Independently run and housed in a theater several blocks from festival headquarters, this parallel event has a long history of showcasing new talent before the festival does. This is where the international film world first discovered Martin Scorsese, Chantal Akerman and Bong Joon Ho.

Since its premiere on Saturday, “Clarissa,” which stars Sophie Okonedo in the title role alongside David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, has been rightly received with a chorus of wows. Directed by the filmmaking brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the movie counts as one of the few genuine discoveries in what has been a generally lackluster year.

When I chatted with the Esiris on Monday, on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, they seemed happy if understandably a touch wrung out. Open and friendly (not everyone is during this demanding, carnivalesque event), they were eager to talk about all things cinema. Arie’s voice was husky from a cold, and he soon swaddled himself in a blanket. Their first screenings were over, but he was staying on, hoping to catch some movies, while Chuko was flying home later that day.

If the American distributor Neon has its way, you will be hearing much more about Arie and Chuko — as they are billed in the film — who are 40-year-old fraternal twins. (Neon hasn’t set a date for the theatrical release, but “Clarissa” will be in rotation on the fall festival circuit.) Written by Chuko, this is the brothers’ second feature following “Eyimofe (This Is My Desire).” That critically lauded drama, about two Nigerians hoping to better their lives by emigrating to Europe, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. It was there at a screening with a festival moderator, and shortly before the world started to shut down, that Arie first learned what he and his brother were going to direct for their follow-up project.

“Chuko just belted out, ‘We’re adapting ‘Mrs. Dalloway” for a contemporary Nigerian context,’ and I was just like, ‘Huh?,’” Arie said. “There was a huge audible gasp in the audience,” he added. “I was just like, ‘Well, OK, I guess that’s what we’re doing.’” The brothers laughed as they recalled that moment, and then shared that Chuko writes at a mahogany desk that he’s named Virginia. Arie elaborated that Chuko “literally does say things like, ‘I’ve got a meeting with Virginia.’”

A stream-of-consciousness novel published in 1925, “Mrs. Dalloway” follows its title character, a 52-year-old upper-class married mother, over a single day as she prepares for a party she’s hosting that evening. As the story shifts between the present and the past, it also moves between Clarissa’s external and interior worlds, slipping from the errands she runs to the newfangled machines in her orbit, the people she encounters and the memories that wash over her. Woolf mixes all this with the inner and outer beings of other characters, among them her old friend Peter and the traumatized Septimus, a tragically fated World War I veteran whom Clarissa never actually meets.

In her introduction to “Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf wrote that once a book was published, it no longer belonged to the author but instead was committed to “the care” of the reader, who must decide what’s relevant to her or not. Chuko Esiri first read the novel, having plucked it off a shelf, while a teenager in a British boarding school. “I didn’t understand it, but I felt it,” he said, and returned to it several times, notably about eight years ago. By that point, he had received his master’s in film from New York University while Arie was getting his at Columbia, and he had changed, as had his understanding of the novel. “I just saw pieces of everybody I knew cached in these characters,” Chuko said, “and it just completely leapt out at me. ‘Oh, this could, would work.’”

There were other commonalities, most obviously colonialism. From the mid-19th century until 1960, Britain controlled Nigeria, and the countries remain deeply connected. (English is Nigeria’s official language.) Present-day Nigeria and England in the 1920s “are eerily similar,” Chuko continued, as he expanded on what he saw in Woolf’s novel, “specifically how conservative the cultures are.” This connection comes devastatingly to the fore in the film when Clarissa’s father berates a server for not wearing white gloves while waiting on her and her friends. The younger people had just been animatedly discussing Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart,” an anti-colonialist landmark, yet remain deferentially quiet during the abusive outburst.

By transposing the story to Nigeria the Esiris have foregrounded the colonialist history that surfaces in the book with its repeated mentions of India and, by extension, the British Empire. It’s a brilliant interpretive move, one that’s all the more powerful because of how the Esiris use Woolf’s narrative fragmentation to suggest this crushingly divided world. The young Clarissa grows up into a comfortably cosseted woman who lives in a large, waterfront house filled with servants. Unlike her father, Clarissa tends to smile at the people who do her bidding. Yet while she wears her privilege lightly, the weight of history presses down nevertheless. There’s pathos to how unknowingly Clarissa seems to drift along, but not an iota of sentimentality.

Arie Esiri focuses more on the visual elements of their filmmaking, and he only read Woolf’s novel after his brother had finished writing the script. After deciding to make the movie, they started watching films for inspiration, as is their custom, Arie explained, to understand their own ambitions for the project and how they would approach it structurally. They watched Michelangelo Antonioni, and spoke admiringly of Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi.” (Their first feature is in the Criterion Collection.)

The brothers shot “Clarissa” on 35-millimeter film, drawing talent both from abroad and from the robust ranks of Nigeria’s film talent; the country’s industry is one of the largest in the world. Most of the movie unfolds in Lagos, where a large construction project looms over her house like a threat from the future. The Esiris filmed the pastoral scenes of Clarissa’s past at a resort run by their father, a businessman turned fine-art painter. Their mother, a former lawyer, founded a library. The parents didn’t let the brothers watch TV when they were young.

The Esiris already have a sense of what their next movie will be. It’s based on a true story about servants who are accused of theft in the house where they work, an idea that Arie has been thinking about for some time. “None of them fess up to it,” he explained. “And then they hire a babalawo, which is ——” Chuko broke in, “a witch doctor.”

Throughout the interview, the brothers, amid thoughtful pauses and shared glances, effortlessly passed the conversational baton back and forth. At one point, we talked about the tricky logistics of sharing directorial duties and how on set Chuko tends to be the more social of the duo while Arie stays with the camera. This team approach has served them well and led to an acclaimed movie that from its first striking shot to its last, expresses a soaringly harmonious joint vision.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.

The post The Brothers Who Made Virginia Woolf the Talk of Cannes appeared first on New York Times.

Looking back to the Age of Revolution, and across the sea, can offer some useful perspective. Although the fact is often forgotten, the American colonists were not the only people who faced a political crisis in the late 18th century. The British people did too. And, ironically, the United States finds itself in a situation today very similar to the one Britain faced back then.

The diagnostic checklist that an attentive observer might have drawn up in Britain in the 1770s seems very familiar. The constitution was out of balance, and the executive—at this time still the King—was accumulating powers and patronage at the expense of Parliament. The system of representation had degenerated into the absurdity of “rotten boroughs”—sparsely inhabited areas that returned members of Parliament chosen by local magnates and their political masters while whole swaths of the country, such as the rapidly growing industrial cities, went almost entirely unrepresented.

The King had at his disposal something called the Civil List, which disbursed stipends, pensions, and other emoluments at the monarch’s discretion, sometimes in the form of specific jobs (for instance, Lord of the Bedchamber), sometimes to provide sinecures (Rousseau was offered one just for being Rousseau), and sometimes to spread favor and influence. Between the Civil List and the ability in essence to buy parliamentary seats in rotten boroughs, the King in the 1770s could command loyalty from about 200 of the 558 members of Parliament—enough to ensure that the legislature was dependent on him.

As a result, the King was able to push Parliament and strain the bounds of established law. Members of Parliament were stripped of traditional legal protections. An elected member was blocked from being seated. The Crown put newspaper publishers on trial for sedition. Meanwhile, the nation was entangled in costly foreign wars whose justifications seemed far removed from the immediate safety of Britain. Society was divided religiously, regionally, and economically.

The structural pathologies of late-18th-century Britain are not perfectly analogous to ours, but they rhyme.

In Britain, three figures from that era had a clear view of the governance problems that the nation faced. The first was King George III himself, a monarch often caricatured but in fact more attentive to the British constitutional tradition than his American detractors allowed. George believed that the system was under strain and that some adjustment was necessary, even as his instincts pulled him toward defending royal prerogative.

The second and third figures were unlikely political allies: Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, a reformer within the British political establishment who argued early and persistently for universal male suffrage, and his extraordinarily talented amanuensis, Thomas Paine, then a corset maker, an excise officer, and a journeyman essayist. In the 1760s and ’70s, these two men collaborated with a secret radical network to counter the King—laying out the case for the restoration of British liberties in a series of newspaper essays under the pen name Junius.

[From the November 2025 issue: Secrets of a radical duke]

Each man sought to establish “the people”—through their legislature—as an effectual counterweight to the monarch. They considered legislative supremacy necessary to ensure that a population would not be subject to the arbitrary whims of a single individual. To get there, though, Richmond and Paine ultimately proposed different paths.

Paine, who had sailed from London to America in 1774, proposed revolution, and then constitution writing. Common Sense, which appeared in January 1776, was the first essay to argue that the Americans should seize their independence from the Crown. That summer, he had a hand in drafting the Pennsylvania Constitution as the colony turned itself into a state. A decade later, he would help James Wilson prepare for the U.S. Constitutional Convention, where the Americans sought to ensure a strong legislature and drafted a document that explicitly designated Congress as the first branch of government. They accepted the need for an executive, after having tried to do without one in the Articles of Confederation, but they wanted that executive properly tied down.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Richmond considered and rejected the path of revolution. Despite defending the Americans in Parliament and ultimately endorsing American independence, he sought an alternative way to put limits on the King and achieve legislative supremacy at home.

The radicals in Britain pursued two chief goals: reform to the Civil List, and the establishment of universal male suffrage. Both had the purpose of reining in corruption. The former would dramatically reduce the King’s ability to dispense patronage. The latter would make it harder to buy seats. You could easily pay off the six voters in a rotten borough. Paying off an entire constituency once the entire male population had the right to vote would be more difficult.

The first of these goals was the great achievement of Edmund Burke. His bill—the Establishment Act of 1782, also known as the Civil List and Secret Service Money Act—placed the finances of the royal household under the control of the treasury department, overseen by Parliament. The second goal took longer to meet. In a letter explaining his commitment to suffrage reform, Richmond wrote that “the experience of 26 years,” in and out of government, had convinced him that restoring a genuine House of Commons by renovating the rights of the people was the “only effectual remedy” against the corrupt system that had brought the nation to disgrace and poverty and had threatened it with “the loss of liberty.” Years later, Abraham Lincoln expressed the same insight when he declared at Gettysburg that government would be for the people only when it was also by the people. Richmond introduced a suffrage bill in 1780. Although it failed, it became the basis for political efforts that built consistently over the next 50 years.

William Pitt the Younger, a 24-year-old prime minister when he was first appointed, in 1783—the year that American independence was legally recognized by Britain—became the next to take up the challenge. Pitt, who laid the groundwork for the modern Tory Party, introduced suffrage bills several years in a row. When he eventually succumbed to the King’s objections and desisted, a younger politician, Charles Grey, a Whig, took on the task. Starting in the early 1790s, Grey introduced an election-reform bill in Parliament every year for decades, keeping the reform idea alive.

When the Tories collapsed, in 1830, and the Whigs had a fresh shot at power, a massive working- and middle-class movement—sending petitions by the cartload to Parliament—made Grey the prime minister. Richmond had rightly predicted that the cry of the people would be needed to achieve reform. This moment of crisis was Grey’s to seize, and he did, in 1832, winning passage of a Reform Act that significantly expanded male suffrage and changed how parliamentary seats were distributed. Parliamentary authority was in the ascendant. Grey’s government soon won passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which ended enslavement in most of the British empire. The government also ended the economic monopoly of the East India Company. In the end, over the course of nearly a century, there would be four Reform Acts. The last, in 1918, finally delivered universal male suffrage, as well as suffrage for many women. A decade later, the vote was extended to all women.

[From the October 2025 issue: How originalism killed the Constitution]

Richmond is scarcely remembered today, even in Britain. His descendant the 11th Duke of Richmond, a photographer and patron of motorsports and the arts, is far better known. Grey, for his part, is not one of the few British prime ministers Americans tend to be aware of. But he would become world famous in another context after he inherited an earldom and assumed the title Earl Grey, his name associated with a popular tea.

When the Age of Revolution arrived, the British Parliament represented sectors, not people: the Church and the aristocrats (in the House of Lords) and a limited subset of property holders (in the House of Commons). To propose universal male suffrage was to transform the basis of governance fundamentally. Advancing the proposal required inventing for the modern era the idea of geographical districts and rediscovering the notion (with its ancient Athenian roots) that one should count the population to achieve constituencies of equivalent size. It is hardly a coincidence that Richmond created the British mapping service to produce maps of the whole country. Districting and census taking for electoral purposes were 18th-century reinventions devised to counterbalance the power of the King with the power of the people.

The fact that something as familiar as electoral districts had to be invented is a reminder of one of the great insights of 18th-century reformers: Representation can be thought of as a kind of technology, and an evolving one. A legislature is not a fixed institutional form delivered once, at a single founding moment. It is a set of practices, rules, and devices that must be redesigned as conditions change—something that may be easier to do in a nation whose constitution is a quilted aggregation of law and tradition, as Britain’s is, rather than an operating manual expressed in one written document.

Think of all of the basic things that have to be figured out, not to mention the fine print: Who is permitted to vote? Do you vote on one day or over many? In person or also by mail? How do you define what the boundaries of a district should be? Who makes that decision? Can you win a district with a plurality of the vote, or do you need a majority? How many members should a legislature have? In Britain, some of the reforms following the first expansion of suffrage were redesigns of a technological kind: for instance, the introduction of the secret ballot for voters to reduce the likelihood of coercion, and the introduction of salaries for members of Parliament to reduce financial opportunism and conflicts of interest.

