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stars-and-bites · 51 minutes ago

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The closing of Dupont Circle felt like a bad omen. The park and its namesake neighborhood, a longtime hub of gay life in Washington, D.C., were expected to be packed during WorldPride 2025. But on June 2, the National Park Service announced that it would be shutting down the place on the celebration’s culminating weekend.

The intrusion of federal Washington on the District was unsettling but not unprecedented; the circle, like many of the most popular spaces in the city, is not under local control. More unusual was the chaos that followed. For many residents, there was a sense of fear that the federal government was intentionally excluding queer people from a beloved green space. (The NPS later said that the city’s police chief had asked for the closure.) The shutdown order was reversed the next day, then suddenly reinstated. Black security fencing went up on Friday, and then came down again the next morning, opening the circle just in time for the headline parade, on June 7.

The entire affair—the opening, the closing, the paranoia, and then the alarming news of a shooting (which was unrelated and, thankfully, nonfatal)—could be easily put down to the vagaries of big-city life. But it also served as a heavy-handed metaphor for the general vibe of Pride month in the capital and across America: severe emotional whiplash.

For D.C.’s queer community, this was supposed to be an unambiguously triumphant June, one marking multiple important anniversaries. WorldPride, an international LGBTQ festival, had hastily chosen D.C. for its ninth event, after the initial 2025 host, Taiwan, pulled out. The change was fortuitous, in part because it coincided with the 50th anniversary of Pride events in D.C. (first organized in 1975 just a few blocks north of Dupont Circle). And most significantly, this June is the 10th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Every Pride is a commemoration of LGBTQ history, as well as a celebration of how far the community has come. For many in Washington, by some measures the gayest city in America, the marking of a decade since the Obergefell decision in the city where the Court ruled represented the ultimate victory lap. But the actual event was more mixed. Although organizers initially expected 3 million visitors, attendance was reportedly only in the hundreds of thousands. Many foreigners skipped it, citing the United States’ recent detainment of travelers and noncitizens over their public statements or social-media posts. Domestic visitors were wary, too, of partying in the federal government’s backyard—particularly in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s big military parade. Trump and his party have made the rollback of LGBTQ rights a nationwide priority, and more encroachments—perhaps even the reversal of Obergefell—appear to be on conservatives’ radar. Backlash has officially arrived just as some members of Generation Z, the queerest cohort in American history, take their first steps into adulthood. Instead of reveling in their progress, they’re having to reenvision their future and wondering which rights are safe and which they might not be able to count on.

Ten years is a long time for a young person. The teens I saw reveling in the streets in rainbow clothes, hair glitter, and body paint were born recently enough that they might not even remember the day of the Obergefell ruling. Older members of their generation were just teenagers when it came down. The bisexual rapper Doechii, who performed at a free concert near the National Mall on Pride weekend, was 16 in 2015; the lesbian pop star Renée Rapp, a grand marshal of the WorldPride parade, was only 15. The youngest Gen Zers, born in 2012, were toddlers at that time. Today, more than one in five Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ, a greater share than in any generation before them. They grew up, and many of them came out, in the most gay-friendly social climate our country has ever seen. They have had role models in every corner of mainstream American life: Congress, the cover of Time magazine, the NFL, the military, The Bachelor. Things that felt impossible for so many teenagers in decades past—using gender-neutral pronouns; cutting their hair short; bringing a same-sex partner to a high-school dance—were normal for an unprecedented number of them. Target marketed them so much Pride merchandise that they shared memes mocking the collection.

But now that they’re reaching maturity, these same young people are watching their status quo erode. The past few years have been marked by harsh, vitriolic backlash. Homophobic language and slurs are back in vogue among a contingent of influencers. The Target jokes stopped being funny when, in 2023, right-wing social-media attacks on its Pride collection got so bad that the company pulled some of the items from its stores, citing threats to employees. The Republican Party has aggressively challenged transgender people’s ability to serve in the military, play sports, update their IDs, and medically transition.

