With relations between the U.S. and Canada becoming more and more strained following the breakdown in trade talks between the two countries, most Canadians are backing their government and the way it has chosen to handle the standoff. But on the other side of the border, Americans are offering the Trump Administration far less support for its approach. 

Trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada collapsed last month, with each side placing the blame on the other. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney criticized the U.S. for requesting what he described as “last-minute changes” that he argued were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” American President Donald Trump, meanwhile, accused Canada of “‘Ripping Off’ the U.S.A. for decades” and portrayed the country as being “difficult and unreasonable.”

The day after trade talks broke down, the Trump Administration’s 50% tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Canadian products took effect. Canada then announced retaliatory tariffs that will go into effect on Sept. 8.

Tensions between the two nations have only continued to grow. Last week, Trump signed an Executive Order directing his Interior Secretary to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America”—a move that angered Canadians and sparked pushback from political leaders in both Canada and the U.S.

There is no clear resolution in sight for the rift in the countries’ critical trading relationship, with both Trump and Carney remaining firm in their stances.

While speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Carney signaled that he would be willing to resume negotiations—but only if U.S. officials stop insulting and mocking his country. “When the Americans stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough, and start being serious about having those discussions, we can have those discussions,” the Canadian leader said.

“It’s not constructive,” he added. “But that’s their democracy.”

Trump, meanwhile, doubled down on his accusations against Canada when asked the following day about the prospect of talks starting back up. “Canada has been ripping off the United States for many, many years, for decades, many decades,” the President said during a Wednesday press conference.

Here’s what recent polls reveal about how Americans and Canadians feel about the heated situation—and how their leaders are handling it.

How do Americans feel about the U.S.-Canada trade war?

Most Americans—nearly 70%—said they feel that the U.S. should be open to reaching a compromise with Canada, even if that leads to many of the U.S.’s demands not being met, according to an Ipsos poll that was released on Tuesday. In comparison, only 25% of Americans said they believe that the U.S. should take a firm stand against its northern neighbor and push for many of its demands to be met.

Americans were also more likely to hold their own government responsible for the breakdown in relations than Canada’s. About 46% said they think that the U.S. shoulders more of the blame for the ongoing trade war, while only 12% said they believe that Canada is more culpable and 18% said they feel that both parties are equally at fault, according to the poll.

The survey also found that most Americans oppose actions that could or have already escalated tensions between the two countries. For instance, nearly 60% of Americans said they are against the U.S. imposing additional tariffs on Canada, while only 20% indicated support for such an aggressive step. And more than 60% of Americans said they disagree with Trump’s order to rename Lake Ontario, while only 14% backed the move. 

Americans’ objection to the Executive Order in particular was seen across party lines—84% of Democrats and 65% of independents said they were against it, and more Republicans (43%) objected to it than those who agreed with it (33%).

A recent Economist/YouGov poll produced similar results: nearly 60% of Americans who responded to the survey said they were against increasing tariffs on Canadian products, compared to less than 30% who said they would back such a move. About 45% said they think Canada has not been unfair to the U.S. when it comes to trading between the two nations, while just 28% are aligned with Trump in thinking that Canada has been unfair.

The majority—64%—of Americans still describe Canada as an ally or friendly, according to the Economist/YouGov poll. But while they remain a minority, the portion of Americans who view Canada in a negative light has grown in recent years; about 22% describe Canada as either unfriendly or an enemy, a record high since 2016. That growth has mostly been driven by Americans who identify as Republicans, the survey found.

Amid the standoff with Canada, Trump’s approval rating has remained at around 38%, where it has hovered in recent months. That figure marks a stark 14-point drop from where his approval rating stood when he retook the White House last January.

How do Canadians feel about the U.S.-Canada trade war?

The majority of Canadians—63%—said they feel that the country made the right choice to maintain its stance and walk away from trade talks with the U.S., “even if it meant higher costs and job losses,” according to an Ipsos poll conducted for Global News that was released on Aug. 29. Even more Canadians—73%—said they agreed with the nation’s decision to launch retaliatory tariffs on American products worth billions of dollars.

The poll did find, though, that support for those actions was lower among younger demographics than it was among older age groups. For instance, a little less than 50% of Gen Z adults backed Canada’s decision to remain firm in trade negotiations, compared to 80% for elderly boomers.

Another poll, conducted by the Canadian nonprofit Angus Reid Institute, found that about 76% of Canadians believe the country was right to suspend trade talks, and that 69% said they believe that Carney demonstrated “strength” by turning down a “bad deal.” A majority of Canadians—62%—also indicated support for retaliatory tariffs against the U.S., calling the move “about right under the circumstances.”

Still, 89% of Canadians expressed concerns that the trade war with the U.S. would affect prices, the poll found—though more than 60% of Canadians said they think the country will eventually come out of the dispute stronger.

As Trump’s approval rating has remained underwater, the Carney government’s increased by four points to 56% in recent weeks, while its disapproval rating has dropped two points to just 29%, according to data shared by the polling firm Abacus Data on Sunday. Approval for Carney individually has also improved recently, with 53% of Canadians having a positive opinion of him and only 28% having a negative view of him. The polling firm said that its findings indicate that “the Carney government’s political standing is built primarily on how Canadians judge its management of the American relationship.”

The Canadian Liberal Party, which Carney is the leader of, has preserved its narrow majority in Parliament, with its candidates emerging victorious in three special elections earlier this week.

Carney cited his government’s actions in the trade war as a driving reason for the victories. “What’s a clear message from last night in three very different ridings across this great diverse country is that Canadians are behind the plan of the government, which is first and foremost about building strong at home, diversifying with reliable partners, building Canada strong for all,” he said on Tuesday.

Vice President J.D. Vance said Thursday that he would not characterize the United States as being at war with Iran, even as the two countries have exchanged strikes in recent days and the Trump Administration has declined to say when a conflict now stretching beyond six months might finally end.

“I wouldn’t call it a war,” Vance told reporters at a White House press briefing, the first since Karoline Leavitt stepped down as press secretary last month. “Right now, there is no active shooting.”

The distinction was striking after a renewed burst of hostilities this week, including American strikes inside Iran and Iranian attacks in the region. But it echoed an argument that President Trump and other Republicans made in the earliest days of the conflict: that the United States was carrying out a limited military operation rather than embarking on another prolonged Middle Eastern war, which, under the Constitution, would require congressional approval.

More than six months later, that distinction has become increasingly difficult to sustain. The United States has repeatedly bombed targets inside Iran as Tehran attacks commercial shipping vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, contributing to higher energy prices.

Vance acknowledged what he called a recent “flare-up” but argued that the most intensive phase of the American campaign had ended long ago. “Major combat operations are currently not ongoing, and they haven’t been ongoing in a very long time,” he said.

He said Operation Epic Fury, the large-scale campaign that followed last year’s Operation Midnight Hammer, lasted roughly six weeks. The earlier operation, he said, destroyed Iranian nuclear facilities, while Epic Fury severely damaged Iran’s conventional military and its ability to produce weapons and rebuild its nuclear program.

But Vance offered little indication of when the broader confrontation might end, saying the Administration would not commit itself to a timeline while Iran continued threatening commercial shipping and global energy supplies. Asked whether the conflict would be over before November’s midterm elections, Vance said he did not know. “You would have to ask the Iranians,” he said, adding: “When will the Iranians stop shooting at ships?”

The answer underscored the open-ended nature of a conflict that Trump and others in the Administration repeatedly predicted would be brief. As recently as Wednesday, the President said he did not believe it would last “much longer.” But his Administration is simultaneously intensifying economic pressure on Iran, maintaining a naval blockade, and reserving the option of further military strikes if Iran attacks American interests or interferes with commercial shipping.

History of avoiding the word “war”

Presidents have long resisted the “war” label in conflicts undertaken without a formal declaration of war. Harry Truman called the American intervention in Korea a United Nations “police action,” while Bill Clinton avoided describing NATO’s bombing campaign in Kosovo as a war. Barack Obama similarly argued that the 2011 intervention in Libya did not constitute a “war” requiring congressional authorization.

In March, Trump openly acknowledged that referring to the conflict as “war” carried legal significance because Congress had not authorized it. “I won’t use the word ‘war’ because they say, if you use the word war, that’s maybe not a good thing to do,” he told House Republicans at the time. “They don’t like the word ‘war,’ because you’re supposed to get approval, so I’ll use the word ‘military operation,’ which is really what it is.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson similarly insisted shortly after the initial strikes that the country was “not at war,” describing the campaign instead as “a very specific, clear mission.” Democrats have rejected that characterization and repeatedly tried to force votes requiring congressional authorization for continued hostilities. Those efforts have failed largely along party lines. The dispute has revived a decades-old argument over presidential war powers and the extent to which a president can sustain military operations abroad without explicit approval from Congress.

Economic and military pressure

Vance said Thursday that the administration would not rely on Iran to negotiate in good faith and would instead use whatever tools it considered necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to protect global energy markets.

He argued that Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz was “effectively gone” and that oil traffic through the crucial waterway was nearing its pre-conflict level. Shipping data, however, shows traffic remains well below where it stood before the fighting began. The Administration has made restoring commercial traffic through the strait a central objective as energy prices have become an increasing political liability ahead of the midterms.

Vance acknowledged the pain of higher gasoline prices but argued that they could have risen substantially more without American intervention in Iran. “Gas, frankly, could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts,” he said. He declined to predict when prices might return to around $3 a gallon, saying the more important objective was ensuring “that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.”

The Administration is now pursuing what amounts to a strategy of intermittent military force combined with sustained economic pressure. Last week, it announced “Operation Economic Outcast,” an effort to further isolate Iran from its remaining trading partners. But the campaign has so far produced limited results, and imposing sanctions aggressive enough to cripple Iranian trade could require confronting countries including China, India, and Russia.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that the Administration expected the principal pressure on Iran going forward to be economic, while reserving the right to use military force when necessary.

Iranian uprising

Trump himself has resumed publicly encouraged Iranians to challenge the regime, writing on Truth Social on Tuesday, “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”

When asked by TIME on Thursday whether the Trump Administration was considering arming Iranian dissidents or providing them with other direct assistance, Vance declined to provide more details. “Everything that could happen is on the table: economic pressure, military pressure, diplomatic pressure, covert pressure,” he said. “Of course, these are tools in the President's toolkit.”

Iranian leaders, meanwhile, have shown little sign of capitulating. Its leadership remains divided between officials advocating negotiations and hard-liners pressing for confrontation, and Tehran has continued striking American interests and allies in response to U.S. attacks.

The renewed American bombing has also brought fresh scrutiny of civilian casualties. Iranian authorities said a U.S. strike this week hit a wedding celebration in Sirik in southern Iran, killing at least five people and wounding scores more, including women and children. A New York Times visual analysis and a weapons expert concluded that the wedding was struck by a bomb released by American forces during attacks in the area.

Vance said the episode was under investigation but expressed deep skepticism about Iran’s account. “The Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what’s happened in the conflict thus far,” he said. “So I’m extremely skeptical of this.”

“Obviously, sometimes things happen,” he added. “When our military makes mistakes, they learn from them to try to get better from them, so we’re investigating it very fully.”

Five years ago, in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, America’s civic institutions pledged to do more to defend our system of fair and free elections. Major philanthropies increased their investments in programs that defend democracy. Law firms expanded their pro bono election-protection work. University presidents publicly condemned the effort to thwart the will of American voters. Many of the country’s largest businesses pledged to stop donating to candidates who had tried to overturn an election.

Today, our elections are again under attack. But while some institutions have maintained their commitment to defending democracy, far too many have retreated.

There are fewer than 100 days until the 2026 nationwide elections. Now is the time for everyone to protect the system of fair and free elections upon which our society and prosperity ultimately depend.

Together, the two of us have spent considerable time in all the major sectors of American society: philanthropy, business, academia, and the law. We understand that leaders in these sectors fear government retribution, and understandably so. But with the integrity of our elections under enormous strain—and with government officials signaling that more aggressive attacks may follow—it is time for all institutions to reaffirm their role as defenders of the free and fair elections at the heart of American democracy.

Defending our democracy begins with a clear-eyed assessment of the threats to it. Over the past 18 months, the Justice Department has disbanded government agencies meant to protect elections from foreign interference and to help states administer them smoothly. President Donald Trump has repeatedly made false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent and made new ones—without evidence—about the midterms. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin recently threatened to jail local election officials his department finds were insufficiently responsive to the federal government’s unproven claims of fraud.  Overall, the federal government has tried to wrest control of elections from the states, with courts repeatedly finding such efforts illegal. 

Now, experts across the country are deeply concerned about what might occur in the coming months, whether it’s false allegations that cast doubt on individual races, state officials refusing to certify election results as required by law, or baseless efforts to block House members from taking their seats in January.

The good news is the success of these efforts to undermine the midterms is not inevitable. To the contrary, enormous work has already been done to protect the integrity of November’s election from those who would undermine it.

Now, it is time for leaders who haven’t yet joined that effort to get off the sidelines no matter what their politics are. Losing our system of fair and free elections would not just affect one element of American life. It would affect all elements of American life.

There are many ways for institutions to meet the moment and keep our country’s elections free and fair. First, many leaders, particularly those from the business community, meet regularly with members of the executive branch and Congress. They should use these relationships to remind elected officials of the need to respect election results no matter who wins or loses.