All of this is bound up with the meaning of representation—what it is for. Representation serves a number of purposes. It provides authorization, giving legitimacy to the exercise of public power. It ensures that the diverse social composition of a polity is mirrored in its deliberative bodies. It brings local knowledge and varied perspectives into contact with one another, so that policy can be informed and refined. It channels the political activity of citizens into collective action. It enables a polity to achieve outcomes that no individual or faction could secure alone. And it provides what 18th-century theorists called “republican safety”—the systemic protection against tyranny that comes from dispersing power across multiple representative bodies and accountable officials. When the technology of representation degrades, the system as a whole begins to lose legitimacy.

This isn’t the place for a laundry list of everything that needs to be done to restore representation to health in the United States. The problems we face and the measures we might adopt to confront them have been discussed for decades. In the most general terms, those measures include restrictions on political spending, federal action to prevent partisan gerrymandering, and an expansion of the House of Representatives. They include transparency and accountability standards for digital platforms, to help restore the media ecosystem to health. Congress, for its part, needs to remember that it is not a junior partner, much less a lapdog, but in fact the place where, in the view of the Founders, democratic power chiefly resides. It must assert that power—indeed, doing so is the central task of democratic renovation. All of this aside, lower levels of government—states and communities—can do much by way of experimentation, nurturing democratic practice at the grass roots.

[Yuval Levin: The missing branch]

It looks impossible—a mountain too steep, every means of ascent impeded. Scaling the mountain will take perseverance and a long time horizon—qualities that 18th-century reformers possessed. They did not stumble into the renovations they achieved, and they did not expect miracles. They had three interlocking goals: Fight corruption, broaden suffrage, upgrade the technology of representation. They organized, argued, persuaded, and built the political coalitions that made structural change possible. Richmond did not abolish rotten boroughs by writing a single letter and leaving it at that. The reformers did the hard work, year after year, for decades—as like-minded people did after them—until the work bore fruit.

Britain today faces some of the same grave problems of representation that we do. No British government has come to power with a majority of the popular vote since World War II. The British and American approaches to governance are also different. Britain’s parliamentary system muddies the distinction between executive and legislature; at the same time, it keeps the prime minister tethered to an electoral leash that is often being tugged. But taking the long view: The British evolved from King George III to King Charles III, producing a constitutional monarchy that, whatever its symbolic eccentricities, performs its restrained constitutional functions with relative stability. American democracy, founded on Revolutionary principles and a written Constitution that has proved enormously difficult to amend, finds itself producing presidents who test the limits of constitutional restraint and a politics in which the structural mechanisms of representation more and more fail to reflect majoritarian preferences. It’s fair to ask: Which approach succeeded more completely in keeping control of the executive?

Last month, King Charles addressed an American Congress that over a period of decades has failed to exercise its powers. He stood as the representative of a nation that had taken a different path from that of the United States, though aspirationally in the same general direction—a path that has not run in a straight line and is hardly at an end. The King nodded to the kinship when he said of the Founders that “they carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment”—a conception of rights and values that long predate the American Revolution. It was impossible to miss the irony of a British monarch, a direct descendant of George III, reminding Americans—needing to remind Americans—that a democratic society advances “not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many.”

The post What the 18th Century Can Teach the 21st appeared first on The Atlantic.

The nomination must be approved by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions before being forwarded to the full Senate.

“The committee has repeatedly fast-tracked N.S.F. nominations in closed sessions that are limited to the senators and their staffs,” said Andrew Black, chief of staff at the science group, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A public hearing creates a public record that can be checked in the future to see if a nominee’s testimony and promises hold up, he added.

The N.S.F. director serves for six years. Mr. O’Neill has no science degrees or personal background in research, although a profile of him at an anti-aging foundation he once led says he advised and invested in more than 70 science and technology companies.

Mr. O’Neill has a degree in the humanities from Yale University and worked extensively with the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel before joining the Trump administration. Starting last June, he was deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services and then acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In March, Mr. Trump nominated Mr. O’Neill to be the N.S.F. director. Soon after, in a social media post, Mr. O’Neill said the government “should take bigger financial risks to pose and answer deeper questions.”

N.S.F.’s scientists and staff, he added, “have built something worth strengthening.” Mr. O’Neill could not be reached for comment.

Many experts have noted his lack of traditional qualifications for the N.S.F. job, questioning his ability to run an agency that has financially supported 274 Nobel laureates and now funds some of the nation’s top scientists.

Science magazine quoted Neal Lane, a former N.S.F. director, as saying Mr. O’Neill would face “a high risk of failure.”

N.S.F. is widely seen as an agency in turmoil. It has had no director for more than a year and is facing budget cuts as Mr. O’Neill awaits Senate confirmation. The administration has canceled or suspended hundreds of N.S.F. grants and recently fired the members of an independent board that oversees the research agency.

On Wednesday, Sudip Parikh, the chief executive officer of the A.A.A.S., based in Washington, D.C., sent a letter to the Senate HELP Committee asking for an open hearing with Mr. O’Neill before the committee votes on his nomination.

“While an unconventional background is not necessarily disqualifying,” Dr. Parikh wrote, “it does require greater scrutiny of the nomination by Congress.”

William J. Broad has reported on science at The Times since 1983. He is based in New York.

The post Science Group Seeks Public Hearing for N.S.F. Nominee appeared first on New York Times.

My reaction was this: “Not this same old yarn again.”

The company promoting its supposed breakthrough is Colossal Biosciences. That’s the Dallas business that created a PR-fueled frenzy last year with an announcement that it had brought the dire wolf back from extinction.

Its announcement caught fire because the dire wolf was a species depicted in the TV series “Game of Thrones” — indeed, part of the company’s publicity campaign featured a shot of George R.R. Martin, the author of the Game of Thrones books, cradling a fluffy wolf-like pup in his arms.

Colossal’s latest announcement was that it has hatched 26 chickens in an “artificial egg” — a “foundational step,” it said, “toward resurrecting extinct bird species” such as the New Zealand giant moa and the dodo.

The announcement resembled Colossal’s rollout of the “dire wolf” pups: Publications that had received guided tours of its lab produced breathless articles taking Colossal’s claims at face value, generally lacking skeptical commentary by unaffiliated biologists.

The company’s latest announcement is connected with its larger campaign to “de-extinct” long-disappeared animals and restore them to their ancient habitats.

Its “landmark” project in this respect is “the resurrection of the woolly mammoth … It will walk like a woolly mammoth, look like one, sound like one, but most importantly it will be able to inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the mammoth’s extinction.” (Colossal specifies that it’s talking about “a cold-resistant elephant with all of the core biological traits of the woolly mammoth.”

Colossal says it’s considering Asian or African elephants as surrogate parents for its mammoths. Thus far, however, this effort has yielded only a few dozen genetically modified long-haired mice, which evokes the Aesopian adage about the mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse.

To unaffiliated scientists, Colossal’s talk of de-extincting long-gone species is hyperbole: hopelessly premature and consistently oversold. The focus of its latest announcement is not so much an egg as an artificial eggshell — though the company defends its labeling the technology as an “artificial egg” as legitimate. The 26 hatched chicks were grown from fertilized tissue transferred from hen’s eggs into the new container, which functioned essentially as an incubator.

To be fair, the company appears to have successfully developed a membrane that can provide oxygen to the growing embryos better than existing technologies that have allowed chicks to grow outside the shell. But outside scientists suggest it’s a stretch to see that as a major step toward resurrecting the moa, a giant flightless bird that disappeared from its New Zealand habitat in the 1400s.

Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm acknowledged that a long road will have to be traversed to move from hatching baby chickens to resurrecting the moa by email. He conceded that “gestation is just one step of many steps in the process.”

Lamm portrayed Colossal’s de-extinction efforts as something of a public service. “Bringing back extinct species allows us to design a long-term system model for endangered species production while also developing novel technologies applicable to conservation today … and in some cases undo the sins humanity has committed,” he said.

Many scientists express concerns about the “de-extinction” idea itself. One is that it’s impossible to resurrect a species that has been gone for so long that no biological material that could provide original DNA exists any longer.

Even if it could be done, whether it should be done is doubtful.

“The environment in which they lived has been evolving since their absence,” says evolutionary biologist Vincent J. Lynch of the University at Buffalo. “To put them back into that environment is introducing an invasive species into an environment in which it hasn’t lived before.” That could produce difficulties for the cloned animals and for modern life, including the possible revival of prehistoric pathogens for which humankind has no defense.

“The de-extinction breathlessness,” says biologist Paul Knoepfler of UC Davis, “potentially endangers real animals for the sake of hypothetical future de-extincted ones.” Colossal boasts about conservation programs it has helped to fund; those “could do some good,” Knoepfler says, “but it would be far better if more of the capital they raised just went directly to helping protect living but endangered animals rather than trying to bring back extinct ones.”

(Knoepfler gave Colossal his annual science hype award last year for its dire wolf claim. “I’m not convinced that a single animal that they ever ‘de-extinct’ will be the real deal,” he told me.)

Colossal’s de-extinction palaver has been exploited by conservatives to justify attacks on the federal Endangered Species Act and other conservation initiatives. That was the subtext of a tweet Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted after the dire wolf announcement, proclaiming that “the revival of the Dire Wolf” would allow the Trump administration to “fundamentally change how we think about species conservation.”

None of this is to dispute that the company has been successful in seizing the attention of people with capital to spare. Privately held Colossal raised $200 million early last year on terms that gave it a putative valuation of $10.2 billion. Its “cultural advisory board” boasts influencers such as Martin, Tom Brady and filmmaker Peter Jackson.

The company defends its PR-heavy campaigning as a necessity in the modern world. “We’re competing with the Kardashians,” co-founder Ben Lamm told Rolling Stone. “We are in the attention economy. … If we want people to care about things like genome engineering and CRISPR and conservation, it has to be as thoughtful, as interesting, as what they’re going to see on MTV or Bravo.”

Lamm told me he was hoping for even more press coverage than the 26 hatchlings received: “I don’t think everyone understood and articulated the incredible challenges overcome in this achievement. I am disappointed more people didn’t cover the news and the significance for developmental biology, science overall and conservation.”

What’s alarming about the credulous coverage that Colossal receives from the press is that it points to a decline in responsible reporting on science. This is what keeps experienced pseudoscience debunkers on their toes.

It’s what has enabled political partisans to sully news columns and the airwaves with unsupported claims that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese lab and that anti-pandemic measures — including the COVID vaccines — were worse than letting the infection spread.

In recent weeks, the press has been filled with what the veteran debunker David Gorski labeled a “credulous take” on acupuncture, ostensibly explaining how acupuncture works — never mind that there is no solid evidence that acupuncture does work.

Once misinformation or disinformation takes root in the public sphere, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. A couple of examples related to Colossal should suffice. One comes from Rolling Stone, which headlined its article about the chicken hatchlings thusly: “First TheyBroughtBack Dire Wolves. Next Up? Artificial Wombs.”

The problem here is that Colossal did not “bring back dire wolves.” The company’s chief scientist, Beth Shapiro, acknowledged as much a few weeks after its initial announcement, telling New Scientist, “It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned.”

The Rolling Stone article, which posted Tuesday, was based in part on a tour of its Dallas lab the company granted a reporter in February.

“To enter Colossal’s 55,000-square-foot Dallas headquarters is to find one’s senses fairly assaulted by the Power of Tech,” the publication wrote, describing it as a place where “many wondrous things are happening.”

Discover Magazine’s article about the hatchlings was similarly uncritical, starting with the headline: “Colossal Hatches Healthy Chicks From an Artificial Egg, Setting the Stage for Giant Moa De-Extinction.”

Not everybody has swallowed the Kool-Aid. Standout reporting on Colossal has been done by Michael Le Page of the British journal New Scientist, whose most recent article bristled with skeptical takes about the hatchling announcement from established scientists.

Colossal’s approach to communicating its work with what I termed last year “unsparing razzmatazz” is playing with fire. That’s because the public that has bought into its inflated spiel may end up being let down with a jolt.

“Eventually it’s going to come out that they didn’t de-extinct the dire wolf or the moa,” Lynch says. “When people realize that, it’s going to negatively impact their understanding of science and their belief in scientific claims, at a time when people are already skeptical about what we do.”

The post Are dodos and mammoths coming back from extinction? Don’t count on it appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

This is the context for evaluating the proposed Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger — not as a Wall Street transaction or referendum on consolidation, but as a question of whether the freight network truly serves the national interest. The Surface Transportation Board received a revised merger application from Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern on April 30 after finding the original December 2025 filing incomplete. The Board is expected to rule on completeness by the end of May. That process appears to be moving carefully, as it should for a transaction of this scale. The policy conversation should not wait for the lawyers.

The fundamental challenge facing American freight is its organizational structure. It is a system shaped by competing rail barons and the territorial rivalries of a bygone era. Long-haul shipments often cross multiple railroads before reaching their destination. Each interchange point adds time, cost, and uncertainty. Shippers absorb those costs. Retailers do as well. And consumers absorb them too, usually without knowing it. The American Transportation Research Institute calculated that highway congestion alone added more than $108 billion to trucking industry costs in a single year. These costs do not stay on the loading dock. They flow through every layer of the supply chain.

