Nathan Howard/AP

Justice Department lawyers including Kenneth Dintzer (center) and Megan Bellshaw (right) arrive for their antitrust case against Google, at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, Sept. 12, 2023.

The Google search engine is so dominant that its name is a verb recognized by dictionaries: to “google.” Competitors’ names, such as Bing and Yahoo, don’t have a similar popular meaning. 

That lexical edge reflects something else, according to the U.S. Department of Justice: an illegal grip on the search engine market. On Tuesday, the largest U.S. antitrust suit in 25 years kicked off in federal court, with prosecutors charging that Google has used its market power to intimidate its industry partners, block its direct competitors, and stifle innovation in a foundational internet technology.

The lawsuit comes as icons of American Big Tech – Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon – are grappling with the vast technical challenge of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence advances. Ripples from the suit’s outcome could help shape the tech business landscape as it enters the new AI era.

“It’s potentially very big,” says Daniel Rubinfeld, a professor of law at New York University who was an assistant attorney general and consultant to the Justice Department during its Microsoft antitrust suit in the late 1990s.

What do prosecutors accuse Google of doing?

Google’s market position is not just dominant – it is overwhelming. Currently, Google accounts for around 90% of the search engine market worldwide. The Justice Department, along with state allies, charges in its lawsuit that Google reached and maintained this position by abusing its market power and becoming a monopoly in its corner of the online world.

Specifically, prosecutors in federal court on Tuesday claimed that Google unlawfully stifled competition by paying upward of $10 billion a year to Apple and other business partners to ensure its search engine would be the default setting on most phones and web browsers. Prosecutors alleged these deals were designed to be “exclusionary” – in other words, intended to block consumers from even gaining access to competing search engines.

From the start, Google was aware of the market-warping power of these arrangements, said prosecutors, citing an internal company document that called them an “Achilles heel” for Microsoft, Yahoo, and other search engine producers.

Prosecutors say Google further rigged the market by requiring its search engine be bundled with its Android smartphone software if manufacturers of phones or other devices want full access to the Android app store.

“This case is about the future of the internet and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead litigator, said at the opening of the trial in Washington.

What is Google’s defense?

In contrast, Google says that its business practices are unremarkable and accepted, akin to cereal or soda companies’ paying for shelf space at local supermarkets. 

Google lawyers on the trial’s first day also emphasized that the company does indeed face competition, not just from deep-pocketed direct foes such as Microsoft, with its Bing search engine, but also from indirect competitors such as websites Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can find information, comparing products or even entire stores. Google may be the default browser on many devices, but it is easy to change that setting and opt for a competitor, the lawyers say.

The reason more users don’t change is that Google is the best search product in the market, updated by constant tinkering, said the firm’s lawyers on Tuesday. 

What the government is trying to do is hinder Google’s ability to compete, “all in the hopes that forcing people to use inferior products in the short run will somehow be good for competition in the long run,” said attorney John Schmidtlein, a partner at the law firm Williams & Connolly, which is representing Google.

What are the stakes?

The Google court trial begins only a few weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first outside investment in the company, which provided founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin enough money to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage. 

Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, is a giant of the Silicon Valley economy. It employs 182,000 people and is worth $1.7 trillion. Its main income stream is $224 billion in annual advertisement sales from a network of digital services anchored by its search engine.

If Google loses, its wealth and stature would likely wane. The Justice Department and its allies say they are not seeking monetary penalties, but bans on what they claim are the company’s anti-competitive practices. This could hobble the firm at a time when some industry experts predict the entire ecosystem of the internet could change due to the rise of AI-generated content and services.

The case more generally is also a wrestling match between Big Tech and Big Government. Many lawmakers from both sides of the aisle worry that a handful of giant corporations now have too much influence over our increasingly online lives. Can laws written for older eras help control the wild river of the internet? Or has technology progressed to the point where it is almost impossible for regulations to work? 

Could the past be prologue?

In some ways, the Google case is an echo of an older lawsuit – the 1998 antitrust complaint filed by the Justice Department against Microsoft.

That suit accused Microsoft of forcing computer makers that relied on its then-dominant Windows operating system to also feature Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, just as internet traffic was exploding.

“They sound very similar when you look at them very broadly, from a legal point of view,” says Professor Rubinfeld of New York University. “In terms of actual substance, they’re quite different because the world has changed in 25 years.”

Back then, Microsoft was by far the biggest redwood in the tech forest, while today Google is one among a number of giants. Microsoft founder Bill Gates was a household name in a way today’s tech CEOs generally are not, with the possible exception of Elon Musk.

A federal judge found Microsoft guilty of antitrust violations. Eventually, the administration of President George W. Bush struck a deal with the firm, under which Microsoft agreed to allow more open competition for PC software providers.

