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My kids were posing for a picture the other day when the older one, like big siblings since time immemorial, threw up a pair of bunny ears behind his little brother’s head.

“That’s not nice,” I told my older kid. He looked at me blankly.

“What?” he said. “It’s just a peace sign.”

I believe him. For at least a year, the peace sign has been my kid’s go-to photo pose. First day of school? Peace sign. Birthday party? Peace sign. Showing off the robot he made out of Legos? Peace sign, obviously. (By contrast, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen him do bunny ears, a common way for kids in my generation to lightly prank one another.)

It’s not just him. Every time his class takes a picture, it’s absolutely prickling with peace signs. An informal poll of kids and parents suggests the practice is widespread. “Everyone does it,” Rhodes, 5, told me. “I started doing it when I was in mid-to-late elementary school,” 17-year-old Allison said by email. Kate Ellen, a mom in the UK said her daughters, 9 and 5, and their friends all pose with the gesture.

The peace sign, or V-sign, is nearly a century old, and has been part of the American cultural lexicon for decades. But the gesture feels more ubiquitous now than in decades past, and it means something new to this generation of kids — even if that meaning is, sometimes, nothing at all.

The origin of the peace sign

The contemporary V-sign — two fingers, palm toward the viewer — originated during World War II as a symbol of victory over Nazism (the V-sign with the palm oriented toward the signer is an older, ruder gesture, whose origins are unclear). Later, in the 1960s, American activists began using it to signify opposition to the Vietnam War.

The repurposing of the gesture was part of a larger movement, said Julia Fell, curator of exhibits at the Museum of Bethel Woods on the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival. “During the 1960s, other cultural expressions, such as clothing, that were associated with the military/war were sometimes turned on their heads by counter culturalists in protest (think army fatigues styled with long hair and adorned with scarves or buttons and patches, a la Country Joe McDonald at Woodstock),” Fell told me by email.

Thus the gesture that had once meant victory came to signify peace (with a bit of a detour thanks to Richard Nixon). Over time, though, the peace sign became more general in its meaning. By the time I was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, it could be a greeting or goodbye, or a way to lend some added character to ubiquitous “hippie” Halloween costumes (other accessories included Lennon glasses, headband, tie-dye). It was not, however, at least in my memory, a go-to photo pose — at least not in the way it is for my kid.

So what’s driving the rise of the peace sign among Gen Z and Gen Alpha? One possible answer is the influence of Japanese pop culture, especially anime.

The peace sign began spreading in Japan as early as the 1970s, potentially popularized by a camera commercial. Japanese young people started using the peace sign in photos, and anime characters started flashing it too.

Today, the gesture often shows up in shonen-style anime shows, when a character celebrates a victory in a battle or tournament, Nicholas Friedman, publisher of Crunchyroll News and host of the podcast The Anime Effect, told me.

This seems closer to the sign’s original meaning. But it’s also common in a more peaceful context. In slice-of-life or romantic comedy anime shows, “people are just hanging out, they’re taking selfies, they’re in photo booths, and they’re throwing up the peace sign,” Friedman said. Especially in the latter context, “it’s often related to the cute or kawaii culture within anime.”

There’s even a Pokémon, Victini, who is essentially a living peace sign.

Anime has been popular for decades, but in some ways, it’s more interwoven into kids’ lives now than in the past. While millennials might have watched Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh on Saturday mornings, kids today are “discovering anime through word of mouth or social media or clips on TikTok,” Friedman said. They have access to thousands of shows rather than one or two. And a lot of the social media trends that form a big part of youth culture today come from anime.

Kawaii aesthetics, especially, are ubiquitous in American kid culture, from stuffies to coloring books. Characters outside anime — on Disney+ shows, for example — now routinely flash huge, dewy, kawaii-style eyes to express sorrow or love.

The popularity of the peace sign is, at the very least, linked to the larger cultural dominance of kawaii. People do it in photos because “they want to look cute,” Rhodes told me.

Why kids need the peace sign now

In talking to both kids and adults, however, I’ve come to believe there’s another force at play: Kids do the peace sign in photos because, more so than in generations past, they need something to do in photos.

“It just feels more natural than keeping your hands at your sides,” Allison told me. “It also makes the photo a little more interesting to look at, particularly if you’re the main subject.”

Ellen, the UK mom, says her kids told her that no one really knows what the peace sign means, and that “it’s just a pose, like for pictures.” In my experience, the gesture is at least as ubiquitous as saying “cheese,” if not more so.

The process of cultural signifiers losing their specific meaning is a common one in recent years, Friedman told me. While millennials might have thought a lot about their use of gestures or other trends, Gen Z and Gen Alpha “just kind of do it.”