And over the past six months, rescinding rights has become official policy. Trump has targeted individual transgender teenage athletes on social media, while his government has cut funding for HIV research and prevention worldwide. State governments and major religious denominations are challenging same-sex marriage, and corporations with a recent history of unfurling rainbow flags—Booz Allen Hamilton, Mastercard, Pepsi—have pulled out of sponsoring Pride events. The White House called LGBTQ-specific suicide-hotline services “radical grooming contractors” and abruptly halted its partnership with the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on preventing self-harm by queer youth. The Supreme Court just ruled that a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors can stand. Meanwhile, support for gay marriage shows a record-high partisan divide, with a major dip in Republican approval and even a slight overall decline.

Pushback against social progress isn’t a new phenomenon, and neither is adversity for LGBTQ people. But prior generations grew up knowing it firsthand, whereas Gen Z has been raised in a world where, each June, huge rainbow parades bearing the imprimaturs of corporations and local governments rolled down the streets of every major U.S. city. That gave them plenty of reasons to believe that the recurrent waves of discrimination their elders faced—the Lavender Scare, Ronald Reagan ignoring the AIDS crisis, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act—had been relegated to history’s dustbin. The milestones of their youth, after all, were victories. But these wins lulled the movement into what Sarah McBride, the 34-year-old transgender representative from Delaware, described to my colleague Hanna Rosin as “a false sense of security.” After Obergefell, there was a “dynamic where public opinion was sort of a mile wide but an inch deep,” she said. And, in her view, the LGBTQ coalition coasted instead of carrying on the work of public persuasion.

Now the reality of the moment is setting in, and it’s taking a psychological toll. “I always say people come to a doctor’s office for two reasons: They’re either in pain, or they’re afraid,” Max Doyle, a physician assistant at Whitman-Walker Health, in D.C., who treats many queer Gen Zers and Millennials, told me. “Lately, my patients have been coming in because they’re in mental pain and they’re afraid.” He’s been seeing an increase in depression and anxiety in his patients, and referring more of them to psychiatry.

The ebb of LGBTQ acceptance provokes serious, immediate material concerns for people who are beginning their adult lives. They must ask themselves questions like: Where is it safe to live? Should I pursue gender-affirming surgery before it’s too late? Should I get married now? Will we still be able to use surrogacy or IVF to start a family if we wait a few years? The freedom these young adults grew up with was, in part, the freedom not to think about these things. That liberty was incomplete—stratified by class, race, region, or pure luck—but wherever it did exist, it represented the fulfillment of a long-held dream, one in which queer people would be able to pursue careers, relationships, and families without fear of being outed or ostracized. Having to ask Where and when can I hold my beloved’s hand? is caustic to a person’s dignity. Having to wonder Where can I safely use the bathroom? is abrasive to the soul. It fundamentally alters one’s brain chemistry to see Sesame Street accused of “grooming” for posting a Pride message.

Doyle is 29, and a Millennial. He says he’s not entirely surprised by this climate of backlash, especially because he grew up in the more conservative Midwest. But his co-workers at Whitman-Walker, which has been providing LGBTQ health care in the nation’s capital for more than 50 years, belong to many generations, and he finds that his older colleagues and patients, especially those who survived the AIDS epidemic, are “more jaded”—but also “better prepared.”

This year’s WorldPride was loud, colorful, and full of confetti. As anyone who has spent June in D.C. might have expected, the air was thick and humid, and attendees were dripping with sweat basically as soon as the sun rose. Signs implored the crowd to support trans troops, to get tested for sexually transmitted infections, to stand against queer-book bans, to join IKEA’s customer loyalty club. Drag queens threw beads and flags from floats; pop hits and disco classics wafted down 14th Street. There was plenty of good humor and an undercurrent of naughtiness and rebellion.

Despite the political climate, WorldPride felt very much like a regular D.C. Pride. These kinds of family-friendly gatherings contain an implicit but powerful argument for acceptance. They glorify the power and importance of love in the lives of all kinds of people. They make gay life visible and diminish stigma or shame. And, crucially, they emphasize similarities instead of highlighting differences, in the hopes of generating wider approval. That spirit can be found in the majority ruling in Obergefell, in which then-Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that gay and lesbian couples respect marriage “so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves”; in McBride’s belief that her allies could have focused more on making the case for expanding trans rights; and in the travel-size trans flag I saw in someone’s back pocket branded with the logo of the mayor’s office.

