How industrial meat and dairy trap us in an infectious disease cycle.

H5N1, or bird flu, has hit dairy farms — but the dairy industry doesn’t want us saying so.

The current, highly virulent strain of avian flu had already been ripping through chicken and turkey farms over the past two years. Since it jumped to US dairy cows for the first time last month, it’s infected more than 20 dairy herds across eight states, raising alarms among public health authorities about possible spread to humans and potential impacts on the food supply.

One Texas dairy worker contracted a mild case of bird flu from one of the impacted farms — the second such case ever recorded in the US (though one of hundreds worldwide over the past two decades, most of them fatal).

Whatever fear-mongering you may have seen on social media, we are not on the cusp of a human bird flu pandemic; the chances of further human spread currently remain low. But that could change. As the virus jumps among new mammal species like cows, the risk that it’ll evolve to be able to spread between humans does increase.

But the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP), an organization of beef and dairy veterinarians, declared in a statement (condemned by public health experts) last week that it doesn’t believe bird flu in cows should be considered bird flu at all.

“The AABP will call this disease Bovine Influenza A Virus (BIAV),” the association’s executive director K. Fred Gingrich II and president Michael Capel said in a statement, encouraging federal and state regulators to do the same. “It is important for the public to understand the difference to maintain confidence in the safety and accessibility of beef and dairy products for consumers.”

In other words, industry vets are trying to rebrand bird flu so that we keep calm and keep buying cheeseburgers. “They’re worried about selling products,” bovine veterinarian James Reynolds, a professor at Western University’s vet school, told me, calling the group’s statement “disease-washing.”

Covering bird flu over the last two years, I’ve seen a lot of wild stuff, but this may be one of the weirdest. And it’s more than just a terminological or political spat: It reflects an inescapable paradox about how we produce food.

The meat industry’s infectious disease trap

Naming infectious diseases is always political.

In this case, the cattle industry appears desperate to distance itself from the bird flu news cycle and avoid the perception that it’s contributing to human disease risk. But animal agriculture is one of the top drivers of zoonotic diseases — and growing global demand for meat, dairy, and eggs may be putting us at ever-greater risk of new outbreaks.

To understand why, one of the most elegant models I’ve found is the “infectious disease trap,” a concept coined in a 2022 paper by New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek.

Farming animals for food requires lots of land — much more land than it would take to grow an equivalent amount of plant-based foods. More than a third of the planet’s habitable land is devoted to animal agriculture alone, making it the world’s leading cause of deforestation as forests are cleared for farms. That in turn leads to more human and farm animal encounters with wild animals, a major source of new zoonotic diseases.

Animal agriculture’s land use can be shrunk through intensification — densely packing animals into factory farms — which limits deforestation and helps reduce meat’s climate footprint.

But such operations are terrible for animal welfare, and they exacerbate zoonotic disease risk in other ways, allowing viruses to rapidly tear through factory farms filled with thousands of stressed, genetically identical animals.

That’s exactly what’s been happening at chicken and turkey farms across the US over the last two years — and to prevent further spread, farmers have killed more than 85 million poultry birds on farms hit with bird flu since 2022, often using a grisly method that kills them via heatstroke. Our current food system is a recipe for brewing more virulent disease strains and, many experts fear, it’s a ticking time bomb for the next pandemic.

As long as global meat production expands, Hayek’s model explains, both low-density and factory farm-style animal agriculture trap us with rising disease risk.

What does this mean for the future of bird flu in cows?

A lot remains unknown about how bird flu has spread so rapidly among cows on dairy farms as far apart as Michigan and New Mexico.

One plausible theory is that the disease is moving with cows being trucked across the country, just as a human disease might move with people.

In recent years, as the dairy industry has increasingly consolidated into large factory farms, long-distance transportation of cows has become very common, Reynolds explained. Young female calves are often trucked from northern states to warmer climates in the south, then shipped back north when they’re old enough to become pregnant and produce milk. “There’s kind of a constant movement that really didn’t exist much 20 years ago,” Reynolds said.

Long-distance shipment can inflict extreme suffering on farmed animals, who are treated more like cargo than sentient beings. It’s also a hallmark of intensive animal agriculture systems described in the infectious disease trap model, allowing diseases to jump to new regions.