Among the small firms that took root in this newly open environment was Google. Now it is the established firm perhaps looking to maintain its position and defend itself from more flexible upstarts.

“The fact that Google was, and I think still is, very creative, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily immune from antitrust liability,” says Professor Rubinfeld.

Back from their long summer break, House Republicans took their first concrete step toward impeaching President Biden on Tuesday – a step they say the GOP base is increasingly demanding.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, of California, announced today that he was directing three Republican committee chairs to launch an impeachment inquiry into Mr. Biden, which he said was “the next logical step” building on their investigations into his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business deals. 

“The American people deserve to know their public offices are not for sale and that the federal government is not being used to cover up the actions of a politically associated family,” Speaker McCarthy told reporters in a brief press conference this morning. 

Mr. McCarthy’s decision to move forward without a vote, which he had promised to hold, has been widely interpreted as an effort to placate members of the right-wing Freedom Caucus. He needs the support of the caucus to remain speaker and to preserve the GOP’s razor-thin majority in the House. But his move could further complicate his ability to lead as the House enters a crunch period of budget negotiations, with the government set to run out of money on Sept. 30.

The previous two GOP speakers were also hamstrung by pressure from the right wing, with John Boehner forced to resign as a result. But Mr. McCarthy faces a new twist: The Freedom Caucus is not united on pursuing impeachment, with some seeing it as a distraction from getting the spending cuts they had promised their constituents. The speaker will need to tap every ounce of his renowned powers to persuade behind the scenes in order to navigate the next few weeks without a political disaster for the party – or his own career.

“This is a baby step following weeks of pressure from House conservatives to do more,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and Freedom Caucus member, on the House floor this afternoon. 

He called on Mr. McCarthy to subpoena Hunter Biden and members of the Biden family “who have been grifting off this country,” and to make good on the agreement the Californian made with the caucus in order to become speaker in January – including holding votes on term limits and a balanced budget. Otherwise, Congressman Gaetz threatened to bring a vote to remove Mr. McCarthy as speaker. 

But Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, another Freedom Caucus member, had cautioned against moving forward with an impeachment vote.

“We’re not going to get an impeachment through the Senate,” he said in an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, adding that Republicans need to stay focused on issues like inflation, crime, and the border. 

Facing pushback from within his party, on Tuesday he tweeted that Mr. McCarthy made the right decision not to take up House floor time with an impeachment vote and focus instead on spending, while letting the Oversight committee lead an inquiry.

Three House committees – Judiciary, Oversight, and Ways and Means – have been investigating Hunter Biden and his foreign business ties for months, but have yet to prove that his father profited from such deals. Mr. McCarthy argued that opening a formal inquiry would equip them with more investigatory powers. Under such an inquiry, committees will not have to prove a legislative justification for their requests and subpoenas.

GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley, a veteran investigator of government wrongdoing who has helped lead the Senate charge to look into Hunter Biden, voiced support for the inquiry.

“I’m not telling the House what to do, but you know how much trouble I’ve had getting information,” he told a handful of reporters en route to a vote, noting that even the House GOP, which has subpoena power, has had trouble getting to the bottom of the issue. “So if the inquiry gets the information, it seems to me that I ought to applaud that effort.”

Mr. Gaetz and others pointed out that they have not yet fully used the powers at their disposal, including subpoenaing Hunter Biden and members of the Biden family.

The White House called the inquiry effort “extreme politics at its worst.”

“House Republicans have been investigating the President for 9 months, and they’ve turned up no evidence of wrongdoing," Ian Sams, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “His own Republican members have said so.”

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.

Matt Rourke/AP/File

A Twitter app icon, since changed to "X," is displayed on a mobile phone in 2017. The White House was concerned about COVID-19 information presented on Twitter.

A few weeks after he was dubbed “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by The Atlantic, Alex Berenson’s name came up in an April 2021 White House meeting with Twitter representatives.

Officials were keen to address how people were being influenced online against the COVID-19 vaccine, with only about 4 in 10 people having gotten the shot. Senior White House adviser Andy Slavitt said it didn’t seem like Twitter was enforcing its rules against Mr. Berenson, citing an MIT data visualization that showed him as the “epicenter” of misinformation around the vaccine.

A former New York Times investigative journalist turned COVID-19 contrarian, Mr. Berenson frequently linked to scientific studies and government data. But critics said his posts were dangerously misleading, often leaving out key context. 

Twitter followed up a week or two later. They would not be removing Mr. Berenson.

Government officials’ frustration with Twitter and other social media platforms intensified, boiling over in mid-July 2021 when President Joe Biden said “they’re killing people” – though he later said he meant specific users, not the platforms themselves. Hours later, Mr. Berenson’s Twitter account was suspended for the first time. By August, he was kicked off entirely. 