That’s not the only way LGBTQ people have made progress, though. Today, recognizing that decades of change may not be as irreversible as they’d thought, some Gen Zers look back to their radical elders in search of models for moving forward. They counter homophobia and transphobia with slogans like “The First Pride Was a Riot.” They argue that the power of Stonewall came from the open rebellion of an unapologetic, unassimilated group. If even Elmo is getting called a groomer, their line of thinking goes, then being palatable doesn’t work: You might as well show up, as many did at WorldPride, in leather and drag.

The first D.C. Gay Pride Day, in 1975, was deliberately split across two sides of the street, the organizer Deacon MacCubbin has recalled over the years. He’d struck a deal with local media: They could film one side of the block; the other was for people who didn’t want to be outed to friends, family, or co-workers. In light of that history, this year’s parade, documented openly by thousands of iPhones and public Instagram posts, feels less like a typical party than a minor miracle.

About 69 million Gen Z people live in the U.S.; perhaps 10 million or more of them identify as queer. They can’t possibly agree on everything and may not have much in common at all, but that is a staggering number of people who acknowledge and share something that many born before them took to their graves. They may make very different choices about what their lives will look like, but even if it becomes much harder to be openly gay or trans in America in the coming years, five decades of history cannot easily be undone.

“We’ve been through this before, and it’s really hard on people, but we’re gonna get through this,” Doyle told me. This is what he counsels his patients, based on decades of knowledge about how, for instance, AIDS activists made medications more available and affordable, and trans people shared and used hormones long before they were widely prescribed. Those 10 million people represent a durable cultural change because they have grown up feeling entitled to be themselves in private and in public. That word—entitled—is frequently thrown around to insult this generation, but there are some cases in which the unabashed expectation of fair treatment is a clear source of strength. Personal liberty is an American entitlement, and these young people will not readily give it up.

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stars-and-bites · 53 minutes ago

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Vaccine experts in the United States have long considered the case on thimerosal closed. A chemical preservative that stamps out contamination in vaccine vials, thimerosal was removed from most U.S. shots more than two decades ago over worries that its mercury content could trigger developmental delays. But those concerns—as well as baseless claims that thimerosal causes autism—have been proven unfounded, many times over. “We took care of this 20 years ago,” Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University, told me.

That’s not how anti-vaccine activists see the compound. Even the strongest data supporting thimerosal’s safety have not quelled the concerns of those who insist on the chemical’s harms. And now the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, has signaled that thimerosal’s presence in vaccines should remain open for debate. The panel is scheduled on Thursday to discuss the compound, which is present in a minority of flu shots in low or trace amounts, and vote on how vaccines containing it should be used.

The panel that will meet this week is more skeptical of vaccines than any version in ACIP history. Earlier this month, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly dismissed all 17 existing members of the panel—among them, some of the nation’s foremost experts in vaccinology, infectious disease, pediatrics, and public health—and replaced them with eight new members who largely lack expertise in vaccines and, in several cases, have espoused anti-vaccine viewpoints. This new panel will hear a presentation on thimerosal not from a career vaccine scientist—as is usual ACIP practice—but from Lyn Redwood, one of the first vocal advocates of the false notion that thimerosal causes autism and the former president of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy chaired until 2023.

ACIP’s charter is to evaluate the data and guide the country’s approach to vaccines. By reopening the case on thimerosal, Kennedy’s handpicked committee has already chosen to entertain a classic anti-vaccine talking point. If the new ACIP’s vote further limits the use of vaccines containing the compound, it will also show, from the get-go, how willing it is to disregard evidence.

A multitude of studies, going back more than 20 years, has shown that thimerosal has no link to autism. Children who have received thimerosal-containing vaccines aren’t at higher risk of developing autism. Nor has removing the compound from much of the vaccine supply in multiple countries—including the U.S.—decreased autism rates. Instead, autism rates have gone up. (Experts who study autism attribute that rise largely to more awareness and more sensitive diagnostics; Kennedy, meanwhile, insists, without evidence, that the uptick is the work of an “environmental toxin” that “somebody made a profit” on.)