At least 18 states have restricted cow imports from states where dairy cows have tested positive for bird flu. The dairy industry recognizes the risks, Reynolds said, and is making efforts to improve biosecurity on these cross-country journeys. Meanwhile, regulators are scrambling to track the disease and stem its spread — but experts have argued those efforts don’t go nearly far enough, failing to require widespread testing.

And whatever steps are being taken now to stop the spread, the infectious disease trap model shows us that if we’re chasing zoonotic diseases after they’ve infected farm animals, we’re already behind.

Escaping that trap requires a much broader societal rethinking of our factory farm system.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers.

If you’re a millennial, you may remember that specific moment in time around the late 2000s when streaming video technology had just gotten good but there weren’t that many legitimate streaming platforms available yet. So if you were a student without a TV and you wanted to watch a show, you would go to a website that aggregated lists of illegal streams.

It would be covered in banner ads and autoplaying video ads decorated with little play button arrows, and in order to watch your show, you would have to solve the puzzle of figuring out which play button to click that would actually get you to your show instead of spiriting you away to a website that sold upsetting porn or amateurish video games. It could be done, but you had to be paying attention, and you had to have the barest modicum of web savvy to do it right.

Right now, navigating the ebook and audiobook marketplaces is like being back on those sites. There are a thousand banner ads larded with keywords, and they’re all trying to get your clicks.

Take, for example, when tech journalist Kara Swisher’s Burn Book came out this February. A host of other books hit the Kindle store along with it. They all had bizarre, SEO-streamlined titles, like those new businesses that are named Plumbing Near Me to game the Google algorithm.

“I found ‘Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley’s Bulldog,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist,’ and ‘Kara Swisher Biography: Unraveling the Life and Legacy,’ by a ‘guy’ who ‘wrote’ four biographies this month,” said Ben Smith when he interviewed Swisher for Semaforum.

Swisher was less than flattered by the biographies. “I wrote [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy and I said, ‘You’re stealing my IP! What is going on?’” she told Smith. (Disclosure: Swisher works for Vox Media.)

Here is almost certainly what was going on: “Kara Swisher book” started trending on the Kindle storefront as buzz built up for Swisher’s book. Keyword scrapers that exist for the sole purpose of finding such search terms delivered the phrase “Kara Swisher book” to the so-called biographer, who used a combination of AI and crimes-against-humanity-level cheap ghostwriters to generate a series of books they could plausibly title and sell using her name.

The biographer in question was just one in a vast, hidden ecosystem centered on the production and distribution of very cheap, low-quality ebooks about increasingly esoteric subjects. Many of them gleefully share misinformation or repackage basic facts from WikiHow behind a title that’s been search-engine-optimized to hell and back again. Some of them even steal the names of well-established existing authors and masquerade as new releases from those writers. According to the Authors Guild, it would be impossible for anyone but Amazon to quantify these books — and that’s not information Amazon is sharing.

All of this means that to buy the book you want — to buy Kara Swisher’s Burn Book instead of Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist — you have to know what you’re looking for and pay a modicum of attention to your purchase.

Who wants to do that? Especially in a marketplace like Amazon, where we are trained to buy quickly and thoughtlessly with a single click and where writers have been trained to send their wares without even thinking about it because where else are you going to sell an ebook.

It’s so difficult for most authors to make a living from their writing that we sometimes lose track of how much money there is to be made from books, if only we could save costs on the laborious, time-consuming process of writing them.

The internet, though, has always been a safe harbor for those with plans to innovate that pesky writing part out of the actual book publishing. On the internet, it’s possible to copy text from one platform and paste it into another seamlessly, to share text files, to build vast databases of stolen books. If you wanted to design a place specifically to pirate and sleazily monetize books, it would be hard to do better than the internet as it has long existed.

Now, generative AI has made it possible to create cover images, outlines, and even text at the click of a button.

If, as they used to say, everyone has a book in them, AI has created a world where tech utopianists dream openly about excising the human part of writing a book — any amount of artistry or craft or even just sheer effort — and replacing it with machine-generated streams of text; as though putting in the labor of writing is a sucker’s game; as though caring whether or not what you’re reading is nonsense is only for elitists. The future is now, and it is filled with trash books that no one bothered to really write and that certainly no one wants to read.

The saddest part about it, though, is that the garbage books don’t actually make that much money either. It’s even possible to lose money generating your low-quality ebook to sell on Kindle for $0.99. The way people make money these days is by teaching students the process of making a garbage ebook. It’s grift and garbage all the way down — and the people who ultimately lose out are the readers and writers who love books.