Mr. Berenson sued Twitter, and was later reinstated after a settlement. But now, he is suing current and former administration officials as well as a Pfizer board member and the company’s CEO for allegedly working together to get him censored. His case also argues that he lost out on the opportunity to promote his November 2021 book, “Pandemia,” to his Twitter audience of more than 300,000.

Mr. Berenson’s case is one of several lawsuits and congressional investigations alleging government censorship on social media, not only regarding the COVID-19 vaccine but also on topics such as the pandemic’s origins, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and allegations about the 2020 presidential election. In a related but broader free speech case, Missouri v. Biden, an appeals court ruled on Friday that the government had indeed run afoul of First Amendment rights by coercing social media platforms to suppress disfavored speech. That case is likely to go to the Supreme Court. 

Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Sipa/AP/FIle

Former New York Times reporter and COVID-19 vaccine critic Alex Berenson addresses attendees at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 24, 2022.

These lawsuits represent the first major pushback against the Biden administration’s efforts to curb COVID-19 misinformation. They could have broader impacts on everything from public health officials’ ability to lead in times of crisis to what users see on social media. 

The White House and the Department of Justice, which is representing the administration in both cases, both declined to comment for this article. But the DOJ argues in court documents that the plaintiffs did not prove a causal link between government officials’ conversations with social media companies and the platforms’ misinformation policy decisions. Moreover, allies say, the government has not only the right but the responsibility to speak out on issues affecting the public welfare.

“I think governments have a duty to inform their citizenry,” says Nina Jankowicz, who headed the Biden administration’s short-lived Disinformation Governance Board and was initially named in the Missouri v. Biden case. 

“I am not in favor of any sort of censorship from the government – deciding what is true or false and then issuing penalties,” she adds. But she takes issue with comparing posts on social media to protests in a public square. “Individuals don’t have a right to say falsehoods at scale to millions of people, or direct them precisely to the people who are going to be most vulnerable to these narratives.” 

Fallout over the censorship of dissenting views on COVID-19, some of which turned out to be correct, has already damaged trust in public health officials. It may also spur Congress to erect new guardrails circumscribing how government can interact with Big Tech, which could limit the ability to curb misinformation and disinformation. And the courts’ rulings could have a profound effect on future scientific and societal debates, not only surrounding things like vaccines but also on other divisive issues, such as climate change. 

“A prosperous, scientifically advanced society depends on the right to dissent, especially in science and medicine,” says Philip Hamburger, a Columbia law professor and head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing four of the five individual plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden. “Censorship not only suppresses some Americans, it also leaves the rest of us blind.” 

White House/AP

Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House COVID-19 Response Team, speaks during a White House briefing on the Biden administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington in this video image from Jan. 27, 2021.

Is a government “request” coercive? 

Three days before Mr. Slavitt, a senior adviser on the White House’s COVID-19 response, brought up Mr. Berenson with Twitter on April 21, 2021, he had posed similarly tough questions to Facebook executive Nick Clegg. In an email, Mr. Clegg summarized their hour-long call for his colleagues, writing that Mr. Slavitt was “outraged” that Facebook had not taken down a highly ranked meme that he said would inhibit confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine. The email came from a trove of internal Facebook documents obtained by House Republicans who, angered by what they believe to be government-orchestrated suppression of conservative viewpoints, last month signed on to the Missouri suit. 

“I countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” wrote Mr. Clegg. But he concluded by recommending that Facebook take stock of its relations with the White House.

While social media companies repeatedly rebuffed such requests from the administration, the backdrop was a growing push from the White House and Congress to change a law known as Sect. 230 that could have profound implications for platforms’ operations, influence, and bottom line. Under the current law, they cannot be held liable for third-party content on their sites – a government-provided immunity that has enabled them to grow into massively influential and profitable entities.

On July 20, 2021, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said on MSNBC that the White House was reviewing Sect. 230 and “assessing whether social media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms.”

“Certainly, they should be held accountable,” she said. 

Mr. Clegg recommended that Facebook consider making some course corrections, “given the bigger fish we have to fry with the Administration.” 

A key question in both lawsuits is whether the requests officials made of social media platforms, juxtaposed against the administration’s ability to affect their bottom line with policy decisions, amount to coercion. 

“You don’t even need to say, ‘There will be consequences’ when you’re in the White House,” says Mr. Berenson.

But proving coercion is difficult, and the government’s lawyers have argued that neither case identifies any concrete demands that were backed by threats. They also point to the fact that the platforms repeatedly rebuffed government requests to suppress certain content, arguing that that proves they were acting independently. 