These nonpartisan principles are the basic preconditions for a functioning democracy and should be respected by all.

Second, many institutional leaders have strong ties to state and local officials. Now is the time to remind state legislators that attempting to disenfranchise eligible voters via last-minute changes to election rules, baseless claims of fraud, or partisan attempts to deny certification harm our democracy and create the kind of turmoil that negatively affects a state’s reputation and business climate.

Third, leaders should forcefully support the local election administrators who run our elections. These are not professional politicians. They are our neighbors, co-workers, and friends—and recently, they have far too often been subject to threats and harassment by those who wish to undermine their nonpartisan mission. Institutional leaders can help elections run smoothly by encouraging their employees to become poll workers, and by supporting nonpartisan civic organizations that defend election officials in performing their duties, or that bring Americans from across the political spectrum together to support the right of all Americans to have their vote counted.

Standing up for fair and free elections is not without risk. But with the foundation of our democracy under unprecedented assault and our basic rights on the line, the far greater risk is ignoring the threat to our country until it is too late.

One day, leaders of America’s institutions will face the same profound question as every other citizen who loves this country. Future generations will ask, “Where were you when the stakes were highest?”

What will you tell them?

Where's the line between shtick and style? If a filmmaker returns to similar themes over and over again but folds them into entertaining shapes each time, is that consistency or a lack of imagination? Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine—playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival—might prompt you to ask those questions, though it doesn’t fully answer them. Like In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, Wild Horse Nine—in which John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play 1970s CIA agents stationed in Santiago, Chile, sent to Easter Island on a special mission—deals with fractious male friendships. There are some beautiful four-legged animals—in this case, horses—but one of them must die; it’s as if McDonagh feels he needs to toughen us up to the realities of nature, rather than just allow us to enjoy an animal’s spirit and beauty. And there are ways in which McDonagh gets tripped up by his own excessive cleverness: the screenplay is so packed with quirky quips that you might long for a little breathing room.

But if the writing sometimes comes off as winking and belabored, the acting is not. Malkovich and Rockwell are a joy to watch, and that, after all, is what we continue to go to the movies for: to see actors at play, even as they work. Malkovich’s Chris and Rockwell’s Lee are an odd-couple duo who have been working together long enough to intuit one another’s thoughts and moods. They also bicker, a lot. Lee seems annoyed by his elder partner’s tendency to tootle down trails of fanciful thought. In an early scene, Chris complains that his apartment in Santiago is riddled with moths, and he doesn’t want them to ruin his clothes. But he also doesn’t want to kill them. Instead, he says, “I’ve been escorting them outside.” It’s 1973, not long before socialist president Salvador Allende will be overthrown in a military coup—Chris and Lee know that’s going to happen, given that their job is to destabilize democratic governments here and there around the world. In one of his many pensive moments, Chris muses, “Sometimes I think I care about the moths in Chile more than I care about the people in Chile.”

Yet somehow Chris does care, despite having secretively killed some 68 people in his long career, and possibly, as one of the movie’s running gags suggests, having had a hand in some grassy-knoll shenanigans in November 1963. He falls asleep listening to one of the saddest ballads ever written, Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” He not-so-secretly hates his boss, MJ (a delightfully ruthless Steve Buscemi) and joyfully spreads lies—or are they?—that he’s a junkie. But Chris himself does heroin, not for pleasure, but because cancer is killing him. He’s happy to have been dispatched to Easter Island—he has long wanted to see what he calls “the big heads”—and he claims that he’s going to get some work done on his long-planned memoir. Lee reminds him that his memory is like a sieve; Chris asserts that working on the memoir will bring it back. He wants his book to begin with a surprise opening, not a boring one, so he decides he’s going to open by talking about dinosaurs. “Did they have souls?" he wonders aloud. Lee scoffs at this idea, but by this point, we’ve already seen the affection, mingled with annoyance, between these men. Chris considers Lee his only friend.

That basic framework sets the stage for lots of acerbic CIA jokes, some flirtation with a duo of pretty student tourists (played by Ailín Salas and Mariana Di Girólamo), and a truly fantastic gag about how the “gay” countries produce the best cheeses. (Chris’ definition of what makes a country gay or not is far from sound, but even so, he may be onto something.) Chris delights in the wild horses that roam Easter Island, forming a kind of soul communion with one in particular, a striking, sensitive beast who nods his head perceptively whenever Chris asks him a question. McDonagh never wants our emotions to get too squishy—remember the donkey in The Banshees of Inisherin?—and thus this noble creature meets an unexplained, albeit gentle, end. But there’s still a degree of warmth here, perhaps more so than in most of McDonagh’s films. This one, at least, has none of the smug superiority of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a film ringing with condescension toward small-town America.

McDonagh may often be excessively arch, but he does know how to write for actors. Rockwell’s Lee is essentially the straight man here, absorbing the vibrations of his friend and colleague’s meandering thoughts on mortality and other subjects. That doesn’t make it a minor role; Lee is Chris’ mirror and sounding board, the trustworthy compatriot who both protects his friend and gives it to him straight. This is a generous performance, one that favors listening over mere line delivery. And Malkovich is simply wonderful. Chris, nearing not just the end of his CIA career but his life, has blown out his filter; now he just blurts the truth. When one of the young, earnestly leftist tourists speaks, with sparkling eyes, about the power of organized protests, Chris gives it to her straight: “Marches are just the places we can get the clearest photos of you without your knowing.” Malkovich doesn’t make the line sound cruel or demeaning. He launches it with a kind of bounce, the way you’d serve a tennis ball. He’s having fun here, and his pleasure becomes our delight. He makes you believe in a guy who would send an invasive, wool-munching insect out into the night air without crushing it. No one can deliver a moth soliloquy like he can.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday struck down a Republican-led attempt to permanently limit the Supreme Court to nine Justices, with lawmakers voting largely along party lines.

The attempt to preserve the makeup of the country’s top court was already a long shot: GOP Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona’s proposal was a constitutional amendment that required two-thirds of the chamber to approve. Even if the proposal had passed the chamber, it faced similarly long odds in the Senate and would have then needed ⁠to be ratified by 38 of the 50 U.S. states. But the attempt fell at the first hurdle in the House, with a 212-206 vote.

Still, the effort has put the Supreme Court—which Democrats have recently targeted over the conservative leanings of its decisions—firmly in the spotlight ahead of the November midterms. The Supreme Court may have bucked President Donald Trump’s agenda in tariffs and birthright citizenship, but it equally handed him victories in federal elections, his attempts to remake the capital, and his Administration’s enforcement of a robust anti-immigration agenda.

The GOP has argued against “packing” the court, whose current 6-3 conservative set-up often benefits Trump and his allies.

But Democrats claim the conservative-led court’s latest rulings show it’s pandering to politics instead of law. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland dismissed the proposal to cap the number of Supreme Court judges as “another ⁠partisan power grab by MAGA, our colleagues who fear for the results in the November election.”

Democrats’ criticisms coincide with signs of negative public opinion about the Supreme Court, with a July 2026 Washington Post-Ipsos poll showing that 46% of Americans believe the court is ruling on Trump’s policies based on ideology rather than the law.

The conservative Justices have denied that the court's decisions are politically motivated.

“I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides,” said Chief Justice John Roberts at an event in May. “I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.”

The past few months have nonetheless seen Democratic lawmakers proposing other ways to revamp the court in an attempt to weed out partisan politics and rein in judicial powers. Here are some of those efforts:

Ongoing discussions over court size

The U.S. Constitution does not state how many Justices make up the Supreme Court, and the number of seats has changed over ​time, from as few as five Justices to as many as 10. Since 1869, however, the court has had nine authorized seats for Justices.

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to expand the court by up ​to six Justices after the incumbents struck down ​parts of his ⁠New Deal agenda, but lawmakers decisively thwarted this.

Since 2021, some Democrats have attempted to increase the number of Justices. In April that year, four Democrats introduced a bill envisioning a 13-Justice Supreme Court, claiming it “would restore balance to the nation’s highest court after four years of norm-breaking actions by Republicans.” Former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in the 2024 presidential election, also said that Democrats should have a “real conversation” about changing institutions, including “expanding” the court.

As recently as May, Rep. Al Green of Texas filed a bill to increase the number of Justices to 13.

“I think that we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress, and we ought to expand—and 13 is a pretty good number,” Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina said in an interview with NBC News last month. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court. And I would hope we would get people on the court who will follow the constitutional underpinnings of this great nation of ours.”

Proposed term limits

In July, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and his fellow Democrats in the upper chamber proposed to limit new Justices’ active terms to 18 years. 

Per Whitehouse’s bill, the next President would nominate two new Supreme Court Justices in the first and third years after a presidential election. 

The bill also states that only the nine most recently appointed Justices on the bench would rule on cases under the Court’s appellate jurisdiction. A Justice will spend about 18 years participating in those cases, after which the Justice would be limited to hearing original jurisdiction cases and performing other duties.

“Term limits and regular appointments would make the Court more representative of everyday Americans and help restore the Supreme Court to the proper independent body it was created to be,” Whitehouse said.

Multiple polls, dating back to at least 2014, show broad public support for Justices’ term limits.

Other ethics concerns

Beyond debates over judicial tenures, some Supreme Court Justices have been hounded by ethics controversies.

Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have faced allegations of conflicts of interest and questions over financial disclosures, including accepting undisclosed luxury trips and other gifts—claims they have disputed.

Democrats have since introduced a handful of bills in hopes of restoring confidence in the judiciary. One bill sought to ban federal judges from receiving gifts valued over $50 in an instance or $100 in total per year per source save for specific exceptions, and a bill also seeks to require Justices and other members of the judiciary—as well as their spouses and children—to put certain assets in blind trusts. 

The Supreme Court has also been accused of “abusing” what is called the “shadow docket”—the docket which the Trump Administration has resorted to in seeking emergency relief in cases challenging the President’s agenda. The Trump Administration has applied for dozens of emergency appeals before the Supreme Court, and the court has, in most cases, ruled in the Administration’s favor. Rep. Raskin has introduced a bill that would require the Supreme Court to issue public legal justification for certain orders issued from this docket.

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut introduced a bill in July mandating an ethical code of conduct for the Supreme Court, appointing an Ethics Investigations Counsel, and requiring Justices to publicly disclose why they decided to recuse themselves from a case. The bill aims to strengthen enforcement of the court’s previous ethics code.

Dolly Parton did so much in her life to help others. In her final days, I think she did one last thing that will help millions of people, if we pay attention to her warning and take action.

Just four days before she died, Parton said that she was being treated for health problems that she “didn’t pay attention to when I was watching over Carl.” She was talking about the years she spent caring for her husband through a long illness. The interview moved on to her upcoming projects, and that line went by so quickly that most people missed it. As we reflect on her death, I think it was a clear wake-up call to America.

This is caregiving in 2026. More than 60 million Americans are going through it, a 45% increase over the past decade. We are struggling in the shadows at great sacrifice to our own health and well-being, and caregiving rarely gets airtime as few people want to hear about it. Even worse, hardly anyone wants to talk about it.

In my mid-30s, I suddenly became a spousal caregiver for my wife through her cancer battle. It took an enormous toll on my own health, and woke me up to the harsh realities that millions of Americans face. I realized that supporting caregivers is one of the biggest unmet societal needs of our time, and I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to helping caregivers. 

I left my thriving career as a hedge fund manager to build a social impact organization CareYaya, where I’ve worked directly to help thousands of caregivers, people taking care of their spouses and their aging parents, who are caring for loved ones through serious illness, dementia or disability. The toll that millions of us are facing is enormous and completely in the shadows.

But with our rapidly aging population, rising rates of dementia, cancer, and serious illness, all of which place a huge caregiving burden on spouses or adult children, I think now is a critical time to talk about caregiving, before it totally breaks our society. Parton’s death can be the wake-up call to change the societal narrative and bring about much-needed changes to support caregivers. 

Parton’s own words suggest that for years, her health was going untended while she tended someone else’s, and that no one caught it. In October 2025, when posting a video to quiet fans who had begun to worry about her health, she said that while Carl was sick and after he died, “I didn’t take care of myself,” and that she had let things slide. A few months later in March 2026, opening the season at Dollywood, she said she had gotten “worn down and worn out.” And in August 2026, she said it a final time, only four days before she passed. For years, one of the most famous women in America was doing the unseen and unheralded work of a caregiver.

We have known for a quarter century that this work can literally kill the person doing it. In the Caregiver Health Effects Study, published in JAMA in 1999, elderly spousal caregivers who reported strain had a four-year mortality rate 63% higher than non-caregiving spouses.

Scientists like Janice Kiecolt-Glaser have mapped in detail the biology underneath this phenomenon. Give a caregiver and a matched non-caregiver an identical small wound, and the caregiver’s wound takes about nine days longer to close. Caregivers’ immune cells show accelerated telomere erosion, the hallmark cellular signature of faster aging.

When Blue Cross Blue Shield went into its own claims database and identified 6.7 million members who were caregivers, it found that caregivers had 26% poorer overall health than a matched benchmark. They were 64% more likely to have high blood pressure, 37% more likely to have major depression, and 34% more likely to have anxiety. Among Millennials, the so-called “sandwich generation” raising their children while managing an aging parent’s illness, the rates of hypertension ran 82% higher and hospitalizations ran 59% higher. The health care system can already see clearly what caregiving does to someone’s own health. It simply has not adjusted the way it responds to help caregivers.

