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It’s long been clear that President Donald Trump won’t get anything resembling the border wall that he promised his supporters on the campaign trail. The government-funding deal struck between Democratic and Republican lawmakers earlier this week only confirms it. Congress will set aside less than $1.4 billion for bollard fencing—a type of physical barrier that’s close enough to a wall to placate Trump, and far enough from a wall to satisfy Democrats. The deal, which must be signed into law at midnight on Friday to avoid another shutdown, is less about resolving any immigration issues and more about providing political cover for a wounded president—lest he lash out yet again, without regard for the collateral damage.

This is a fitting outcome for the Trump era. The three-month clash over border wall funding was always more about theatricality than substance, even though the 35-day government shutdown damaged the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Americans. The reported details of the deal only confirm what was obvious all along about this standoff: that it was a nihilistic political gambit by the president and his Republican allies.

There’s no way to spin the emerging deal as anything other than a defeat for them. In December, Trump scuttled a compromise struck by lawmakers that would have allocated $1.6 billion in funds for physical barriers along the southern border, and instead demanded $5.7 billion to construct the steel and concrete wall that he had promised voters he would build. This new deal, by contrast, reportedly provides only $1.375 billion for barriers along the southern border. No wonder Trump is so openly dissatisfied with the deal’s terms.

But he may have no choice other than to accept it. The shutdown threw more than 800,000 federal workers into immediate financial hardship and paralyzed key government functions. Cascading economic and political damage eventually forced Trump to approve a three-week resolution to reopen the government—a humiliating climbdown for the president on his signature issue. With GOP lawmakers now firmly opposed to any further shutdowns, the president lacks any real leverage to force Congress to act on the wall before the 2020 elections.

The bill’s final text had not been released by noon on Wednesday, but it appears more performative than legislative for Democrats, too. Negotiators had privately pushed for a hard cap on the number of people who can be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump and his congressional allies responded by framing the request as an attempt to release hardened criminals onto America’s streets. As Mother Jones’ Noah Lanard noted, most of the people detained by ICE were originally arrested for minor offenses like traffic stops. But the pushback appears to have worked, as no such hard cap appears to be in the final package. (Instead, it reportedly sets funding for detention beds at 17 percent below current levels, but allows ICE to draw additional detention funds from other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.)

While a wall would undoubtedly stop some people from crossing the southern border, it also misunderstands how undocumented immigration works. Most of the nation’s undocumented immigrants came to the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas; most evidence suggests that unauthorized border crossings have steadily plummeted since the Great Recession. Nor would a wall stem the flow of illegal drugs into the country, as Trump has repeatedly insisted it. Almost all of those drugs enter through the nation’s ports of entry, not the hinterlands that separate them.

The wall may thus sound like a solution in search of a problem, but that would be misunderstanding its purpose. The real problem is Trump’s political self-image. The wall’s main goal is to serve as a physical manifestation of the president’s reactionary white nationalism. He pushed the idea so aggressively on the campaign trail because it symbolizes his xenophobic worldview, functioning more as rallying cry for his like-minded supporters than as a practical redoubt for the nation.

This explains why Trump has switched to lying about the border wall’s status. News that a compromise had been struck first broke during Trump’s rally in El Paso, Texas, on Monday, and he passed this along to his assembled supporters. “Just so you know, we’re building the wall anyway,” he said to cheers. The White House has been floating the idea of declaring a national state of emergency to divert other government funds to make this a reality. Such a move would almost certainly end up in the courts, where the administration has a grim track record. What matters to Trump is not necessarily that he wins, just that he’s not seen as losing.

All of this kabuki theater would be more bearable if it had no real-world impact. For the federal workers who endured lost paychecks because of the president’s posturing, that’s not the case. The rest of the nation lost something, too. Time is a finite resource that the Trump administration is nonetheless eager to squander. Members of Congress have spent months trying to fashion something that would satisfy Trump’s voluble whims. All the energy and effort could have been spent on literally any other plausible legislative effort—infrastructure funding, further criminal-justice reform, the opioid crisis, or drug-price reform. Instead it went toward soothing the president’s bruised ego and burnishing his tattered self-image.

As momentum for the Green New Deal grows, so do its detractors. The ambitious plan to fight climate change introduced by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey last week has been called everything from “brainless” to “delusional” by conservatives. President Donald Trump said it sounded like “a high school term paper that got a low mark.” Some Democrats have criticized the Green New Deal, too, saying that its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2030 is unachievable. Others believe the plan doesn’t go far enough.

What, then, do these critics propose instead? What should America do to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow catastrophic global warming?

Most Republicans don’t have an answer to that question because they deny that anything needs to be done at all. But as New Yorker staff writer Osita Nwanevu noted on Twitter, those who accept the dire reality of climate change aren’t helping by offering empty critiques.

No one criticizing the Green New Deal -- not a single person -- has an alternative plan for transitioning the American energy economy in the timeframe climatologists say we must. Nobody. If you don't think it's realistic, put out something else. What should be done instead?

Some conservatives are getting frustrated with the lack of alternative proposals from the Republican Party, too. “The ‘Green New Deal’ is a bad idea,” Eddie Scarry wrote recently for the Washington Examiner. “But it’s an idea, nonetheless. And the country has shown it’s willing to try new things if it might make lives better. Republicans should learn that quickly, or lose.” Mike Cernovich, the male supremacist and conspiracy theorist, made a similar argument on Twitter.