While White House officials did urge platforms to remove content they considered problematic, and expressed frustration that social media companies were not being fully transparent about their algorithms and data, exchanges that have since been made public also suggest the government was genuinely trying to understand a highly complex, technical issue.

“If people do their own homework, we ought to trust them. Not everyone will choose to get a vaccine,” said Mr. Slavitt, according to internal Facebook notes of an April 14, 2021, meeting. He noted that he didn’t regard news about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine being temporarily suspended for safety reasons as misinformation, or even problematic.

What did concern him, he said, was people being “unduly influenced” – including by those who misrepresent data, knowingly or unknowingly. “We want to know the most effective way to respond.”

Much of the debate has focused on the pros and cons of content moderation – but some experts say that approach has limited value, given that most misinformation is seen shortly after posting. Laura Edelson, a computer scientist who worked on the Virality Project, which tracked COVID-19 misinformation and shared findings with the government, says a better solution lies in designing improved algorithms. That would enable platforms to combat the spread of misinformation without infringing on free speech, she adds. 

“I think people need to stop thinking about these two goals as being in tension, because I just don’t think that they are,” she says.

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry testifies about the Missouri v. Biden case on Capitol Hill in Washington, March 30, 2023.

What does this mean societally?

Missouri v. Biden alleges that the government coerced social media platforms to suppress dissenting viewpoints – including those expressed by plaintiffs Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, epidemiologists at Harvard and Stanford, respectively. 

One of the main examples they give is “an organized campaign” against the Great Barrington Declaration, which they co-wrote with Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta. Published in October 2020, it called for replacing broad government-mandated COVID-19 restrictions with a more narrow focus on protecting vulnerable individuals, while lifting the lockdowns for everyone else to avoid other harms. It has since been co-signed by nearly 1 million people, including more than 62,000 scientists and health care professionals.

About a week after publication, the co-authors noticed that Google’s search results led with criticism of the declaration instead of the declaration itself, despite other search engines still showing it as a top hit. Facebook took down the Great Barrington Declaration page for a week. Reddit removed links to it.

Declarations from Drs. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya note that these actions were in line with a behind-the-scenes request from the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, to Dr. Anthony Fauci and another colleague for a “quick and devastating published take down” of the declaration’s premises, though there’s no evidence that the officials contacted those platforms about the matter specifically. Both epidemiologists say they were also personally censored on social media. 

“The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’ ” wrote Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana when he issued a preliminary injunction July 4 that barred dozens of agencies and officials from working with social media platforms to address protected free speech. “Each United States citizen has the right to decide for himself or herself what is true and what is false.”

The government appealed, but on Sept. 8 the Fifth Circuit partially upheld the injunction, blocking certain federal entities and officials from “significantly encourag[ing]” social media companies to suppress content. These officials included Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the successors to Mr. Slavitt and then-Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty – all of whom are also defendants in Mr. Berenson’s case.

In the Berenson case, the defense filed a motion to dismiss last month, arguing that Mr. Berenson did not prove a causal link between federal officials’ requests and Twitter’s decision to remove him on Aug. 28, 2021. On that same day, former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb, who left government and became a Pfizer board member, had contacted Twitter about a Berenson tweet which said that the COVID-19 vaccine doesn’t stop infection or transmission and has a “terrible side effect profile.” “And we want to mandate it? Insanity,” Mr. Berenson wrote. 

He was deplatformed that day. Less than two weeks later, President Biden announced vaccine mandates for all federal employees and large businesses, and extended mandates for health care workers to cover 17 million people. 

A decision on the defense’s motion to dismiss Mr. Berenson’s case is expected later this year. 

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist who advised the Biden transition team on COVID-19 issues including misinformation, says there’s not a simple answer in how to weigh the value of a robust public debate that includes fringe views against a more controlled information environment that may turn out not to be 100% correct.

“The problem is, first of all, the facts do change,” he says, noting that frequently in fast-moving situations, people are dealing with incomplete data. 

Secondly, “the interpretation of data is, in science, often contested – that’s the nature of research and science,” he adds, noting that today everyone, not just experts, can read scientific journals as soon as they’re published. “What the appropriate response is – even if we agreed on the facts – is also highly contested.”

Critics say that when the government tries to become the arbiter of truth, particularly if it is censoring not only factually untrue statements but also misleading or politically inconvenient ones, citizens lose trust. And while COVID-19 misinformation policies might have mostly irked conservatives, liberals would likely care just as much if the same approach were taken to issues that matter more to them. 

“The government, every government, always has an incentive to silence people with messages that they don’t like – that’s why we have a First Amendment,” says John Vecchione, one of the lead counsels in the Missouri case. “Would you want your worst political enemy to have the power that the government used in this case against you and your posts?”

