Vox.

But these efforts are not nearly far-reaching, sustainable, or accessible enough. It’s time to start asking what else we need to invest in to spread exercise opportunities more equally. As the rich get fitter, what are we doing for the rest of society?

Note: This piece was originally published in 2017.

Correction: An earlier version of this story had a subheading and sentence misstating the total number of Americans living near public workout spaces. The YMCA also contested the IHRSA data on their membership trends, so we cut that.

All the candy that’s sold during Halloween week, in one massive pumpkin

2018-10-31T11:13:26-04:00

Look around: Chances are there is Halloween candy near you right now. If the candy is not in your home, your office, or your school, it’s in a bowl at the dry cleaner’s, the doctor’s office, even the yoga studio.

We’ve officially entered the long season of candy-centric holidays. After we drench ourselves in sugar this Halloween, we’ll do it again on Christmas and Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, Passover, Easter, and in the weeks between these special days. The candy industry counts on us to celebrate with sugar for a huge portion of its annual sales.

We can all agree that Halloween and other seasonal candy is a fun ritual. I like chocolate as much as my Vox colleagues who recently ranked their favorite Halloween candies. And a bit of candy here and there is no problem for our health.

But we’ve reached a point where the amount of candy in circulation is excessive — and symbolic of our sugarcoated environment. In 2018, the candy industry expects Halloween will bring in $9 billion in retail sales.

Unlike the soda industry, which has taken a hit on its sugary products as consumers have gotten more health-savvy, the candy industry is doing better than ever. Overall, Halloween week now accounts for about 8 percent of yearly confectionery sales and 34 percent of seasonal candy sales (including those other candy holidays, like Christmas and Valentine’s Day), according to the National Confectioners Association. Only Easter, the next-largest candy holiday, comes close to October 31.

If you took all the candy that’s sold during Halloween week and turned it into a giant ball, like the one looming over the nation’s capital below, it’d be as large as six Titanics and weigh 300,000 tons:

That’s 2 pounds of candy per American. With this kind of volume, and everyone buying candy and handing it out, it’s hard to control how much we — and our children — eat.

How big candy took over Halloween

Candy and Halloween didn’t always go hand in hand. It wasn’t until the 1950s that confectioners started to push their product this time of year as a way to boost flagging fall sales.

Candy was ideal for trick-or-treating, as convenient to hand out and carry around as it was affordable. Over the years, as the popularity of these treats increased, candy has also gotten cheaper, making it much more accessible to all. As the New York Times explains, “Milky Way, Snickers and 3 Musketeers bars were 59 cents a pound [in 1964], or $4.53 in today’s money.” Today, you can buy a pound of Halloween chocolates from Walmart for less than $3.

Beyond price, ubiquity, and tradition, there are other reasons we’re hooked. Companies like Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé engineer their products to become irresistible and habit-forming, and spend billions overwhelming us with ads to entice to eat more and more.

A UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity report found that in 2014, food companies spent $1.28 billion to advertise snack foods (including candy) on television, in magazines, in coupons, and, increasingly, on the internet and mobile devices. Almost 60 percent of that advertising spending promoted sweet and savory snacks, while just 11 percent promoted fruit and nut snacks.

It might be time to say no to so much candy

We know that our environments have a huge impact on the health choices we make, and the holiday candy deluge is another example of how sugary the food environment has become. Back in 1977, the average adult got 228 calories per day from sugar in food and drinks. By 2010, it was up to 300 calories a day. Added sugar consumption has increased 20 percent among kids.

Because sugar is so omnipresent now — not just during our holidays but throughout the year — health experts consider it a public health hazard, linked to obesity, tooth decay, and diabetes. Junk food more broadly is now being called a human rights concern.

So don’t be afraid to reject Halloween candy — or just throw some of it away. The heads of food banks are doing it, and so are dentists. It’s hardly a treat anymore.