Egg prices, bird flu, and a flock of must-read stories

This week, no one had to egg me on to find a theme. Looking at the Vox homepage, I couldn’t help but notice a flock of stories that made me think of our feathered friends, even if they weren’t actually about them at all. 

Maybe I am just a true bird brain, but I’d argue we have a lot in common with these winged creatures: we’re obsessed with air travel, we’re more effective in large groups, we each have our own kind of eye-catching Drake, and, of course, we’re unfortunately susceptible to deadly diseases. 

Please, allow me to take you under my wing and show you some Vox articles and podcasts I loved this week. A little bird told me you’d like them too.

—Meredith Haggerty, senior culture editor

Could bird flu cause a human pandemic?

I know my first question when it came to bird flu was simple: “oh no, for me???” Here, Keren Landman explains what it means that H5N1 had apparently been spreading among dairy cows for months before we knew about it. It’s not remotely time to panic — only one person has gotten sick, and it’s mild! — but there are real reasons scientists are keeping an eye on this outbreak and what it means for the human population. 

Why we keep seeing egg prices spike

While we’re talking about the ramifications of H5N1 on your daily life, Whizy Kim took a closer look at how the outbreak might affect the cost of eggs. The truth is that prices haven’t changed that much in this round of concern (phew!), but that’s far from the end of the story. Consolidation in the egg market and the realities of factory farming mean that hundreds of millions of hens are packed into fewer than 350 farms in the US. These close quarters allow disease to spread, which leads to both higher prices and lots of dead birds.

That consolidation also means a lack of competition, and big deal egg producers are reportedly taking advantage. Cal-Maine, a major player in the space, saw a 471 percent rise in its net profit from 2022 to 2023, but the number of eggs sold only rose 5.9 percent. Hmm!

🎧  The failed promise of egg freezing

Speaking of eggs! (Sorry, sorry.) Today, Explained spoke to senior correspondent Anna North about her fantastic feature about egg freezing, which for the last dozen (hah!) years has been sold by some companies as a huge perk for women in the corporate world. While you might think that the only thing Anna’s story has in common with Whizy’s are little ovoid building blocks of life, the more important overlap might be that this is yet another situation in which only corporations benefit. 

After decades of inaction, states are finally stepping up on housing

“Meredith,” you might be saying, “what does housing have to do with birds?” Duh: nesting. 

For those of us who are smaller and more avian in constitution, building a place to raise our families is just a matter of some good twigs and a nice branch. For the bigger and more mammalian of us, it’s a greater struggle. Rachel Cohen took a deep look at the way the government — mainly states — is making some progress on the housing crisis. We badly need to build more places for people to live, and that means updating zoning laws, fixing home-building codes, and changing the way residential planning works. 

Philosophers are studying Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?”

You know what birds are? They’re all little as— okay, this one’s a stretch, but I just care so much about Reddit’s Am I the Asshole, I had to include Sigal Samuel’s story about how philosophers are studying the forum. 

As Samuel points out, traditional philosophical thought experiments leave out the relational context — like, do you know the five people tied to the trolley tracks? What about the one person you’d have to kill to save them? This stuff matters! Using this subreddit where normies discuss moral problems like “am I the asshole for yelling at my pregnant wife?” (yes!!), academics are able to get a sense of how we think about ethical issues with the kind of complicated context we might actually experience. 

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