As Mexicans prepare for Independence Day festivities this week, including the traditional midnight grito, or shout, aspiring nurse Flora Espinosa says this year she’ll be screaming in celebration of Mexican women.

That’s because in the span of a few hours on Sept. 6, many like Ms. Espinosa felt a shift in women’s standing. The Supreme Court decriminalized abortion, expanding reproductive rights, and the ruling party chose a woman as its presidential candidate, matching the opposition, meaning Mexico is almost guaranteed to have its first presidenta next year.

“It gives me butterflies,” says Ms. Espinosa, sipping coffee through a straw on her morning commute. “I’m not used to this; I’m actually feeling hopeful for women.”

Mexico may be a byword for machismo and have sky-high rates of femicide, but in recent years the country has also led the way in ensuring gender parity in politics. Women hold half of all congressional seats and Cabinet positions. And social movements, such as the mothers of children who have disappeared amid historic levels of violence, have become important political players, increasingly well organized and hard to sideline.

A woman president doesn’t guarantee a political agenda focused on women’s rights, cautions Esperanza Palma, a political scientist at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Azcapotzalco, and it will take time to ensure that doctors respect the Supreme Court ruling. But these recent moves are reasons for hope, she says.

“This is Mexican women’s moment,” she says, pointing to the years of feminist-led organization and persistence that laid the groundwork for last week’s developments. “These are historic achievements, and we can feel optimistic.”

Eduardo Verdugo/AP

A woman hangs a portrait of a missing person during a march demanding the government do more to locate the 111,000 people who have disappeared in 10 years of cartel and gang violence in Mexico.

A more just society?

For decades, Latin America has been known for some of the most restrictive abortion policies in the world. But in recent years, countries such as Argentina and Colombia – and now Mexico – have begun dismantling restrictions on reproductive rights.

“This is a request from civil society that’s getting louder. Courts are listening. Governments are trying to listen,” says Alejandra Coll, advocacy adviser for the Center for Reproductive Rights in Colombia. 

Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling did not instantaneously do away with criminal penalties for abortion, which are still in effect in 20 of 32 states. But for those who use national health care services, regardless of where they live, the decision guarantees them legal access to an abortion, and doctors nationwide no longer face legal consequences for carrying out an abortion. The ruling is expected to serve as an impetus for more states to adopt the federal norm.

“We are moving towards a more just society, in which the rights of all are respected,” Sen. Olga Sánchez Cordero, a former Supreme Court justice, told the national newspaper Milenio last week.

Dr. Palma attributes the recent expansions of reproductive rights to a broader appreciation of gender perspective. “Incorporating an understanding of international mandates, and considering human rights and women’s rights in how decisions are made – it’s a reflection of a new generation of decision-makers,” she says.

Not all women are so enthusiastic.

“I wouldn’t call abortion a win for Mexican women,” says Magdalena Valero, selling pastries and coffee from a folding table outside a metro station one recent morning. “Mexico’s problems like organized crime or violence against women, they all come down to society forgetting family values. That should be the focus for making Mexico a better place for women or for anyone,” she says.

But, Ms. Valero acknowledges, her two teenage grandchildren disagree. “They tell me it is progress,” she says. “Only God knows.”

Henry Romero/Reuters

Former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum raises hands with party colleagues the day she was declared the presidential candidate for Mexico's ruling party.

Coming up in ’24 - “Señora Presidenta”

On the same day as the court’s ruling last week, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former mayor of Mexico City, was declared the ruling Morena party’s candidate in the 2024 presidential elections. Earlier, the Broad Front for Mexico, a coalition of leading opposition parties, had tapped Indigenous senator and businesswoman Xóchitl Gálvez as its candidate.

Though Mexican women voted for the first time only in 1958, Mexico is now set to elect its first female president before the United States does.

Electoral gender quotas were first introduced in the 1990s, as Mexico emerged from decades of single-party rule, but political parties found ways to work around a requirement that 30% of candidates be women. Civil society groups, such as Mujeres en Plural, helped make parity a reality, taking their complaints to federal court.

Their dedication helped lead to constitutional changes, including the Political-Electoral Reform in 2014 and a 2019 reform that introduced the concept of “parity in everything.”  That demands gender parity in all government positions, at all levels, where public decisions are made.

The proportion of women in politics climbed from 15% in 1994 to 50% in 2021.

Today women serve as president of the national electoral commission, head of the Supreme Court, presidents of the Senate and Congress, and head of the Bank of Mexico, among other high-profile positions.

“We’ve been focused for so long on the quantitative, but now that we have reached parity, there’s more focus on the qualitative,” says Marisol Vázquez, a member of Mujeres en Plural, a network of politicians, academics, journalists, artists, activists, and professionals working for the political empowerment of women.