Utopian ideas, however unrealistic, beat no ideas.

The Green New Deal is more persuasive than anything the GOP has.

Cry and scream that it won't work.

The Green New Deal is the *most persuasive* idea on the table.

Find a better idea or lose. https://t.co/V8rAMtSI5s

It’s a strange day when an alt-right troll admits that climate change denial is a losing strategy. But Cernovich is right. Americans increasingly recognize that the world needs to decarbonize quickly. To prevent the planet from warming by 2 degrees Celsius, which many scientists consider the tipping point, the world must become carbon neutral by 2070. How can it meet that goal without the kind of massive government intervention that the Green New Deal proposes? I put that question to the plan’s critics.

The Green New Deal is based on the idea that the only way to solve a problem as enormous as climate change is to change the way society works: to reform American capitalism itself. That’s why, in addition to transitioning the country to 100 percent renewable energy and installing a high-speed rail system to reduce our reliance on cars, Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s resolution calls for universal health care, a federal job guarantee program, and affordable housing for all. It also says the public should have “an appropriate ownership stake” in the achievements of the Green New Deal.

The latter policies are what bother Joseph Majkut, the director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank that describes itself as a group of “globalists” who support “economic and social inequality” but also a “belief in the wealth creating power of free markets.” “[The Green New Deal] is a whole portfolio of things that aren’t necessarily aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “I understand the perspective that this is supposed to be a reorganization of the social and political economic order, and climate is a part of that. But to me it feels like climate is just one part of this larger progressive reorganization of society.”

Majkut and the Niskanen Center argue that a federal climate plan should stick to climate-specific policies. He advocates for a nationwide carbon tax; investment in “advanced research and development” for reducing carbon emissions from industry and agriculture; more government subsidies for low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar; and stricter efficiency rules on buildings.

But will those policies be enough to achieve net-zero carbon emissions within several decades? Majkut said he’s not sure, but added that he’s not sure how the Green New Deal would do it, either. “I don’t see how having Medicare for All makes it easier to achieve decarbonization,” he said.

How, I asked, can we make it easier to achieve decarbonization?

“I have absolutely no idea, man,” Majkut said. “Climate change is really hard.”

Ramez Naam, who lectures on energy and environment at Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, outlined similar policy ideas to Majkut in a viral Twitter thread on Friday. But he argued that significant research investments in zero-carbon agriculture and zero-carbon manufacturing—along with government incentives for the technology that emerges—would be enough to achieve decarbonization. “We can figure out how to take agriculture, which is currently 25 percent of our emissions, and do it in a zero carbon way,” he told me. “Then government policy can shape the market and encourage deployment of this new technologies.”

Our biggest climate problems - the sectors that are both large and that lack obvious solutions, are: a) Agriculture and land use changes (AFOLU in the graphic) and b) Manufacturing / Industry. Together, these are 45% of global emissions. And solutions are scarce. 11/ pic.twitter.com/cNIDqdxAC3

Decarbonization is possible, Naam argued, if the U.S. government invested enough resources in low-carbon agriculture, manufacturing research, and new technologies. “American companies would be the ones exporting the technology for carbon-free cement, carbon-free steel, carbon-free factories, and that would be a huge opportunity,” he said. “I think it will have even more impact than the Green New Deal, because the Green New Deal only decarbonizes the United States. We would only reduce global carbon emissions by 15 percent, and that’s not enough.”

Critics of Naam’s plan might argue that it’s far too risky for a problem as dire as climate change. It relies on scientists’ developing miracle cures for our highest-emitting sectors within just a few years—and then it relies on industry to successfully deploy those cures across the planet. The plan does not seek to reduce excessive consumption, but to somehow make excessive consumption sustainable.

The Green New Deal seems less risky by contrast, since it would mandate the transition to low-carbon energy sources that already exist. The are a lot of questions surrounding the Green New Deal—first and foremost whether it could ever become law—but at least it doesn’t rely on miracle cures. It’s an almost impossible solution to an almost impossible problem.

And yet, even the Green New Deal may not be enough. “We can’t just seek to decarbonize America,” Naam said. “The ultimate climate policy is policy that makes it easier for other countries to decarbonize.” He cited a tweet by Vox’s Matthew Yglesias that called not for a Green New Deal, but a Green Marshall Plan. That frame isn’t exactly right, Naam said: “We shouldn’t be going to countries and building their infrastructure for them.” But it’s the seed, at least, of a potential alternative to the Green New Deal.

The nightmare haunts Victor Dempsey even in his waking hours, tightening his chest and snatching his breath. It is as if it’s waiting for him, and when he sleeps there’s no escape. The dream first came to him when he was waiting for the verdict in the 2017 criminal trial of the police officer who shot and killed—murdered, Dempsey believes—his unarmed brother, Delrawn Small. The two brothers are running, laughing, across rooftops, like they did as boys in their Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. Then they come to a gap. Dempsey jumps for the next rooftop. He lands it. But as he looks back, calling his brother’s name, he sees Small fall into the inky darkness, and he jolts awake.

