Hey readers,
Sara here. It's back-to-school season, and across the US, the aroma of freshly sharpened pencils, pumpkin spice everything, and ultra-processed pizza lunches is in the air.
Sure, the Department of Education might be hanging on by a thread, and teenagers keep buying walkie-talkies to circumvent cellphone bans. And the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the most comprehensive evaluation of US students, indicate that the reading skills of 12th graders are the worst they have been in three decades. But, by and large, the kids are back in class.
That's not something we should take for granted.
Over 270 million children around the world today — including a staggering one in 10 young kids and over a quarter of teens — are not enrolled in school. That's 21 million more than the year before. It's as if you took every single school-aged child in the US, from kindergarten to 12th grade, out of school and then multiplied that number by five. |
To make matters worse, the United Nations Children's Fund released an analysis last week estimating that another 6 million kids won't make it to class this year because of cuts to international aid for education, which is expected to decline by a whopping $3.2 billion by 2026, a 24 percent drop from two years prior.
Many of those children live in countries embroiled in years of war and violence. Places like Sudan, Nigeria, Gaza, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. And, as the number of conflicts has doubled over the past few years, the simple ability to keep children in a classroom has become another casualty of war.
Just a few years ago, the pandemic caused students around the world to miss out on in-person classes, many of them for far longer than in the US. We know now just how damaging those absences were for kids' reading and math skills, not to mention their emotional health and happiness.
For kids living through a crisis, school is even more essential. It's where they can get a few meals a day, and a much-needed dose of stability and support in a sea of conflict. That's why many of their parents and teachers haven't given up, even in the most dire circumstances.
And, dozens of makeshift classrooms have popped up in tents across Gaza and Sudan, giving thousands of kids the chance to, well, be kids and learn. Even for just a few hours.
We know how to keep more kids in class, because we've done it before. By investing in global education, we've managed to slash the number of children out of school by about 35 percent since 2000. But there's still a long way to go. With no end to foreign aid cuts in sight and with domestic education spending already on the decline in low-income countries, things will probably get worse before they get better.
And at what cost? UNESCO estimated last year that education gaps will sap about $10,000 billion in lost potential from the global economy every year by 2030. With kids' futures on the line, the stakes couldn't be higher. |
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| Sara Herschander Future Perfect fellow |
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| Sara Herschander Future Perfect fellow |
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Mosquitoes at the US southern border reveal a frightening reality about climate change |
This small Texas city is leading the country's response. |
For a long time, the US largely kept mosquito-borne diseases in check. It took decades of spraying pesticides and destroying breeding grounds to contain these illnesses and the organisms that spread them, particularly mosquitoes, eventually pushing the diseases they carry to the margins. But as a result of that success, these disease threats have fallen down the priority list. And now, progress is starting to slip.
Today, people are traveling more to places where mosquito-borne diseases are more common, increasing the chances that a vacationer is coming back with a dangerous souvenir. The warming climate is also expanding the areas where mosquitoes can thrive. Cities and towns are sprawling further, eliminating habitats for natural mosquito predators while creating more puddles, ponds, and pools where mosquitoes can breed. Now, vector-borne diseases are rising in the US, doubling over the past 20 years.*
I wanted to see how front-line public health workers are confronting these threats, and so this summer, I traveled to southern Texas, where one unassuming city is leading the country's resistance.
Brownsville, Texas, is, unlike most American cities, taking this threat seriously. It has invested in a mosquito surveillance and management system to stay ahead of outbreaks and respond to them quickly. As a border town with a growing population, many transiting visitors, a widening urban landscape, and a warming climate, it is one of the first places where mosquito-driven diseases land in the US. But more cities need to follow its lead to preserve the US's gains against vector-borne disease — or we risk overlooking a new health crisis. —Umair Irfan, climate correspondent |
*Mosquito-borne disease risk is rising across the country, but you can stay vigilant. We created a quick-reference field guide that can help you identify the seven most dangerous species here. |
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Last week, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic, casually discussing organ transplants as a means of attaining immortality.
These authoritarian heads of state chatted on the sidelines of a Beijing military parade, celebrating the end of World War II at China's infamous Tiananmen Square, next to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Through an interpreter, Putin told Xi that "with the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality."