Rail offers a demonstrably more efficient alternative for long-haul freight. Freight railroads move one ton of cargo nearly 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel, three to four times as efficiently as trucks on a comparable basis. That is a significant economic and environmental advantage that the country is only partially realizing, because the existing network was not designed for seamless coast-to-coast service. Trucks remain essential, particularly for first- and last-mile delivery, and a better rail network makes the overall system stronger, not weaker.

Union Pacific has traditionally served the western half of the country, while Norfolk Southern serves eastern ports and industrial centers — which means a combined network would likely reduce inefficiencies, providing shippers with more reliable schedules, fewer handoffs, and better end-to-end visibility. Those improvements translate into real savings that ultimately show up in consumer prices.

This does not mean any merger should close without serious scrutiny. We also need an honest conversation about competition — and the limits of protecting it. Sometimes, in our zeal to preserve market structure, we have blocked combinations that might have kept struggling carriers viable and the network stronger. Like most things in policy, it is a balancing act.

BNSF Railway, which competes with Union Pacific in the West, says the revised application lacks sufficient information for a proper competitive assessment. Other railroads, shippers, and short line operators have questioned market concentration, captive shipper pricing, and competitive access — especially once a combined network controls about half of domestic rail freight volume. These questions deserve well-contemplated answers, not procedural delays.

The STB has the authority and the duty to impose meaningful conditions if it approves the transaction. These include enforceable service quality standards, guaranteed interchange access for short line railroads, pricing transparency, and clear penalties for service failures. These conditions can determine whether a merger delivers on its promise or simply consolidates market power without public benefit.

There is a broader infrastructure picture worth considering. Federal highway funding has dropped in real terms since the early 1990s. Public resources cannot keep up with the maintenance backlog on the national road network. President Trump has even proposed suspending the federal gas tax, which funds roads and bridges, in response to fuel price pressures. Private capital flowing into freight rail infrastructure helps ease that burden — without needing a congressional appropriation and without adding to the federal balance sheet.

The Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure, which I chair, does not take positions for or against specific mergers. What we consistently advocate, on a non-partisan basis, is that infrastructure decisions be judged on performance, not ideology. Does a proposed change make the system more reliable, efficient, and resilient? Does it serve the public interest over the long term? These are the right questions for any major change to national infrastructure.

The operational need for a more integrated rail network is real. The STB is well-positioned to weigh the competitive risks and arrive at a balanced decision — provided the process moves forward without procedural hurdles that create unnecessary delay. In an industry where timeliness is everything, the review itself should model the standard.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

The post The U.S. freight network is broken by design. One merger could start fixing it appeared first on Fortune.

After fitful progress last year, which included a couple of rockets disintegrating over the Caribbean, an upgraded design features changes aimed at enhancing performance and reliability.

The stakes are high for SpaceX, which aims to sell shares in an initial public offering as soon as next month, and for NASA, which plans to use Starship as a lunar lander to take astronauts to the surface of the moon in a couple of years.

When is the launch, and how can I watch it?

SpaceX is aiming to launch Starship on Thursday from its Starbase facility in southern Texas, outside Brownsville. The 90-minute launch window opens at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time.

SpaceX plans to provide live coverage of the test flight on its website, starting about 45 minutes before liftoff.

What is Starship?

Starship is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has said it will be fully reusable, with both stages returning to the launch site to be caught by giant mechanical arms.

If SpaceX could pull off this vision, Starship could revolutionize the space industry, enabling the launching of bigger, heavier payloads at lower costs.

The 408-foot-tall vehicle consists of an upper-stage spacecraft, also called Starship and often shortened to Ship, and a powerful booster stage with 33 engines, known as the Super Heavy.

Why hasn’t SpaceX launched any Starships since October?

The five launches last year were Version 2 or Block 2 of Starship. They incorporated improvements from the first round of launches in 2023 and 2024.

In November 2024, during the sixth test flight of the first version of Starship, the upper-stage spacecraft survived re-entry over the Indian Ocean and slowed to a hover over the water as if it were landing.

SpaceX hoped that Version 2 would allow it to build on the successes of Version 1, including a demonstration of transferring oxygen and methane propellants from one Starship to another. Because it is so big and heavy, Starship burns up almost all of its propellants to reach low-Earth orbit. Refueling is necessary before it can head to more distant destinations, like the moon.

But in January 2025, the seventh test flight, and the first of a Version 2 Starship, disintegrated as it headed into space.

The eighth test flight also failed. The ninth made it into space but disintegrated during re-entry. The 10th and 11th were successful, but essentially just repeated what the Version 1 Starships had accomplished a year earlier.

Since then, SpaceX has been busy not only developing Version 3 of Starship, but also building a brand-new launchpad. That has taken longer than Mr. Musk anticipated. (Ten weeks ago, in early March, he said the launch was about four weeks away.)

On Friday, Jose Luis Bautista, a 25-year-old worker at Starbase, died after falling eight feet off a scaffold, Mary Esther Sorola, a justice of the peace for Cameron County, said in an interview.

The preliminary autopsy report indicated that he suffered from blunt force trauma from the fall, she said.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the incident. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

What’s new with this version of Starship?

In a post on its website, SpaceX described a long list of improvements, including a new version of the Raptor engines that is more streamlined in design and lighter but also more powerful. The plumbing, thermal protection and power systems around the engines in the Super Heavy booster have also been redesigned.

On the booster, there are now three larger grid fins, which help guide the booster during its re-entry through the atmosphere, instead of the four fins on earlier boosters.

On the upper-stage spacecraft, improvements include hardware that will be used for docking and for the transfer of propellants from one Starship to another.

Will this Starship go into orbit, finally?

By design, all of the Starship test flights so far have followed a suborbital trajectory. Although the rockets reached speeds essentially fast enough to enter orbit, they traveled along elliptical trajectories that intersected with the Earth’s atmosphere. That way, if something went wrong, the rockets harmlessly burned up over the ocean.

This 12th test flight will also be suborbital. If that goes well, then the 13th could be the first to go into orbit around Earth.

Will SpaceX catch the booster this time?

The most thrilling breakthrough of the Version 2 Starship was during the fifth test flight, when the Super Heavy booster returned to Starbase and was caught in midair by two large mechanical arms on the launch tower. SpaceX repeated that feat during the seventh and eighth test flights.

On this test flight, however, the booster will not return to the launchpad and instead will simulate a landing over the Gulf of Mexico about 20 miles offshore.

During a future test flight, SpaceX wants to not only catch the booster, but also the Starship’s upper-stage spacecraft after it returns from orbit.

What will happen during this test flight?

The flight plan largely repeats what the last test flight accomplished.

“The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time,” SpaceX said on its website.

Why is this important for NASA’s Artemis moon program?

NASA hired SpaceX to provide a version of Starship that is to take its astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon. However, with Starship’s development running behind schedule, NASA raised the possibility that it could switch to a lander from Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

In February, Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, announced an overhaul of the Artemis return-to-the-moon program. Instead of attempting a lunar landing during Artemis III, that mission will now remain in orbit around Earth so that NASA can practice docking between the Orion spacecraft and one or both of the lunar landers.

NASA is now aiming for that first moon landing to occur in 2028, during its Artemis IV mission. But that schedule is very tight, with little time to investigate and fix problems if Starship suffers another major failure.

Why is this important for SpaceX?

SpaceX is currently navigating a process to go public in what could be the largest initial public offering of all time. The company, which values itself at $1.25 trillion, is aiming to go public as early as June and could raise $50 billion to $75 billion in what could be the largest I.P.O. of all time.

Part of that valuation is built on the idea that the company will expand manufacturing and artificial intelligence data centers to space and eventually fulfill Mr. Musk’s dream of sending people to Mars. Starship has been central to that vision, with the company stating in an update this month that changes to this next version of the rocket would allow for the deployment of “orbital data centers, and the ability to send people and cargo to the moon and Mars.”

On Wednesday, SpaceX revealed some of its financial figures ahead of its I.P.O. and stated that it lost more than $4.9 billion in 2025. While much of that was because of its heavy spending on A.I, the company also lost $657 million from operations of its space segment, which encompasses its launch business.

Ryan Mac contributed reporting.

Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.

The post SpaceX to Attempt Its 12th Test Flight of Starship appeared first on New York Times.

“I’ll speak to him,” Mr. Trump told reporters when asked whether he would call Mr. Lai before deciding on an arms sale to the self-governing democracy. “I speak to everybody,” he said, adding later, “We’ll work that, the Taiwan problem.”

Responding on Thursday morning, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said Mr. Lai would be happy to speak to Mr. Trump.

It was the second time in a week that Mr. Trump said he intended to speak to Taiwan’s leader. Mr. Trump first raised the possibility while returning from his summit in Beijing with President Xi Jinping of China.

“I have to speak to the person that right now is — you know who he is — that’s running Taiwan,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One after leaving China, in an apparent reference to Mr. Lai.

Mr. Lai’s office has not received communication from the United States regarding a phone call, his senior aide, Pan Men-an, said on Thursday in response to a lawmaker’s question at a legislative hearing in Taipei.

Any such call would infuriate China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and opposes contact between Taiwanese and foreign leaders. It would also mark the first direct dialogue between sitting American and Taiwanese presidents in many decades, breaking with longstanding U.S. practices excluding top-level contacts with Taiwan.

No sitting U.S. president has spoken directly with a Taiwanese president since at least 1979, when Washington severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan as part of recognizing the People’s Republic of China. Even before then, American and Taiwanese presidents generally communicated indirectly through aides or letters and telegrams. Taiwan’s authoritarian leader, Chiang Kai-shek, met President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Taiwan in 1960

Mr. Trump last spoke with a Taiwanese leader in 2016, when he was president-elect and Tsai Ing-wen, then Taiwan’s president, congratulated him on his election victory by telephone. He was believed to be the first president or president-elect to speak with a Taiwanese leader since 1979.

The call drew surprise and disbelief from China. “We believe it’s a petty action by the Taiwan side,” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said at the time.

On Thursday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, told reporters that China opposed the U.S. arms sale to Taiwan as well as any official exchanges between the two sides. The package includes missiles, anti-drone equipment and air defense systems intended to bolster the island against military threats from China.

During the summit, Mr. Xi warned that support for Taiwan would damage U.S.-China relations. He told Mr. Trump that if China’s concerns over the island were mishandled, the two countries could clash.

After leaving Beijing, Mr. Trump said that he had discussed the arms deal with Mr. Xi and described it as a “negotiating chip” that could be used against Beijing, remarks that raised questions about the reliability of American support.

John Yoon is a Times reporter based in Seoul who covers breaking and trending news.

The post Trump Again Says He Will Talk to Taiwan’s Leader, Risking China’s Anger appeared first on New York Times.

Reynolds American, makers of Vuse vapes, made the donation on April 30 through a subsidiary to MAGA Inc., the Trump-backed super PAC, bringing its total contributions to the group to $8 million, according to campaign finance records released Wednesday and reported by the New York Times.

Two days after the donation, a top Reynolds executive and two company lobbyists had lunch with Trump at his Jupiter, Florida, golf club. Two executives from rival tobacco company Altria were also there. During the meal, the industry representatives complained about FDA regulation of e-cigarettes, and Trump interrupted the meeting to personally call FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. When Makary didn’t pick up, Trump called his boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to complain about vape regulation.

Less than a week later, the FDA issued new guidance that could allow major tobacco companies to sell flavored vapes and capture a chunk of the $6 billion e-cigarette market. The policy circumvented the FDA’s normal rule-making process, the Times noted.

Four days after the guidance was announced, Makary resigned, telling associates he could not in good conscience remain at the agency after it backed such a policy.

The revelation triggered immediate outrage online.

“President Trump doesn’t even bother to hide his grift anymore,” investor Doug Kass posted on X.

Commentator Paul Niland was equally blunt: “If you assumed the FDA approval of flavoured vapes could only have been as a result of a bribe, congratulations. You have passed the test of being a rational human being,” he wrote.

Physician Tyler Black, MD, posted simply: “I was told America didn’t like tyrants.”

Perhaps most cutting was the reaction from musician Five Times August, who responded to the news with a single line of biting sarcasm: “Make America Healthy or whatever” — a reference to RFK Jr.’s signature MAHA health initiative.

The White House denied any connection between the donation and the policy shift.

“The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health policymaking is gold standard science,” a White House spokesman told the Times in a statement. The spokesman said the FDA’s regulatory treatment of vapes and nicotine pouches “is rooted in recent evidence that has found they can help adults quit smoking.”

The post ‘Bribe’: Outrage as report reveals massive donation preceded Trump’s ‘gift’ to Big Tobacco appeared first on Raw Story.

Now comes the hard part — making sure this change improves the education we offer, something that depends on much more than just the decisions made on our campus.

Easy A’s are a problem for a whole lot of reasons. They reduce the incentive to learn, which means that students leave college with less knowledge and fewer skills. They make it hard for truly exceptional students to stand out from their merely successful peers. And though inflated grades might seem to lower pressure on students, the opposite is also true; grade-point averages got so high at Harvard that just two A-minuses were recently enough to disqualify students from graduating summa cum laude.

Over the seven years that we two have taught EC 10, the university’s introductory economics class, we gave full A’s to over 4,000 students, or more than 49 percent of the people we taught. That places us below the average of our fellow instructors, who in the 2024-2025 academic year awarded full A’s 60 percent of the time. Although all the highest-ranked EC 10 students had mastered the material, they hadn’t all crossed the threshold of “extraordinary distinction” that the student handbook says a full A is supposed to represent.