But around the turn of the millennium, experts felt pressured to remove thimerosal from vaccines, especially those targeted to young children. After studies had linked chronic exposure to high levels of mercury found in fish and whale blubber to developmental delays, scientists began to worry about the element’s effects on the young brain. The FDA kick-started a campaign to suss out the mercury content of the products it oversaw. By 1999, researchers had pinpointed thimerosal as suspect: The levels of the type of mercury found in vaccines containing the compound seemed, at the time, worryingly high, Walter Orenstein, who directed the U.S.’s National Immunization Program from 1988 through 2004, told me. “So there were concerns that it might be harmful to children.” (Autism, notably, wasn’t a consideration.)

No research proved that harm, but the fears seemed theoretically legitimate. “It put us in a very difficult position,” Orenstein said. The studies necessary to thoroughly test whether the thimerosal in vaccines was toxic could take years; in the meantime, kids could suffer unnecessarily. Some experts argued that keeping thimerosal in the vaccine supply wasn’t worth the risk to children’s health—and to public trust in immunization. If the FDA publicized its findings on mercury and the government didn’t take action, “we would look pretty stupid or unconcerned,” Neal Halsey, who was at the time the chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases, told me. Plus, thimerosal’s role in vaccines wasn’t technically essential: Its main use was to stave off harmful contamination in multidose vaccine vials, which clinicians repeatedly dip into; with some tinkering, many manufacturers would likely be able to sub in other preservatives, or switch to pricier single-dose containers.

So in 1999, the government and the AAP asked pharmaceutical companies to get rid of the thimerosal in their vaccines as quickly as they could—and advised health-care providers to delay giving the hepatitis B vaccine, which contained the compound, to low-risk newborns.

As it turned out, the compound never posed serious danger. The form of mercury in thimerosal is different from the one found in fish; scientists soon determined that it was excreted from the body faster—which meant that it didn’t pose equivalent risk. No major problems in childhood development could be linked to thimerosal-containing vaccines. At the time of the original decision, “if we’d had full knowledge, we wouldn’t have done it,” Orenstein told me. Thimerosal was, and is, safe.

But that wasn’t the message that anti-vaccine activists took away. Instead, they seized upon the government’s decision as an admission of guilt; multiple mercury-focused anti-vaccine activist groups sprang up. Some of them began to insist, without evidence, that thimerosal caused autism; among the most prominent advocates for that claim was Kennedy himself. The fervor around autism “caught us all by surprise,” Halsey told me. “That’s not what our concern was in 1999.”

And yet, those fears ballooned. In the mid-aughts, several states restricted thimerasol-containing vaccines for children and pregnant women. In some parts of the country, the misinformation yielded misguided treatments: In 2005, a family in Pennsylvania had their 5-year-old autistic son injected with a mercury-chelating chemical in hopes of curing his condition; less than an hour later, the boy died of a heart attack.

By 2001, thimerosal had been removed from most vaccines for Americans under 6. But the compound’s disappearance had costs. Multidose vials are an especially cheap, efficient way to package vaccines; blacklisting thimerosal made many shots more expensive, Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me. The speed of the decision spurred confusion too. Shaken by the call to remove thimerosal, some hospitals stopped offering the hepatitis B vaccine to newborns entirely; shortly after, a Michigan baby on a delayed vaccination schedule, born to a mother infected with the virus, died.

Certain scientists, including Offit, still consider the removal of thimerosal a mistake, not least because it made vaccines appear more suspicious. In a press release at the time, the AAP noted that “the current levels of thimerosal will not hurt children, but reducing those levels will make safe vaccines even safer”—a statement that appeared to validate thimerosal’s dangers. In an attempt to preserve public trust, the government instead broke it, Offit said. “They were meeting the anti-vaccine activists halfway.”

Now ACIP seems poised to make a concession to those same anti-vaccine groups. “The fact that it’s come up again is reason for some people to say, ‘Well, there was an issue,’” Edwards told me.

In response to a request for comment, an HHS spokesperson said, “The new ACIP committee is committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense. Its recommendations will be grounded in data, not ideology or opinion.” The spokesperson did not address questions about thimerosal specifically or the evidence for once again bringing it under scrutiny.

But the experts I spoke with weren’t optimistic about the forthcoming discussion. In the past, any question the committee voted on was usually published weeks in advance, and subcommittees including ACIP members, CDC officials, and independent subject-matter experts vetted evidence and discussed policy options in advance of meetings, Grace Lee, a Stanford pediatrician who formerly chaired ACIP, told me. The new ACIP panel has had no time for that level of preparation. At least one new member, Vicky Pebsworth, has also argued that thimerosal-containing vaccines are dangerous for children and pregnant people in an article published by Children’s Health Defense.