None of this is happening through any willful malice, per se, on the part of the platforms that now run publishing and book-selling. It’s happening more because the platforms are set up to incentivize everything to cost as little as possible, even if it’s garbage.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Ashley Vanicek said, “We aim to provide the best possible shopping, reading, and publishing experience, and we are constantly evaluating developments that impact that experience, which includes the rapid evolution and expansion of generative AI tools.”

Yet the garbage books predate the problem of AI. Here’s how they get made in the first place.

The scammy underbelly of online self-publishing

These days, the trash ebook publishing landscape is fully saturated with grifters. There are blogs that talk about the industry, but they tend to be clickbait sites riddled with SEO keywords and affiliate links back and forth between each other. Virtually every single part of the self-publishing grift world that can be automated or monetized has been automated and monetized.

If you look a few years back, however, you find a very different landscape. In the internet of the early 2010s, lots of people were excited about making money with trash ebooks and trash audiobooks, but they weren’t yet all trying to scam one another on top of their eventual readers. They wrote real blogs about the process of the grift with their real human voices. They distinguished between schemes that were “white hat” (following the rules) and “black hat” (violating some terms of service). They compared strategies and teachers of strategies.

According to the blogs of the era, one of the most infamous teachers was a man who went by Luca de Stefani, or Big Luca. Legend had it he held the world record for making the most money using Kindle Publishing in a single day. What set Big Luca’s Self Publishing Revolution course apart from the rest — Big Luca’s “black hat breadwinner video lesson,” per one review — was that he gave his students access to a secret Facebook group where self-publishers organized review swaps and buys.

For the self-publishing grift, good reviews are crucial. The more five-star reviews a book has, the more likely Amazon’s algorithm is to push it toward readers. If you’re mostly publishing trash books, you’re not going to get tons of five-star reviews organically. Big Luca’s Facebook group gave grifters a place to offer to swap five-star reviews or sell five-star reviews for $0.99 a pop. As far as Amazon’s algorithm was concerned, there was no difference between that kind of review and the one a real reader might leave. The results were extremely lucrative.

Luca didn’t invent this formula. He learned it from the OG self-publishing grift course K Money Mastery, now apparently defunct, where he excelled.

Eventually, Big Luca had wrung all the money he could from the self-publishing hustle. He climbed up to the next level of the pyramid and became a teacher, and in 2016, the lore goes, a man named Christian Mikkelsen enrolled in Big Luca’s Self Publishing Revolution.

The Mikkelsen twins are named Christian and Rasmus, and they are 28 years old. They have dark blond hair and blue eyes and meticulously groomed facial hair, and they always seem to be posting to Instagram from luxurious private pools that are also somehow exotic beaches. They have managed, in what must be fairly acknowledged as a feat of branding wizardry, to hold on to the domain Publishing.com, and there they peddle their wares: a course they say can help students make a lifetime of easy cash off the revenue from books they don’t even have to bother to write themselves. If they happen to land a student who wants to write a book in good faith and just doesn’t understand how to sell their book on their own, well, they’re happy to take money from that student, too.

According to a profile in Inc., Christian found his way into the self-publishing world by googling “how to make money online.” His first book was a brief ebook titled How to Be a 4.0 Student in College, Like Me. Big Luca’s method apparently served him well enough that he thought it would be worthwhile to bring his twin Rasmus into the fold.

Together, the Mikkelsens published trash book after trash book, guides to keto and sex and crystals. Then they started running their manuscripts through Google Translate to start selling foreign language editions, an innovation on the old grift that bumped their income into six figures and, after a few months, got Amazon to block their publishing account. The time had come, as Inc. would put it, to “do what entrepreneurs do”: pivot. They started a YouTube channel so they could teach the business of self-publishing to anyone else who wanted to learn. Six months and 1,000 subscribers later, they launched their first paywalled online course.

First it was called Audiobook Impact Academy. Then it was Publishing Life. Now, with AI an ever-more-fashionable buzzword, it’s AI Publishing Academy. It’s always more or less the same method, with a few new tweaks in every new iteration. But the method doesn’t change as much as you might think.

How the garbage books get made: A case study

If you want to take the Mikkelsen course, the first thing you do is sit through their sales pitch. It runs for two hours, and it’s just a video of Christian sitting in a dark room, drinking thirstily from a water bottle as he shows you screencaps of his students’ royalty checks and repeats that he is already rich; he doesn’t have to show you how to make this kind of money. He’s doing it for fun.