On those nights, Dempsey, 33, leaves his fiancé and his three-year-old son, and stumbles sleepily down the stairs of their home in Queens. He sits at the computer and watches the surveillance footage from an auto shop security camera in East New York of the final moments of his brother’s life. The footage, a minute and 45 seconds long, shows two cars stopped at a red light. One carries Small, driving his girlfriend, their young son, and teenaged stepdaughter home from a July 4 barbecue. The other, Wayne Isaacs, a 38-year-old police officer who had just finished a 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift at the 79th precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Police later told the media that the two drivers had gotten into a traffic dispute moments before Isaacs fired his gun at Small. The video shows Small exiting his car and walking up to Isaacs’s unmarked vehicle. Within seconds, from inside his car, Isaacs shoots Small three times. (The autopsy showed that one bullet pierced Small’s chest, another his stomach, and a third grazed his head.) Small falls back, gets up, lurches a few steps, and collapses between two parked cars.

“I know that video,” Dempsey told me recently. He has watched it hundreds of times, pausing, rewinding, and studying it frame by frame, so carefully that the images of it loop in his mind long after he has left the glare of his computer screen. “I can look at it without looking at it,” he said. The images also torment him with questions: Why didn’t Isaacs roll up the window? Or drive away? Or brandish his badge instead of his gun? “Why did he feel he had the authority to kill my brother?”

Small was the first of three black men whose death at the hands of police over the course of three days in July 2016 gained media attention. On July 5, Alton Sterling, 37, died after police in Louisiana tackled and shot him outside the convenience store where he was selling CDs. The following day, Philando Castile was shot and killed by police in Minnesota during a traffic stop. The horrific eyewitness videos of both shootings immediately went viral on social media. One social media post of the leaked video of Small’s death has since been viewed more than 70,000 times.

Historically, such searing images have helped gather support for legal reforms against racial discrimination and state violence against African American people. In the 1890s, Ida B. Wells documented lynchings across the United States, publishing statistics and details of several dozen of the killings in pamphlets such as Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases and The Red Record. According to research by the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,000 African Americans were lynched across 20 states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950. (In 2018, for the first time in American history, the Senate passed a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime.) During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, photographers captured images of African American demonstrators being attacked by police dogs and law enforcement officials wielding billy clubs and fire hoses. A generation later, in 1991, video of Rodney King being clubbed and kicked by police was broadcast on national and world news.

In the digital age, however, images of police violence have never been as widespread. No longer confined to mainstream news coverage, these incidents are on our Facebook and Twitter feeds instantly and continually: police firing at Walter Scott as he bolts away; five-year-old Kodi Gaines telling his mother “They trying to kill us” moments before police shot and killed her and wounded him in their apartment; Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe” as New York City officers gripped him in a chokehold.

With the ubiquity of smartphones and dash and body cameras, there is ample footage to expose police violence and grab the nation’s attention. In a virtually unlimited digital space, the images spread fast and far. Footage has refuted police accounts, revealed crucial facts withheld from families of victims, and sparked campaigns for justice and reform. “The racial justice movement against state violence would not have accelerated at the quick pace that it did without these videos,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Yet because the images of police violence are so pervasive, they inflict a unique harm on viewers, particularly African Americans, who see themselves and those they love in these fatal encounters. This recognition becomes a form of violence in and of itself—and even more so when justice is denied.

For Dempsey and scores of viewers who watched the surveillance video, the shooting death of Small was a clear-cut crime. When the shooting was first reported in the media, Isaacs and the New York City police department said that Small had exited his car and repeatedly punched Isaacs in his face through Isaacs’s car window. Isaacs said he feared for his life, a justification that has been routinely deployed by police officers when they use deadly force on African Americans. But the video, Dempsey said, “is like truth serum.”

Four days after the shooting, the footage was leaked, disputing the police account. The family thought the video would be enough to prove that Isaacs had used excessive force. “That was our hope,” Dempsey said. “That was our redemption. That was our justice.” So when the murder trial inside Brooklyn Supreme Court ended with a not-guilty verdict in the fall of 2017, “it was literally like losing him twice,” Dempsey told me. “It was like he got killed in front of us again.”

“So these videos don’t mean anything,” he added. “So now, what the hell matters?”

Social scientists have a theory about “linked fate”: In the African American community, individual life chances are recognized as inextricably tied to the race as a whole. So when black people watch a video of police violence against another black person, they see themselves or their loved ones in that person’s place, knowing that the same fateful encounter could very well happen to them. “It’s an image now stuck in your head forever,” said Monnica Williams, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut who specializes in race-based trauma. “You carry that horror around with you.” Viewing such images, various studies show, induces stress, fear, frustration, anger, and anxiety. There is also preliminary evidence suggesting that these images could lead to a cascading series of physical ailments, including eating and sleeping disorders, high blood pressure, and heart problems.

Williams said that viewers also start to think differently about their world. They feel their future is limited, while any symbol of the police can impart a sense of fear and dread. The images “remind them of the cheapness of black life,” Muhammad said. This feeling deepens when these videos showing violent black death are treated by the media as death porn or perverse entertainment. “To just have black bodies laying out on the street,” Williams said, “like roadkill for everybody to see—this is dehumanizing and traumatic.”