Even when the person they’re caring for dies, the risk does not end, as a well-documented “Widowhood Effect” shows the surviving spouse has an excess mortality of over 30% in the first three months after the passing of their loved one.

So what’s the solution? We can start with making caregiving a diagnosis.

Let’s take high blood pressure as an example. It often causes no symptoms and does not hurt. Yet we screen for it, code it, track it, and treat it anyway, simply for one reason: it reliably increases your risk of dying early. That is the logic of preventative health care, to address the risk factor before it becomes an emergency.

By that standard, caregiving should be at the top of the list. It elevates blood pressure, depression, and inflammation, suppresses immune response, correlates with a measurable rise in mortality. And unlike most other risk factors, it is very obvious who might be affected. 

The caregiver is often the person standing in the clinic exam room with their loved one, doing the paperwork and answering questions on someone else’s behalf. Yet currently, they are invisible to our health care system. 

In my years as a cancer caregiver for my wife, taking her to dozens of appointments and treatments, I was never once asked how I was doing or how my health was holding up. Only 15% of caregivers have ever been asked by a health care provider how they are doing. Even on the mental-health side, clinicians still lack the diagnostic pathway to bill for supporting caregivers, so even if caregiver burden is documented, it’s not treated because it’s not billable. Our health care system can bill for almost anything these days, yet it cannot bill for one of the most common health exposures in American life.

What else would caregiver support look like?

If you know a caregiver, please stop texting, “let me know if you need anything.” An exhausted caregiver will never ask, and answering requires more work and inventing a task for you. Just name a day and a four-hour window, and show up. Bring food for them and take over the care duties for a few hours, so they can get a much-needed break to go watch a movie, go to their own doctor’s appointment, sit in a park, or take a nap.

If you are the caregiver, treat your own medical appointments as part of the job. Book them at the same time that you book your loved one’s. Tell one clinician on your care team that you are the caregiver, and ask to be checked on, too. That is information the system needs. And think about it as the announcement you hear when you board an airplane: “In the event of an emergency, please put on your oxygen mask before you help others.” If you don’t manage your own health, you may not be capable of helping your loved one.

As a country, we need to see caregivers, name the burden, and pay for it. Register caregivers alongside the patient, and screen them for physical health, mental health, and economic stability, with actual corresponding help. We should fund respite care and tax credits for caregivers. Unpaid family caregivers deliver over a trillion dollars of economic value in care every year, and we need to decide that’s worth supporting.

The next time a caregiver walks someone they love into an exam room, somebody in the room should ask how they are doing, write the answer down, and support them. 

That is the memorial Dolly Parton earned, and the best way we can honor her legacy.

In the beginning, there was the famous story about the young journalist Gloria Steinem, going undercover in 1963 as a Playboy Bunny, all décolletage and rabbit ears, in order to expose a culture of degradation and misogyny. The Bunny episode is certainly the Steinem anecdote most often cited, but it’s such an early story that it’s just a canary, really, hinting only a little at what would become a lifelong commitment to feminism. 

Steinem, who died Sept. 2 in her home in New York City at the age of 92, was an icon of second-wave feminism. As one of the co-founders, in 1971, of both Ms. magazine and, along with many other feminists, the National Women’s Political Caucus, Steinem advocated fiercely and vocally on behalf of women’s rights. She was also involved in the fight for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. 

But she didn’t consider her life as an “active feminist” to have started until 1969, when in her mid-30s she attended an abortion speak-out in a church basement. Steinem was there as a reporter for New York magazine, but found herself struck by the stories the women told, and the truths that they were willing to reveal in front of other people. She had her own truth, which she came to share.

Some years ago, she personalized the story further, in the dedication of her 2015 book, My Life on the Road, which reads:

This book is dedicated to:

Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.

Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”

Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death:

I’ve done the best I could with my life.

This book is for you.

What is it that makes these words so moving? There was always something real and approachable about Steinem, visible in this dedication as well as in the interviews she gave and the speeches she delivered. You felt you knew her, or you wished you did. You even imagined being her, just a little.

I definitely had feelings along those lines toward Steinem. As a teenager I watched my own mother, a writer who hadn’t been encouraged by her parents to explore her talents fully or go to college, become truly affected by the women’s movement, publishing her first novel in her mid-40s. We subscribed to Ms., and I became part of a consciousness-raising group in school. Though the term "consciousness raising" can feel outdated, I still remember those conversations the other girls and I had. Someone would bring over a container of Lipton’s onion dip and a bag of chips, and we would go around the room speaking about subjects that until then had been kept inside, connected with what we had thought of as privacy, but which in some instances was really shame.

Later on, I was excited to win the Ms. magazine college fiction contest; and still later the writer Mary Gordon invited me to attend Steinem’s 50th birthday party with her. In addition to being overstimulated and thrilled at seeing Steinem, I am pretty sure I also saw Carol Burnett, Sally Ride, and Rosa Parks—if that tells you anything about Steinem’s reach. Beyond that, it was so heady that I can’t tell you much of anything.

“In my old age—really old age, since I’m going to live past 100, I hope,” Steinem once said in an interview with New York magazine, “I would love to have a diner.” She envisioned it as having “blue gingham curtains” and being “by the side of the road,” and she went on to explain: “Diners are the most democratic places. Everyone goes—truck drivers go, people from the neighborhood, people in their tuxes after parties go… And in the back room,” she said, “we could have a little revolutionary meeting from time to time.”

Steinem never actually had a diner, although you could make the case that she did have a sort of symbolic one, because her life’s work involved bringing all kinds of people together to talk, often to touch on matters of radical societal change. She seemed to be everywhere, from the nightly news to a mention on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The warmth and genuineness of her personality, as well as her convictions, breadth of knowledge and experience, and her talents both as a writer and speaker, helped make her a reliable figure over all the decades she spent working for women’s equality. In 2013, Barack Obama presented her with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The expression “the personal is political” easily comes to mind when thinking of Steinem, whose own origin story strongly shaped her inclination toward activism. Born on March 25, 1934 in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem lived with her mother Ruth after her parents’ divorce, becoming, at 10, the sole caretaker for her mother, who struggled with mental illness. Among Ruth's many other challenges was keeping a job. Feminism was in Steinem’s DNA (her father’s mother was involved with women’s suffrage and was the first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education), but Steinem later realized that witnessing the contempt and disregard that people in power expressed toward her mother—seeing how she was treated as invisible—became a formative social justice experience for her.

She took her percolating consciousness off to Smith College, the all-women’s school in Northampton, Mass., where she studied government. But Smith in the 1950s, while academically rigorous, was also sometimes described by its critics as a place where students went to get their "MRS" degrees. This, Steinem knew, was not something she wanted for herself. As she once told People magazine, “In the 1950s, once you married you became what your husband was, so it seemed like the last choice you’d ever have.” She added, “I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child, my mother. I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else.” (Steinem did eventually marry, but not until her 60s.)

Being responsible for her mother not only molded her convictions about what she didn’t want, but also seems to have allowed her to figure out, earlier than other people, what she did want. And one thing she apparently wanted was experience. Steinem got that, traveling to India on a fellowship; then, later, at Ms., and as a journalist, mentor, and speaker to audiences around the world. Along the way, the glamorous Steinem had a well-documented love life that sometimes involved relationships with powerful men. Her stylishness––the signature aviator glasses and great hair––combined with her intelligence and political engagement, challenged retrograde and insulting ideas about graceless, unappealing feminists. 

It would not be an overstatement to call Steinem the “face” of second-wave feminism, whether it was her preference or not to be known that way. Steinem believed that her personal formation as a feminist had been importantly shaped by Black women. “I thought that they invented the feminist movement,” she said in 2015. “I realize that things being what they are, the white, middle-class part of the movement got reported more.” Throughout her life, both personally and politically, she was sensitive to the needs of various groups whose interests had been sidelined.  

Steinem seemed to capture the feminist imagination in profound ways across decades, often acting as a convener of women. She was known for the “talking circles” frequently held in her home. In 2009, I received an invitation to her house in New York City for a reception to celebrate the filmmaker Jane Campion. Various women in the arts had been invited, and Steinem went around and briefly described everyone’s work, one by one. I suppose “networking” took place that night, but that seems too corporate a term for what I experienced, which was a series of good conversations with women I admired, in the home of someone who mattered to us all. She somehow had time for all of this—more time, even as the clock sped up the way it seems to do as you get older, before it inevitably slows down, then stops.

I had cause to think of Steinem again some years ago when talking to a friend, the novelist J. Courtney Sullivan, who in fact I met for the first time that night at Steinem’s. Sullivan was a core member of the all-volunteer group Immigrant Families Together, which worked to reunite mothers and children who had been separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2018 she sent out a mass email, looking for housing for immigrant women and their children. She told me she sent 50 emails, and at that point received only one response in which the person volunteered her own home. It was from Steinem, who told Sullivan, in effect: Any of those mothers and their children are welcome to stay in my house for as long as they need.

Love Island USA would not exist without Black women. Their viral moments, reads at the fire-pit, and ability to shape pop culture in their image are the stuff of marketing executives' dreams. Within the timespan of a summer, Season 8’s core four—Trinity Tatum, Kayda Bosse, Aniya Harvey, and Melanie Moreno—gained millions of followers across social media platforms, signed deals with major talent agencies, and received widespread coverage across mainstream media publications. 

The Love Island USA effect is not limited to these four women. The show has also brought notoriety and fame to their male partners and other Islanders, as well. But the breakout stars of the Peacock dating series are experiencing these phenomena on another level, with built-in fanbases that follow and support every campaign they take part in, both on and off social media. In a landscape where fame equates to followers and followers equate to money, these four Black women are raking in the profits and new opportunities their newfound fame has brought, and Black women are to thank for it. 

But even as their fans prop them up, it often seems as though they are taken for granted by other Islanders, those cast members’ fanbases, and ITV America and Peacock, which have seen their bottom lines grow significantly as a direct result of the dating franchise. Despite their success, Tatum, Bosse, Harvey, and Moreno have been subjected to constant anti-Black racism and sexism, and the support network that should be there to protect them has been conspicuously absent: There’s been no statement of support or condemnation from the networks, while cast members defend their mistreatment of the core four rather than have their backs. What’s more, the harm to these women is experienced by Black women watching the show as vicarious racism—an indirect exposure to racial and gender discrimination—that elicits feelings of fear, sadness, and anger. (As of publication, representatives from Peacock and ITV America had not responded to a request for comment.)

On the Love Island USA Season 8 reunion, which aired Aug. 31 on Peacock, mistreatment on social media was a recurring theme among the Islanders, specifically the Black Islanders, who spoke about receiving death threats, racial slurs, and discriminatory harassment from fans of the Fiji-set dating franchise. “I don’t stand for racism towards me, towards Titi [Tierra Davis], and any of the other cast members, which is a big reason why I haven’t really been on social media,” said KC Chandler on the reunion stage. “I wanted to get my mind right and really focus on what matters to me, which is my family and my mental health.”

This was not the first time a Black Islander had expressed discontent on the Love Island USA reunion stage. Last year, breakout star Olandria Carthen tearfully spoke about the racism and bullying she experienced from fans of Huda Mustafa, including one who photoshopped her face onto the body of George Floyd. Serena Page, winner of Love Island USA Season 6, told podcast host Kamie Crawford that she talked to production staff about their decision to cast male Islanders who were not attracted to Black women, thus reinforcing the stereotype that Black women are undesirable. And these messages are sent to a massive audience: the most recent season accumulated nearly 19 billion hours of viewing—a streaming record for Peacock.  

It is no secret that reality television has historically been unwelcoming and unsafe for Black women. Nor is Love Island USA the first unscripted television show to have a toxic fandom. But the lack of protections for these stars, in addition to being an ethical lapse with serious ramifications for their mental health, could pose a threat to the future of the franchise. Fans are loyal to Islanders more than to the show itself, and if the show’s biggest stars are no longer in its orbit, it becomes harder to keep their devotees in that orbit too. The trio of friends nicknamed PPG—Leah Kateb, Serena Page, and JaNa Craig—who catapulted the unscripted series into fame in Season 6, have publicly distanced themselves from the dating show. Carthen took a similar tack after last year’s reunion. And Moreno claimed not to have tuned in to the Season 8 reunion via an post on the official Shondaland Instagram page.

To be clear, Black women aren’t the only ones who seem to be moving on once their time on the show is done. “ I don't think these people want to be professional reality stars,” says Anna Peele, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of Enter the Villa: The Unauthorized Reality Behind Love Island. “ Huda [Mustafa] wanted to keep being on reality TV. I think some of the cast members who left earlier are going to be very happy to be [on its spinoff series] Beyond The Villa.” But for the most part, she explains, they want to pivot or branch out. “These people want to be models, hosts, presenters, DJs.  I don't know if those are higher aspirations than being a reality star, but they are different aspirations. The way that you comport yourself is going to be different than continuing to feed the public interest in your private life.”