The exact proposal that ACIP will vote on hasn’t yet been made public, either. But materials now posted to the CDC’s website hint at the question the group might consider. Redwood’s presentation, which was officially added to the agenda just a day before the start of the meeting, includes a series of slides that largely ignores the strong evidence supporting thimerosal-containing vaccines’ safety, misrepresents at least one study, and concludes that “removing a known neurotoxin from being injected into our most vulnerable populations is a good place to start with Making America Healthy Again.” In an unusual move, though, the materials pertaining to Redwood’s presentation also include a CDC report—titled “CDC background briefing material,” flanked with asterisks—that reiterates thimerosal’s safety, and the evidence that debunks a link to autism. (Redwood, Pebsworth, and the CDC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Even Senator Bill Cassidy—the chair of the Senate’s health committee, who helped secure Kennedy’s confirmation—seems to be having doubts about these developments. On Monday, he wrote on social media that the new ACIP lacked the expertise to make sound decisions about vaccines, and called for the meeting to be delayed “until the panel is fully staffed with more robust and balanced representation.” (A spokesperson for Cassidy did not respond to a request for comment.)

If ACIP does vote to remove recommendations for remaining thimerosal-containing vaccines, it could create practical problems, Halsey told me. Even though only a minority of flu vaccines would be affected, forcing manufacturers to alter their products on a tight timeline could make it harder to prepare for annual vaccination campaigns. Lower-resourced regions might also struggle to afford single-dose vials.

But the bigger issue with that decision would be this new committee’s brazen disregard for decades of evidence on thimerosal’s safety. The original discussion to remove thimerosal was contentious but understandable: a precaution taken in a vacuum of information. This time around, though, the experts have long had the knowledge they need—enough of it that there should be no discussion or vote at all.

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stars-and-bites · 54 minutes ago

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Best Cinematography: Sinners (2025) — cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw

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stars-and-bites · 15 hours ago

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stars-and-bites · 16 hours ago

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hear me out…

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stars-and-bites · 17 hours ago

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The illusion is imploding.

Inadequate grifters can only manage for so long.

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stars-and-bites · 17 hours ago

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-Fran Lebowitz

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stars-and-bites · 17 hours ago

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Fishing is an inherently international business, and so fishers inevitably brush up against the lines of geopolitics. In recent years, Norwegian fishermen have defied Russian Navy vessels conducting exercises in Norway’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). But now, Norway faces a particularly nasty piscatory threat, one that has been growing over many months: Russian fishers doubling as spies and saboteurs.

For decades, the international community has been trying to bring order to fishing, which is a multibillion-dollar industry that simultaneously feeds millions of people and threatens its own future if left unchecked. Overfishing has devastated marine life; waters that once teemed with fish now have just tiny fractions of the catch they once provided.

Since the oceans belong to no one, managing fishing stocks is a classic problem of the commons and a good indicator of the state of the international order. A 1946 convention brought some manner of order to whaling. The 1971 Ramsar Convention regulated wetlands. A 1980 convention regulated krill catches. In 1982, countries passed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is considered the constitution of the oceans and provides a framework for their governance. And a 1993 compliance agreement sought to tackle rule-breaking fishers’ practice of regularly reflagging their vessels.

Similar efforts have continued since then, with more conventions signed and others being negotiated. But something is changing: The global fishing order, like the postwar order in general, is deteriorating.

Recently, China’s vast and menacing long-distance fishing fleet has been picking the waters clean. Its 17,000 ships park themselves, blitzkrieg-like, just off countries’ territorial waters. When they depart a short time later, the trawlers leave behind a maritime environment so stripped of life that local fishers can say goodbye to feeding themselves and their families.

And off Norway’s coast, foreign fishers are making unwanted visits of a different kind. Russian fishers are not banned from Norwegian waters; on the contrary, Russia and Norway allow each other’s fishers to fish in their EEZs in the Barents Sea. Together, the two countries also operate the Joint Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission, which sets the Barents Sea’s fish quotas each year. Last November, both agreed on this year’s fish quotas, the lowest in more than three decades. Declining fish stocks are an enormous worry, but, miraculously, the joint commission continues to function.