There is also concern that viewers might eventually become inured to these images, indelible as they are, which might dampen efforts to hold accountable the police officers and the criminal justice system. Conversely, such repeated footage can also make some viewers so piercingly aware of police violence that they instinctively disengage from the police rather than risk facing them. For weeks, Denzell Jackson, 22, a barber and truck driver from Pittsburgh, continuously watched the eyewitness video of police firing gunshots at 17-year-old Antwon Rose as he ran away from them. “To remind myself of what could, can, and most likely will happen at anytime,” Jackson told me. “Everyone needs to be aware.” The video intensified his fears of police. Jackson said, “I’m scared for my life any time a cop is around.”

He is not alone. In many black communities, residents hesitate before calling the police—either because officers rarely show up, or because of fear of what may happen if they do. When Dave Reiling called 911 in Sacramento, California, last year to report that someone had broken into his truck, the officers who responded shot his 22-year-old neighbor Clark, a father of two, eight times in Clark’s grandparents’ backyard, killing him. Clark was unarmed. His name was soon trending on social media, and when police released body cam video of how his shooting unfolded, posts were viewed more than one million times. “It makes me never want to call 911 again,” Reiling, who is white, told the media. “They shot an innocent person.”

It is not only videos of police violence that traumatize black viewers, but also the response from commenters once the footage has been posted. On social media, some users blame the victim in “why didn’t he just…” or “she should have just …” admonishments. Some white Americans “don’t understand, see, or appreciate our reality,” said Williams of the University of Connecticut. “They walk around in a very privileged space so they don’t even see racism that’s happening in front of them.” The result, Williams said, is that “they are constantly hurting us.” And a seemingly innocuous response, or no response at all from friends, to a video of police violence on social media can carry over into everyday life, causing some black Americans to mask their pain and anger in spaces such as the office or a dinner party.           

This trauma is compounded when videos reveal what seems to be a clear case of excessive or unnecessary police force, only for the officers involved to not face charges or be acquitted, routinely by a mostly white jury. When Gregory Hill Jr., a soon-to-be married father of three, was shot through his garage door, media published a haunting image of Hill lying in a pool of blood. The Florida jury that deliberated the wrongful death case awarded the family just $4 in damages. In response to the ruling, the Hill family lawyer told the media: “This says, black lives don’t matter.”

“We saw Eric Garner get choked to death,” said Kesi Foster, a 36-year-old youth community organizer based in Brooklyn. “We saw Saheed Vassell get shot down. We saw Ramarley Graham run into his house. And the mayor says nothing is wrong here, go about your day. There is no accountability for being executed on the street.” Foster and the teens in his program have regularly joined families of police violence at rallies to call for justice and reform. “It’s a constant struggle in trying to navigate it,” he said of the images and their repercussions, “in a way that’s not paralyzing or traumatizing.” 

After the funeral for his son Saheed, which was attended by hundreds of people, Eric Vassell watched, over and over, the surveillance video of Saheed being shot and killed in their Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood by police officers. He would pause it. He would slow it down and count the seconds: one, two, three, four, five. Five seconds, Vassell counted, for the unmarked police car to turn onto a street nearby his family’s home, and for four officers to start firing at his son. Police said Saheed had pointed an object at them, which two callers to 911 had previously identified as a gun or possible gun. The object was actually a piece of a welding torch. Vassell keeps a photo of it on his cell phone as evidence that the shooting of his son by police was unjustified. “Saheed should still be alive today,” Vassell told me. The state attorney general has opened an investigation into the shooting.

Months after Saheed was buried, parts of Crown Heights are still in mourning. Some of the local businesses display pictures of him in their windows. Many owners remember Saheed as a child, when he would volunteer to do odd jobs for customers, like carrying stuffed grocery bags for a dollar. Vassell is often stopped on the street in the neighborhood. People, some of them strangers, hug him and ask, “Pops, how you holding on?” His wife still cries every day.

But Vassell steels himself with the belief that Saheed was sacrificed to raise awareness about police violence—and to ultimately facilitate reform. He has been waiting for the city to release the police department’s unedited footage of the shooting, as well as the names of the four officers who shot and killed Saheed, all of whom he thinks should be arrested and prosecuted for his son’s death. He said he has also sued the city for $25 million. “But what could they give me?” Vassell asked. “There is no amount. My pain will always remain.”

To Vassell and other people whose lives have been shattered by police violence, justice lies in police accountability, which includes full access to city surveillance footage and police records. He—along with Eric Garner’s mother and Delrawn Small’s brother and sister—have called for the repeal of a New York state law that they say shields bad police officers’ personnel files and allows for racially biased and violent officers to continue policing communities. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 34 states and the District of Columbia have laws for body cameras. But in some states, to the frustration of impacted family members, activists, and local politicians, such footage is not public record, or local governments can limit how much footage is released.

In some cases, it is clear why police would want to keep their behavior hidden.

After body-cam footage was posted of a BART officer in West Oakland fatally shooting 28-year-old Sahleem Tindle three times in the back last January, as he wrestled on the ground with another man, it has been viewed more than 10,000 times. The media had reported that police initially said Tindle had been wielding a gun. Still, Tindle’s mother, Yolanda Banks-Reed, told me, “I don’t just want likes and shares, I want help.”

Banks-Reed went on to found Mothers Fight Back, writing letters, making calls, storming city meetings, and demanding justice for her son and police reform from elected officials. She, like Vassell, also wanted the officer who shot and killed her son to face criminal charges. Over the summer, she organized a rally at the state capital that included audio recordings of mothers who had lost children to gun and police violence. About three months later, in October 2018, the county prosecutor declined to file criminal charges against the officer involved. The officer reasonably believed, the investigation concluded, that he was acting in self-defense and the defense of others. 