The franchise has perhaps inadvertently shown fans the downsides of being a part of it. Beyond The Villa became its first spinoff series following the breakout success of Season 6, which saw significant growth in the show’s stateside audience. The spinoff followed the fan favorites of that season as they adjusted to their newfound fame in Los Angeles. The show was meant to be an inside look into the lives of America’s favorite Islanders, but it wasn’t all glamorous. Viewers were privy to these young adults’ experiences of heightened anxiety, depression, struggles with their shifting personal and professional identities, and other issues related to their participation. And its window into Black female cast members’ experiences was grimmest of all. Season 2 of the spinoff did not feature runner-up Nic Vansteenberghe, Carthen, Mustafa, nor Allen “Ace” Steve Greene and Michelle “Chelley” Evelyn Bissainthe, after many of them expressed frustration over the way they were depicted. The spinoff was renewed for a third season, but the likelihood of Season 8's core four joining is slim to none—though contractual obligations mean other new opportunities may be temporarily limited.

Islanders are beholden to a one-year exclusivity clause, an industry standard in reality TV. “It gives the network or streamer veto power over any brand or commercial deals the talent may pursue,” McKinley Franklin explains in the Hollywood Reporter. “And it gives them a window to see if they want to sign up the talent in question for any future shows or spinoffs.” Jade Sherman, head of digital at Gersh—the talent agency that represents Vanderpump Rules alum Ariana Madix, who hosts Love Island USA, as well as Aniya Harvey—spoke about the clause to Variety. “Love Island is an incredible brand, and they try really hard to protect their IP. They’ve put things in place to do that, and it’s on us as representatives to be able to pivot and adapt to where their changing rules are,” she said.

Yet no discussion about the series’ record-breaking viewership or Islanders’ post-show deals is complete without acknowledging the impact of the discourse online. Islanders receive a psychological screening before they begin filming the show, and they have access to on-site psychological support in Fiji. But the support does not seem to adequately address one of the biggest threats to contestants’ wellbeing: fear of their fans. When Peele interviewed former Islanders for Enter The Villa and conversations touched on their hesitancy to step in when another Islander was being harassed, they described the fans as terrifying. “ There's a moral imperative to do the right thing and to do what's right. But they can't control them,” says Peele. Fred Johnson, a talent manager at Select Management Group, the agency that represents Love Island USA Season 7 fan favorite Jeremiah Brown, told The Ankler, “The audience that takes a typical content creator years to build pretty much arrives overnight” for an Islander. 

There is a lot of power in being a fan favorite, but for Black women Islanders, it exacts a particular toll. Zari Taylor, faculty fellow at New York University and co-author of From Screen to Store: Exploring the Reality TV to Influencer Pipeline on Love Island, spoke to TIME about the double standard they face. "On the one hand, while Black women [are] emerging victorious, especially dark-skinned women, they have to go through something” in order to achieve that fan-favorite status. Taylor describes the process as a trial by fire, in which the Islanders have to walk through the hot coals of misogyny and sexism on the show itself. They have to take the male Islander back even after lies and betrayals during the Casa Amor segment of the show, when he is tempted by other women, and are often an object of pity from the audience.

It is impossible to fully curb racism and sexism online. But that doesn’t mean the franchise can’t take meaningful steps toward creating a safer workplace and post-show experience for Black women—one that might encourage them to invest in it rather than move away from it as quickly as contractually possible. When asked what changes could be made to improve the conditions for Black women on Love Island USA and those who watch it, Taylor had one clear starting point. “ Black women put a lot of effort into the show because we've had to fight for the representation that we have. Both franchises [Love Island and Love Island USA] have had a Black couple win or a Black woman win. [The producers of these shows] need to be more conscious of things like online misogyny influencing the people that come on, and misogynoir, misogyny in general, so that they can keep an eye out for it.” This includes in the casting process, when prospective Islanders are asked about their dating preferences.

Peele sees the addition of Ciara Miller as the host of Love Island: Aftersun, a recap show where the events of the episodes are discussed postmortem, as a sign that show is trending in the right direction. Her presence helps provide a space for conversations about dating as a Black woman on reality TV, led by a woman with personal experience. And Peele points to the possibility of age-restricted safeguards, barring fans under the age of 18 from participating in the discourse online, as Madix has noted that putting such restrictions on her own content significantly reduced negative interactions.

Love Island USA remains in a moment of major growth and unprecedented attention. Madix secured the series’ first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program. She will host Season 9 of the franchise, along with Love Island Games, in 2027. Viewership is growing: 35% of viewers this summer were new to watching the series. And the Season 8 reunion closed with an announcement that casting is already underway for the next crew of Islanders. But more eyeballs bring more scrutiny, and growth cannot be sustained without the very people who made it possible. Let’s hope that expansion brings more discussions about continuous protection for the Black women who will join the franchise in addition to those who came before. Because no amount of fame can compensate for the damage done by anti-Black racism and sexism. And the show is nothing without its brightest stars.

Twenty-five years later, Sept. 11 remains a watershed moment, one with both personal and global implications. To mark the anniversary, TIME spoke to people with very different connections to the day, to hear about what they experienced at the time as well as the ripple effects. For some, the legacy of the date is one of profound loss. Others know about the tragedy mostly from history class. One thing is clear: The attacks that changed the world also changed lives.

Buy a copy of 9/11 Stories of Resilience 25 Years Later here

A firefighter following in his father’s footsteps 

An aspiring pilot inspired by legacy 

A lawyer fighting for her client at Guantánamo Bay

A veteran finding new ways to serve

A pastor who learned a lesson about love

A volunteer who will cry with you

An Afghan immigrant still chasing his dream 

A teacher who won’t let history be forgotten

A New Yorker committed to getting victims compensated

A Broadway director who found healing through art

A journalist who told the story of the attacks

A family formed on a day of tragedy

Colin McShane

I was 4½ when my dad died. I have only brief memories of that day. I remember my mom taking my twin brother and me out of preschool. I remember watching the TV at home and then going over to one of her friends’, whose husband was also a firefighter, and watching it there. We were so young, we didn’t really grasp what was actually going on. But as you get older, you start to realize what you’ve missed out on. It’s not quite the same as being sad because you miss someone close to you. It’s more like you’re sad because you didn’t really get to be close to them.

My dad was a cop for 12 years and a firefighter for only 18 months, but joining the FDNY was always his plan. For as long as I can remember, I also wanted to be a firefighter. I did the entry exam when I was 18, even though they don’t take anyone until 21. I went to college, but I think I was just killing time. I dropped out after two years, as the process ramped up. My mom kept encouraging me to consider other things, but she knew I had put all my eggs in that basket. I loved the routine and discipline of the academy, and I really tried to earn my spot; I didn’t want to feel like I was getting special treatment. 

A lot of things about the fire department don’t change, and I remember thinking my dad might have stood right where I was standing, worrying about getting yelled at by some drill instructor for having a button undone. I don’t have many shared memories with him, but that came close. He worked in Brooklyn, just on the other side of the tunnel from the World Trade Center. I wanted to go to a different firehouse, to let the guys make up their mind about me without having known his reputation, so I’m in the Bronx. The firefighters I meet that knew him, I feel like they're happy to see that I'm on the job.

On 9/11 I usually go to Mass at my firehouse and then drop by Ladder 101, where Dad worked. Last year for the first time I met someone who was actually riding that day, and he gave me the full rundown. They were staged at the mouth of the tunnel right under the towers, and as they sat there on the rigs, they watched the second plane come in. They could feel the impact and then they went straight in. From what I understand, his group went up a way, came back down, and were in the lobby when the building collapsed.

Dad was also a lifeguard at Overlook Beach in Long Island, and the lifeguards there put up a little memorial for him. My mom is not big on going to the firehouse or the ceremonies in the city on the anniversaries. I think it’s just too overwhelming. So we do a more casual gathering in the afternoon. It’s less somber, more a reason for everyone to just get together. 

Sometimes the attention that comes with being a legacy firefighter is uncomfortable, but not for the reasons you might think. I don’t have trouble talking about it; it was something that happened when I was young, but I had a happy childhood and a very fortunate life. I’m not looking for sympathy—I feel lucky to have had that role model of selflessness and self-sacrifice. On the other hand, I do miss having had a real relationship with my dad. 

Do I wish he was still alive? Of course. I sometimes wonder if I’d be different if I’d known my dad. But that event shaped my way of thinking and shaped me. I’m very proud of what he did, and I think it’s a very admirable and honorable way to die. And I wouldn’t want someone else to have been in his place because I don’t think that’s what he would have wanted. –As told to Belinda Luscombe

Kelsey Griffin

My journey of becoming a pilot started when I was 14, when I went to a youth summer camp sponsored by the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP). When I first told my parents that I wanted to be a pilot, of course they were a little bit concerned about the dangers that come with flight training at a young age, but they were also very supportive.

I took my first discovery flight with an instructor in 2022. At first I was definitely nervous, because there was so much going on in the plane at once. But once we were at around 2,000 feet, everything became incredibly peaceful. Looking down at the scenery gave me a sense of freedom that I never really experienced anywhere else. I knew at a young age that I never wanted to work a traditional nine-to-five job. I was also really big on traveling, and that discovery flight showed me that being a pilot was something I could do every day and enjoy. I took my first solo fight in 2024.

Flight training is expensive, but my parents made sacrifices to support me financially as I sought out scholarships and opportunities. I was drawn to the LeRoy W. Homer Jr. Foundation Scholarship, because of their mission to empower future aviators. He was an African American pilot, and a first officer for United Airlines on Flight 93. I wasn’t alive when 9/11 happened, so my understanding comes from learning about it through documentaries and conversations with my parents and grandparents and others. 

The tragedies definitely impacted not only the lives of everyday people, but also caused major disruption in the aviation industry. When my mentor just started his career as a pilot, he got furloughed soon after 9/11 because the airline industry was completely devastated over Americans’ fear of flying. I have a family member that is still afraid to fly on aircrafts.

Before I went to college, I became a private pilot and a licensed drone pilot. I briefly stopped my training after one of my friends passed away, but getting the scholarship lifted my spirits and gave me an extra push to continue my goal. The scholarship exists because of somebody who lived with courage, professionalism, and commitment to serving others. Knowing that I’m representing his legacy motivates me to work harder and fly with integrity, and never take opportunities for granted.

At Middle Georgia State University, I'm enrolled in aviation courses to finish out my remaining ratings and license and also to, as we call it in the industry, time build. I have to get at least 1,000 flight hours before I can go to a regional airline. It will probably take me about six more years of training to become a major airline pilot. African American women make up less than 1% of professional pilots in the U.S. I have had the privilege of connecting with several of them through organizations such as Sisters of the Skies, OBAP, Aviation Career Enrichment, Pink STEM, and Youth in Aviation. Having this support gives me a sense of comfort and understanding that through hard work, I can also achieve it. –As told to Philip Wang

Alka Pradhan

I was infamous as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins for choosing classes in the afternoon so I could sleep all morning. My more diligent roommate would try to wake me so she’d have someone to talk to. On 9/11, I thought that’s what she was doing. Maybe a minute or so after she got me to the TV, the second plane hit. It was terrifying.

Even at 19, I was on track to study the intersection of human-rights law and international humanitarian law. When it became clear in early October that we, the U.S., were going to strike Afghanistan in a way that seemed not entirely targeted and seemed to conflate the Taliban with al-Qaeda, that began my interest in all this. But to me, our actions didn't seem to comply with the law of war that I had been studying. I really did not anticipate that I would eventually use my specialization to litigate as hard as I possibly could against my own government. But that is what I have done for the past 13ish years in my work at Guantánamo.

I was already working with Guantánamo detainees when, in 2015, I got a call from a friend at the Department of Defense, who said the military commissions, which are prosecuting those actually alleged to have organized the attacks on 9/11, were hiring civilians. He asked if I’d be interested in representing Ammar al-Baluchi, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew. I thought, well, there's nothing I can do that is deeper in the heart of this morass than the military commissions, because the CIA torture programs are at the heart of these cases. So I've been a defense attorney for Ammar al-Baluchi’s 9/11 case since 2015. It has been in pretrial hearings for 14 years. 

For 9/11, the actual fact allegations against al-Baluchi are that he transferred money to people who ended up being the hijackers. We have never contested the fact that he transferred money. He was in Dubai, he was asked to transfer money, he transferred money. The $10,000 question is: What did he know at the time? And the government has no evidence that is not derived from torture that indicates he had any knowledge of what was happening on Sept. 11.

The 9/11 case really is all day, every day. It is the biggest criminal case in U.S. history. I hold a top-secret security clearance, and I still don’t have all the information I need about the torture at the black sites that impacted how Ammar is today and the statements he gave later. The trial has just been scheduled for June 2028, but I don’t know if it will ever happen, and I think that is a very hard truth, particularly for the victims’ family members. Witnesses have passed away, evidence has been destroyed by the government. The men themselves are deteriorating because the U.S. refuses to give them the medical care they need as undisputed torture victims. Millions and millions of dollars have been wasted on this exercise so far. It’s the Jarndyce v Jarndyce of the United States. 

However I also think this is one of the most important things I will ever do because it shows fellow Americans that this is what dissent looks like, and I know it sounds trite, but this is also what patriotism looks like. I am both grateful for and have great contempt for what the Department of Defense has done over these 25 years. On 9/11 I will reach out to the victims’ family members who I am in touch with and convey my very deep sadness and anger over what happened. I will watch the commemorations. I will contemplate. Then I will start speaking again about everything that we are continuing to do wrong. –As told to B.L.