Henry Romero/Reuters

Xóchitl Gálvez, a Mexican senator for the opposition National Action Party, will be her party's presidential candidate in elections next year.

“Sure, you’re a woman and you’re on the ballot,” she says, “but what’s your agenda? How do your plans affect women? There are two women candidates for president this year, but it’s because they were the best candidates for each party.”

Both were selected through polls of party members, points out Dr. Palma. “That’s to say there seems to be a change in public perceptions around what it means to have a female candidate. It says women have the power, the presence in political parties, and can win over the public.”

But victories for women in politics have not translated directly to other spheres. Mexican women are underrepresented at all levels in the private sector, according to a 2022 report by the consulting firm McKinsey, and their participation in the labor market is among the lowest in Latin America. Femicides are a distressing reality, with an estimated 10 women and girls killed in Mexico every day.

Despite her optimism, Dr. Palma is not running any victory laps yet. “I wouldn’t want to build up my expectations too high,” she says. “Women, like men, have party ties and limitations. They have to respond to other interests, and they will inherit the complex problems of the country” like overwhelming organized crime, she points out.

“Politicians are full of surprises,” she warns. “Sometimes the triumphs are not long term. We could see setbacks.”

For much of her teaching career, Carrie Stark relied on math games to engage her students, assuming they would pick up concepts like multiplication by seeing them in action. The kids had fun, but the lessons never stuck.

A few years ago she shifted her approach, turning to more direct explanation after finding a website on a set of evidence-based practices known as the “science of math.”

“I could see how the game related to multiplication, but the kids weren’t making those connections,” says Ms. Stark, a math teacher in the suburbs of Kansas City. “You have to explicitly teach the content.”

As American schools work to turn around math scores that plunged during the pandemic, some researchers are pushing for more attention to a set of research-based practices for teaching math. The movement has passionate backers, but is still in its infancy, especially compared with the phonics-based “science of reading” that has inspired changes in how classrooms across the country approach literacy. 

Experts say math research hasn’t gotten as much funding or attention, especially beyond the elementary level. Meanwhile, the math instruction schools are currently using doesn’t work all that well. The United States trails other high-income countries in math performance, and lately more students graduate from high school with deficits in basic math skills.

Supporters say teaching practices supported by quantitative research could help, but they are still coming into focus. 

“I don’t think the movement has caught on yet. I think it’s an idea,” says Matthew Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Florida who was among researchers who helped create a science of math website as a resource for teachers.

What is the science of math? 

There’s a debate over which evidence-based practices belong under the banner of the science of math, but researchers agree on some core ideas.  

The foremost principle: Math instruction must be systematic and explicit. Teachers need to give clear and precise instructions and introduce new concepts in small chunks while building on older concepts. Such approaches have been endorsed by dozens of studies highlighted by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the U.S. Education Department that evaluates teaching practices. 

That guidance contrasts with exploratory or inquiry-based models of education, where students explore and discover concepts on their own, with the teacher nudging them along. It’s unclear which approaches are used most widely in schools. 

In some ways, the best practices for math parallel the science of reading, which emphasizes detailed, explicit instruction in phonics, instead of letting kids guess how to read a word based on pictures or context clues. After the science of reading gained prominence, 18 states in just three years have passed legislation mandating that classroom teachers use evidence-backed methods to teach reading. 

Gene J. Puskar/AP

“I’m doing a lot more instruction in vocabulary and symbol explanations so that the students have that built-in understanding,” says Margie Howells, who teaches elementary math at Wheeling Country Day School in West Virginia. Above is her fifth grade class Sept. 5, 2023.

Margie Howells, an elementary math teacher in Wheeling, West Virginia, first went researching best practices because there weren’t as many resources for dyscalculia, a math learning disability, as there were for dyslexia. After reading about the science of math movement, she became more explicit about things that she assumed students understood, like how the horizontal line in a fraction means the same thing as a division sign.

“I’m doing a lot more instruction in vocabulary and symbol explanations so that the students have that built-in understanding,” says Ms. Howells, who is working on developing a science-based tutoring program for students with dyscalculia and other learning differences.

The so-called math wars

Some elements of math instruction emphasize big-picture concepts. Others involve learning how to do calculations. Over the decades, clashes between schools of thought favoring one or another have been labeled the “math wars.” A key principle of the science of math movement is that both are important, and teachers need to foster procedural as well as conceptual understanding. 

“We need to be doing all those simultaneously,” Ms. Stark says.

When she demonstrates a long division problem, she writes out the steps for calculating the answer while students use a chart or blocks to understand the problem conceptually. 