Like many of our colleagues, we wanted to grade more rigorously, but worried that doing so would disadvantage the students in our course or unintentionally push some away from our field of study. This is exactly the kind of collective-action problem we teach about in EC 10 — in which people agree in theory that everyone should act so as to benefit society as a whole, but then in reality pursue their own individual interests. It’s a pattern that, in other contexts, has resulted in fisheries being depleted, public land overgrazed and rivers polluted. In the case of grade inflation, the pressures are especially severe for junior faculty, who fear that honest grading will result in worse course evaluations, lower enrollments and slimmer prospects for tenure. That type of fear fed on itself, producing grades that were not only high but continually rising — in other words, inflation.

Various deans exhorted the Harvard faculty to stop giving out so many A’s, but little changed until we acted together to bind ourselves as a community. When individual incentives pull in the opposite direction of what is best for society, the only durable solution is a mechanism that incentivizes or requires everyone to act in the common good. We talk about that in EC 10, too.

Ultimately, grade inflation hurts not just the quality of individual students’ education; it hurts the university — any university — as a whole, by corroding its reputation for excellence. Asked about Harvard’s proposal, the dean of Yale College, Pericles Lewis, told The Yale Daily News, “I don’t want an A at Yale to be seen as a lesser A.”

The approach Harvard chose is one of many possible ways to overcome grade inflation. Every proposal that was floated, including this one, has downsides and unfair cases. The 20-plus-four approach, for example, would penalize a class that had unusually many talented and hard-working students. But it provides an easy-to-understand, workable solution to the grade inflation that plagued the old status quo. So we chose it.

Anti-inflation measures are hard to maintain, however. Princeton’s cap on A’s lasted from 2004 to 2014; Wellesley’s grade-deflation policy lasted from 2004 to 2019. Both were repealed under student and faculty pressure. For our new cap to work, we will have to show that it is part of a broader effort to improve education and learning — that we are not simply punishing our students with lower grades but raising the bar with more challenging and exciting classes. And more academic competition too.

The effort can’t be limited to just Harvard. Almost all universities have seen their grades become inflated over time, but the same collective-action problem that applies at the level of individual Harvard classes also applies at the level of institutions. Easier-grading schools may believe that they are giving their graduates an advantage. We hope that all schools decide to push back on grade inflation — both to advance their students’ education and, as the reputational costs of grade inflation become clear, to strengthen their graduates’ chances in the job market and graduate admissions.

Employers and graduate school admissions committees should play a role, too, by rewarding schools that make grading more meaningful and more informative. They should demand a nationwide system that tracks and compares grading policies at different schools — and assume the worst of any school that refuses to participate. Barring this, they should push individual schools for more information on average or median grades by class, as McGill University and Dartmouth do.

When a school’s transcript stops distinguishing students from one another, employers and graduate schools fall back on what they can: connections, internship pedigrees, the polish of a personal essay (increasingly written with artificial intelligence). Grade inflation doesn’t just devalue an A; it also quietly hands more weight to factors other than what a student actually learned. That is true at Harvard and every other school that has let its grades drift upward. Bringing inflation down is hard. The alternative is worse.

Jason Furman, a contributing Opinion writer, was the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017. David Laibson is a professor of economics at Harvard University. Together they teach Harvard’s introductory economics course.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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The post Harvard Just Took a Big, Brave Step Against a Nationwide Problem appeared first on New York Times.

• Oana Olteanu left an established venture firm to start her own shop — a risk in a tight market.
• Her track record includes bets on Poolside and MaintainX, which have both achieved unicorn status.
• Olteanu took the No. 12 spot on Business Insider’s 2026 Seed 40 list.

Oana Olteanu turned down a job at artificial intelligence lab Poolside. She took the upside instead.

Then a partner at early-stage venture firm SignalFire, Olteanu had impressed Poolside founder Eiso Kant as someone who understood machine learning and could get exceptional engineers on the phone. Kant asked her to leave venture and help him build a tech team. Olteanu declined. She wanted to keep investing.

So Kant offered her a different way in: a chance to invest personally. Olteanu wrote a small personal check to Poolside, which is now valued at $12 billion.

That bet is helping power her next move: launching her own seed firm, Motive Force. The firms backs early-stage startups, mainly at the pre-seed and seed rounds, in areas including artificial intelligence, enterprise software, and robotics. Its mission is to find technical outsiders and overlooked founders before the rest of Silicon Valley catches on.

The timing could hardly be tougher. First-time funds are a difficult sell in any market. In this one, Olteanu says, fewer rounds are getting done, and capital is clustering into mega-rounds led by giant firms. Smaller funds cannot match the biggest checks or always get into the rounds everyone wants. The institutions that fund venture firms, meanwhile, put more dollars behind the firms they believe still have access to hot deals.

When I spoke to Olteanu this month, she did not sound especially worried. Her pitch is that the market’s obsession with a chosen few creates an opening for a smaller, nimbler investor able to find founders “early when it’s not obvious” and often “before they even think of raising” a formal round of capital. Olteanu declined to share details about her fund, citing rules that prohibit investors from marketing a fundraise.

So far, she has some early signs of success. Poolside is the splashiest example. Her track record also includes spotting Inngest, whose tools help software teams ensure multi-step software tasks finish reliably, before it raised funding from Altimeter Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. She also backed MaintainX, a software startup for industrial teams that helps them monitor and maintain equipment, which is now valued at $2.5 billion.

‘I joined VC for a green card’

Olteanu relates to the outliers she backs. She grew up in rural Romania in a home with no computer. At 18, she entered a NASA contest to design a space station and won the grand prize. The award led to her first-ever plane ride, a trip that took her to the NASA Ames Research Center in the heart of the Bay Area.

She spent the following years in Germany, putting herself through a computer science degree by working three jobs. She was so strapped for cash that she petitioned the German government for a special waiver to work more hours than the legal student limit. Eventually, a full-time offer from enterprise giant SAP gave her the visa she needed to return to California.

Her introduction to the local elite was entirely accidental. Knowing nothing about Bay Area neighborhoods, in 2015 she rented a room on Craigslist that happened to be in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Los Altos Hills. Her landlord was an early engineer at Atari, and her neighbor was Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Olteanu, meanwhile, drove a beat-down Kia Rio.

While she felt like an outsider in her neighborhood, she was becoming an insider in the burgeoning artificial intelligence scene. She spent her nights at machine-learning meetups alongside engineers who would go on to lead Anthropic and OpenAI. By day, as a 22-year-old in the office of the SAP CEO, she was co-developing chatbots with customers like Slack.

Olteanu’s path into venture began as a favor. Scale Venture Partners was considering an investment in BigID, a company that partnered with SAP and that Olteanu knew well. She helped the firm understand what BigID had actually built. Her technical know-how caught the eye of a partner who realized the firm needed her expertise to vet the coming wave of machine-learning startups.

Scale offered her a job, and with it, a path to permanent residency. “Honestly,” she said, “that was the magic word. I joined VC for a green card.”

Building a fund for the outliers

After stints at Scale and SignalFire, Olteanu is now building a firm around the kind of drive that has defined her career.

The name Motive Force comes from physics. It’s the push or pull that causes something to move. Olteanu uses the phrase to describe founders who start building before they have permission, before anyone gives them money, and before they receive the status or applause of the market.

Jemima Meyer is one example. A South African dietitian, she taught herself to code so she could build software to screen patients for malnutrition. Olteanu met her through a women-in-tech community she runs, before Meyer had launched a formal fundraise. On one early call, Meyer told Olteanu she was pitching her company, HealthLeap, to a Los Angeles hospital and “was not leaving until they tried the product.” That drive eventually caught the attention of the broader market. Meyer landed customers like Cedars-Sinai and Penn Medicine.

This is exactly the type of founder Olteanu believes the venture ecosystem is currently failing. “I believe founders deserve a fund to exist like the one I’m designing,” she said.

Olteanu is not dismissive of the classic founder credentials. A Stanford degree, she said, can be useful. But to her, pedigree is only “a station a train passes through,” not proof of where the train is going.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post She became a VC for a green card. Now she’s backing billion-dollar AI bets. appeared first on Business Insider.

If the former Fox News commentator and the reality television bad boy move on to November’s general election, they’ll be running as conservatives in a super-blue state and city where most voters loathe President Trump.

The president endorsed Hilton last month, posting on social media that he “is a truly fine man, one who has watched as this once great State has gone to Hell.” On Wednesday, Trump said he wants Pratt to “do well … I heard he’s a big MAGA person,” before claiming that California elections are rigged and that he would have won the state two years ago “if we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes” because “I do great with Hispanics.”

Trump was right about one thing — the importance of Latino voters. If Hilton and Pratt are to pull off historic upsets, they’ll need this bloc, which has emerged as a mercurial swing vote in local, state and national elections — but only if stirred into action by anger. And if ever there was a year for Latino anger, 2026 is it.

In recent years, Latinos in California have drifted rightward as they tire of Democratic policies, from L.A. City Hall to Sacramento. Rick Caruso captured a majority of the Latino vote in his unsuccessful bid for L.A. mayor four years ago, and there are more Latino Republicans in the state legislature than ever. Some of the most Latino areas in Southern California saw the biggest shifts toward Trump from 2020 to 2024.

Hilton has held town halls in small, Latino-majority cities across a state that’s about 41% Latino. He frequently appears alongside lieutenant governor candidate Gloria Romero, a pioneer in challenging disaffected Latinos to not always vote Democrat.

Pratt has shared AI-generated salsa and merengue songs that hail him as a savior and uses Spanglish when referring to Mayor Karen Bass as “Basura” — trash. He’s starting to roll out endorsements from Latino business groups and held a block party in South L.A. this week for which a Instagram post tried to draw supporters with the promise of a taco truck.

So if the candidates know that Latinos are essential to their long-shot campaigns, why the hell aren’t they running as far and fast from Trump as possible?

Two years ago, Trump — the most anti-Latino president since James Polk — grabbed a larger share of the Latino electorate than any Republican presidential candidate ever had. GOP leaders predicted that Latinos were finally theirs. But Trump annihilated that advantage by launching his deportation deluge. Now, he has turned off even some die-hard supporters by starting a war in Iran, which has further strained an already shaky economy.

A New York Times/Siena poll released this month found that only 20% of Latinos support Trump — the lowest during his two terms. A Pew Research Center survey, meanwhile, found that only 66% of Latinos who voted for Trump now approve of him, compared to 81% of white Trump supporters.

Instead of running away, Hilton and Pratt seem fine with hitching their prospects to this political Titanic.

Hilton sought and received Trump’s endorsement, arguing that it’s better to have a friendly relationship with the White House than the antagonistic path California’s elected leaders have chosen.

But most voters want no part of Hilton’s kumbaya. Proposition 50, a direct rebuke of Trump’s gerrymandering efforts in other states, passed with more than two-thirds of the vote last fall. A CalMatters analysis found that Latino-majority precincts voted in bigger numbers for the ballot initiative than for Kamala Harris two years earlier.

Hilton can promise Latinos his “Califordable” agenda and eat all the tacos he wants. But our economic malaise was caused in large part by Trump, who recently said he thinks about Americans’ financial struggles “not even a little bit.”

For Hilton not to decry such cluelessness is almost as ridiculous as his recent boasts that he — the British son of Hungarian refugees who became a U.S. citizen just five years ago— is the candidate of “legal” immigrants. That’s a callback to the days of Proposition 187, when Republicans obsessed with the state’s changing demographics turned off my generation of Latinos by demonizing our undocumented friends and family. The GOP was finally starting to emerge from the political wilderness with Latinos, but Hilton cozying up to Trump will drag the party back into that weak salsa place.

Pratt has been coyer on his thoughts about Trump, but at least he seems to realize that the president might be a liability. The Republican said his party affiliation doesn’t since the mayor’s race is nonpartisan. He has portrayed himself as focused solely on improving Los Angeles, telling CBS News, “I don’t do national politics. I don’t do tribal politics.”

But for someone who says he wants to make L.A. a world-class city, Pratt seems unconcerned about Trump’s assault on us, including last summer’s unchecked immigration raids and temporary occupation by the Marines and the National Guard. Rather than denounce those moves, Pratt has instead denounced L.A.’s sanctuary city ordinance and vowed to work with ICE and other federal immigration agencies to target bad hombres if he becomes mayor, even though a majority of those rounded up in the raids had no criminal history.

It’s as if Pratt’s understanding of Latino L.A. ends with an Erewhon burrito. He continually platforms supporters who portray L.A. as a multicultural wasteland. And when another mayoral candidate, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, posted Trump’s praise of Pratt on social media, he responded with a snippet of himself making a dismissive face during a debate.

But this is nothing to dismiss. For Pratt and Hilton to win, they need Latinos to believe in them. And why would we believe anyone who hitches their wagon, even a little, to Trump?

The post Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt need Latinos, not Trump appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

On some level, that’s expected: Elon Musk (the world’s richest person) and his businesses have long been their own landscape of lightning rods. But SpaceX has always especially captured imaginations. The company’s been around since 2002 and for decades has been revamping the once-impenetrable space economy. And the headlines have always been evocative: Reusable rockets! Colonies on Mars! Starlink everywhere! 

But SpaceX itself is also, let’s remember, a Frankensteined company in its own right: Rockets may be the headline, but SpaceX is also comprised of its massive Starlink business, the artist formerly known as Twitter, Musk’s AI outfit xAI, and perhaps eventually even AI coding mega-unicorn Cursor.