Some of that may be philosophical — an anti-overthinking, it’s-not-that-deep approach. But some of it is also almost certainly aesthetic: Kids are just photographed far more than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, they see photographs of themselves far more, and they’re growing up in a culture that thinks strategically about how to pose in pictures. It’s not odd that they would embrace a particular gesture that’s associated with cuteness — and that, as a bonus, gives them something to do with their hands.

My kid may soon have more options than the standard peace sign. Allison recently completed an exchange trip to Japan, and noted that “the gyaru peace sign, which is named after a popular fashion subculture, has the palm facing up and the fingers pointing out,” and that “a sideways peace sign with the eye framed between the fingers is also popular.”

Meanwhile, whether because Gen Alpha are too pure to make fun of each other, or because it was never that funny in the first place, the bunny-ears gesture may be over. When I asked Rhodes about it, he had no idea what I was talking about.

Dozens of children were already on planes on Sunday night when a judge blocked the Trump administration from deporting them to Guatemala — at least for now.

“AI has transformed my experience of education,” high school senior Ashanty Rosario writes at The Atlantic, adding that “these programs have destroyed much of what tied us together as students.”

A New York City program closes certain streets to car traffic during the summer, and 9-year-old New Yorker Julian M. wrote an op-ed about the joy of being able to bike down the street on his own. “When I got home, I felt pretty happy, like I accomplished something,” he says.

My little kid is currently obsessed with Too Busy Marco, a picture book by genius cartoonist Roz Chast in which a small bird simply cannot go to bed until he has invented invisibility gum, painted a masterpiece underwater, and launched a career as a professional bowler. This is relatable for my child because he cannot go to bed until he has yelled about a lot of things.

“We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel — everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”

That was Yoav Gallant, then the Israeli defense minister, two days after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 more hostage. The following week, Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed a similar sentiment: “So long as Hamas does not release the hostages,” he posted on X, “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives — not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”

Israel, in other words, did not engineer a famine in Gaza overnight. From the war’s outset, Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, to varying degrees, resulting in the spread of preventable diseases, including malnutrition, across the territory. In fact, since late 2023, international organizations have been warning that Gaza has been on the brink of famine. And in April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that children had been dying from starvation.

So why is it that it took this long for the world to turn its attention to this humanitarian disaster?

Part of the answer is that in recent weeks, the situation really has gotten much more dire, after Israel ended its 42-day ceasefire with Hamas in March and stopped allowing any aid into Gaza for two months, as my colleague Joshua Keating recently wrote.

But there’s another factor: The images coming out of Gaza have been absolutely heart-wrenching. Photos and videos have gone viral — on news sites and on social media — clearly showing malnourished babies starving to death, as well as those showing children and adults with their skin clinging to their bones with barely anything in between. “It is tragic that it takes those types of really graphic, really horrible images to break through,” said Alex de Waal, an expert on famine who serves as the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. “And that is such a terrible commentary on just a gargantuan failure.”

This, of course, is nowhere near the first time horrific images from Gaza have surfaced and sparked outrage around the world. But there’s something about the visibility of a human-made famine that, for many people — including some of Israel’s most ardent supporters — crosses a moral threshold.

Starving an entire population cannot be spun as collateral damage or merely the cost of war — a messaging tactic that Israel has turned to to justify its killing of innocent people despite plenty of evidence that it has routinely targeted civilians. “You can’t starve anyone by accident. It has to be deliberate and sustained,” de Waal said. “It is beyond dispute that you have to starve people systematically because it takes so long.”

Indeed, Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has been well-documented by human rights organizations since 2023, and both Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare.

Israel’s mass starvation of Gaza is, by definition, a form of collective punishment — imposing potentially fatal consequences on every Palestinian living in the enclave, whether they are a combatant or an innocent civilian. That’s why using starvation as a weapon of war is illegal under international law.

But that wasn’t always the case. What Israel is doing is part of a long history of weaponizing food and basic resources. Still, while there are many examples of countries intentionally creating or exacerbating famine conditions on populations, there are also aspects of Israel’s current policies in Gaza that are unique.

How countries have used starvation as a weapon of war

Using starvation as a weapon of war wasn’t always explicitly illegal under international law. The siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, was one of the deadliest sieges in history, killing more than one million people.

Many of these deaths were attributed to starvation. An American-run tribunal, however, determined that the forced starvation was compatible with international law. After all, it was a tactic that the Allies themselves had used as well, notably in their blockades of German-occupied territories and in Japan.

There are many examples throughout history of famines that were either entirely engineered or deliberately made worse through reckless colonial and war policies. In 1943, as the British empire’s colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent was nearing its end, the Bengal famine killed up to 3 million people.