Jukay Hsu

I was student-body president at Stuyvesant High, three blocks from the World Trade Center. I had an early meeting that day with the principal about the plans for the year. So normally I’d be walking to school when the first plane hit. We evacuated, I think, just as the first tower fell, and I remember looking through these two-story plate-glass windows at this billowing black-gray kind of fog coming from one way as we went out the other way into a sunny sky.

I grew up in Queens. My mother was a social worker. I was lucky to get full financial aid to Harvard, and signed up for ROTC, then went to Iraq. I always thought service was public service. I was a second lieutenant leading a platoon of 40 men in Salahuddin province, kind of at the mid-end of the surge. Even with combat patrols, I ended up doing a lot around civil governance because counterinsurgency involves that. It was a very different kind of learning.

When I got out of the military, all my classmates were going into tech. I was like, If New York is going to become a tech sector, how can more people be included in that? All the soldiers I worked with never went to college. That's the difference between officer and soldier. Even though my platoon sergeant was 20 years older than me, I was in charge because I went to college. It really got you thinking: All these companies and jobs and wealth are being created, but two-thirds of Americans and two-thirds of New Yorkers don’t have a four-year college degree. In 2011, I ended up creating Pursuit. Our idea was to train working-class people in the skills tech companies tell us they need. The average student arrived making $16,000 and a year later has a job paying $94,000. 

I left Pursuit to start a research organization called Bright Future to focus on AI alignment for the benefit of humanity. There’s this idea that AI is going to be so dominant, so superpowerful, not just tools, but creating a being—we’re trying to create like a god, essentially, right? It's kind of crazy. So what does that mean for humans? This year I also joined the New York City Economic Development Board, which oversees and shapes AI policy.

Perhaps the future is not college versus noncollege. Perhaps it’s going to be AI and non-AI. But hopefully, there’s a way to democratize that and enable cooperation. We're creating these new digital minds, so you have to consider their power and impact. Early on in high school, it was imprinted on me that what’s most important is what happens to all of us. And the ability to have agency in that. 9/11 helped cement that. Important critical junctures really can bring out the best in humanity, if we choose to respond.

Marc Rivera

I was born in Puerto Rico but have lived all but the first three months of my life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Next year, it will be 50 years that I'm pastoring down here. Primitive Church is within eyeshot of the towers. On 9/11, I saw the towers fall and then didn’t set foot outside lower Manhattan until March the following year.

I had just dropped my younger son at high school a block away from the Trade Center and I was going into the church office when I saw my secretary outside. She simply says, “Look.” Sure enough, there was a gaping hole in the north tower. I could see what I thought was debris falling. Later on, I discovered it may have been people. I turned around to get my son, but the police wouldn’t let me through, so I went back to the church, and all of a sudden, a sea of people filled with soot and stuff came walking down our street. We opened the church to them. We had four landlines that were somehow still working. Eventually my son walked in with a bunch of friends, all covered in soot. My older son also arrived from midtown. That was a rebirth moment for me. I was able to shift my attention to helping the helpers and healing the healers. 

By day two after the collapse, I was doing what I've always done: galvanizing people and starting to help individuals, raising money to pay people's rent and medical bills and for funerals. We established the Ground Zero Clergy Task Force, which was simply clergy of different faiths, denominations, and traditions who gathered together to help at the site and to coordinate churches with FEMA and the New York City government. Every day, anywhere from 15 to 50 clergy would meet in the sanctuary, and then go down to the hole, to ground zero, to see what we could do. About a year afterward, I established a Northeast Clergy Group, which was broader and longer-standing. It tried to run the same program for people at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

We closed those organizations eventually, but through them I saw the importance of not being so rigid or immovable in my theological training. Many religious people, regardless of faith tradition, tend to think that we have the patent on truth. This event broadened my perspective and really challenged me to make that change intellectually and also in my practice. When tragedy strikes, no one cares how much training you have, how many books you have written, how large your congregation is. Because the bottom line is love. I saw a fireman who looked so tired and I asked if I could pray for him. I didn’t ask what he believed first. 

The most painful consequence for me personally was that my oldest son, Tim, was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer, one of the cancers that is covered by the 9/11 fund. He fought it courageously for three years, but this September will mark one year since his passing. He would have been 46. We believe he probably got it because we live down here. 

One of my greatest concerns today is that there are still people in our congregation and in this community who may qualify for assistance through the 9/11 fund that the federal government set up, but some remain reluctant to apply. They’re more afraid of the system than they are of getting sick. So, more than two decades later, part of our ministry is still helping people understand that the consequences of Sept. 11 did not end on Sept. 11. We are still caring for people. We are still encouraging people to seek the help that is available to them. And we are still learning what that terrible day taught us from the very beginning: when people are hurting, our first responsibility is to love them.

Connie Stevanus

That day, I was working at a bank, and as I went from department to department, they were bringing this up on their computers. On my way home, it’s just a two-lane country road, and there was so much traffic. Cars were passing me in either direction. They were state police cars. When I finally got home, I see my husband picking things out of the yard, and I didn’t know what he was doing until I went to pull into our driveway. It was black, totally black, with small pieces of burnt debris. And it just hit me then what I was looking at. Flight 93 carried mail. We had mail in our trees, in our yard. The neighbor across the road from us had a piece of the United Airlines magazine in her yard.

We started volunteering at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa., after my husband had retired from work, like five years after 9/11. People come from all over—Europe, Australia, different countries. They like to tell you where they were and their experiences of that day. And then they always ask, “Where were you when this happened?” We get a lot of school students, and they're very alert to what happened here, so they're usually very quiet and very respectful. My 21-year-old grandson wasn't born yet. And when he was in eighth grade, I think it was, his school came out. 

I never get tired of talking about it. Probably 99% of them still feel the pain and show their emotions easily when we're talking. Sometimes it’s a little hard to be there, because I’m that person—I might not be able to say the right thing to you, but I can cry right alongside of you. At the Visitor Center, we have those three phone messages. You know that some of the passengers on Flight 93 had to leave messages because they didn’t get an answer? Those are very powerful. 

Can I share one little story with you? This was just after they were done with the excavation and the road opened up. So it was about two weeks later. My husband and I stopped there after work one evening.  And it was just like the day of 9/11. Sunny, bright blue sky, not a cloud in the sky. There was nobody around, just me and my husband. We looked down through the field, and you could just see where the crash site was, the fresh soil that covered that area. And we just stood there. And all you could hear were birds, the rustling of the high grass, and just silence. And there wasn't a flag. There was nothing where you would think something like this happened. You could see the little fence that they had around the debris field. But that is a moment that I'll never forget. –As told to Karl Vick

Shams Frough

I was going into fifth grade when 9/11 happened. I remember, because it was two days after a famous Northern Alliance commander was assassinated. Obviously, there was no TV in Kabul, but our ears were wide open and we did hear about it on the radio. (From a very young age, I was listening to BBC Persian.) Then came the bombings, and life in Kabul became a bit hard, so for a short period, I went back to my village, Kapisa, which is 100 km from Kabul, where I had shepherding duties. I remember very well the big difference when we returned to school; girls were going too, and we no longer had to wear black turbans. Everybody wanted the Taliban to go, but we didn’t know that eventually all these American soldiers would come and there would be a hot war again. We all thought the Northern Alliance would take over. 

My mother died when I was young, and my father really worked to make sure his children did not have to work on the farm. I went to an elite Turkish-run high school; out of 6,000 applicants, only 100 were accepted—and some of those places were reserved for the children of government ministers. Most lessons were in English, but we also learned Turkish. I wanted to go to medical school, but I was young and male and I believed the hype, and in the last year of school I began working with the U.S. Army. I was sent to Kandahar as an interpreter. After I was nearly killed twice, I was transferred to the Department of Procurements in Kabul and ended up doing simultaneous translation for colonels and generals who were advising the Afghan military and police. I reported what looked like corruption in the Afghan procurement process, and then I knew I had to leave. It took three years, until 2014—a week or so after I resigned—for my Special Immigrant Visa to be processed. 

My wife and I were initially assigned to Albuquerque, N.M., which was funny, because my Army friends always made fun of the mud huts in Afghanistan and there they were in America, only it was called adobe. When we moved to Chicago, I went to community college and so I took up driving taxis and Ubers. I’d study all week and then sleep in my taxi at the airport, because there was always a three-hour wait for a fare. Then in 2021, I started a business called Kapisa Rugs; it was rebranded as Rugistan in 2024, and we directly source hand-knotted rugs from Afghanistan. It’s not easy with Amazon and other competition, so to keep prices down, I’m here seven days a week. Right now we have two locations, but this is not the goal. 

I love rugs. I'll always cherish them. But hopefully, in about a year, it will be profitable enough, and my wife will have taken over and I will be able to fire myself. Some of my high school friends who didn’t join the Army are already doctors here, so I sometimes feel like I haven’t lived up to my capacity in the way I could have in Afghanistan. I am currently completing my master’s of public health at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and I hope to start medical school in 2028. I joke with my wife that I’ll probably graduate alongside our sons. –As told to B.L.

Sari Beth Rosenberg

My first day of student teaching was supposed to be 9/11. I was 26, in grad school, planning to observe a teacher teaching U.S. history at LaGuardia High School. My alarm-clock radio played Z Morning Zoo, a show known for its goofiness, but the hosts were talking about a plane crashing into the Twin Towers and I thought, “That’s not funny.” I turned on the TV, and that’s when I was like, “Oh my, no, this is actually real.” I got a phone call from one of my best friends who worked on Canal Street near the Twin Towers, and when I saw the first tower buckle, I yelled to her, “You have to run!” 

The next semester, I was placed at Stuyvesant High School by what was once the Twin Towers. The air was constantly being tested in the cafeteria. And yet 9/11 never came up in the classroom. In the years that followed, I would have students interview a friend or family member about that day as a lesson in how history is remembered, showing them that they just collected primary sources.

Nowadays, students are more clued into current events on their devices and TikTok, so they’re asking really interesting questions about 9/11, like “Why did we attack Afghanistan?” Many students don’t understand the difference between why we went into Afghanistan in the early 2000s versus Iraq. Many adults don't know the difference if they don't really pay attention to the news or recent current events. How do you understand what’s going on in Iran now if you don’t understand the history of Iraq, Iran, the Middle East? 

Kids don’t talk about the fear of terrorists coming from the Middle East. The thing that kids are more scared of today is what they see as domestic terror coming from ICE agents. I’ve had to explain that ICE was created in 2003 as part of the new Department of Homeland Security, which was established in response to 9/11, and now it’s being used to, in my opinion, terrorize communities. 

I’m definitely going to bring up the 25th anniversary in class this year. They were born so long after 9/11, it’s history to them. We need to find ways to cover more recent history. In a U.S. history class—or any history class—there’s so much to cover, and we don’t get to the recent history, from 1980 to the present, because it’s not emphasized on tests and also you run out of time. –As told to Olivia B. Waxman

Allison Turkel

On Sept. 11, I was outside of Albuquerque, N.M. I worked for a not-for-profit then called the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, and we were running a conference. And the receptionist where we were holding it said a plane just hit the World Trade Center, and you could go into our break room to watch it on TV. I went in just in time to see the second plane hit. Luckily I was able to reach my dad, who had a meeting downtown that day. I got him right before the phones went out in New York, and then we started driving back. We looked on our map. We tried to avoid missile silos because we thought that those might be under attack or shooting things. We had no idea. I drove crying. Not the whole time, but a lot. It’s a skill.

I lived in the D.C. area at the time, but I grew up in Manhattan, up in Washington Heights. I worked down in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which was actually in the zone. So all of it translates well into how and why I’ve been the Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund for the last 3½ years. 

We want as many people as possible to know, one, we’re still here. We are in business until 2090. We have as much funding as is necessary to pay every eligible claimant. And two, we serve people beyond first responders. We serve people that lived, worked, went to school in the New York exposure zone, who were at Shanksville and at the Pentagon. We really encourage people if they were there, to register with the VCF. In order to file a claim, folks need to get certified that they have a 9/11 illness from the World Trade Center Health Program, which is our sister program that runs out of HHS. We are receiving over 700 new claims a month.

Since 2011, when we reopened, we have received over 110,000 claims. We've paid out $18.5 billion compensation. [The original VCF closed in 2004 after paying out the $7 billion appropriated for those killed or physically injured on 9/11.] The CDC estimates that in New York alone, over 400,000 people may have been exposed to the toxins.

Remember “America Strong”? “Let everybody return”? “Let's begin to live, work, go to school, start over again”? People went back into the New York zone, and the consequence, of course, is they were exposed to these toxins that have made them ill. And people have died from it. On that day, 2,977 people perished at all three sites and on the planes. Since we reopened, we’ve had 6,100 of our claimants die from exposure to the toxins. And unfortunately, every year there are more people becoming ill. Today, 63% of our claimants have a cancer, and those cancers, because of the unique nature of what people were exposed to, may have long latency periods.

Every Sept. 11, the memorial and museum in New York City does the reading of the names of the victims, and there’s always six moments of silence, to mark the four moments of impact and two tower collapses. This year, they’re adding a seventh, to honor the people that have become ill from the toxins. I think that’ll help spread awareness that so many are still suffering and that the 9/11 VCF is here to help.