Christian’s offer is, he says, unbeatable. He will show you how to produce a book without having to write it. “What used to be the hardest part in the process — which was creating that book that you upload onto Amazon — is now the easiest part, and the most fun,” Christian explains. “Because AI can help do that for you.”

Specifically, AI will write your outline for you. The twins feel that the quality isn’t there on purely AI-generated books yet; they demand better for their readers than AI prose. Still, they say using AI to outline saves their students weeks of researching their own manuscripts.

That AI is part of but not central to the process is a helpful talking point for the Mikkelsens as Amazon strengthens its regulations against purely AI-generated text for sale.

“Last year we began requiring all publishers using our Kindle Direct Publishing service to provide information about whether their content is AI-generated and further reduced the total number of titles that can be published in a day,” said Amazon spokesperson Vanicek. Vanicek added that they have “a robust set of methods” to detect content that violates their guidelines, and they regularly remove those books and sometimes suspend the publishing accounts of repeat offenders.

“The thought of human creativity being overshadowed by robots isn’t exactly the prettiest picture,” Christian wrote in a (suspiciously ChatGPT-sounding) blog post in March. “But we’re here to set the record straight. There are two camps of AI use out there: AI-generated and AI-assisted. They are completely different.”

In April, however, the Mikkelsens announced that they were preparing to launch a new proprietary AI program, Publishing.ai, that they promise will write a manuscript for you, “Soooo much faster than a ghostwriter!”

Under the Mikkelsen model, you also don’t have to pick your own topic. They give you access to keyword scrapers that have pulled trending topics off Kindle and Audible. And once AI is finished with your outline, you can send it over to a ghostwriter to turn into a book for a mere $500. For a 30,000-word book, that works out to a fee of $0.016667 per word. (The Mikkelsens work with a ghostwriting company developed by two former students. There, ghostwriters get hired on a freelance basis and are kept anonymous.)

Once you have your manuscript, Christian promises, the twins will show you how to hire audiobook narrators for a flat $20 fee by haggling their prices down. They’ll introduce you to a network of people who are generous with their five-star ratings and will push your book up the algorithmic Amazon rankings for you. All you have to do is sit back and collect your royalty checks as you rake in month after month of passive income.

As Christian talks, he seems to cast a kind of hypnotic spell. You start to wonder: “Am I stupid for not having invested in ebook publishing before now?” You see five-figure check after five-figure check. A ticking clock turns on. Christian wants to give you a special rate for the course. The course is worth $15,500. The regular price is $6,000. But he’s willing to give it to you for just $1,995 as long as you’re one of the first people to sign up after the webinar ends!

None of what the Mikkelsens are describing here is illegal, but if you know the norms of publishing, you know it’s unethical. As documentarian Dan Olson lays out in a lengthy 2022 deep dive into the Mikkelsens, their method of publishing means developing a book you’re probably not qualified to write. It used to mean paying a ghostwriter starvation-level wages to churn out a manuscript; now it means creating a book likely riddled with misinformation and minimal means of correcting it. It means deceiving readers with fake reviews. (That one can get you kicked off Amazon if you get caught.)

If you aren’t versed in publishing’s industry standards, however, the Mikkelsen model can seem incredibly attractive.

“I was like, ‘Yup, this would be great.’ I was totally vibing with it,” recalls Jennifer (whose name has been changed to protect her privacy), a 37-year-old in Virginia, who signed up for the twins’ course in September. She had recently written and self-published her own book on Amazon, but she wasn’t sure what to do to start promoting it.

The twins’ sales pitch struck her as the perfect solution: She could provide her ideas, people who were good with words could rewrite her draft and polish the whole thing up into a sales-ready package, and everyone would get paid. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to invest and make this a better thing.”

“It was a very efficient, friendly, interactive webinar,” recalls Cecilia (also not her real name), a Seattle-based 50-year-old who works in the health space. She signed up for the twins’ seminar in September, and she remembers being pleasantly won over by that two-hour sales pitch. It seemed to be so transparent. “It promoted trustworthiness,” she says.

Once Jennifer and Cecilia had turned over their money for the course, both of them changed their minds fast.

“I started listening to the modules,” Jennifer says. “And I don’t know how else to describe them” — there is a long, expressive pause — “but as a jet stream of bullshit.”