Ms. Stark helps coach fellow teachers at her school to support struggling students – something she used to feel unequipped to do, despite 20 years of teaching experience. Most of the resources she found online just suggested different math games. So she did research online and signed up for special trainings, and started focusing more on fundamentals. 

For one fifth grader who was struggling with fractions, she explicitly re-taught equivalent fractions from third grade – why two-fourths are the same as one-half, for instance. He had been working with her for three years, but this was the first time she heard him say, “I totally get it now!”

“He was really feeling success. He was super proud of himself,” she says.

Still, skeptics of the science of math question the emphasis placed on learning algorithms, the step-by-step procedures for calculation. Proponents say they are necessary along with memorization of math facts (basic operations like 3x5 or 7+9) and regular timed practice – approaches often associated with mind-numbing drills and worksheets.

Math is “a creative, artistic, playful, reasoning-rich activity. And it’s very different than algorithms,” says Nick Wasserman, a professor of math education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Supporters argue mastering math facts unlocks creative problem-solving by freeing up working memory – and that inquiry, creativity, and collaboration are still all crucial to student success.

“When we have this dichotomy, it creates an unnecessary divide and it creates a dangerous divide,” says Elizabeth Hughes, a professor of special education at Penn State and a leader in the science of math movement. People feel the need to choose sides between “Team Algorithms” and “Team Exploratory,” but “we really need both.”

A higher importance on reading?

Best practices are one thing. But some disagree such a thing as a “science of math” exists in the way it does for reading. There just isn’t the same volume of research, education researcher Tom Loveless says. 

“Reading is a topic where we have a much larger amount of good, solid, causal research that can link instruction to student achievement,” he says.

To some, the less advanced state of research on math reflects societal values, and how many teachers themselves feel more invested in reading. Many elementary school teachers doubt their own math ability and struggle with anxiety around teaching it.  

“Many of us will readily admit that we weren’t good at math,” says Daniel Ansari, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Western University in Canada. “If I was illiterate, I wouldn’t tell a soul.”

Still, Dr. Ansari says, there is enough research out there to make a difference in the classroom.

“We do understand some of the things that really work,” he says, “and we know some of the things that are not worth spending time on.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct where Professor Burns is employed. He is now at the University of Florida.

This piece is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series documenting challenges and highlighting progress, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight diverse newsrooms: AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The sun sparkles on the surface of Great Bay, the silt suspended in the murky water from the previous day’s rainfall. But from her spot on the dock, Brianna Group doesn’t notice. Head tilted down, hands in rubber work gloves, she meticulously counts baby oysters. She and her team of conservationists don’t have a moment to waste. The oyster farmers are coming. 

“This one has seven,” says Ms. Group, a program manager for The Nature Conservancy in Great Bay, a tidal estuary close to New Hampshire’s coastal border with Maine. She holds up a shell with baby oysters, known as “spat,” attached and rapidly fills dozens of giant, flat mesh cages. The baby oysters were grown in water tanks steps away at the University of New Hampshire’s estuarine laboratory. 

Suddenly, as if on cue, a skiff approaches the dock, carrying sisters Laura Brown and Krysten Ward, arriving to transport the baby oysters to their nearby aquaculture farms. “If we make space, I think we can take all of them in one trip. We need to get these in the water,” Ms. Brown says.  

These oysters are not for eating. Instead, they are part of a partnership that brings aquaculture farmers and conservationists together to help boost dwindling oyster populations and provide farmers with a dependable income. The collaboration has proven successful enough that The Nature Conservancy and its partners have dedicated $6.3 million in additional funding to further scale the program over the next four years. 

“It’s the perfect partnership,” says Ms. Brown, who is a former artist turned owner of Fox Point Oysters, a small aquaculture farm located in the waters of Great Bay. “The Nature Conservancy getting involved in oyster restoration and partnering with us for that just makes the whole bay a better spot,” with cleaner water and a better habitat for oysters, she says. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Oyster farmer Laura Brown stands on her boat after loading juvenile oysters at the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory dock, Aug. 9, 2023, in Durham, New Hampshire.

Replenishing a lost population

New England’s coastal waters were once filled with oyster reefs. Yet after centuries of overfishing, pollution, and disease, the number of reefs has trended closer and closer to zero. 

Native oysters in Great Bay were decimated from more than 25 million in 1993 to around 1.2 million in 2000, a 95% loss. Like coral reefs in warmer waters, oyster reefs – clustered together by the hundreds or even thousands – are the foundation of coastal food chains. They protect shorelines, provide shelter for marine life, and are natural water filters. A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

“We’re down below 10% of the oyster resource on the wild reefs of what we were beginning in about the late 1990s,” says Ray Grizzle, a research professor at the University of New Hampshire. 