Some videos that refute police accounts have aided in indictments and convictions. In August 2018, Roy Oliver, a police officer in Texas who shot and killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for Edwards’s murder. Police camera footage played a key role in the trial: Edwards and four other high-schoolers were driving away from what a 911-caller had described as a rowdy house party in a Dallas suburb when Oliver fired five shots into the teens’ car. Before his arrest, Oliver said that their vehicle had backed toward his partner, and that he feared for his partner’s life. But the footage played for jurors showed the car backing up then driving away, past Oliver and his partner. One leaked clip showed Edwards’s stepbrother exiting the car with his hands up pleading with officers: “Please help us. He’s dead. Please don’t shoot me.”

Still, the videos may not have been the decisive factor in the court case. During the trial, Oliver’s partner essentially testified against him, saying he did not fear for his life, and did not think he would be hit by the teens’ car.

Ultimately, Williams said, video accounts alone have brought about few, if any, substantial police reforms. They have brought widespread awareness that implicit racial bias indeed exists within police departments. However, that basic fact is now bitterly, painfully clear, and the question is what comes next for America, in terms of actual change. “This isn’t rocket science,” said Muhammad of Harvard. “We certainly don’t want more of them to strengthen the case.”

There have been efforts to counter the “blue wall of silence” ingrained in police culture. Voters in some cities have ousted longtime prosecutors and replaced them with officials who promised, during their campaigns, to hold police officers accountable. Some family members of those killed by police—like Michael Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden—have announced bids for local political offices. (McSpadden is running for City Council in Ferguson, Missouri.)

Some police departments have introduced de-escalation and implicit bias training. Last year, the District of Columbia’s police department even made it mandatory for officers to visit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is hard to measure what, if any, impact the exposure will have on police relations with black communities. Delores Jones-Brown, a professor at John Jay’s College of Criminal Justice, pointed out that several departments now tell their officers they have a “duty to intervene” when they witness one of their own involved in illegal or questionable behavior during encounters with the public. 

Meanwhile, justice in the courtroom largely remains elusive. After a Chicago police officer shot and killed Laquan McDonald in 2014, initial police reports ruled the shooting justified. Then, thirteen months later, the police department released damning dash cam video of McDonald walking away before an officer began shooting at him, 16 times in total. In October 2018, the officer was convicted of second-degree murder. In January, a judge sentenced the officer to six years and nine months in prison. The former officer must serve two years of his sentence to be eligible for probation.

The sentencing came as a disappointment on social media. Commenters like Kevin Covington, who watched footage of the shooting, said that the amount of prison time was not nearly enough and that the whole trial felt like a sad, horrid joke. “It just confirms what you feel,” Covington, the 51-year-old father of two sons and a college administrator in Philadelphia, where he works with an enrichment program for young, black males, told me. “It used to be your word against their word. Then, ‘Wait until there’s a video,’” he said. “It just brings me to the point of these things happen because white America stills view black people in one way: dangerous. Like, you don’t have any rights to be here. It’s our reality today and has been for too long.”

The advent of new technologies has allowed us to chronicle and testify to a horribly entrenched truth: The American justice system continually, daily devalues black bodies. It has only been forced to reckon with the reality of its own bias when a flash of video shows, in soul-wrenching detail, the ease with which a life can be extinguished. This revelation comes at a cost to the well-being of African Americans across the country who are exposed to these images at the swipe of a finger or the click of a mouse. And so far, with precious little to show by way of significant and lasting reform, the cost has been too high.

In August 2013, Mark Post, a professor of physiology at Maastricht University, held a press conference in a television studio kitchen in London. Lifting the silver lid from a platter, he revealed a creation that seemed very humble by culinary-TV standards: a round, palm-size patty of dark pink hamburger meat. But as Post explained, his burger was no ordinary chunk of beef. Instead of coming from the flesh of a slaughtered cow, the muscle fibers in the meat had been grown from cow cells in a lab. A chef pan-fried a few and served them to a panel of food critics, who praised the meat’s dense texture and the way the outside browned up in the pan, lamenting only the lack of salt, pepper, and ketchup.

The burgers were the result of cellular agriculture, an emerging field of biotechnology that uses tissue engineering to produce the edible products—fats, proteins, and trace minerals—that have traditionally come from livestock and farming. It is this technology (referred to variously as lab-grown meat, in vitro meat, animal-free meat, and clean meat), along with plant-based substitutes, that Jacy Reese’s The End of Animal Farming argues will put livestock farms out of business, without necessarily meaning the end of meat. In the future that Reese envisions, consumers will be able to choose from a variety of real meats, cultured in facilities resembling beer breweries, with no animals harmed in the making.

Reese, an animal rights advocate from rural Texas, now lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée, their dog, and two rescue hens. (The hens, saved from factory farms, are medicated with something analogous to birth-control so that they won’t lay eggs, which, Reese says, lets them live longer and happier lives.) He came to animal advocacy circuitously, through his interest in effective altruism—using data analysis to figure out what actions will yield the greatest positive impact on the world. From there it was a short intellectual journey to his concern for the widely overlooked but vast issue of animal suffering. “Atrocities,” he writes, “rely on the exclusion of certain sentient beings from our moral consideration.” If we considered the treatment of the more than 100 billion farmed animals alive on the planet at this moment, most of which will be born into lives of miserable confinement, we would see our current industrial system of animal farming, Reese writes, as “a moral catastrophe.”