Christopher Ashley

I actually didn't behave that great that day. I almost got into a fistfight. 

It was the first day of rehearsal for the play Wonder of the World, which I was directing. We canceled rehearsal for that day and the next, and I ended up walking back home to the West Village. Late that night, there was a very drunk man who put himself in front of me and asked if I was an Iraqi. He kept putting himself in front of me, and I kept trying to get away. Then he took a swing at me, and I punched him in the face. 

It’s not automatic that people are their best selves in these moments. I think one of the things people do with traumatic situations is move on, so it was really meaningful to me to dig back into the feelings that that day created while directing Come From Away, a musical about 38 planes grounded in Gander, Newfoundland, and the people who took care of strangers at this moment of real terror. Telling that story around the world, onstage, on Apple TV helped me heal.

In 2011, the play’s authors, David Hein and Irene Sankoff, went to a 10th anniversary event reconvening a lot of the people who had been diverted there on 9/11. They expected to be there for a couple of days and ended up staying for weeks and weeks. Claude Elliott, the mayor of Gander, used to joke, "Wait, you guys are making a musical about making sandwiches?”

In the current world we're living in, it almost seems mythical that people would take this good care of each other because there are just so many things that pull us apart and make us suspicious of each other. We're all vulnerable. Nobody’s safely apart behind a wall. We're all going to have to figure out how to share the world and the space together. The world keeps changing, but the show remains about the responsibility we have to each other and the value of kindness and connection. Twenty-five years ago, if more people thought like the people in Gander—“these people are my problem, my responsibility, and I will take care of them, despite the fact that I didn't meet them until today”—I think we'd be in a better place. –As told to O.B.W.

Nancy Gibbs

Moments after 8:46 a.m., attention fixed on one incomprehensible event. As first responders scrambled and survivors fled, the rest of us skidded to a stop and watched. 

At TIME, editor Jim Kelly launched a reporting army: correspondents around the world tracked the attacks and reactions in real time. White House correspondent Jay Carney was with President Bush in the press pool; writers and editors in the New York City headquarters headed downtown, or to city hospitals and command centers. My job was to curate and condense it all into a single story for a special issue of the magazine. “I just want you to tell the story of today,” Jim told me. “Think of it as a time capsule.”

In one sense we all saw something different. If you lived in New York City, not only did you see the smoke, you smelled it, tasted it. You heard the sirens, felt the fear. Elsewhere, the alerts jolted large towns and small. Local landmarks shivered and then shut down: Disney World and the Sears Tower, Congress and the Supreme Court, the Space Needle. Also, the entire airspace of the United States. 

But at a deeper level, we all saw the same thing, a once unimaginable attack on what we soon started calling the Homeland, as though we were all residents of the same reality. No matter how different our individual experiences of that day, we lived through it together and emerged more united: By October, 60% of people said they trusted the government to do the right thing all or most of the time, a three-decade high. 

It’s easier to put a jigsaw puzzle together when you can see the whole picture on the lid of the box. Yes, there were toxic rumors and conspiracies even without the yet-to-be-invented Facebook and X. But compared with what has transpired since then, the information landscape looks practically pristine. The demolition of the business model for traditional news sources corresponded with sinking institutional trust across the board. Journalism’s self-inflicted wounds and technological upheaval radically changed how people make sense of the world. Trust in government now sits around 17%. Trust in the media has hit an all-time low. 

If you had told me 25 years ago, as we color-coded the threat level, cast a wide surveillance net, launched a Global War on Terror, that we would manage to avoid further terror attacks, I would have found it hard to believe. But I also couldn’t have imagined the maceration of the media as our news channels filled with content of all kinds streaming in from all corners. This year for the first time, more people globally rely on social and video platforms for news, rather than TV or news websites. As audiences migrate from broadcast and cable, print and radio, to creators on TikTok and YouTube, the very notion of a shared reality feels quaint. Eight in 10 of us say Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on basic facts, which makes reasoned discussion of everything from security threats to education reform all but impossible.

Twenty-five years ago, like journalists everywhere, I focused on how to tell this story, in the belief that stories are stickier than bloodless fact. But what has happened since makes me wonder if I missed the actual war. Sept. 11 did not cause 21st century truth decay, but it coincided with it. Jolted out of the snug 1990s, people went searching for answers they could trust, tribes they could join, distraction as an antidote to alarm. We no longer hear the same stories and too many leaders are counting on that. We can each collect the puzzle pieces, but it's harder to see the full picture. Even when the country is broadly united around key values—reject political violence, protect the safety net, get money out of politics, regulate AI—the sense of division abides and people on both sides see mainly a caricature of their opponents. 

Strong societies need good information; communities benefit from shared stories. On Sept. 11, many of those stories were of quiet, reflexive heroism, sacrifice, service. First responders and random strangers modeled courage under fire, and the rest of us were swept up in a wave of gratitude that helped drain the fear. Those are stories worth retrieving now. –Nancy Gibbs

Keira Unterzuber, Eric Johnson, and Freya Johnson

Keira: My first child was due on Sept. 3, and my doctor was going to induce me on the 13th. So the 11th was any other day, really.  I was getting ready for work when my husband, who is a pilot and was home on family leave, said, “Keira, come here.” He explained that a plane had crashed in the World Trade Center, and I said, “But it's so sunny!” He's like, “Yeah, that's really weird.” And while we were watching the TV, the second plane hit. As the morning went on, I started to feel unwell. But then I don’t think anybody felt well that day.

Eric: We live near the Pentagon, and suddenly, it was like somebody pushed over a piano in the room next to us. It shook the whole house. The cats jumped off the bed and hid. I went outside and saw smoke. Sometime in there, Keira said, “I’m having the baby today.” I drove 80 to 90 miles an hour all the way  to the hospital. There was zero traffic. It was eerie, like driving somewhere in the middle of the night. 

Keira: Because of construction, we had to go through the emergency-room entrance and I remember all these emergency medical staff just waiting, and not for me. In the delivery room, Eric started to say he was ready to join the military and go fight the terrorists and because of the mood that he was in, he suggested several new names for the baby: Phoenix, America, Freedom, Liberty. I just said no, no, no. Eventually he picked Freya, who is goddess of war and love and a very strong woman. 

Freya: When I was young, I didn’t really understand the significance of the day. But around the 10th anniversary, I realized, “Oh, this is huge,” and then it became very depressing. On the morning announcements at school, they’d show a video tribute, and those videos were obviously very sad. In middle school, some kid told me that I was the reincarnation of Osama bin Laden. So I used to wish I was born on the 10th or the 12th. I actually didn’t celebrate my birthday from ages 10 to 13. It just felt inappropriate and weird to be so happy when everyone else was not. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told people my birthday, and it becomes a whole conversation. When I need ID at a bar or when I have to pick up a prescription, and they ask me for my birthday, they’re like, “Really?” I’ve even had people ask me, “What was that like for you?” And I have to say, “Well, I was not even born yet so I was not aware of anything.” I’ve learned to just say my birthday is in September. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I like my birthday. It’s such a beautiful time of year. I’m at the point where I can acknowledge that it was sad, but I can also celebrate myself. All my friends tell me that when they think of 9/11, they think of me as their first thought. 

Keira: When something tragic happens, it’s a beautiful thing to be around a newborn baby. My brother’s wife lost her first husband on the 10th, and his funeral was on the 13th. She adores Freya because, in her world, she’s a bright light at a dark moment. We have a lot of friends who say that year after year: She was the shining light that day. –As told to B.L.

Over the course of her long and influential life, Gloria Steinem went from being described in the pages of TIME as “one of the best dates to take to a New York party these days” and “smashing looking Gucci liberal” to being lauded as a “feminist icon.” If nothing else, the shift in the tone of her coverage in the magazine provides a window into the change in attitudes toward women that she helped engineer over the course of her 92-year life, which ended on Sept. 2.

Let’s add one more description to the list: durable dynamo. Steinem never outlived her ability to be relevant, inspiring several generations of women to organize and strive to be given the same opportunities as men. She never stopped blazing a trail for those who faced a particularly dense thicket and she never thought small. “I believe that things are a circle, not a hierarchy,” she said to TIME in 2011. “The kind of society we are striving toward is one in which things are linked not ranked. And one in which we understand that the women’s movement and the anti racist movement and the gay movement and the environmentalist movement, they’re all linked.”

Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, to a homemaker mother and a father with, she later said, only two points of pride: "He never wore a hat, and he never had a job. He was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink." She didn't spend a full year in school until she was 12, when her parents split and she ended up living with her mother, whose mental health was in a dire state, in East Toledo, Ohio. At 16, she was sent to live with an aunt in Washington. Before that, she says, "I'd never lived any place to invite anybody home to. I thought that people always ate out of refrigerators."

After graduating from Smith College in 1956, she spent two years in India on a fellowship (and also to get out of an engagement), then came home to work in Cambridge, Mass., for a group encouraging American students to attend Communist youth festivals abroad. It was later revealed to be CIA-funded, but Steinem was unfussed, saying she “was happy to use the Establishment's money against the Establishment."

In 1963, she famously published a first-person account of her glamour-free month undercover as a Playboy Bunny in Show magazine. It was her big break, and it also threatened to be her curse, since at first she almost exclusively got offered assignments along the same lines. This was the period when TIME thought it important to note an appearance in which she wore “a Luis Estevez creation that consisted of five widely spaced bands of chinchilla held together by transparent black net. In between was supposed to be little more than a bare bodkin.”

She later got hired at the fledgling New York magazine, where in 1968 her first story was about Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s stint as a New York City waiter and laundryman. As she steadily found her journalistic feet, she began to find her calling: to use her charm, wit and platform to promote equality. Steinem understood the fear that these ideas stirred up in people. “Women don't want to exchange places with men,” she wrote in an essay for TIME in 1970, shortly after the magazine identified her as “a trim, undeniably female, blonde-streaked brunette who has been described as 'the thinking man's Jean Shrimpton.' " She went on to add: “But we do want to change the economic system to one more based on merit. In Women's Lib Utopia, there will be free access to good jobs—and decent pay for the bad ones women have been performing all along, including housework.”

Inevitably, her activism moved beyond writing to organizing. In 1971, along with Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and several others, she convened the National Women's Political Caucus to try to get more women into government offices. Shortly after that she co-founded Ms. magazine, which she described as “a how-to magazine; not how to make jelly but how to seize control of your life." TIME’s writers, by this time calling her “feminism’s superstar,” finally began to acknowledge her impact. A story about the 1972 Democratic convention—titled, alas, "Eve's Operatives"—opened with: “Gazing around the convention through her blue-tinted glasses, Gloria Steinem pronounced with satisfaction: ‘We've changed the population here. It almost looks like the country. What she meant was that women are 52% of the nation's population, and last week close to 40% of the convention delegates were women—a dramatic jump over their 13% representation at the 1968 Democratic Convention.”

There was a still way to go, however—both for women and for TIME. “Decorative as the women were in their bell-bottom trousers, miniskirts, jeans and hot pants,” the magazine went on to say, “they were not there to be on display but to seek power. Except for a couple of setbacks, they got enough to satisfy and even surprise them.” After the crushing loss of Democratic Presidential Candidate George McGovern to Richard Nixon, Steinem’s political campaigning took a backseat to her advocacy work. The 1977 women’s conference, which she has called "the most important event that nobody knows about," remained one of her proudest achievements, even as it sparked a conservative backlash and perhaps the founding of the religious right.

As the decades passed, Steinem’s activism grew to encompass more than women’s equality. She campaigned on behalf of native people, was arrested while protesting apartheid, publicly opposed the first Gulf War, advocated for disarmament in Korea, spoke against child abuse, female genital mutilation and pornography, and was an early supporter of LGB rights. (It took her a little longer to endorse the transgender movement.) Her advocacy was always couched in pragmatism and compassion. She pointed out that the pedestal women were put on was "as much a prison as any small, confined space" and called her 2019 memoir The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off! Writing, her first calling, remained one of her great loves—"the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." She published books throughout her career, many of which, including her first memoir, 1983’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, were bestsellers; her latest, An Unexpected Life, is due out this fall. (She often joked that she wished her books didn’t get republished so much because it would mean they were no longer relevant.)

By the '90s, Steinem had scored a TIME cover, albeit one about a pushback against feminism, after her book about female self esteem—Revolution From Within—was a bestseller. “As she tours shopping malls, Steinem is being mobbed by crowds that, according to one bookstore owner, exceed those of Oliver North and Vanna White, the backlash icons of American manhood and womanhood,” Nancy Gibbs wrote. As well as writing her own books, Steinem contributed to countless others, appeared in more than 120 films, help produce several documentaries and inspired the 2019 Off Broadway play, Gloria: A Life. She cast her gaze domestically, locally, nationally and globally, founding Equality Now, which aimed to elevate and protect the rights of girls and women internationally.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, the times—and TIME— caught up with Steinem; her ideas became mainstream and her words and activities were covered with the kind of reverence reserved for icons. In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Half a century after writing her Women's Lib Utopia essay for TIME, she annotated it, warning that women had made many advances but that the "time of greatest danger comes after a victory, and that’s where we are now." (She also noted that she found out later that she had been paid less than the men who wrote for the same issue.)