“All it does is tell you to buy different products,” Jennifer recalls of the Mikkelsen course. “It’s like there’s nothing that they actually provide themselves, other than ‘Go buy other people’s products’ — and I’m sure they own those too, right?” (We can’t confirm that the Mikkelsens do own the products they recommend, but the ghostwriting company they work with is run by former Mikkelsen students.)

The course cost $2,000, but that wasn’t enough. To get a Mikkelsen-approved topic for your book, you had to pay for access to the software that analyzed Amazon keywords to tell you what was trending. To create the perfect outline, you had to pay for access to the AI that outlined and drafted your book for you. You had to pay for the cover design and for the reviewers. The $2,000 fee was supposed to guarantee you frequent one-on-one calls with a publishing coach, but the coaching calls were mostly about upselling to the premium $7,800 course, Jennifer says.

After a few weeks of phone calls, Cecilia decided she had had enough of the program and asked for her money back. She didn’t expect it would be a problem, since the course was advertised as fully refundable. Customer service reps then told her that, to qualify for a refund, she had to prove she’d sat through the whole course, published a book, and failed to make her money back. She says she had to threaten to call the attorney general before they sent her money back without such proof.

Jennifer wrote off her $2,000 as the cost of learning a bad lesson, but she wanted to warn other people against making the same mistake. She posted a negative review of Publishing.com on the user review site TrustPilot, where it has a 4.7 rating. So did Cecilia. Both of them found their reviews queried by TrustPilot, which required them to submit proof of going through the course in order to keep their reviews up. Most of the course’s five-star reviews, however, remain unverified. I reached out to some of the five-star TrustPilot reviewers to get their take on the Mikkelsens’ course, but I never heard back from any of them.

After the Mikkelsens’ course got big, the rumors on Reddit say Big Luca was furious that they’d ripped off his business model. He used to brag that he was going to drag them into court. Instead, he got out of the self-publishing game.

Now he runs a program called Big Luca International or, more informally, School for the Rich, self-described as “the world’s leading company in online marketing training.” It’s supposed to teach you how to monetize any online business — the self-publishing black hat breadwinning tricks, extrapolated out to all the other industries of the internet. With the advent of AI, it’s easier than ever to flood the whole digital ecosystem with trash in pursuit of passive income.

The neverending grift

“It sucks that I did this,” Jennifer says of her experience at AI Publishing Academy. “But I mean, it’s put some fire under my butt to do it [marketing] myself for my own books.”

Jennifer didn’t set out to make a quick buck with a garbage ebook. She did the work of writing a book because she believed in it. The Mikkelsens got her because she couldn’t figure out how to sell her book on her own, and part of the reason she couldn’t sell it is because the marketplace is already so flooded with books. Many of which are garbage books.

The Mikkelsens are not the chief villains of this story. They are small-time operators working one level of a very big grift industry. The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books. Together, without ever caring enough about the issue to deliberately try to do so, they have built a landscape in which it’s hard to trust what you read and hard to sell what you write.

The incentives of the modern book-selling economy for writers are to keep your costs low, low, low and your volume high, high, high, and definitely put your book on Amazon because where else are you going to sell an ebook? The incentive of the modern book-buying economy for readers is to go onto Amazon and lazily click around with a few search terms, and then buy the first book that looks right with the click of a single button. The incentives are, in other words, driving us all straight into a flood of garbage.

That’s what the grift does. It finds every spot in the process of making and selling a book that is inconvenient or laborious, and it exploits those spots. It exploits our cultural belief that books are meaningful, that writing a book is a valuable act, that reading a book will enrich your life. When it’s finished, you’re left with something that’s not a real book but a book-shaped digital file filled with nothing of any use to anyone at all.

Companies sometimes match donations to charity. What if the government did too?

Imagine a charity comes to you with an offer. If you give them a donation now, they’ll get it at least partially matched — so for every dollar you give, a wealthy benefactor will add 25 cents. Your giving has a higher bang for the buck than normal.

Now imagine the charity instead tells you that your gift might help your taxes ... but it probably won’t. In fact, there’s a 90 percent chance it will do nothing to reduce your tax burden. But there’s a small chance it will help. How much will it help? Hard to say; you might get anywhere from 10 to 37 percent of the donation back on your taxes next year, depending on a ton of other factors that have nothing to do with charity.

Which of these options sounds better to you? And more importantly: Which of them is more likely to spur you to donate?