On matters of strategy, however, he differs sharply from other animal rights advocates, and has criticized PETA for its provocative publicity tactics, including the use of fat-shaming to promote a vegan diet, and a campaign to eliminate anti-animal language (which suggests substituting the saying “kill two birds with one stone” with “feed two birds with one scone”). “The word ‘PETA’ has become a pejorative for stunts, gimmicks, and putting feelings over facts when it comes to animal issues,” he wrote in the conservative publication Quillette last December. Reese believes, instead, that technology could render animal farming obsolete; rather than focusing on change at the grass roots, he makes scientists and entrepreneurs the heroes of his narrative. In the literature of meat-eating ethics—in which Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation is the philosophically rigorous canonical text, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals the sentimental journey toward vegetarianism, and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma the gourmand’s effort to balance conscience and appetite—Reese has carved out his own niche: the business-friendly techno-utopian optimist.

His approach resonates with a set of growing concerns about the effects of animal farming. Between warnings of livestock’s contributions to climate change and environmental degradation and increasing public awareness of the cruelties of factory farming, meatless tech is on the rise. In recent years, the Impossible Burger—made from a meaty-flavored, genetically engineered soy—launched to much buzz. You can now get them in a White Castle slider. The Economist declared 2019 the year of the vegan and forecast a plant-based future: A quarter of adults aged 25 to 34 say they are vegetarian or vegan. And the market is following their lead, with clean-meat startups and agribusiness giants investing in alternatives to animal protein. Noting that even Tyson Foods has bought a stake in a “plant-based meat” company, The Economist’s John Parker wrote that “even Big Meat is going vegan.”

The science of tissue culturing began in 1885, when the German zoologist Wilhelm Roux extracted some neural tissue from a chicken embryo and maintained it in warm saline solution for several days, establishing that under the right conditions, tissue could survive and even grow outside the body. In the 1950s and ’60s, experiments in cell-culturing scaled up from individual efforts to bigger research programs. Observing these developments, the biologist Willem van Eelen started to explore manufacture for consumers, and in 1999 he patented techniques for growing meat, helping to pave the way for Mark Post’s slaughter-free burger. Today the process starts with cells from a live animal, putting them into a culture medium that provides necessary nutrients, adding a biomaterial “scaffold” to which cells attach and form muscle fibers, and combining the whole mix in a bioreactor where fluctuations in temperature will spur growth—more complicated, but not terribly unlike brewing beer or kombucha.

Reese gives a quick overview of the scientific developments in cellular agriculture, but his main aim is to identify forces that these products will have to overcome if they are to outdo animal meat on a mass scale, and to offer advice on marketing them. Reese knows that meat eating is deeply ingrained in many cultures and is growing in others, and that convincing people to give it up won’t be easy. He lists the “four Ns” as the main categories of reasons people give for sticking with meat—that it is nice, normal, necessary, and natural—and, for each of these positions, he offers counterarguments.

It’s important, Reese writes, to challenge the assumption that meat is “normal,” because many consumers may be wary of straying from the status quo. But if they hear, for example, that Ariana Grande is a vegetarian, or see that the default airline meal is animal-free, those experiences add up and can change their expectations of ordinary food. Reese swiftly and easily dispenses with the idea that eating meat is “necessary” for health, pointing out that vegans and vegetarians are often healthier than their meat-eating counterparts, and that vegan athletes and bodybuilders have no trouble getting protein or gaining strength. Countering the idea that meat is “nice,” or pleasurable to eat, is hardest. Many people simply aren’t interested in the substitute meats that exist, or they’re reluctant to give up favorite animal-based dishes.

The discussion of whether meat is “natural” is the most illuminating. It might seem natural for humans, simply as omnivores in the food chain, to eat meat. But Reese argues that if we define natural as, roughly, that which would exist without modern human technology, then “virtually no modern food is natural.” For decades, sometimes centuries, animals have been selectively bred and reared to proportions that maximize meat production. How much more “unnatural” is it to eat a chicken breast grown in a lab than it is to eat one that came from a live bird that was bred to have such outsize chest musculature that it could barely stand without tipping over?

Though Reese’s arguments are compelling, he doesn’t believe that this kind of reasoning is what will ultimately drive a change. He expects that to come from advances in animal-less meat technology, and from the growing problems with production of food from animals. “The ace in the hole for the inevitability of the end of animal farming,” he asserts, “is the incredible inefficiency of making meat, dairy, and eggs from animals.” That is, an animal’s body does more than produce meat—it builds bones and hair, it breathes and moves and senses, all of which consume energy, so that for every one calorie of meat produced, a farm animal takes in ten calories or more. Lab-grown meat doesn’t perform any of these functions, of course, and so it has a much higher caloric conversion ratio than animals, which are, in Reese’s words, “inefficient producers of flesh.”

He profiles some of the main companies in the meatless technology field, which he hopes will take clean meat mainstream. Hampton Creek, now called JUST, creates plant-based alternatives to eggs and dairy, and wants to target average consumers, not just vegans. Impossible Foods takes an analytical approach to isolating the components and characteristics of meat, and builds plant-based versions that have more in common with animal flesh than with the veggie burgers and Tofurkeys of yore. Beyond Meat makes products similar to those from Impossible Foods, but whereas Impossible Foods was initially marketed to restaurateurs like David Chang, Beyond Meat goes for the home cooks, selling to Whole Foods and other grocery chains.