Xi's interpreter responded with "predictions are, this century, there's a chance of also living to 150."
Future Perfect fellows Shayna Korol and Pratik Pawar dive into longevity, immortality, and where the focus on organs should really be. |
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| Shayna Korol
People living longer, healthier lives is a good thing, but Xi, Putin, and Kim have no intention of giving up power. Putin and Xi are both 72 years old; Putin has been in power for 25 years, whereas Xi for 13. And Kim is some 41 or 42 years old and spent a little more than a third of his own life in power.
Putin, at least, is dead serious: His favorite scientist and family friend Mikhail Kovalchuk is leading Russian research into immortality. He's obsessed with youth and longevity, a kind of Qin Shi Huang — the first Chinese emperor who drank toxic mercury to become immortal, RIP — for the modern age.
Organ transplants are lifesaving for the people who need them, but they are definitely not the elixir of eternal life that Putin hopes for. Forget the ever-present possibility of transplant rejections for a moment, and consider that organ transplants are major surgeries. They're not a tune-up for an old car or a quick facelift.
And where would this endless supply of human organs come from? Biotechnology's not yet at the point that we can grow them on demand in the lab, and we might never be able to do that at scale. To avoid rejection issues, you could get them from clones raised explicitly for the purposes of organ harvesting à la Never Let Me Go, but that's clearly wildly unethical. If biological immortality is even possible (beyond cancer cells), I don't want autocrats to have first dibs. |
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Pratik Pawar
Immortality-by-organ-swap sounds very metal, but there's only one problem: biology doesn't work like that. Transplants save people with organ failure, but they don't reverse aging. That's like thinking new tires make your car younger. Plus, every surgery comes with immunosuppression, risk of infection, and even cancer. That's not a path to live till 150 — let alone forever — it's a reprieve for the sick.
But even if we play along with Xi and Putin's fanfic, the whole idea falls apart on supply. We already struggle with current organ demand — 100,000 people in the US alone are on the kidney wait list, and 13 die every day waiting. In China, the waitlist runs into hundreds of thousands, and in Russia, it's in the thousands. In every case, way more people need organs than ever actually get them. There's no spare-parts pipeline of organs just waiting to be harvested.
But for patients waiting for kidneys and other organs, there are some positive signs. Pig-to-human kidney transplants have inched from single heroic case reports into the first clinical trials. If they work at scale, they could ease dialysis queues and save thousands of lives. But they also raise thorny ethical questions from the welfare of pigs bred for organs to whether patients facing death can really give free consent to such risky experiments. Regardless, it's not a technology that autocrats can use to respawn. Even the most optimistic breakthroughs extend life by months or years for patients in crisis, not centuries.
The nondystopian take here is kind of boring, but also hopeful. The way forward isn't some secret immortality lab; it's the unglamorous work of fixing organ donation systems, lowering barriers for living donors, and making sure new science like pig-to-human transplants is tested safely and shared fairly. That's not dystopia, it's progress. |
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📲 So — who was more convincing? Tell us by hitting reply to this email! |
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CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT... |
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| Title: Future Perfect fellow
What I cover: Global health and philanthropy
What I'm listening to: Double Infinity by Big Thief has been on repeat. |
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Pigeons get a bad rap. "Rats with wings," they call them. But I smile wryly every time I see one of these speckled street-smart doves swoop through a subway station or nibble on a sidewalk crumb.
As Joseph Earp eloquently put it in the Guardian last month, today's pigeons are a product of our own foolhardy creation. They love us because we taught them to. And now, after we've literally kicked them to the curb, we have the nerve to call them pests. We ostracize our former friends from cities they helped build. No longer quite serviceable to the news casting, food, or fancy for which they were bred, they are the primordial urban outcasts. It's as the kindly pigeon lady says in Home Alone 2: "I'm like the birds I care for. People pass me on the street. ... They wish I wasn't in their city."
Well, we could all stand to care for them a little bit more. Years ago, a friend and I found a pigeon in an alley with an injured wing. I carried him — we named him Peter — on the train in a box on my lap all the way to the bird clinic. I hope he knows we heard his coo. |
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Today's edition was edited and produced by Izzie Ramirez. We'll see you Friday! |
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