Here’s what most stood out to me as I combed through the go-public filing the first time.

Kardashev Type II civilization… This S-1 has a pretty legendary glossary of terms. Consider: Kardashev Type II, which “refers to a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of its local star, like our Sun, to power unprecedented growth and sustain the civilization’s existence.” Or: “lunar mass driver,” which is “a launch system that we intend to build on the Moon’s surface that will be designed to use electromagnetic acceleration to propel payloads into space without the use of rockets.” I’m not made of stone, and that’s cool.

Twitter isn’t exactly crushing it… Apologies, X. The social media platform, which Musk dramatically acquired in 2022 for $44 billion, saw its advertising revenue decline by $595 million, as its revenue for 2024 dropped by 11.5%. The filing is clear: “The decrease in advertising revenue was due to the loss of advertising partners for X.” But, on the bright side, there was an increase in subscription revenue of $157 million. 

Cursor check… SpaceX’s prospective $60 billion acquisition of embattled AI coding juggernaut Cursor is not guaranteed, but clearly plays a key role in the story SpaceX is telling the public markets about its place in the AI landscape. We also got a sneak peek into Cursor, which at the end of its fiscal year had $3.1 billion in total assets—$2.7 billion in cash and about $550 million in liabilities. Cursor also would get a $1.5 billion termination fee, should the deal go bust.

This is still Musk’s show… Musk currently has 85% voting power thanks to Class B shares, and will retain his iron grip post-IPO. Here’s the exact language, if that’s your thing: “Mr. Musk will have the power to control the outcome of matters requiring shareholder approval, including election of all our directors.” Translation: Elon’s in charge. There are examples of other “controlled” companies in the public markets, like Meta.

Money moves… There’s really so much here. Some quick facts to ruminate on: Starlink is financially bolstering the business. Anthropic is apparently paying SpaceX a whopping $15 billion a year. (This is oddly delicious: Musk once called Anthropic “evil.”) And Musk’s pay package is not only tied to stock price, but to the establishment of a colony on Mars, with a minimum of one million people.

This looks to be, far and away, the largest IPO ever (if reports are true). The valuation math is extremely aggressive: we’re talking about a valuation that’ll supposedly be as high as $2 trillion, for a money-guzzling business that generated about $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue. That’s a tough sell, at least to me. But it’s possible—even likely—the red flags won’t matter and demand will soar. So, caveat emptor.

Let’s all prepare for liftoff.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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The post SpaceX’s IPO filing is full of surprises appeared first on Fortune.

This week, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize drew attention from readers who suspected that one of its winning stories, “The Serpent in the Grove,” was written by A.I. Like all five regional winners of the competition, the story was published online by Granta, a British literary journal that has featured work by renowned authors like Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie.

“We’ve taken stock of the comments and tried to be very systematic in our understanding of some of the perspectives and tried to look at ourselves internally to see if we feel that our process to date has been robust enough,” said Razmi Farook, the director-general of the Commonwealth Foundation, which administers the prize, in a video call with The New York Times. “We’re confident in the rigor of our process, but we’re conscious that this is an evolving technological environment.”

Granta, which did not respond to questions sent by The Times before publication, took a different stance in its multiple public statements.

“We showed Claude.ai the story and asked whether it was A.I.-generated,” Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta, said in a statement. “The response was long, concluding that it was ‘almost certainly not produced unaided by a human.’”

Rausing added: “It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of A.I. plagiarism — we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”

On its website, the magazine posted a statement above each of the five winning stories distancing its editors from the contest’s selection process.

“Granta editors were not involved with these stories or their selection beyond copy-editing them upon receipt,” the statement reads in part. “The suggestion that writers have submitted material not authentically their own is a charge we take seriously, but until definite evidence comes to light we will keep these stories on our website.”

The story’s author, Jamir Nazir, is described in an accompanying bio on Granta’s website as “a prolific poet and author, with books published and others forthcoming.” Among the little other work that Nazir appears to have published is a self-published poetry collection, “Night Moon Love: Poems for All Who Have Loved or Dreamed of Love.” Nazir did not respond to a request for comment.

This year’s competition received around 7,800 entries. Of the five chosen as regional winners, one will be named the overall winner on June 30.

The speculation surrounding “The Serpent in the Grove” came on the heels of news, reported by The Times in March, that Hachette Book Group was halting plans to publish “Shy Girl,” a horror novel, in the United States, and discontinuing sales of the book in the United Kingdom. The move followed widespread allegations online that its author, Mia Ballard, had relied heavily on A.I. to write the book. (Ballard told The Times that an acquaintance she hired to edit a self-published version of “Shy Girl” had used A.I., but that she herself did not.)

Earlier this week, The Times also found that the author Steven Rosenbaum had included a number of fictitious or misattributed quotes generated by A.I. in his recent nonfiction book about artificial intelligence, “The Future of Truth.” (In a statement, Rosenbaum said that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and that he had started his own investigation.)

Authors have taken varying public stances on the role of A.I. in their creative processes.

The author Coral Hart, for example, has been open about using A.I. to help her write; last year, she self-published more than 200 romance novels, with the help of Anthropic’s Claude.

The Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk caused a minor uproar in the literary community this week after telling an audience in Poland last week that she used A.I. while writing her latest novel. Tokarczuk responded with a statement shared by her publisher.

“I make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world — I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts,” Tokarczuk said. “None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence — except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research.”

For publishers and prize juries, A.I. presents a challenge with no clear solutions. The accusations made against “The Serpent in the Grove” and other works have revealed how tricky it can be to determine whether a work was written by a human.

In the days following the story’s publication, readers on social media and online forums pointed out signs of A.I. writing tics, such as excessive use of metaphors and similes; nonsensical figurative expressions (one line in particular, “she had the kind of walking that made benches become men,” drew a lot of flak); and negative parallelism, which is more commonly known as the “not X, but Y” construction.

But these traits often appear in human writing as well. To confirm their suspicions, some readers, including the Wharton School professor and A.I. researcher Ethan Mollick, ran the story through A.I. detectors like Pangram, which suggested that the text was 100 percent A.I.-generated.

Still, some experts caution that these tools are not entirely reliable.

“The A.I. text detectors make lots of mistakes, particularly on creative writing that uses unusual constructions that may not be typical in what Pangram has trained their system on,” said Nicholas Andrews, a senior research scientist in computer science at Johns Hopkins University whose work focuses on A.I. and machine learning.

Jack Grieve, a professor of corpus linguistics at the University of Birmingham, pointed out that without controlling for variations in dialect, topic, genre and prompts, relying on A.I.-detection tools can be risky. To his eye, he wrote in an email to The Times, the short story was neither obviously A.I.-generated nor obviously not A.I.-generated.

“The technology isn’t quite there, and because of its imperfections, it leads people to think things are black and white when they’re not necessarily so,” Farook said. She added that for organizations, it is important to avoid having “a knee-jerk reaction to the general hysteria around these issues at the moment.”

This is especially the case, Farook added, because of the risks to writers that false accusations carry.

“These are people with personal stories, writers facing their own personal challenges, and writing is a very vulnerable tool,” Farook said. “The prize brings those people to the fore. They’re having to contend with something new. They’re often unpublished writers, so there’s a duty of care and consideration we need to take into account.”

The post Was a Story That Just Won a Literary Prize A.I.-Generated? appeared first on New York Times.

The A.I. build out was in full swing, driving up demand for computer memory chips, an industry dominated by Samsung and another South Korean company, SK Hynix. Reflecting this new age of plenty, SK Hynix had in 2025 unveiled new, industry-leading perks: 10 percent of operating profit was set aside for worker bonuses. Caps for those bonuses were also removed.

In recent days, Samsung’s largest labor union made a similar request in its negotiations — that the company commit 15 percent of its operating profit for performance bonuses for the semiconductor division, and to remove a cap that limits individual bonuses.

Disagreements with the company brought the workers to the brink of a strike, which was averted Wednesday night after an intervention by government mediators.

Under the provisional agreement, which abolished the bonus cap, Samsung is expected to set aside 10.5 percent of profits for bonuses. In the first three months of this year, the company’s profit soared to $39 billion. The union will vote on whether to finalize the deal by next Wednesday.

While the deal defused the immediate crisis, the episode illustrated a question taking on increasing urgency amid South Korea’s A.I. windfall: How should its profits be distributed?

“South Korea has never seen the level of sudden and unexpected wealth we’re seeing in the current semiconductor supercycle,” said Yong Gu Suh, a business professor at Sookmyung Women’s University. “How we solve this problem will be a test of South Korean capitalism’s sustainability.”

As South Korea’s largest employer, Samsung Electronics is a critical pillar of the country’s economy. It and SK Hynix together account for over 40 percent of the total market capitalization of the Kospi, South Korea’s main stock index, while semiconductors make up about a third of South Korea’s total exports.

A work stoppage at Samsung could have rattled the global A.I. supply chain, which is demanding more of the company’s chips. Samsung and SK Hynix are already two of the main bottlenecks in the A.I. build-out, as they have not been able to keep up with increasing demand.

Nonetheless, bullish investors have driven up the value of the Kospi by more than threefold since early 2025. Earlier this month, Samsung Electronics crossed $1 trillion in market capitalization.

Despite the company being known for much of its history for smartphones and TVs, in the first quarter of this year, 94 percent of Samsung’s operating profit came from semiconductors. This has given the union significant leverage as most of its 70,000 members work in this division.

But even within this division, the company said, not everyone contributed equally.

Carrying the division’s profitability is its crown jewel, the memory unit, which makes the chips vital for A.I. But the division also includes two units, one that designs logic chips and one that makes chips for other companies, that are running losses.

How much each unit deserved became the core sticking point in the negotiations. The union requested that the majority of the bonus pot be equally distributed among workers in all three units — as well as those in roles that do not directly create profits, like research. Samsung said it would be “socially unacceptable” to reward lackluster performance.

In a statement on Wednesday, Samsung said the union’s proposal “directly contradicts the company’s core management principle that ‘rewards should follow performance.’” Last night, the union agreed to back off to 40 percent.

Outside the chip-making division, other fissures have opened up. With so much of the union’s focus in the negotiations concerned with how to divvy things up in the semiconductor division, workers from the consumer electronics division have accused the union’s leadership of sidelining their interests. Many remember a not-so-distant time when semiconductors were a loss-making business, and smartphones and TVs were the company’s lifeline.

Mr. Suh, the professor, said that the Samsung Electronics union, which is also widely referred to as a “millennial and Gen. Z” union, represents a new species of labor movement native to the A.I. era — younger and less ideological than its predecessors, focused more on getting immediate wins than building broader worker solidarity.

In the end, this may threaten the union’s bargaining power. Over the last month, around 4,000 consumer electronics workers reportedly left the union, many of them rallying around a smaller union seen as better representing their interests. The splintering is likely to accelerate if Wednesday’s provisional agreement is finalized.

On Wednesday, President Lee Jae Myung, a pro-labor liberal, also took aim at the union’s demands, describing them as an overreach.

“Labor rights are meant to protect workers as a socially vulnerable group, but there are also the important principles of solidarity and responsibility that go along with it,” he said. “They do not grant the power to use collective action to secure the rights of a small group of people.”

Meaghan Tobin in Taipei, Taiwan, and Jin Yu Young in Seoul contributed reporting.

The post Samsung Averts a Walkout With Big Bonuses, but Discord Over A.I. Profits Brews appeared first on New York Times.

“Allies of Mr. Blanche thought he could achieve two seemingly irreconcilable goals when he was elevated to temporarily replace Pam Bondi after her ouster in April: restoring stability and competence to the department and taking a handful of actions that were sufficiently drastic to convince the boss he was tough enough to make his title permanent,” said the report. “So far, however, Mr. Blanche has exhibited few of the modest moderating tendencies he exhibited during more than a year as Ms. Bondi’s top deputy.”

For example, Blanche oversaw the re-indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a social media tweet. And even more notably, “In announcing on Monday a $1.8 billion fund that would benefit those who claim they were targeted by the federal government, he effectively forged a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to Trump allies, among them supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Blanche has now been put in the awkward position of trying to clarify how this program, already decried by Democrats as a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies, will work, and how it will be legal.

“While Mr. Blanche’s name is on the documents, and he has defended the actions as lawful and necessary, his precise role in formulating these policies remains unclear,” said the report. “During an interview with CNN on Wednesday, he suggested that Mr. Trump’s ‘outside counsel’ and department lawyers, but ‘not me,’ had been involved in drafting the settlement, including the provision shielding the president from I.R.S. scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, he has also declined to say Jan. 6 rioters, even those convicted of new crimes since Trump’s pardons, would not be eligible to apply for the fund — and “said he would appoint five commissioners who would make all the major decisions, that Mr. Trump would have authority to fire them, vowed to appoint one member after consulting Congress — but refused to commit to including even a single Democrat.”

All of this comes as even Senate Republicans start considering a legislative crackdown on the fund, including limitations on who is eligible, in their immigration enforcement reconciliation package.

The post Todd Blanche in a bind as he defends — and distances from — boss’s scheme: analysis appeared first on Raw Story.

Among the heaviest patients in the trial, the results were on par with those seen with gastric bypass surgery, the only effective treatment for most with severe obesity.

The drug, retatrutide, appears to be the most powerful yet in a wave of injections and pills that have transformed the treatment of obesity — so much so that some participants in other research have said they stopped taking retatrutide because they felt they were losing too much weight.