The second option is how the United States charitable deduction currently works. It’s only available to people who “itemize” their deductions, meaning they eschew the standard deduction for specialized benefits based on mortgage payments, state taxes, and other factors. But barely 9 percent of filers even did that in 2021, and they are disproportionately wealthy ones.

How much the charitable deduction reduces your taxes, and thus benefits you, depends on your tax bracket, which means it could be worth as little as 10 percent of your gift or as much as 37 percent. It’s a complex, difficult-to-understand program, which surely limits how effective it can be at its main goal: encouraging Americans to give to charity.

The first option, the 25 cents on the dollar match? That’s what the United Kingdom does. When you donate to a charity there, you can check a box confirming you’re a UK taxpayer. The charity then gets a 25 percent match from the government on all donations from taxpayers.

The program is called Gift Aid, and it has helped the UK preserve its system of pay-as-you-earn income taxes, in which about two-thirds of Britons don’t have to file tax returns at all. Most things that would be deductions in the US instead exist outside the tax system in the UK, in programs like Gift Aid. It seems to work at making giving more popular: A recent global survey found that 71 percent of Britons donated to charity, compared to 61 percent of Americans, and a sharp contrast from the very low rates of giving in much of mainland Europe (37 percent in France, 42 percent in Italy).

It’s a simpler way to incentivize charity, and as Tax Policy Center economist Robert McClelland explains in a new report, it’s a more effective way too.

Many studies suggest matches are more effective than deductions

In recent decades, economists and psychologists have taken to conducting studies trying to uncover biases in the way people respond to economic situations, a research program known as “behavioral economics.” For instance, people tend to be more sad about losing something they have than happy when gaining something of equivalent value (“loss aversion”); they tend to put undue weight on the first thing they hear about a certain subject (“anchoring bias”).

Partly due to this research program, a number of economists have conducted experiments to see whether matching grants or a “rebate” like the charitable deduction work better. McClelland reviews many of these experiments and finds that they overwhelmingly show matches are more effective.

The team of Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman conducted many of these trials. A paper of theirs in 2003 found that a match was about three times as effective as a rebate; a 2017 paper includes three experiments, all of which find matches are more effective if your goal is maximizing the ultimate resources of the charity.

Gift Aid means a simpler, fairer tax system

The UK model has other advantages too. Gift Aid functions as a universal, refundable charitable credit of 20 percent, available to all of its residents regardless of their tax bracket or situation. It is not solely available to a minority of taxpayers who claim a special set of itemized deductions. It is available to all Britons regardless of income. That means a wider share of donors get their philanthropic preferences reflected.

The administration is also simpler than a credit because donors need not remember their donations when filing taxes. Administration for charities is also relatively simple, requiring only a report of eligible donations to His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. This is equivalent to the Form 990 reports already required of large charitable institutions in the United States. The additional reporting burden would be fairly minimal.

What’s more, this kind of approach would make it easier for the US to eliminate its itemized deductions, a long-held goal of tax reformers. Economists generally believe the home interest deduction is a disaster that makes homes more expensive and encourages excessive debt; the state and local tax deduction is mostly a regressive transfer to wealthy people in high-tax states. Eliminating the charitable deduction in favor of a Gift Aid program would reduce the number of people using these deductions too, by making itemizing less attractive overall.

If, as expected, Congress votes to continue the larger standard deduction passed as part of the Trump tax cuts in 2017 (and which is currently set to expire in 2025), these deductions will continue to be claimed by only a small share of taxpayers. Getting rid of the charitable deduction would make that share smaller still, and help shrink itemized deductions to a size where they might be junked entirely.

A Gift Aid program would also eliminate certain key abuses of the charitable deduction. In recent years, wealthy donors have flocked to “donor-advised funds,” investment vehicles at financial institutions like Fidelity or Charles Schwab that promise their proceeds will eventually be dispersed to charitable institutions. Donors receive immediate charitable deductions for their contributions to these funds, irrespective of when or even if their donations are actually dispersed (there is no time limit within which they have to spend the money). This has provoked attempts at reform meant to speed disbursement, but as of this writing, no reform has passed Congress.

More daringly, some taxpayers have used the charitable deduction to subsidize what amounts to personal consumption. A number of wealthy art collectors have in recent decades claimed large deductions for donations to museums they themselves have created — and which are rarely, if ever, open to the public. The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, located close to the home of its benefactor Peter Brant in Greenwich, Connecticut, provided Brant with tax breaks for all the art he endowed it with, despite only being open to the public by appointment.