Through it all she kept one of her less acknowledged gifts intact: her sense of humor. She did not come up with the classic feminist saying that women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, but she popularized it. She was always threatening to get a back tattoo for her 70th birthday. So frequently was she asked about her beauty secret that she came up with the perfect reply: "Revolution," she would say. "It keeps you young."

In 2011, TIME asked what she would do if she only had two years to live. “It seems to me one of the uses of age is to help you know what you want to do and keep from wasting time,” she said. “And I have this unfortunate notion that I’m immortal, which doesn’t cause you to plan very well. I think it would be mainly about writing and seeing friends, my chosen family. And writing what I believe. And maybe living with elephants. I do still want to live with elephants.”

Gloria Steinem, the feminist activist who inspired a generation of women and fought for gender equality, has died at age 92.

Her foundation announced the news in a social media post Thursday morning, sharing that Steinem had "passed away peacefully" at her home in New York City the day before, surrounded by her loved ones.

"Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard. Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor," the statement read.

"Gloria loved the tradition of lighting signal fires on hills to light the way to the other side of the mountain. Lighting your own candle for Gloria makes you part of this global and celestial community circle."

Steinem was a celebrated writer and magazine editor, who became the face of the women’s movement.

In the 1970s, Steinem co-founded a number of trailblazing initiatives, including the Women's Action Alliance, a feminist organization dedicated to fighting sexism, Ms. magazine, a publication focusing on women’s issues, and the National Women’s Political Caucus, a multi-partisan grassroots organization aimed at increasing women’s participation in the political process.

Steinem avidly campaigned for women's reproductive rights and later supported the legalization of same-sex marriage. Much of her work centered on pushing for equal rights and pay for women.

"Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie," she wrote in a 2008 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times.

Steinem’s early years

Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, on March 25, 1934. The family moved a lot, somewhat due to her father’s profession as a traveling antiques dealer, and Steinem didn’t attend school full-time until she was around 12 years old. After her parents separated, Steinem lived with, and helped care for, her mother, who suffered from depression. 

In her 2015 memoir, My Life On The Road, Steinem credited her mother for influencing her journey to activism.

“Depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed,” she wrote. “My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward an activist place where she herself could never go.”

The makings of an activist

Upon graduating from Smith College, Steinem pursued a career as a freelance journalist.

She completed an 11-day stint as a Playboy bunny to inform her exposé of the working conditions faced by the women in the job.

Her two-part story, titled “A Bunny's ⁠Tale," featured in Show magazine in 1963. (In 1985, ABC transformed the exposé into a made-for-TV movie starring Kirstie Alley as Steinem.)

By 1968, Steinem was a contributing editor at New York Magazine and used her platform to shine a spotlight on women's rights. Her 1969 article titled "After Black Power, Women’s Liberation," which attracted national attention, saw Steinem connect feminism with the Black Power movement.

In 1972, Steinem's newly-launched Ms. magazine created another national conversation when an article titled "We Have Had Abortions" showcased a petition signed by 53 prominent American women, including Steinem herself. It was published a year before the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision established a woman’s right to an abortion.

Family, legacy, and recognition

Steinem continued campaigning for women's rights over the decades and authored critically-acclaimed books as a lead voice within the feminist movement.

Her 1983 collection of essays titled Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions blended political commentary with personal anecdotes. Her 1994 collection of essays, titled Moving beyond Words: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender, further explored the female experience and gendered stereotypes.

In 2000, Steinem, then age 66, married lawyer David Bale, the father of Oscar-winning actor Christian Bale.

"I hope this proves what feminists have always said—that feminism is about the ability to choose what's right at each time of our lives," Steinem said in a statement about the marriage, her first and only. David Bale died of brain cancer in 2003.

Steinem received numerous accolades over the years on account of her activism and global impact.

In 2013, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

“As a writer, a speaker, an activist, she awakened a vast and often skeptical public to problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, unfair hiring practices," Obama said at the time. “And because of her work, across America and around the world, more women are afforded the respect and opportunities that they deserve. But she also changed how women thought about themselves.“

Tributes pour in for feminist icon

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remembered Steinem as someone who "pushed open doors not just for herself, but for literally millions of women behind her."

Paying tribute to the platforms Steinem created for others, Clinton said: "She wasn't going to be an astronaut, but she made it possible for Sally Ride to be an astronaut. She wasn't going to play college sports, but she stood behind the women in Congress who passed Title IX."

Meghan Markle posted a picture of herself and Steinem, highlighting how she was "celebrating the life and legacy" of her "friend and mentor."

"Privately, she was even better than you would imagine," Markle said. "Spending Thanksgiving with our family, introducing me to one of my best friends (forever the champion of female friendship), loving our children with her whole heart, counseling me during hard times, and giving extraordinary advice and perspective with a cup of tea and an unrivaled cheekiness and wit."

Former First Lady Jill Biden remembered Steinem as someone who "understood that women’s equality begins with the freedom to make decisions about our own bodies, health, and futures."

Paying tribute to Steinem's activism, she continued: "For decades, she fought to make that freedom real for generations of women and girls. She spoke up when it was difficult, listened to those whose voices too often went unheard, and never stopped pushing our country forward."

Former Vice President and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris championed Steinem's life-long ethos during an appearance on MS Now's State of Play.

"I have this saying that you never let anyone tell you who you are, you tell them who you are," said Harris. "And that really epitomized Gloria Steinem's approach to it all, which is, be strong. Know that you have support. Know that you belong. Don't look for affirmation in people who have a limited ability to see your capacity, and don't let that be a limitation on your perception of who you are and your ambition."

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to Steinem as "a fearless trailblazer who transformed the fight for equality in America and inspired generations of women to know their power."

Early dawn. A slice of last night’s chocolate cake. Watching the rays of the sun spread over the city. Stealing a moment like this was a coveted morning ritual for some of the breakfast staff at Windows on the World, the restaurant that was on the 107th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. 

This was the meeting place where New Yorkers and out-of-towners went to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries; to revel with food and drink and to mark life milestones. And for many of the staff, it was a dream job.

“I would have worked there just for the insurance,” says Windows sommelier and waiter Paulo Villela, who immigrated from Brazil in order to get medical care for his son, who had a rare medical condition. “It was the best job.” He would tell his friends on staff, who hailed from dozens of countries—Bangladesh, Ivory Coast, Peru, China—“I’m never going to leave this place.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, so much changed. So much was lost. Most tragically, there are the 2,977 people who were killed, including 79 workers from Windows, and 91 of its guests. Those victims and their families are at the heart of this dark moment in history, which millions of us experienced from close or afar.

How one feels is at least partly determined by one’s proximity to the event. On that day, I was covering the Toronto Film Festival as a journalist. As a native New Yorker, I felt like I’d left my post. I was watching an 8:30 a.m. screening of Monsoon Wedding, a movie directed by Mira Nair, the mother of then 9-year-old Zohran Mamdani, who is now New York City’s mayor.

It’s a tenuous connection I mention because that’s what happened on 9/11; the attack cast in stark relief the myriad connections that are otherwise invisible in this city. Suddenly, we found out that our daughter’s fifth-grade teacher’s cousin worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, or a neighbor’s brother was a fireman who worked at Engine 54. On that day, the connections were rippled with panic. And then, for too many, grief. That manifested with the missing posters that filled the city for weeks; desperate pleas that became heartbreaking tributes. 

Those posters were an early act of collective mourning. The city was still an open wound. You could smell the smoke almost everywhere for weeks. The randomness of the event—we were flooded with stories of those who died and those who didn’t by happenstance—draped over the city like an uncomfortable, existential veil.

One story was that of Michael Lomonaco, the chef at Windows on the World. He was in the basement of the World Trade Center, having decided at the last second to get his glasses fixed before he took the elevator to work. He felt the ground shake, saw debris raining from the sky, watched United Airlines Flight 175 crash into the South Tower, and observed people stranded above the 91st floor waving large sheets that were probably tablecloths from his restaurant.

“The memories are so vivid,” says Lomonaco, who helped start a fund for the families of his staff and who has gone on to run several successful restaurants in the city. “A generation has grown up since then, but it still seems like yesterday to me.”

A 25th anniversary marks a swath of time that can be illuminating because, to someone who is younger than 30, it feels like an eternity. Or a lifetime, which to someone who actually is 25, it is. But to someone who is over 50, as I am, it feels like a chapter. A long one, perhaps. But, still, a part of something else. 

9/11 is a hinge of time that separates generations. It shouldn’t be surprising—but it always is—when I ask young folks about 9/11, and they just can’t get their hearts around it. It’s something that they learned about in class or saw on YouTube. They don’t feel it like I do. Like we do. 

Those of us who are moved by this anniversary—no matter how close we were to the actual tragedy—should find some way to talk about it. “We have an obligation,” Lomonaco says. “When we talk about the people who died, we’re acknowledging the significance of their lives.”

But there’s a delicate balance. Many of us want to avoid the sadness: say “Never forget,” and move on. 

Over 25 years, Lomonaco says he’s gone through the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and I would contend he has wisdom to share. “When we mourn with someone else, we’re actually mourning our own loss at the same time,” he says. “That creates a human bond.” He emphasizes the connections between us, which were so palpable in the days after 9/11, when lines of New Yorkers wanting to donate blood wrapped around the block. 

For me, the interminable years that it took to clear Ground Zero and eventually build the new World Trade Center felt like a void. I won’t overstate it. It did not consume me. But it was there. And, at least partly to fill that hole, I wrote a book, in 2019, The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World: The Twin Towers, Windows on the World, and the Rebirth of New York. It has been turned into a documentary created with TIME Studios, Top of the World, which CNN is airing on Sept. 7.

I wanted to tell the life of the restaurant and the people who went there and who worked there. It was a way of honoring the people and a part of New York City that was erased. And, as Lomonaco indicates, it was also my way of working through my own personal grief: I lost my father when I was 10 years old, in 1980, when he was killed in an automobile accident. 

I recently read William Styron’s book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which introduced me to the concept of “incomplete mourning,” which is pretty much what it sounds like. I can see myself wrestling with incompleteness in the way that my books—one is about the bygone video-store era, and another is about how author Kurt Vonnegut sought to reconcile his World War II experiences by writing his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five—share a theme of loss. 

But is there even such a thing as complete mourning? I stumbled upon a 2023 eulogy by Park Avenue Synagogue’s Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, in which he refers to The Missing Piece by children’s author Shel Silverstein. In the book, a circle goes looking for a wedge of itself that is missing. It rolls around and has adventures. And when it finally finds its missing piece, it is delighted—at first. But when it is complete, the circle rolls too fast and it is no longer able to talk to the bugs and other passersby and have the experiences it enjoyed during its journey. So, the circle decides to release the piece, preferring to live without it. 

Cosgrove was commemorating the passing of another rabbi, Harold Kushner, who first made the connection between grief and The Missing Piece. In Kushner’s words, “We’re more complete if we’re incomplete.” I think that’s a beautiful way to approach grief. 

We need to see the light in the darkness. “In the face of loss, we must see the preciousness of life,” Cosgrove says. Lomonaco agrees: “My appreciation of individual lives, of life, has grown,” he says.

It’s a bit of a trick to both grieve and grow, like keeping two contradictory thoughts in your head, except in your heart. I hope to be getting better at it. I’d contend that the city has managed pretty well with the 9/11 Memorial and its reflecting pools. They’re solemn and reverential and, at the same time, thriving with tourists. (A New Yorker’s sense of irony, and humor, helps with the grieving.)

And the Tribute in Light, those awesome spotlights that pierce the sky each Sept. 11, are a pitch-perfect way to memorialize the day.

“It’s like going into a church and lighting a candle,” Lomonaco says. “It’s an act of mourning. But a light also literally lights our path forward.”

Roston is an author of several books and a New York City high school teacher

On America’s 250th birthday this year, the White House’s “Great American State Fair” was supposed to bring the country together in a patriotic flurry. Instead, it became a political rally beset by performer cancellations, sparse crowds, and a congressional investigation.

You might think the whole thing gave state fairs a bad rap. But the truth is that state fairs were never meant to be national events. These colorful smorgasbords of local culture were designed to help people connect on what makes their particular place great. They work because they bank on a powerful and simple force in American life that’s as important as ever: local pride. 

I say this as someone who lives in a state with one of the biggest state fairs in the country: Minnesota. Every year, roughly 2 million people—over a third of our state’s population—wander through 322 acres at the “Great Minnesota Get-together,” eating 300,000 ears of corn, 200 tons of french fries, and 2.1 million pickle chips along the way. Territorial fairs have been around since before we even became a state in 1858, and the fairs have adapted with the times for over 170 years.

Part of the magic of state fairs is that they’re wide open. You can walk right up to almost anyone and start a conversation. Within minutes of entering the Minnesota State Fair this year, I’d chatted with a candidate for Attorney General, a microbiologist specializing in invasive species, Minnesota’s secretary of state, a roofing business selling shingles, and employees at the local public radio station. 

None of this took a calendar invite or a text chain. In an age of digital everything with gatekeepers everywhere, it’s refreshing to be in a place where everyone’s at the same level: the dirt you’re walking on. The almost complete lack of filter is one of state fairs’ most enduring qualities, and a powerful reminder of the timeless power of serendipity.