If the drug’s effects do not wane with time, and if its results in the real world echo those in the clinical trial, it may extend the notion of what a weight loss drug can accomplish.

Eli Lilly reported the findings in a news release. The results have not yet undergone peer review or been published in a medical journal.

The drug’s powerful effects came at a cost. At higher doses, the drug often causes gastrointestinal side effects that are so unpleasant that some patients stop taking it.

Eli Lilly reported that 11 percent of participants who got the highest dose dropped out of the study because of side effects, higher than the figures seen with less powerful obesity drugs that are already available.

All of these drugs often cause side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation, but those effects are rarely severe.

Eli Lilly has not yet applied for regulatory approval, but the drug has already generated intense interest.

As word has spread about promising results in Eli Lilly’s clinical trials, some Americans have been going online to order knockoff versions from China — alarming physicians and researchers, who are concerned that patients are not being monitored and could be harmed.

If approved, retatrutide would join an increasingly crowded market. Still, some doctors said they expected it might be most useful for the heaviest patients who are looking to lose the most weight and are reluctant to have bariatric surgery.

The results announced by Eli Lilly were from a randomized study of 2,339 patients who were obese or overweight. Those who got the highest dose of the drug had lost 70 pounds on average, or 28 percent of their body weight, after 80 weeks, the company said.

The drug led to even more weight loss in the heaviest patients in the study. Those with a body mass index over 35, considered moderate or severe obesity, were assessed after two years.

Over that time, those on the highest dose lost an average of 85 pounds, or 30.3 percent of their weight. By comparison, patients who have gastric bypass surgery lose about 30 to 35 percent of their body weight after two years.

The weight loss with retatrutide surpasses what is typically possible with the two most popular injections for obesity: Eli Lilly’s Zepbound and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy.

They can help people lose about 20 percent of their body weight over a similar period. Pill versions of the drugs deliver more modest weight loss, between 12 and 14 percent of body weight.

That is not enough for the 24 million Americans who have what is characterized as severe obesity, a body mass index of at least 40.

To reach a healthy weight, they need to lose 80 to 100 pounds, said Dr. Carolyn Apovian, an obesity specialist at Harvard Medical School.

Bariatric surgery usually can do it. But it has always been a hard sell, and the advent of effective obesity drugs has made it even less attractive for many patients. Demand for bariatric surgery has fallen as the obesity drugs have grown popular.

Eli Lilly hopes retatrutide can offer an alternative for very heavy patients. That group, in fact, was the initial target for the drug.

Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, the company’s top scientist, said he thought retatrutide might be most attractive to people who needed to lose large amounts of weight. But then he saw that the appeal might be broader.

The unexpected happened when patients took the lowest dose. More people taking the placebo dropped out of the study because of perceived side effects than people taking the active drug, Dr. Skovronsky said.

At that dose, participants lost about 19 percent of their weight, which is about what people lose with the highest dose of Zepbound. But retatrutide seemed surprisingly well tolerated.

Like Wegovy and Zepbound, retatrutide is injected once a week, and the dose is gradually increased, which minimizes gastrointestinal side effects.

The drug is a sort of a souped-up GLP-1, a class of drugs that has revolutionized the treatment of diabetes, obesity and other conditions.

It affects three hormones that help control appetite, energy balance and metabolism. They are GLP-1, which is the hormone modulated by Wegovy and Zepbound; GIP, targeted by Zepbound; and glucagon, a hormone that neither Wegovy nor Zepbound affects.

It is not clear to researchers why targeting these three hormones had a greater effect than the earlier medications that affect just one or two.

Dr. Ania Jastreboff, an obesity specialist at Yale who was principal investigator for the retatrutide study, said the study had “very impressive results, no doubt.”

But, she added, obesity is a chronic disease and what is important is not just the number of pounds lost.

Instead, she said, it is “the effects on a person’s health over their lifetime.”

For Eli Lilly, retatrutide is a chance to continue capitalizing on the weight loss drug craze. The company’s sales have boomed thanks to Zepbound, for obesity, and Mounjaro, for diabetes. Last fall, Eli Lilly became health care’s first company worth $1 trillion.

Eli Lilly sued the Food and Drug Administration in 2024, arguing that the agency had improperly classified retatrutide as a traditional drug, not as a biologic drug. The fight, which remains tied up in court, hinges on a highly technical dispute over how many amino acids retatrutide has in its chemical structure.

Getting the drug reclassified as a biologic could translate into billions of dollars for Eli Lilly, because it could block competitors and allow the company to charge higher prices for years longer than would otherwise be possible.

Gina Kolata reports on diseases and treatments, how treatments are discovered and tested, and how they affect people.

The post Experimental Drug Yields Dramatic Weight Loss appeared first on New York Times.

• Steve Antonioni coined “Camp FIRE,” a mini version of the financial independence movement.
• It involves saving a ‘war chest” to allow yourself flexibility to make a career change or take a break.
• His money-saving advice is to treat your personal life like a business, viewing savings as profit.

Steve Antonioni stumbled into a miniature version of FIRE — financial independence, retire early — the movement he’d been pursuing throughout his early 20s.

After building a $90,000 “war chest,” he quit his corporate job and started making YouTube videos about financial independence. A few years into that career pivot, he took another break, stepping away from YouTube to focus on his family and start writing a book.

The idea of saving aggressively for a few years to fund a career change or a temporary break resonated so much with him that he gave it a name: Camp FIRE.

Unlike traditional FIRE, which often requires years or even decades of saving and investing to retire permanently, Antonioni sees Camp FIRE as a shorter-term strategy. The goal isn’t necessarily to stop working forever. It’s to build enough savings to buy yourself flexibility sooner.

“What if you built up this amount of money over a shorter span of time, and then used it to switch your life to be more in alignment with perhaps what you were waiting to do in those 15 years?” he told Business Insider. “Instead, you just kind of did it now. You did it sooner.”

The savings mindset shift: Think of your personal life as a business

Whether you’re saving for FIRE, Camp FIRE, or simply trying to increase your savings rate, Antonioni says one mindset shift can help: Think about your personal finances like a business.

“I think having the right attitude around savings is very, very important,” he said, adding that “even the word ‘saving’ kind of messes you up from the first place.”

People use different language to describe corporate finances and personal finances. For example, businesses have “revenue” and “profit,” whereas individuals have “income” and “savings.” He finds it helpful to draw a direct comparison between the two.

“A business is trying to earn a profit, right? It’s the exact same thing for you — your savings are your profit,” he said, adding: “You want to run your life in such a way that you’re earning a profit, because that profit is yours. That goes directly to you.”

For Antonioni, increasing that “profit” has meant living well below his means and approaching his spending systematically. When he was pursuing financial independence, he said he ate the same two or three meals nearly every day and designed much of his life around routines that kept costs low.

That level of routine happened to fit his personality. Antonioni said he tends to thrive with structure and discipline, but he knows the same approach won’t work for everyone.

“I hesitate to give advice for the general person, because I tend to be a bit more of an extreme person myself when I’m in pursuit of a target,” he said.

He also pointed out that his circumstances made aggressive saving easier. At the time, he was young, single, and living alone. Now that he has a family, he said, maintaining the same level of simplicity would be harder. Plus, saving aggressively is more difficult in 2026 than it was when he was building his first financial cushion.

“The cost of groceries has literally doubled in many cases,” he said. “For people who are looking to get into the housing market, it’s a pretty dramatic picture.”

The broader lesson, he said, isn’t that everyone should eat the same meals every day or live as frugally as possible. It’s that savings can be more powerful than leftover money. Treated like “profit,” it can become a tool for making a major life change, whether that means trying a new career, pursuing a creative project, or simply taking time away from work.

Read the original article on Business Insider

The post A millennial who’s saved enough to take ‘mini retirements’ shares the mindset shift anyone can use to build wealth appeared first on Business Insider.

But on Wednesday, Reikado was reduced to a charred skeleton after a fire tore through the building, engulfing its wooden prayer rooms. No one was injured, the authorities said. The flame itself was salvaged and moved to a different site after the blaze, according to the Daisho-in Buddhist temple, which oversees the hall.

“We have received many messages of sympathy,” the Daisho-in temple said in a statement on its website. “Thank you for your concern.”

The temple said that it would work to rebuild the hall immediately.

It was the second time in recent decades that Reikado, near Hiroshima, has burned down. The hall had already been rebuilt after a fire in 2005, which was sparked accidentally during a post-typhoon cleanup. The authorities said they were investigating the cause of the latest fire.

Temples and shrines in Japan are vulnerable as many are made from wood and feature traditional materials like thatch and bark. There have been several such blazes recently, including at Daihoji Temple in northern Japan, where 13 buildings were damaged this month in a fire that likely started in a kitchen. In April, the Atago shrine in the port city of Niigata burned in a late-night fire, cause unknown.

Tetsuya Kotaki, a fire prevention official at the Hatsukaichi fire department, which led the response, said the authorities received a call at 8.32 a.m. on Wednesday from an official at the temple, saying Reikado Hall was on fire.

The blaze was brought under control about two hours later, he said.

“The response team had to bring hoses from the bottom of the hill,” he said. “The temple had a fire prevention water tank but the team used it up quickly.”

Reikado is situated at an altitude of roughly 1,500 feet on Miyajima, a sacred island and popular pilgrimage site.

The “eternal flame” is said to have been lit by Kukai, a celebrated monk who founded the Shingon school of Buddhism in the ninth century. Water boiled in an iron kettle over the flame is revered as having healing properties and bringing good fortune.

Javier C. Hernández is the Tokyo bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Japan and the region. He has reported from Asia for much of the past decade, previously serving as China correspondent in Beijing.

The post ‘Eternal Flame’ Survives Fire That Destroyed Buddhist Hall in Japan appeared first on New York Times.

As for me, I’ve gone into silver. That is, I constantly look for the silver linings in Trump’s heinous acts.

One silver lining, of course, is his cratering job-approval numbers in the polls, especially among the young and Latino voters who made his reelection possible. But here’s another: By his humiliating failure to bring Iran to heel, nearly three months after starting a war that he said would last weeks at most, Trump has brought new, more positive attention to what he again this week derided as “Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” (The emphasis on “Hussein” is Trump’s, always.)

The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired.

That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck. Call it JCPOA Lite.

If he were able to get Iran’s sign-off on the sort of detailed, restrictive agreement that Obama and other world leaders won 11 years ago, he’d be trumpeting himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker. (He does that anyway, but his record proves otherwise.) Instead, by his own failure to date, Trump has invited reconsideration of the very agreement he decried as the “worst deal ever” on his march to election and reelection.

No sooner was the 2015 deal signed than Trump and Republicans succeeded in defining it as a giveaway to Iran that assured, not hindered, its development of a nuclear weapon to threaten Israel and the world. Opponents condemned the agreement for not addressing Iran’s other threats, notably its support for militant proxies throughout the Mideast. Some Democrats, notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, were among the foes. Other Democrats, cowed by opposition to the agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and pro-Israel lobbyists, were all but mute in the pact’s defense.

Now some Democrats are belatedly finding their voice (and, post-Gaza, some willingness to defy Israel). Along with nonpartisan experts, those Democrats are drawing comparisons between the 2015 agreement, flawed yet successful, and Trump’s promised yet ever-elusive alternative. What’s ironic for Israel and Netanyahu, still implacably against negotiating with Tehran, is that they could end up, under Trump, with a nuclear deal that gives Iran more leeway than the hated JCPOA did.

As Americans are being reminded, the 2015 deal wasn’t just between Iran and Obama, as Trump has long suggested; other signatories were China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the 27-nation European Union. Reconstituting that group would be all but impossible today.

The pact’s 159 highly technical pages and five appendices — a far cry from the short-lived one-pager that Trump officials teased earlier this month — required Iran for 15 years to limit its nuclear program to civilian purposes, forfeit more than 97% of its enriched uranium and submit to intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure compliance. In return, Iran gradually got relief from some, but not all, international economic sanctions and access to Iranian funds that were frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Presumably, after 15 years, the agreement would have been extended somehow.

By all accounts, including those of Trump’s first-term intelligence and national security officials, Iran was complying when he abandoned the deal. Its “breakout time” for building a nuclear weapon was about a year — time enough for the world to intervene — instead of two to three months. Now, though the president boasts he barred Iran from having that weapon by breaking the Iran nuclear deal, he incessantly tells Americans that he went to war against Iran on Feb. 28 because it was on the brink of a bomb — never mind that he also said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer, a program that was in a well-monitored box until he first took office.

If you’re confused, you’re paying attention.

A month ago, Trump posted online that he was close to a deal “FAR BETTER” than the 2015 accord. “I am under no pressure whatsoever, ⁠although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” To several reporters, he suggested he in fact had a deal and that Iran had agreed both to suspend its nuclear activities and to forfeit all of its enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium.

Preposterous claims, given Iran’s current government, and Tehran promptly denied them. It was a sign of Trump’s squandered credibility that few, if anyone, believed him in the first place. Nor have folks believed his more recent talk of imminent success; oil markets, too, have learned not to trust the president, as prices at the pumps attest.

On Tuesday at the White House, amid a noisy tour of the billion-dollar-ballroom construction site, Trump told reporters he’d been “an hour away” from striking Iran again that very day but Mideast leaders asked for more time for negotiations.

Don’t hold your breath.