Without a charitable deduction, these kinds of abuses would not be possible, and they would not be possible under a Gift Aid regime either. While a billionaire-controlled nonprofit art museum would be eligible for Gift Aid reimbursement, it would be legally required to use that money to further its philanthropic mission. By contrast, money a taxpayer saves due to the charitable deduction could be legally used for any purpose. Donor-advised funds could give to charities that then in turn receive Gift Aid subsidy, but the subsidy would only come when the funds were actually dispersed.

2025 is a time to get creative about taxes

While much of the focus today is on this year’s taxes — get them in by the end of the day — next year is set to be one of the most consequential years in a long while for the federal tax code.

Most of the individual provisions of the 2017 Trump tax cuts — the rate cuts, the larger standard deduction and child credit, limits on the state and local and mortgage interest deductions — are expiring. With Trump wanting to defend his legacy and Biden refusing to raise taxes on people earning under $400,000 a year, both parties desperately want to preserve the bulk of these cuts.

One of my biggest hopes is that they do this in a way that makes the code overall less, not more, complicated and reduces taxpayers’ burden in time and energy. Replacing the charitable deduction with a Gift Aid program would go a long way toward that, pushing the US further away from specialized deductions for this and that and toward a simpler system where everyone at a given income pays the same amount.

Taking the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a bold new visual direction has worked out phenomenally for Paramount in the past, but the studio’s next experiment with the characters feels like something that’s going to be tricky as hell to pull off well.

According to The Hollywood Reporter — Paramount is in the early stages of developing a live-action, R-rated film based on The Last Ronin, IDW’s 2020 comic that tells the story of how one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles grows up to become an even deadlier warrior following the death of his three siblings. The movie is set to be produced by former head of DC films Walter Hamada, and Boy Kills World co-writer Tyler Burton Smith is attached to write the script.

The comic series — written by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, and Tom Waltz and illustrated by Esau Escorza, Isaac Escorza, and Luis Antonio Delgado — was far darker than most classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stories and left readers guessing as to which member of the original quartet they were seeing eviscerate scores of people on the page. Coming after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, pivoting the Turtles IP back to live-action feels like a risky bet on Paramount’s part that’s going to remind everyone how nightmarish the 1990 adaptation was.

But as solid as the comics are, Paramount could be onto something with this new project, especially if it can find a creative team that has the right vision.

Rachel Treisman reports via NPR: Authorities in the Russian republic of Chechnya are banning music they consider either too fast or too slow, effectively criminalizing many genres. The Chechen Ministry of Culture announced the ban on its website last week, by the order of Culture Minister Musa Dadayev and with the agreement of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. "Musical, vocal and choreographic" works will be limited to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) to "conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm," said Dadayev, according to the Russian state-run news agency TASS. "Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible," Dadayev said, per a translation by The Guardian. "We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens." Russian media report that artists have until June 1 to rewrite any music that doesn't conform to the new rule, though it's not clear how it will be enforced. [...] The government's crackdown on certain musical tempos would silence most modern music genres. Electronic styles of music like house, techno and dubstep all tend to have BPMs of over 116, says the audio tech company Izotope, while the average tempo of 2020's best-selling pop songs was 122 BPM, according to the BBC. The independent Russian news outlet Meduza said the tempo of the Russian national anthem would be considered too slow under the new limit, reports RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty. But it would seem to permit hip-hop music, which generally has a BPM of 85 to 95. "Chechnya is a roughly 6,700-square-mile autonomous republic situated in the North Caucasus of southern Russia and home to some 1.5 million people, the vast majority of whom are Muslim," notes NPR. "The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has said Kadyrov's regime 'maintains hegemony through the imposition of a purported 'traditional' version of Islam, which falsely claims to defend local belief and culture, and combat violent extremism.'" "'In reality, Kadyrov has [co-opted] Chechen religion and culture to support his brutal regime, which violates the secular constitution of the Russian Federation and international standards of freedom of religion or belief,' it added."

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A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force AI companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. From a report: The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software-and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content. The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users' prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies. "AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives. We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections," Schiff said in a statement. Whether major AI companies worth billions have made illegal use of copyrighted works is increasingly the source of litigation and government investigation. Schiff's bill would not ban AI from training on copyrighted material, but would put a sizable onus on companies to list the massive swath of works that they use to build tools like ChatGPT -- data that is usually kept private.

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