Since then, studies have uncovered scientific evidence that the famine was not a result of climate conditions like serious drought. Instead, British policies, under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — which included confiscating rice and boats from the coastal parts of Bengal and exporting rice from India to other parts of the empire — seriously exacerbated famine conditions. Churchill denied this, saying that the reason there was a famine was because Indians were “breeding like rabbits” and suggesting that if the situation was indeed as dire as people claimed, then Mahatma Gandhi would be dead.

Another example is the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians under the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Joseph Stalin pursued a range of policies that engineered famine conditions — including restricting the movement of people, seizing grain even when there wasn’t enough to feed the local population, and exporting grain even as Ukrainians starved — in part, historians argue, to tamp down Ukrainian nationalist movements. Several countries and scholars have since recognized the famine as an act of genocide.

The US also used blockades as a means to advance its war interests. One of its military campaigns against Japan during World War II was named “Operation Starvation” — which aimed to destroy Japan’s economy by limiting the distribution of food and other imports. The military assault deprived Japan of essential raw materials and led to food shortages. That, along with naval blockades and America’s destruction of agricultural infrastructure contributed to widespread malnutrition and starvation.

It was only after World War II that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 established some rules about the responsibility to allow food and other essentials into enemy territory for vulnerable populations. But even then, by and large, starvation tactics were still permissible.

“The reason it was permitted was because the Americans and the British rather liked using it,” de Waal said. “It really wasn’t until the British and the Americans had abandoned their colonial wars — the American one being Vietnam in the ’70s — that they thought, ‘Okay, now we’re not going to fight these kinds of wars, and we can get around to banning it.’”

The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which were agreed to in 1977, finally prohibited the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare [or combat].” And just over 20 years later, in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court officially codified weaponizing starvation as a war crime.

How Israel’s starvation of Gaza is different

Any food shortages in Gaza have been directly triggered by the Israeli siege, not by any market failures or climate disasters, since Israel has the capacity to allow more food in at a moment’s notice.

“Here, what we see is all the ingredients coming together in a deliberate way. We see the [Israeli leaders’] statements; we see the total bombing of all the food production,” said Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. “I don’t think there’s [another] case in history, because other cases had to do with other stuff going on that were not human-made. Here, the whole starvation — from beginning to end — is human-made.”

Israel has also significantly limited traditional aid groups’ operations and, for months, entirely blocked aid from entering Gaza. Generally, UN-coordinated aid providers, which include UN agencies and established NGOs, have been able to enter and operate in war zones.

But since the ceasefire ended in March, Israel has placed unprecedented constraints on those organizations. Instead, since May, Israel has been coordinating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly formed US- and Israel-backed private entity that operates militarized distribution sites in central and southern Gaza.

GHF has denied that its system is unsafe. But it operates far fewer distribution sites than experts recommend — dramatically decreasing the number of aid sites that were in place before Israel instituted its total blockade in March, making it more and more difficult for Palestinians to access food.

Israeli troops have also shot at aid-seekers at GHF’s distribution sites, and, according to the UN, some 1,000 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF. Gordon calls GHF “a famine profiteering company,” adding that it “does not actually provide the necessary food, while producing these hunger games that everyone was watching, [showing] starving people are going to get food and getting shot at.”

Israeli government officials have defended GHF and instead blamed Hamas for the food shortages, accusing the group of looting humanitarian supplies despite Israeli military officials saying that there’s no proof that Hamas has systematically stolen aid. But the UN and many NGOs have called for GHF to be shut down, calling it dangerous and ineffective — a departure from established international humanitarian relief systems and a rejection of basic humanitarian principles.

While Egypt has been complicit in enforcing the blockade through its border with Gaza, the reality is that even aid going into Gaza through the Egyptian border has to go through Israeli inspection. The result is that Israel has effectively vacuum-sealed Gaza, with full control of what aid gets in.

Israel could have chosen to prevent a famine at any point. Instead, it has repeatedly hampered or entirely rejected efforts to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians — all in contravention of international law. “Israel is not unique at all in using hunger as a weapon of war,” de Waal said. “What is unique about the Israeli one is just how rigorous and how sustained it is, and how it is in defiance of an international humanitarian capacity that can respond just like that. So if Netanyahu wanted every [child in Gaza] to have breakfast tomorrow, it can be organized.”