For all these companies’ efforts, Reese is also aware that changing people’s diets and food cultures—which foods they consider delicious or luxurious, or which they incorporate into traditional dishes—is a deeply social project. He recognizes that advocates for animal-free food will need to work on social change, to ensure that as the technologies continue to develop (“which seems fairly inevitable”), people actually choose to eat the products. If scientists and businesses lead, recipes must follow.

Reese’s book isn’t likely to win the hearts and palates of many meat eaters. Its tone is coolly dry, bordering on mathematical. Part of this comes from Reese’s commitment to effective altruism, whose adherents say they use “evidence and careful analysis to find the very best causes” rather than “just doing what feels right.” It might be a refreshing shift in tone from the extreme compassion and occasional sanctimony that can surround arguments for animal welfare, and it’s certainly a sensible way to organize the activities of an advocacy group—but as the engine of a work of nonfiction, the constant emphasis on efficiency runs a little cold. Even Reese’s discussion of suffering itself is mathematical, as he calculates the amount of harm a farm does by the number of animals it keeps and the number of hours they spend there, without accounting for differences in their consciousness. He gives the suffering of a fish the same weight as the suffering of a pig.

Yet despite its structure and tone, the book’s underlying argument itself is important. Reese makes plain that eating meat causes an enormous amount of avoidable pain and suffering, and refuses to accept ignorance as an excuse. Most people have long known that farmed chickens live in tight wire cages where they go crazy with stress, or that hogs will get so depressed that they don’t fight back when nearby animals bite their tails. People who know these facts and eat meat anyway (I do both) may tell ourselves that it’s just the way things are, or cultivate an internal moral firewall, refusing to think about the processes that brought our protein to our plates.

Reese also rejects measures intended to make eating animals a little less morally objectionable. Michael Pollan has, for instance, envisioned not the abolition but the transformation of animal farming, into a system in which animals can live outdoors, “in contact with the sun, the earth, and the gaze of the farmer,” and in which consumers know where their meat comes from. A neat way to make the industrial meat system kinder, he thought, might begin with simple visibility: “Maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country,” he wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “is to pass a law requiring that the steel and concrete walls” of the slaughterhouses “be replaced with … glass.” Then, surely, conditions would have to improve. Why end the practice altogether when the cruelties can be eliminated?

Reese concedes that some smaller specialty farms might operate more ethically than the factory behemoths, but insists that exploiting sentient beings “is a moral misdeed even if those sentient beings live happy lives.” Most significantly, he argues that these specialty farms provide a “psychological refuge” for meat eaters, who can take solace in the fact that they sometimes eat ethically farmed meat, even though most meat isn’t produced this way. By occasionally choosing the “happier” meat option, people are able to imagine that their choices don’t contribute to the big, brutal system, that the meatballs on their kitchen table have nothing to do with those shadowy stories about deranged chickens and terrified cows.

Again, he’s right. Cruelty is all but impossible to eliminate from an industrialized meat-production system that prizes profitability above all else. Up to the 1940s and ’50s, typical animal farms in the United States were pasture-based and raised various types of animals. Now they are concentrated operations—the term of art for a factory farm is a “concentrated animal feeding operation,” or CAFO. This consolidation has made it possible for Americans to eat more meat, more cheaply, and it has brought horrific conditions. The current system tasks workers with stunning live birds by dunking them in electrified water and docking the tails of pigs, in settings where the primary concern is keeping costs low. (Pollan pointed out that in ancient Greece, slaughter was entrusted to priests: “priests!—now we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers.”) In 2018, the average American ate more than 200 pounds of red meat and poultry, a record high. The way this plentiful meat is produced is simply hard to stomach.

Reading Reese’s book, I found myself thinking of Matthew Scully’s Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, published in 2002. Like Reese, Scully describes the abuse of animals as a moral wrong, but unlike Reese, Scully’s assessment is suffused with fellow-feeling. Scully comes to the issue as a Christian (though, by his own assessment, “not a particularly pious” one) and as a conservative. And so it’s surprising that his book also includes scathing critiques of capitalism throughout: “My copy of the Good Book doesn’t say, ‘Go forth to selleth every creature that moveth.’ It doesn’t say you can baiteth and slayeth and stuffeth every thing in sight, either, let alone deducteth the costs,” he writes. He criticizes his fellow conservatives for their posture in animal-welfare conversations, for their “lazy disdain of moral inconveniences,” and their belief “that somehow the free market will right all things and any cruelty will be redeemed by the miraculous workings of capitalism.” And this from a man who worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush.

It is something of this kind of fiery radicalism that I was hoping to find in Reese’s book. His idea is radical. But The End of Animal Farming proceeds blandly through its points like a slide deck at a pitch meeting. Instead of critiquing the capitalist logic that gives us factory farming, Reese proposes replacing the meat business with another, more technically advanced model. And that’s fine and sensible. But it seems unlikely that such a dispassionate approach will be enough to spark the major changes in eating habits and foodways that could bring about a slaughterless future. Reese’s idea—that people will give up something pleasurable and familiar without the spark of something deeply felt, be it shame or compassion—relies on a very generous view of the human animal.