But for the tragic consequences, Obama might be enjoying some justifiable schadenfreude about Trump’s travails.

“We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of the enriched uranium out,” he told Stephen Colbert in an interview last week. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that Iran was abiding by the nuclear limits, Obama added, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”

That sure doesn’t sound like the “worst deal ever.” It wasn’t.

Bluesky: @jackiecalmes Threads: @jkcalmes X: @jackiekcalmes

The post Obama’s strong terms curbed Iran. Trump struggles to secure even a weak deal appeared first on Los Angeles Times.

The reason? Britain’s creditors balked after Mr. Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, made clear on Friday that he would grasp for 10 Downing Street. Last year, he said that the government should not be “in hock to” the bond market when deciding how to spend money. That comment was not forgotten.

In the past few days, he has tried to quell the fears about his financial credentials, vowing to bring Britain’s debt down and stick to fiscal rules.

But that wasn’t before investors dumped British government bonds, known as gilts, pushing down their prices and driving up their yields, in some cases to levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. The timing of Mr. Burnham’s run was unfortunate: The market for gilts was already on high alert, alarmed that the war in Iran was stoking inflation, which eats into the value of bonds.

Even as yields have also been rising in other countries, including Japan and the United States, the political fallout in Britain has been the most acute. That’s in part because the British government has been here before. Mr. Burnham’s challenge set off reminders of Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership in 2022, when financial markets recoiled at a financial plan heavy on tax cuts, paid for by more borrowing.

Ms. Truss was one of five prime ministers to pass through the revolving door of leadership in the past decade, and Keir Starmer could be next in the coming months. So the British government’s fraught relationship with its creditors is again squarely on the public agenda as yet another leadership contest brews.

The nation’s political and business communities are seized by a growing sense that the bond market has become an unofficial — and unelected — judge ready to punish leaders who are deemed to have stepped out of line on fiscal policy.

Who is the bond market, anyway?

Britain spends more money than it brings in through taxes, and it borrows to make up the shortfall. The more it borrows, especially at higher rates, the more it must spend paying interest on the debt. If the economy isn’t growing firmly, that leaves less money for public services and other investments. In the last financial year, the British government devoted about 8 percent of its total spending to interest payments.

Britain has about 2.9 trillion pounds ($3.9 trillion) in debt, about 93 percent of the size of economy. The debt burden has grown sharply: Much of that debt started piling up during the financial crisis two decades ago, before which debt was 34 percent of gross domestic product.

For a long time, Britain has relied on what a former central bank governor called “the kindness of strangers.”

About a third of British government bonds are held by overseas investors, including Japanese pension funds and American asset managers. The rest are held by British funds, investors and the Bank of England, the central bank.

That pool of investors has shifted drastically. The share of gilts held by domestic pension funds and insurance companies has shrunk noticeably over the past six years. At the same time, the Bank of England has reduced its holdings, from about a third of all outstanding gilts in 2022 to less than 20 percent.

In place of these patient and conservative buyers, who would hold gilts for a long time, hedge funds and other financial institutions have expanded their place in the market. Private investment firms buy and sell the debt more quickly, seeking to make money on small changes in yields. More trading brings more volatility and can push up yields at times of stress.

Now, Britain has become increasingly reliant on the kindness of price-sensitive investors.

“It doesn’t raise the overall level of yields,” said Michael Saunders, a former official at the Bank of England who helped set interest rate policy. “But it probably makes gilts more sensitive to shocks.”

What do these investors care about?

Britain’s borrowing costs have surged this year, outpacing its peers, such as the United States, Germany and Italy. The yield on 10-year benchmark bonds climbed above 5 percent to their highest levels since 2008, while the yield on 30-year debt was the highest since 1998.

The big driver of the higher yields is the outlook for inflation, said Mr. Saunders, who counts political uncertainty and the bigger role of hedge funds as “secondary factors.”

Before the war in the Middle East began, investors believed that the Bank of England was on the cusp of cutting interest rates. Instead, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial Persian Gulf shipping channel, led to a spike in energy prices. That quickly fed inflation in Britain. Investors changed their view and started betting that the central bank would raise rates.

Inflation in Britain was already higher than in some other European countries, setting a higher floor for bond yields, and the domestic political uncertainty has increased the chances of more government borrowing.

It’s not just Britain.

While the bond market is making the front pages in Britain, these are global challenges.

Many governments have borrowed more in recent years, to fund emergency responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 energy shock after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and are under pressure to do so again as the war in the Middle East drags on. But this time, central banks aren’t buying huge swaths of government debt and easing pressure on borrowing costs. That leaves hedge funds and other investment funds as bigger buyers in the debt markets of many advanced economies.

There are also rising expectations for inflation globally. In the United States, longer-term bond yields hit highs last seen in 2007. Japan’s 10-year yields were the highest in about three decades.

In fact, the sell-off in the Japanese bond market this year has been worse than the one in Britain. Japan’s heavy debt burden — more than 200 percent of its G.D.P. — could grow as the government tries to shield its economy from the war in the Middle East.

In the short term, though, the higher inflation outlook will be difficult to avoid around the world. Including in Britain, regardless of who the prime minister is.

Experts say British politicians must acknowledge that investors are paying close attention to the country’s economic outlook and to whether lawmakers follow through on the plans they make.

Investors aren’t on the verge of dumping British assets in a major way, said Ed Al-Hussainy, a portfolio manager at Columbia Threadneedle, an investment firm that holds gilts. One reason: the higher yields mean gilts are offering better returns for investors. But in “a global environment in which interest rates are going up,” he said, “the U.K.’s quirks around fiscal policy and the U.K.’s disadvantages when it comes to the growth” mean it is being “disproportionately punished by investors.”

Eshe Nelson is a Times reporter based in London, covering economics and business news.

The post British Politics Is Obsessing Over the Bond Market. Here’s Why. appeared first on New York Times.

As a good intelligence analyst, you know all the upbeat metrics that are pumped out by Beijing and increasingly accepted by Western observers. China is first in power generation, first in steel production, first in military construction and many defense technologies, first in university rankings, first in top research papers. A new Australian study confirms China’s lead in 66 of 74 critical technologies.

Xi, your leader, is so confident that he needles Trump openly about China’s rise and America’s decline, telling him at the summit that “transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe.” Trump amazingly endorsed the message, posting later that Xi’s description of America as “a declining nation … was 100 percent correct.” Trump blamed his predecessor, President Joe Biden, but you’re an intelligence analyst; you know better.

So what do you tell the top spies at their headquarters in northwest Beijing, near the Summer Palace? The safe bet is to embrace the consensus at home and abroad that China is rising and America is falling. That’s certainly what the numbers suggest. And Trump’s flattery of Xi, offered in a spirit of cooperation, also conveyed notes of weakness and uncertainty. But your boss at the ministry assigned you to make a skeptical “red team” analysis to challenge the conventional wisdom about China’s emerging dominance. So, you try to think of ways in which the pro-Beijing narrative might be wrong.

The first problem that worries you, as you’re drafting the assessment, is that America keeps falling uphill. The 2008 financial crash appeared to be a deep crisis for capitalism, but U.S. financial markets bounced back and are as dominant as ever. America’s two decades of wasteful, no-win wars in the Middle East were corrosive, but the U.S. military is now innovating.

America is weirdly resilient. Covid-19 looked like a crippling problem, but China took a harder hit than the United States. Border policy was a mess under Biden, but the public now seems unhappier about Trump’s crackdown than about illegal immigration. And finally, there’s the ever-expanding balloon of the U.S. economy. Despite inflationary tax and tariff policies, it keeps rolling along. The AI companies are so advanced they scare themselves.

All the harbingers of American decline are present, to be sure. Trump himself is a walking symbol of arrogance and corruption that people once would have called “un-American.” But there’s a mysterious self-correcting mechanism at work. Every poll you read says that despite Trump’s electoral machinations, he’s still likely to lose the House of Representatives in November. Trump continues to try to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence (which would truly be a gift to China), but he keeps failing. And even a Supreme Court packed with Trump appointees has rejected his arguments on tariffs and other big issues.

Trump makes wild statements every day, denouncing journalists and former presidents and intelligence chiefs as “traitors.” But increasingly people are tuning him out. There will be another president in less than three years, and no successor is likely to help China and Russia as much as Trump has by bashing America’s allies and partners. The “Trump Bump” for China won’t last.

You want to be an honest intelligence analyst, but you don’t want to get fired. So you decide to title the section on America’s decline: “Hopeful signs of U.S. demise, but too soon to tell.”

What about China’s rise? That part is even harder. Signs of China’s prosperity and modernization are everywhere — not just in the metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, but in second-tier cities such as Yinchuan, Kunming and Nanning, which are dotted with new skyscrapers. Unfortunately, some of those gleaming towers are half empty, and the real estate sector has been shaken by a generation of overspending, debt and corruption.

China is the world’s factory, seemingly able to manufacture everything faster and cheaper than anyone else. But this immense scale creates its own problems. It’s like trying to stuff an elephant into a Volkswagen. Trump’s anger about trade imbalances is shared by millions of resentful Americans, and by Europeans and Asians, too. For all its masterful planning, the Communist Party still hasn’t figured out how to share China’s wealth with its people. They don’t get to consume the vast surplus they produce.

And finally, as an analyst, you know that China has a demographic problem eerily similar to what Europe, Japan and South Korea are facing. There aren’t enough young workers to create the income and wealth needed to sustain an aging population.

Is this the Chinese century? Here, too, you want to hedge to avoid being sent to the MSS office in Chengdu. So you decide on a headline: “China’s rise: Inexorable but still some question marks.”

Your boss doesn’t like all the waffling. He says your net assessment reads like it was written by a graduate of the CIA’s Sherman Kent School of Intelligence Analysis: all caveats and no bold conclusions. So he asks you the bottom-line question: Are you willing to risk China’s stability and security on the confidence that China is becoming the dominant partner in its relationship with the United States?

And your honest answer, on careful reflection, is simple: No. China isn’t as strong as it appeared in Beijing, and America isn’t as weak.

The post America keeps falling uphill. That’s Beijing’s big blind spot. appeared first on Washington Post.

Artfully detailing strangers’ private parts on the internet is not exactly the kind of work the protagonist of Margo’s Got Money Troubles dreamed of doing when she was little, but she’s strapped for cash, parenting solo, and has an uncanny gift for it (such as: “Your Bulbasaur’s special move is Ooze Attack, extremely potent pre-cum”). Before long, and with 200 new followers, Margo has learned her first lesson: “The ones that hate their dicks, they tip the most.”

TV has never shied away from portrayals of sex workers and the business of porn, but Apple TV’s adaptation of Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel of the same name, provides one of its most complex. The show’s season finale aired May 20.

OnlyFans is now its own subgenre in pop culture. A decade since it launched, and with more than 4 million creators on the platform, the adult content site, and everything it represents about the future of work for Gen Z, has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most human narratives. As Margo makes clear, “I can’t just go and get another job.” The creator class, also a pain point in the current season of HBO’s Euphoria, has become the ultimate allegory for society: online, we are all just entertainment for one another.

The very niche genre of erotic humiliation is just the tip of the iceberg for Margo (Elle Fanning), a book-smart 20-year-old college dropout who, after a brief affair with her literature professor, finds out she is pregnant, loses her job, and suddenly has to pay double in rent after two roommates move out because they can’t handle the baby’s relentless crying. Turning to OnlyFans, though, ends up being a blessing in disguise; it provides Margo with a stable income while also acting as a creative outlet for her.

Margo quickly runs into a common problem for creators on the platform who don’t have large social media followings: No one can find her. (According to OnlyFans, the platform intentionally limits its search feature as a safety precaution so users don’t accidentally encounter NSFW content they didn’t intend to see.) Online, she learns that posting multiple times a week and collaborating with like-minded creators is the best way to grow her following—and, with the help of her cosplay-obsessed bestie, she creates a persona called Hungry Ghost, an alien with an insatiable sexual appetite. “Give me your boredom, your sadness, your anxieties. I will eat it all,” she writes in her bio, realizing she will have to expand her social media presence beyond OnlyFans to gain more followers. “Find me on TikTok and Instagram to see how my story began.”

It’s the kind of sex work story, unsexy and mundane, rarely entrusted to an audience, and not because those stories don’t exist, but because they have never fit into the tidy—or sensationalized—narratives of how the business actually works. There isn’t anything particularly titillating about the granular details of how to grow your following—in Margo’s case, it’s more funny than anything else.

Thorpe created an OnlyFans account to do research for the book because she didn’t want Margo to be just another content creator who sells the same boring nudes and custom videos. “Part of what makes OnlyFans sexy is when it feels authentic and real, as opposed to hyperproduced pornography that makes it feel less intimate,” Thorpe said in an interview with Variety. Drawn to their ability to combine actual human elements into the profession, she pulled inspiration from unorthodox creators like BigHonkinCaboose, a comedian who incorporates a lot of humor into her OnlyFans, and HarperTheFox, a musician with a gift for creating parody songs about giving head and consensual anal sex.

“The work inherently has funny aspects to it. Sexual things in general can have an air of silliness and absurdity, and I’ve never shied away from making jokes within my sex life or my content. I find it puts people at ease,” Megan Graves, who performs as BigHonkinCaboose, tells WIRED. “I’ve also dressed up as Handsome Squidward and Meg Griffin for content simply because I thought it would be funny, and I stand by those choices.”