But all is not well. For several years, Russian fishing vessels have been behaving suspiciously in Norwegian waters. In April 2021, Russian fishing boats crossed an undersea cable off the coast of Norway multiple times—and when they left, the cable had been severed. In fact, a 3.6-mile chunk was gone. In January 2022, a cable linking Norway and Svalbard was damaged and went dark—just after Russian fishing boats had spent days crisscrossing it.

Since then, Norwegian authorities and journalists have witnessed all manner of mysterious visits by Russian fishing boats. They arrive in Norway’s EEZ, linger (usually on top of undersea cables or pipelines), and leave. They call at Norwegian ports despite having no business there, since they deliver their catch at Russian ports.

Investigative journalists at NRK, Norwegian public broadcasting, have documented how mysterious people board such boats in Norwegian harbors. They found that at least 50 Russian fishing vessels constantly appear and conduct mysterious business in Norwegian ports and waters. But the ships don’t just loiter in ports and on top of cables; they also appear near visiting NATO submarines, in oil and gas fields, and by naval training areas and strategic bridges. They even appear to seek weather refuge in areas where Norway and its allies conduct naval exercises.

Last summer, the Norwegian government had had enough. It announced that Russian fishing vessels will only be able to stay in Norwegian ports for five working days, after previously limiting them to three designated ports. The government also limited the areas of each port that Russian fishing boats could use and said it would introduce more rigorous checks on them.

The Kremlin was not pleased. “In the event that further unilateral restrictions will apply to the Russian fishing vessels’ access to ports in Norway are introduced, the Russian party reserves the right to suspend this protocol without regard to the deadlines set in §7 of the Rules of Procedure for the Norwegian-Russian Joint Fisheries Commission,” it said. In other words, if Norway tries to curtail espionage and subversion by Russian fishers, Russia will cancel its maritime agreement with Norway, which would trigger disorder in the Barents Sea that would end up harming both countries by potentially destroying fish stocks.

Such threats would make any government nervous, and Norway seems unsure how to tackle the dilemma. The new regulations “take care of both sustainable (fishery) management and better control in ports,” Norwegian Fisheries Minister Marianne Sivertsen Naess told the Barents Observer, but Russia is visibly ready to pounce as soon as Norway introduces further measures—or detains the crew of a fishing-cum-espionage ship. In another odd maritime twist, Russia recently launched a cruise route from its Arctic port of Murmansk to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. Traveling by ship allows passengers—who, on the ship’s inaugural journey, comprised a few Russians—to circumvent flights via mainland Norwegian airports. (Norway no longer issues tourist visas to Russians.) One wonders, though, what makes it so important for Russian tourists to visit Svalbard and for Ildar Neverov, who is the CEO of the Russian mining company Arktikugol and functions as Svalbard’s Russian leader, to receive them.

Europe is already feeling the pain. In May, the European Union sanctioned Norebo and Murman SeaFood, two of the largest Russian fishing companies that harvest in the Barents and Norwegian Seas. “Vessels owned and operated by Norebo JSC show particular movement patterns that are inconsistent with regular economic practices and fishing activities. The movement patterns align with malign objectives, such as repeatedly being in the vicinity of or loitering near critical infrastructure and military sites,” the EU explained, while Murman SeaFood’s Melkart-5 ship “has repeatedly shown untypical behavior inconsistent with its regular economic practices and fishing activities, including its presence in close vicinity to an ongoing NATO military exercise, and regular presence close to Norwegian critical infrastructure and military sites.”

Melkart-5 is one of the ships that repeatedly crisscrossed the Norway-Svalbard cable just before it suddenly malfunctioned. Ordinarily, Norway acts in lockstep with the EU, but if it implements this small part of the EU’s 17th sanctions package, Russia’s wrath awaits. Given Russia’s expertise in gray-zone aggression, the retaliation would be just below NATO’s Article 5 threshold.

Through Russia’s malice, Norway has to choose between its security and the health of marine life. A crumbling international order endangers not just the safety of humanity, but the agreements that keep a fragile and damaged global ecology intact.

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