One example of Israel’s (and the world’s) capacity to stop the worst from happening is the polio vaccination campaign that happened last year. When polio — which had been eradicated from Gaza for 25 years — resurfaced as a result of the humanitarian and sanitation crisis imposed by Israel’s war, governments around the world pressured Israel to agree to a humanitarian pause in combat, in order to vaccinate children across the Gaza Strip. In the middle of the war, the vaccination campaigns were successful, reaching 95 percent of the target population. An effort to stop malnutrition can be similarly efficient.

The faster Israel relents and allows unimpeded aid delivery, the more lives can be saved. But unfortunately, it’s already too late for far too many Palestinians in Gaza. “Even if there was divine intervention — and we had a ceasefire and the best doctors and the right kind of food — I think we’d still have hundreds [or] thousands of deaths,” Gordon said. “But we’re not going to have that divine intervention.”

How we tell the story of the United States — and who’s included in it and how — has been an ongoing battle in the country for decades. It’s one currently being waged by the Trump administration, such as when it scrubbed references to Jackie Robinson and Harriet Tubman from government webpages in the name of clamping down on “DEI.”

And in the 1990s, Disney had a particularly zany idea of how to tell the story of America — one that set off a culture war as the company sought to create an amusement park focused on US history, warts and all.

Disney’s America, the doomed amusement park, would have contained the story of immigration told through the Muppets’ musical-comedy stylings. It would have had sections dedicated to the Industrial Revolution, Native America, and the Civil War. It would, as Disney executives put it at the time, “make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave.”

The ensuing battle over Disney’s America would be one of Disney’s biggest failures — and a precursor to battles we’re still fighting today.

To learn more about what Disney tried to do, what ended up happening, and what it all means, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with historian Jacqui Shine.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where does this story begin?

It begins with Michael Eisner, who came to Disney as its CEO and chairman in 1984. Eisner is ambitious, aggressive. Over the next 10 years, in what Disney buffs called the Disney Renaissance, the company has this enormous critical and commercial success with a run of animated movies. The juggernaut of this is The Little Mermaid, followed by Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Aladdin.

Maybe high on that supply, Eisner announces this plan for what he calls the Disney decade, which is this broad expansion of the company’s parks and resorts. The most high-profile project here was Euro Disney Resort, which is now Disneyland Paris. And there’s high expectations for the Disney decade and for the success of the Parks program.

This doesn’t go quite the way that they hope it will. Euro Disney doesn’t do well at opening. It loses nearly a billion dollars in its first year. So the failure of Euro Disney leads the company to want to pivot to more US expansion on smaller park projects.

In 1991, the head of the parks division brings Eisner and Disney’s president Frank Wells to Colonial Williamsburg. This inspires this plan for a history-themed Disney Park, Disney’s America.

They want to put it in Virginia because they imagine that it can become part of the DC-area tourist economy, and that a Disney theme park that is about American history will fit really well into this context. This is not a project that was supposed to involve Mickey Mouse or any of the Disney icons. Disney was starting work on Pocahontas.

Eisner says that he was reading a lot about John Smith and Pocahontas and that internally, the company was interested in democracy as a sort of, as a thematic subject.

So Eisner and Disney have an idea of what they don’t want to do, and perhaps more importantly, what they do want to do with this park. To build it, obviously you’re going to need some land. I imagine Disney just didn’t already have a huge parcel of property in northern Virginia-ish. Do they buy some?

They do. Between 1991 and 1993, Disney secretly begins buying up parcels of land in the area through shell companies. The guy who was in charge of buying apparently used a fake persona; this was very undercover, this is all happening secretly. It is also less than five miles from a National Park Service Civil War Battlefield: Manassas. This is a place where about 3,700 men died and where there were about 25,000 total casualties.

They’re doing this secretly. At what point does Manassas find out that Mickey Mouse is buying up their land?

Almost everybody finds out in November 1993 when Disney announces the project.

I think initially people receive this warmly, because Disney’s promising a significant amount of economic development for the region and Disney is promising a complex experience of American history there. The guy who heads the Disney’s America project, Bob Weis, says in the press release they envisioned Disney’s America as a place to debate and discuss the future of our nation and to learn more about the past by living it.

And they are quick to say that this is a project that is not going to whitewash American history. Eisner is interviewed in the Washington Post the next day. He says that the park will present painful, disturbing, agonizing history. We’re going to be sensitive, but we will not be showing the absolute propaganda of the country. We will show the Civil War with all this racial conflict.

This was a very serious, very powerful, very successful entertainment executive saying, “We’re gonna make a kiddy theme park that will take our most brutal history seriously.”

Yes. And I think, like you, a lot of people had trouble with that contradiction. The day after this press release is issued, Disney holds a press conference in Haymarket. At this presser, Bob Weis, who is the senior vice president of imagineering, which is Disney’s creative division, says, “This will be entertaining in the sense that it would leave you something you could mull over. We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the underground railroad.”