Graves, 30, joined OnlyFans in 2020 and says that being herself has always been the most satisfying and natural way to create something and to find people who genuinely connect with it. It’s the same approach Margo takes: building sets and crafting elaborate storylines about Hungry Ghost into viral TikTok microdramas with the help of two local creators (always, of course, with a reminder to check out her spicy content on her OF page.)

While Graves says there’s no universal way to tell a story about sex work, “the more it’s coming from a place of being genuine and not trying to be the butt of a joke or used for shock value, the better.”

Where Margo’s Got Money Problems wants to humanize the experience of sex workers rather than catastrophize the extremes of the profession, Euphoria—which has always had an uneasy relationship to sex and online sex work—revels in shock value.

Currently in its third season, creator-director Sam Levinson frames the profession through a series of escalating humiliation rituals by depicting sex workers as willing to do anything for money. Initially, Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) starts on OnlyFans to foot the bill for the $50,000 in wedding flowers she’s determined to have, but with Maddie (Alexa Demie) as her manager, it quickly descends into something much darker.

For Cassie, being an influencer, we’re told, is her destiny. “For my fans, I’ll do anything,” she says, and means it. But the glamour and fame of the job is undercut by the constant churn of new content: she records foot videos, ASMR, humiliation kinks, age play, and gets requests to fart in jars for $700. In one scene, she pretends to be a baby while wearing a diaper, legs spread in the eagle position (OnlyFans prohibits age-play content that includes real or simulated minors under 18, and the video likely would’ve been removed from her page in real life). In another, she acts as a giantess, squeezing a doll between her breasts, pretending to make her subscribers feel tiny (this, however, is a frequent practice among straight and gay creators).

Levinson, who apparently drew inspiration from the 1958 sci-fi horror film Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, has said that he wanted to frame Cassie’s foray into sex work to read as a series of hijinks. “What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

According to Annie Knight, Maddy was right about one thing when she told Cassie, “You got their attention, now you gotta keep it.”

While sex workers have called Cassie’s storyline “bleak and gross,” Knight tells WIRED her arc actually mirrors how internet fame works for some creators and says she deliberately leaned into controversy to build her own brand. “The more eyes on you, whether the feedback is negative or positive, means you’re reaching more people, and a lot of those people are willing to subscribe,” she says. “I started thinking, what can I do that’s going to grab people’s attention?” Knight, who is 29 and has over 500,000 followers across Instagram, TikTok and X, built her persona around challenges, first by sleeping with a different guy every day for a year, then, in 2025, having sex with 583 men in a single day.

“People went crazy. They were saying horrible things, but the more people commented, the more viral my videos went, the more subscribers I earned. I definitely realized very quickly that controversy was profitable,” she says.

As the cultural footprint of OnlyFans has expanded, so too have the representations of sex work in the larger culture. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is about the art of the profession, and the community of people around it. Euphoria underscores the most extreme realities of the business. Both, in their own way, pull from the fabric of our vast and ever-growing online sexual economy—one that is being recorded in real time.

The post ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ Won TV’s OnlyFans Wars appeared first on Wired.

Judges spend days assessing hundreds of thousands of plants against nine carefully-defined criteria, as visitors in blazers and fascinator hats — among them royals, retired soccer players and British TV stars — sip on champagne and Pimm’s, a favorite English summertime cocktail.

But the genteel attendees at the century-old show, now underway in London’s Chelsea neighborhood, may find themselves spitting out their drinks.

This year, organizers have permitted an entire garden dedicated to sexual desire.

The new section, named “Aphrodite’s Hothouse” for the Greek goddess of love, explores carnal themes through the medium of houseplants, sponsored by the adult toy brand Lovehoney. And on Tuesday, the judges awarded it a gold medal in the category of houseplant studios.

“In Britain, we can be quite tongue-in-cheek about sex, especially the crowd at a show like this,” said James Whiting, the designer behind the display. This garden, he said, was his attempt to break some of that taboo.

From the outside, there are warnings that this red-hot greenhouse contains something other than your typical petunias. A steaming fountain and neon “GODS ONLY” sign invite visitors toward an entrance flanked by curling palms, intended by Mr. Whiting to evoke Aphrodite’s mythical garden.

(Shrinking violets, avert your eyes now.)

For the inside, he planted trumpet-shaped calla lilies for their evocative form, caladiums for their resemblance to painted hearts, and carnivorous nepenthes for their bulbous pitchers. A small tree is suspended horizontally from two plush swings, cutting a suggestive figure.

“I can’t imagine any of my garden looking like that. It felt quite sensuous,” said Juliet Rumbelow, an amateur gardener with a countryside patch of her own. “Good for Chelsea,” she added.

One passerby compared the result to a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Others were struck by the glow of neon.

“Your classic Cotswolds cottage garden it is not,” remarked Nick Hobbs, another visitor who said he was a fan of Mr. Whiting’s “whimsy” design after stumbling across it.

The show drew consternation even before it opened. One Christian group condemned it as “soft porn” that was unsuitable for “such a prestigious staple of British culture.”

Mr. Whiting said he was trying to push the world of elite landscaping to consider with a more open mind the links between the natural world and sexual reproduction.

“Plants grow and evolve in the way that they have so they can reproduce,” he pointed out, whether that be by seed or pollination. Simply put: “Gardening is all about sex.”

The response to Mr. Whiting’s creation was positively curious. But there was also the occasional tut.

“It’s a bit contrived and not very garden-like,” commented Peter Foster, who was visiting from near Oxford and disparaged the ornaments on display inside as “tacky.”

“The whole style is just not very ‘Chelsea’,” he said.

Another visitor, Joey McMahon, disagreed, noting the long line to get in. “It’s not offensive. In fact, I think it’s sort of tasteful,” she said.

Her friend, Rosie Findlay, suggested that many flowers can feel erotic anyway. Both said they hoped the display would encourage younger gardeners to participate at Chelsea.

Mr. Whiting’s greenhouse is one of 30 gardens at this year’s competition, with others exploring more traditional themes such as the wildflower meadows of rural England and the aesthetics of the Japanese courtyard garden.

In total, organizers expect around 145,000 visitors over the five-day show, which concludes Saturday. Each garden category is assessed by a panel of eight judges for criteria such as flair, visual composition, attention to detail and theater.

And Aphrodite’s Hothouse wasn’t the only installation to break with tradition. Organizers have temporarily lifted a longtime ban on garish displays of gnomes. A few hundred yards away at a trade stand, Matt Keightley, a landscape designer and entrepreneur, displayed three small gardens designed, he said, using artificial intelligence.

To generate the designs, Mr. Keightley said he used a smartphone app he developed that can generate plant lists and plans for garden spaces.

He argued that using A.I. could “democratize garden design, by giving good quality information to people who might not previously have approached a garden design studio.”

The response from the industry has not been effusive. Andrew Duff, who chairs the Society of Garden and Landscape Designers, a trade body, argued that A.I. could never replicate the artistry of a human-designed landscape.

“The human touch is vital for the world in which we are working, one with living things that are ever changing,” he said. “Only a human hand can do that.”

In a statement, the Royal Horticultural Society defended the use of A.I. as “a useful tool to support gardeners,” though not one that can replace them. Part of the society’s mission, it said, is to support the careers of horticulturalists into the future.

Mr. Whiting, the creator of the Aphrodite exhibit, said that he too wanted to promote landscape design to a new generation of gardeners. That’s part of why he gravitates toward houseplants, he said, an underdog category at Chelsea that is associated with a younger crowd of apartment dwellers.

“It’s about ensuring the longevity of gardening,” he said.

The post A Sexy Garden Ruffles a Venerable British Flower Show appeared first on New York Times.

According to the New York Times, after Bondi was sworn in as attorney general in February 2025, she immediately placed guardrails around settlements “that largely prohibited payments to groups not involved in an underlying lawsuit.” Now those same restrictions are threatening to derail the Trump administration’s controversial compensation scheme.

On her first day as attorney general, Bondi signed a directive titled “Reinstating the Prohibitions on Improper Third Party Settlements” that revived a Justice Department policy adopted in 2017 and was later canceled by the Biden administration.

According to the Times’ Devlin Barrett, the memo explicitly stated that, except in “limited circumstances,” the department should not use settlements “to require payments to nongovernmental, third-party organizations that were neither victims nor parties to the lawsuits.”

Yet the new $1.8 billion fund appears structured precisely to circumvent that restriction — designed to steer large sums to third-party claimants, most of whom have not filed suits and may never file suits now that a compensation fund exists.

Former Department of Justice officials immediately expressed alarm at the apparent end-run around Bondi’s own ethics directive.

“I have never heard of the department ever being willing to grant blanket immunity. That seems blatantly corrupt. It’s a shocking gift to the president,” Jennifer Ricketts, a former branch director in the department’s civil division, told the Times.

Ricketts added: “I’ve just never seen litigation risk outside the four corners of the complaint being used as justification for something in a totally unrelated lawsuit.”

Normally, settlement figures are calculated based on actual legal claims filed against the government and risk assessments by Justice Department lawyers regarding potential jury awards, the Times is reporting. For Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” it remains unclear what set of cases or claims formed the basis for the $1.776 billion figure.

The paperwork establishing the fund says it can be used to pay “entities” — language that appears to directly violate the purpose of Bondi’s ethics memo, which was specifically designed to prevent the kinds of funding arrangements sometimes made during the Obama administration, which has created a cloud over the current proposal.

The post Pam Bondi may have doomed Trump’s slush fund: report appeared first on Raw Story.

Mr. Wysopal is one among a small band of livestreamers who have taken it upon themselves to investigate the disappearance of Ms. Guthrie, the mother of the “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie, ever since she went missing in February and set off a nationwide frenzy.

Wearing gaiters to guard against always lurking rattlesnakes and filming with his cellphone, Mr. Wysopal sidled up to a spot on the dry river bank, a few miles from Ms. Guthrie’s home.

“Oh, what is that?” he said to the thousands of people who tune into his YouTube channel. “That’s a bone.”

His heart racing, he called 911.

News of the discovery rocketed across social media, sparking speculation among devotees of true crime that there had finally been a break in the case of the missing 84-year-old.

But after the local authorities arrived on scene, they soon clarified: “This will be a prehistoric anthropological investigation,” a Tucson police spokesman said at the time. “This is not a criminal investigation.”

The bone was more than 750 years old.

James T. Watson, the curator of bioarchaelogy at the Arizona State Museum and an expert on prehistoric remains, confirmed the hunch. He said the bone dated back to a period between 650 and 1250 A.D., when the Hohokam people tended farms and lived in the area.

On camera, Mr. Wysopal, 38, had prodded the bleached piece of skeleton with his hiking pole. Then he began digging and “it kept getting longer and longer,” he said in an interview.

“It got to the point where it was pretty clear it looked like a leg bone,” he said.

In fact, he had unwittingly wandered onto a Native American archaeological site.

The livestreamer did the right thing by calling the police as required by state law, Mr. Watson said. But he warned that the case was a cautionary tale about the consequences of citizen investigators taking matters into their own hands. Mr. Wysopal disturbed a culturally sensitive site and the ensuing media circus jeopardized the security of the remains, Mr. Watson said.

Watching the video of Mr. Wysopal’s discovery “felt icky,” said Mr. Watson, who devotes his days to ensuring all human remains are treated with respect.

“Whether it’s Nancy Guthrie or an ancient individual, you shouldn’t be poking at them with a stick. It’s common decency,” Mr. Watson said. “Would you do that with your grandmother’s remains?”

The Arizona State Museum is now working with the Tohono O’odham tribe, modern descendants of the Hohokam people, to repatriate the remains. The tribe did not respond to a request for comment. Hohokam remains were found in the same riverbank three years ago, Mr. Watson said.

Mr. Wysopal, a Tucson resident, said that if he had known he was walking among burial sites, he would have stayed away. And if the tribe asked him to remove the video of his discovery, which now has more than 40,000 views, he said he would.

Some streamers like Mr. Wysopal, who has named his YouTube channel A.J.DoubleU News, simply film their frequent searches for Ms. Guthrie, often turning up only urban flotsam like rusted cars and discarded clothing. Others engage in more outlandish stunts.

But all seem to agree that the authorities are not doing enough to find Ms. Guthrie, who the police believe was kidnapped from her home in the early hours of Feb. 1. The case has frustrated law enforcement, and there have been no major updates for months.

In a statement, Sheriff Chris Nanos of Pima County, who has been leading the local investigation, said of the streamers and searchers: “We appreciate their concern and we all want to find Nancy — but this work is best left to professionals.”

Some streamers and true crime podcasters have been accused of trying to profit off the pain of the Guthrie family. At times, their wild speculation has had disastrous consequences for innocent people.

“There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way,” said Mr. Wysopal, who said he has tried to be considerate of Ms. Guthrie’s loved ones and has largely avoided streaming from near her home, opting instead to “go out there and look for something.”

He insisted he was trying to help and said he was motivated by fear that the culprit could come for his loved ones, too.

As the case has dragged on, its twists and turns — and false alarms — have become only more bizarre. Even though the bone he found was not connected to the Guthrie case, Mr. Wysopal said it motivated him to keep combing the desert hills.

“It gives you hope you can actually find stuff out there,” he said.

Reis Thebault is a Phoenix-based reporter for The Times, covering the American Southwest.

The post Bone Found Near Guthrie Home Predates Her Disappearance by 750 Years appeared first on New York Times.