This week, the United States and Poland will be co-hosting a summit in Warsaw to “Promote a Future of Peace and Security in the Middle East.” More than 70 countries have been invited, a departure from the Trump administration’s usual unilateralism.

Unfortunately, history suggests the conference won’t amount to much.

Nearly 30 years ago, the United States launched its boldest regional effort toward peace and stability. The Madrid Conference of 1991 arguably failed on its core objectives—but not for lack of trying. And the Madrid example, today, shows just how unlikely the Trump administration’s efforts are to bear fruit.

Capitalizing on the end of the first Gulf war in the spring of 1991, President George H.W. Bush announced that the time had come to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. His administration, led by tireless Secretary of State James Baker and a brain trust of Middle East and Cold War specialists, orchestrated a major international summit on the Middle East in Madrid, Spain, that October.

Despite shortcomings, Madrid did succeed in bringing all the parties in the Arab-Israeli conflict to the negotiating table for the first time. The conference launched unprecedented multilateral cooperation between Israel and the Arab world on arms control and regional security, economic development, the environment, water, and refugees. It broke a taboo of Arab officials refusing to sit with Israeli officials. Gulf states like Oman and Qatar hosted Israeli delegations in subsequent years, with a surprising amount of engagement continuing even after the demise of the Clinton-era Oslo peace process by the late 1990s.

To develop the conference, Baker spent eight months in what is known as “shuttle diplomacy,” consulting regional and international partners on the meeting, even co-chairing the summit with the Soviet Union. The vision of the conference was clear: to capitalize on the war’s conclusion to build a foundation for regional peace, with the resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as the cornerstone of the effort.

Compare that kind of preparation and vision with that of the current administration. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the summit in an interview scarcely a month ahead of the actual meeting, evidently without consulting key allies, even reportedly surprising its Polish hosts: In the midst of a Middle East trip to shore up regional pressure against Iran, Pompeo suggested an important element of the conference would be “making sure Iran is not a destabilizing influence.”

Just a few weeks later, after pushback from Poland as well as European allies uncomfortable using an international summit to target one country, the administration broadened the aims of the meeting to focus on a range of issues, from extremism, to missiles, to terrorism (all topics of high relevance in the Iran file). With the administration’s special envoy on Iran playing an instrumental role in organizing the forum, skepticism remains about the meeting being anything other than a vehicle to pressure and isolate Iran. “The first issue on the agenda is Iran,” Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said Sunday, despite the word “Iran,” according to the BBC, appearing nowhere on the official agenda. Needless to say, Iran has not been invited, and key global and regional players like Russia, Turkey, and the Palestinians declined to attend.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also not on the agenda, though President Trump’s “peace team” is reportedly attending. This decision marks another key difference with the Madrid conference. While the Bush administration’s team did not believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the sole or even primary source of the region’s instability—after all, the United States just fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in a war that had nothing to do with Israel—they also correctly recognized that without a resolution to the conflict, Israel would never be at peace and the region would never be stable.

This week’s Warsaw meeting seems to ignore this reality. To be sure, Israeli-Palestinian peace is hard to prioritize amidst the Middle East’s multiple civil wars. And Israeli and some key Arab leaders appear more aligned than at any other point in the conflict due to common concerns over Iran. But even were the Warsaw meeting to feature a dramatic meeting between Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s leaders that some have speculated about, a full normalization of relations still depends on resolving the Palestinian conflict. Given that the Trump administration and Palestinian leadership are not even on speaking terms (other than through Twitter taunts), we are likely to be waiting a long time for such resolution.

Nor would limited Israeli-Saudi rapprochement in Warsaw, if it occurs, be particularly groundbreaking: Saudi Arabia is not a military risk to Israel today, and further alignment between two countries on the same side of the Iran showdown would hardly usher in a new era of peace in the region. International alarm over the Khashoggi affair or Saudi policies in Yemen—more dangerous because of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry—seem similarly unlikely to be resolved in this setting. As the late Yitzhak Rabin famously observed, you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends.

Madrid wasn’t perfect. Like today, Iran was excluded, as were other countries that opposed peace with Israel. This exclusion made sense given the overriding purpose of the conference—peace between Israel and its neighbors. But unfortunately, the exclusion of Iran provided further incentive for it to undermine the Madrid work by supporting terrorist groups opposed to Arab-Israeli reconciliation; it even found sympathy in Arab public opinion by characterizing the peace effort as an attempt to impose American and Israeli hegemony over the region. Senior U.S. officials also failed to pay adequate attention to the multilateral peace process after its initial purpose at Madrid—to entice the Israelis to the table—was satisfied. Many of the successes of the multilateral working groups on shared regional issues evolved in spite of this American indifference.

There will be opportunities to learn from Madrid and improve the regional architecture for successful diplomacy, particularly in the aftermath of the horrific conflicts in Syria and Yemen and the daunting environmental, water, and economic challenges facing the region and its next generation. This will require painstaking work by global powers to generate widespread regional and international support. And it will require a cooperative approach that includes friends as well as adversaries, rather than building upon ever-shifting security alliances.

The Madrid process begun nearly 30 years ago showed promise, but ultimately stalled, and will need rethinking to adapt to today’s Middle East. The world could use a worthy successor. The Warsaw summit probably isn’t it.