This moment, I think, comes to define this conflict in the public eye.

It’s such a nutty thing to hear a serious person say. Your kids could come to our theme park, home of Mickey Mouse, and find out what it’s like to be a slave. I imagine at this point, people are just like, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna need some more specifics.”

Yes. They put out a brochure, which is where a lot of the information that we have about what this would’ve been like comes from.

You enter at Crossroads USA, and there you board an 1840s train that takes you first to President Square, which they say celebrates the birth of democracy. It’s about the Revolutionary War.

You follow that to Native America. They say, “guests may visit an Indian village representing such eastern tribes as the Powhatans, or join in a harrowing Lewis and Clark raft expedition through pounding rapids and churning whirlpools.” We’re going to be educating people about Manifest Destiny here.

We move from Native America to the Civil War fort, where they say you’re going to experience the reality of a soldier’s daily life. After the Civil War fort, you go to a section on American immigration. And they’re going to build a replica Ellis Island building. Some sources indicate they would’ve done a show called The Muppets Take America.

The next section is a factory town called Enterprise that centers on a high-speed adventure ride called the Industrial Revolution. That involves a narrow escape from its fiery vat of molten steel.

Then you go to Victory Field, where guests may parachute from a plane or operate tanks and weapons in combat.

You then hit the last two areas, State Fair and Family Farm, to learn how to make homemade ice cream or milk a cow and even participate in a nearby country wedding, barn dance, and buffet.

This sounds like one doozy of a brochure. Does it work? Does it convince everyone?

Does that slow down Michael Eisner? Is he ready to give up?

No. And that is where the fight begins. People hook in, in particular, to this idea that Disney’s going to include some element about American chattel slavery. And he is aggressive about saying, No, we weren’t going to do that. Why would you think that?

He is really persuaded that Disney’s big swing can work, that this idea has value and merit, and that the people who are standing against it are misguided.

At this point, is this fight relegated to Virginia, or is it getting bigger? This is obviously an international company with a huge cultural footprint.

It’s getting bigger. One of the things that contributes to this is that the Washington Post does a lot of coverage of this, which makes it go national. And it starts this debate in editorial pages about whether or not Disney can responsibly represent American history and whether or not the Disneyfication of American history is advisable.

And what happens when national papers, opinion columns start weighing in on this debate?

A few things happen. In early 1994, a strong coalition of opponents develops, including people who are concerned about preserving the environment there.

But then the historians get involved. The big guns come out when this group called Protect Historic America launches. This is a group of big-name, high-powered academic historians. This group of major figures stepped forward to say they’re concerned about education around the Civil War and about the park’s location near Manassas. In very short order, dozens and dozens of historians volunteer their time to write editorials, to comment to the media. They’re really fired up about this.

I read that this fight also somehow made it to the United States Congress. Why is this even Congress’s business?

This is one of the interesting things that comes out of Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee hearings. The entree into this is that this involves public lands of national importance. Five hundred people come to the Senate hearing, and Eisner’s really combative. He says about the people who are opposed to this, “I sat through many history classes where I read some of their stuff and I didn’t learn anything. It was pretty boring.”

At this point you’ve got historians speaking out about this. You’ve got op-ed columns being written, it sounds like all over the country. You’ve got a hearing on Capitol Hill. Are people out in the streets protesting this somewhere?

They are. Eisner is on the Hill trying to make nice with DC politicians and invites them to a special screening of The Lion King. But when they leave the theater, there are about a hundred protestors outside. Bigger than this though, in September 1994, 3,000 people march on the National Mall to protest Disney’s America.

Nationally, public support for the park has dropped to like 25 percent. At the end of September 1994, the company announces that Disney is withdrawing from the Virginia site. It’s clear that people don’t want it to be sited where it is, and they’re giving up. It’s over for Disney’s America. It is curtains for Disney’s America.

How do you think what happened in the ’90s connects to the kinds of fights we’re having about our history right now?

Any kind of debate about public history is always going to be about trying to stake some sort of political or ideological claim about the meaning of American history. Right now we see this very direct, very aggressive effort to insist on a positivist narrative about American history.

One of the things that I think people found puzzling about the early days of the Trump administration was that the National Endowment for the Humanities cut an enormous amount of active grants. And they issued new guidelines seeking projects, they say, that instill “an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.” I think partly this is the administration’s backlash to efforts in the last decade to bring a more nuanced and complex understanding to structural oppression in US history.

We fantasize about American history in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places. I don’t know that Disney in seeking to do that was necessarily doing anything out of step with how we represent the American story.