When the pandemic closed restaurants and oyster bars in 2020, oyster farmers across the country found their livelihoods threatened. That’s when conservationists from The Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit based in Virginia, launched the Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration project (SOAR), in partnership with The Pew Charitable Trusts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The program purchases oysters from farmers in seven states, including New Hampshire, to use in restoration projects. 

Three years later, the program is notching early successes in the Granite State, with growth in the juvenile oyster population in Great Bay. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Baby oysters are shown attached to an oyster shell at the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory, Aug. 9, 2023, in Durham, New Hampshire.

For the last 20 years, The Nature Conservancy and the University of New Hampshire have grown oysters in a lab and deployed the small, baby ones onto artificial reefs. But using adult oysters from farms is a “new twist,” says Professor Grizzle. “It’s an unusual arrangement and unusual collaboration for us and I think pretty much for everybody in the oyster restoration business.”

So far, results suggest that the older, larger adult oysters from farms are more adept at filtering water, resisting predators, and producing more larvae to further grow reefs. 

Repurposing the “big uglies” 

On the tailgate of Ms. Brown’s black pickup, her business slogan reads, “From the bay to your belly!” When pandemic lockdowns clammed up her restaurant clientele, Ms. Brown began selling her oysters from her flatbed truck near her farm in Little Bay, New Hampshire. 

Then The Nature Conservancy offered her a partnership. They would buy her large adult oysters and hire Ms. Brown to raise their lab-grown oysters at her subtidal farm. 

“We already grow them out here, and we’re more successful at it,” Ms. Brown says. “So they give them to us, and we raise them or we give them some of the big uglies, and then we can restore some of the natural reefs they’re working on.” The “big uglies,” an affectionate industry term for oversize oysters, are typically rejected by restaurants. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Oyster farmer Laura Brown of Fox Point Oysters drops juvenile oysters into cages at her subtidal oyster farm in Little Bay, Aug. 9, 2023, in Durham, New Hampshire.

In the first phase of the SOAR project, more than two dozen oyster farmers in New Hampshire and Maine earned extra income and more than 666,000 farmed oysters were deployed onto artificial reefs, placed adjacent to wild reefs to help them repopulate. 

This year, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department counted more juvenile oysters near two Nature Conservancy restoration sites than any other sampled locations in Great Bay. The number of baby oysters observed near Nannie Island in Great Bay was at the highest level since 2006.  

Due to the initial success of the program in New Hampshire and other states, the organizers of SOAR are expanding the number of participating sites and of oysters purchased. The next phase is to expand into new restoration sites in New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California, and Washington state. 

“We really are developing this concept into a replicable model,” says Steve Kirk, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Massachusetts Coastal Program. While the specifics will vary by state – Massachusetts has different regulations for coastal management, for instance – one thing is certain for Mr. Kirk and others leading the expansion. 

“Building these partnerships in the community helps us all out,” he says. “We’re all in this for the long haul.”

Reuters

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prays during a meeting with a group of girls who reached the age of puberty in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 3.

With its rich history of cultural expressions, Iran is not poor in creating new forms of dissent. One of the latest is girls roller-skating through the streets of Tehran without wearing the mandatory head covering, or hijab. Videos of these hair-in-the-wind skaters have been shared widely on social media. One in particular contains this description: “We’re injecting joy into society, sir.”

Another new type of microdemonstration is girls dancing in public to songs by ABBA or to street musicians. Compared with the mass street protests against laws that constrain Iranian women, the hair-swaying movements of the girls affirm a different freedom through action.

From Rumi’s poetry to classic Iranian art to wedding feasts, “joy is a part of our culture,” writes Tara Grammy, an Iranian Canadian, in Harper’s Bazaar. “Fear is the agent used by the regime to control the masses,” she adds, but maintaining joy has been a means of survival for Iranians.

The Persian word for demonstration, tazahorat, means “to show what is true.” By being the change they seek, young women in Iran may be shifting the way they challenge an Islamic regime that sees enforcement of hijab as essential to its existence. “I am telling you that the removal of the hijab will definitely come to an end,” said President Ebrahim Raisi in August.

In recent weeks, the regime has stepped up enforcement of hijab-wearing for women, in anticipation of renewed mass protests for a key anniversary. On Sept. 16 a year ago, a young woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being detained for wearing a hijab “improperly,” sparking months of protests.

After more than 500 killings and at least 20,000 arrests, the protests have been largely suppressed. Now Iranians are exploring positive ways to display what they want. The regime knows that the number of women who practice civil disobedience every day has increased, says Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American journalist. People across Iran will celebrate a revolution ignited by the killing of Ms. Amini. “Maybe you don’t see people in the streets, but revolutions have different phases,” Ms. Alinejad says.   

For now, one phase may be girls dipping in Iran’s deep culture of joy.