State fairs might also be the last best venue we have where people compete for the love of their passions. At the Creative Arts building this year, I walked by display cases with hundreds of cookies, scones, and bars from kitchens across the state. Tiny flags glued to toothpicks poked out from atop the winners. 

Next, I stopped by the horticulture building to see our neighbor’s prize-winning floral arrangements; she grows flowers all summer to show them at the fair. And over at the livestock barns, I watched farmers carefully parade their perfectly groomed sheep in a circle around a judge who was picking winners. I asked one of the contestants what they would get if they won.

“A trophy, a ribbon, and about 28 bucks,” she said, adding with a smile, “If you’re getting into sheep for the money, it’s not worth it.”

In a time when almost every level of competition is heavily commercialized, from youth sports to the NIL era to the professionalization of everything, it’s refreshing to see people competing solely for the pride of putting their work on display. And thankfully, there’s nothing controversial about a flower, a cookie, or a beautiful animal—they’re things everyone can enjoy.

There are plenty of other reasons to praise state fairs: we get to see where our food comes from (farms, not shelves); we can get a snapshot into the culture of this moment (from fine art to bizarre new food concoctions); and we get to mark the transition from summer to fall (in Minnesota that means that yes, we’re already starting to think about winter).

But state fairs also help us do something that we don’t do often enough in person or in public these days: process what we’re going through.

This year, Minnesota has gone through a lot. The nation’s eyes were glued to our state for weeks as Operation Metro Surge brought ICE agents into conflict with citizens in our streets, resulting in the death of two people and the arrests of thousands. At the fair, an hour-long line stretched around a record-large crop art display, where artists who glue dried seeds to plywood to create beautiful collages struck a predominant theme: the Minnesotan resistance to the surge. 

Regardless of their political views on immigration, fairgoers were soaking in the displays so carefully that organizers had to consistently move people along so that the line didn’t stay at a standstill.

The first two days of the Minnesota State Fair this year set daily attendance records. Other states have also seen jumps in attendance: Ohio set an all-time record for the fair this summer, and attendance at the California Mid-State Fair was up 12%. 

Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising.

At a time when America feels divided, and our digital world creates easy silos to hide from each other, coming together to celebrate what you love about the place you call home is comforting. It reminds us that connection is always easier at the local level, where there’s more trust. For all that divides us, going local is the best shot America has at renewing our faith in our place and our country. 

And state fairs, one of the oldest traditions we have, remain one of the best ways to do it.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is urging President Donald Trump to replace Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth because of what he described as “inept management.”

The North Carolina lawmaker’s call to oust Hegseth comes after Dan Driscoll resigned from his role as Army Secretary on Monday, amid tension that had been reportedly broiling between Driscoll and Hegseth for months. In a social media post on Wednesday, Tillis thanked Driscoll “for his leadership to our Army and service to our country,” before going on to slam Hegseth.

“If we had a @SecWar who maintained the same priorities and forward-thinking, he would be fighting to retain talented leaders like Dan and the many flag officers he has forced into retirement,” Tillis said. “Instead, he is creating a leadership void at the top of our military ranks.”

Tillis, who previously served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, included in his post a link to a CBS News article that lists about 20 military and civilian leaders who have been ousted or stepped down since Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Department of Defense, including Driscoll. Also among them is Gen. Randy George, who was serving as the Army Chief of Staff until Hegseth requested that he retire, effective immediately, in the spring.

Tillis voted to confirm Hegseth as Defense Secretary last year, though he initially had reservations about him. Amid mounting controversy surrounding Hegseth’s nomination, three other Republicans broke from party ranks and voted against it, forcing Vice President J.D. Vance to be the tiebreaking vote. It was the smallest margin for the confirmation of a nominee to lead the Defense Department since the Secretary role was first formed in 1947, Senate records indicate.

Despite Tillis’ crucial vote in the confirmation, he has since publicly criticized the Defense Secretary. The Republican Senator told POLITICO in May that he thought that “Hegseth misinformed [the President] on the challenges” related to a war in Iran, adding that “I’m glad the president did what he did in Iran. I’m not glad that he has Hegseth advising him on the details.” He went on to tell the news outlet: “I’d love to see Pete Hegseth fired because he’s incompetent and doing a horrible job. That’s kind of on a Christmas wish list.”

And he renewed those calls on Wednesday.

“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis said in his post on X. He accused Hegseth of being “intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force.” 

“I urge the President to find a new leader at the Pentagon who will retain and empower our military talent rather than diminish it,” Tillis continued.

There has been tension between Tillis and Trump before

Tillis and Trump have clashed in the past, most notably when the North Carolina Senator joined two other Republicans in the upper chamber in voting against the President’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” last year. In the aftermath, the President lashed out at Tillis, threatening to back candidates who could challenge Tillis in a Republican primary race. 

Soon after, Tillis announced that he would not seek reelection in the 2026 midterms, citing what he described as a shift away from bipartisanship in Washington in recent years.

“Too many elected officials are motivated by pure raw politics who really don’t give a damn about the people they promised to represent on the campaign trail,” Tillis said in a statement last June. He added that a choice “between spending another six years navigating the political theatre and partisan gridlock in Washington or spending that time with” his family is “not a hard choice.”

A House Republican says he agrees with Tillis

Republican Rep. Don Bacon told CNN on Wednesday that he was aligned with Tillis in his feelings about Hegseth, though he didn’t go so far as to call for the Defense Secretary’s firing.

“I agree with the sentiments of Sen. Tillis,” Bacon said. “I hate to tell the President who he should hire and fire. I don’t know if it’s really my role, but I would say this: I would not—[Hegseth] would not be on my team. I think he is—he has not been a very good leader in many ways.”

“I wouldn’t hire him myself,” the Nebraska Congressman added.

In a post on X on Wednesday, Bacon said that the Defense Secretary “has the legal right to hire & fire whom he wants, but that doesn’t make it morally right or wise.”

“Firing a large number of senior officers & canceling many promotions demands an explanation,” he continued. “Americans deserve to know why. It is called decency to tell a person why they’re fired.”

Trump has been vocally supportive of Hegseth

Trump has remained firm in his support for Hegseth. Amid speculation that Hegseth is considering launching a 2028 presidential bid, a reporter asked the President if he would back the Defense Secretary in such an event.

“I think he’s doing a fantastic job, but it’s very early to talk about that,” Trump said. “We have to get through the midterms first, and I think he’s a very good guy.”

“Right now, all [Hegseth] loves is, and all he cares about is, the military and taking care of the military,” he continued.

Hegseth has denied that he is considering running for President in 2028.

Africa’s agricultural productivity has grown in recent decades, but more progress needs to be made to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and create lasting economic growth, experts agreed at the TIME Impact Dinner on Wednesday Sep. 2 in Kigali, Rwanda. 

Moderated by TIME senior correspondent Justin Worland, leaders in agriculture, climate, and development discussed the progress that has been made in growing Africa’s agricultural productivity and the work that still remains. 

A report released this week from AGRA, an African-led institution focused on scaling agricultural innovations for smallholder farmers and the event sponsor, shows that Africa’s farm output has roughly doubled in the last 20 years. Yet despite meaningful investments, not enough has been done to ensure that gains are not siloed, says Ismahane Elouafi, executive managing director of CGIAR, the world's largest, publicly-funded agrifood research network. “We have made increases in productivity, but not enough,” she says, noting that while a farmer might have healthy soil, they could still lack water or strong irrigation systems. “So basically, we have done it in piecemeal, but not as a food system as a whole.”

Many African countries do not treat food systems as an important part of economic and development agendas, says Kingsley Moghalu, founder of the Institute for Governance and Economic Transformation (IGET) Academy and CEO of Sogato Strategies LLC, a global risk advisory firm. “Our countries look at agriculture as some niche area, and that bypasses 80% of its potential,” he says. 

Agriculture is central to Africa’s economy, contributing 20% to GDP and employing over 60% of the workforce, according to the World Economic Forum. That, coupled with a rising population that is expected to represent 25% of the global workforce by 2050, could present a new avenue for growth in Africa, Kingsley notes. "It's a huge opportunity if you make [the workforce] agri-food system skilled."

Yet strengthening the food system can only happen if the needs of smallholder farmers are taken into account, says Temiyeoluwa Alabi, head of corporate communications at ThriveAgric, which connects smallholder farmers across Africa to financing, support, and markets. 

“We try to emphasize the need to look at the smallholder farmer as an important … entity within the value chain,” Alabi says. “Otherwise, we can't unlock the real value, because if the farmer just won't get value for what he does, then there cannot be prosperity for him.”

Technological advances present a promising opportunity for change, says Elouafi. “In Africa there is definitely a lack of infrastructure that makes the value chain very long,” she says. “But I think now with AI, with advisory services, with the way we can really look at big data, we could make a very quick and very fast impact and improvement.” 

Those opportunities shouldn’t come at the cost of farmers. “If we are to have a change, we must invest in the entire value chain,” says Elizabeth Wathuti, climate activist and founder of Green Generation Initiative. “Technology and innovation is not supposed to make the farmers realign their lives to accommodate it. It's supposed to actually look at how it's addressing the realities on the ground and what exactly the farmer is doing on the ground.” 

Success must be measured in different ways—beyond a farmer’s yield, Wathuti notes. 

“For farmers that are in areas that are completely degraded, it is almost impossible for them to be able to continue adapting to a changing climate. How are we strengthening the farmers and ensuring that the farmers actually have more security?” she says. “We have to also look at the profitability and the value that the farmer gets from being able to put in the work to be able to produce our food.”

TIME Impact Dinner: Reimagining Farmer Prosperity: Building Africa’s Next Food Systems Frontier was presented by AGRA.

America’s AI investment boom is real. However, this surge has yet to result in the kind of industrial revolution that many had hoped for. 

To be sure, the United States is experiencing a genuine boom in AI investment. The hyperscalers accelerated their R&D and capital investment 50-fold over the past two decades to $750 billion in 2025 compared to $15 billion in 2005. By the end of 2026, total investment by these hyperscalers could approach $1 trillion.

But here’s the catch: despite that record level of spending, productive investment as a share of U.S. GDP has barely budged. That measure matters because it tracks spending on the economy’s productive assets—the factories, equipment, infrastructure, and intellectual property that underpin future productivity and competitiveness. The AI boom is real, but it has yet to reshape investment across the broader industrial economy.

This disconnect matters because productive investment is a leading indicator of competitiveness and of where production, jobs, and growth will occur. While the United States has outperformed most advanced economies on investment since the global financial crisis, China is adding roughly $4.4 trillion in net productive assets annually, roughly four times the equivalent amount in the United States.

We estimate that addressing the most critical U.S. import dependencies could require on the order of $2 trillion in additional manufacturing investment or about 6% of GDP. At the end of 2025, investment in factory structures fell 6% after peaking in 2024. Meanwhile, investment in general industrial equipment was essentially flat, although there was a slight uptick in machinery and equipment investment in the first quarter of this year. The reshoring momentum that started in 2022 has plateaued in the numbers, and any recent announcements will take time to translate into construction and development.

One clear challenge to sparking a U.S. industrial renaissance: it’s expensive to make in America. Across most steps of the production process—construction, labor, materials, equipment, and time to market—the United States is a costly place to invest. Excluding any subsidies, the all-in costs to build products like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals are roughly 40% and 60% higher, respectively, than in the most competitive locations, while the cost of developing a new antibody medicine is 2.7 times as expensive compared to China. Two factors constitute the bulk of the cost gap. The first is more costly and slower capex delivery. U.S. construction costs are about double what they are in Asia, and construction times can be twice as long: recent nuclear projects have taken up to a decade to complete compared to six years in China. Second, labor costs are two to five times more than in China or Taiwan, a difference that used to be offset by productivity differences. But in like-for-like industrial settings, productivity differences have all but vanished. In advanced fabs, for instance, Taiwanese engineers produce about a quarter more per worker than in the United States, where wages are more than 2.7 times as high.

To close such gaps, companies hoping to build at home could start by using modular, off-site methods that can cut project timelines by half and capital costs by 10 to 20%, and deploying technology, collaborative contracting, and more to lower construction costs. Also AI- and robot-first operating models can help employers transform labor productivity. Our analysis found such steps could close half to two-thirds of the U.S. cost gap.

Where cost competitiveness isn’t possible, companies can compete on service quality, brand, customer proximity, and innovation. Complex drug therapies, for example, command premium margins and a decade or more of effective commercial exclusivity. Performance and trust can sustain premium prices. Increasingly, unrestricted access to the U.S. market also matters.

Policymakers face their own challenges. They cannot protect, nurture, ringfence, or subsidize every industry.  Instead, they can support industries that can solve America’s so-called “Achilles heels,” the roughly 25% of imported manufactured goods that are critical to national security, exposed to supply concentration, and derived from geopolitically distant trading partners. The scale of intervention required, whether selective trade measures, financial support, industrial policy, or other measures, is substantial. The task is about triage, deciding which industries justify a scale of intervention that would change the playing field, starting with the 25% of imported manufactured goods in which dependencies are most pronounced. Policymakers will also want to work to address existing skews in the international trading system.

The U.S. technology boom shows the country can mobilize capital at breathtaking speed. Kicking off an industrial renaissance raises a harder question: Is the United States willing to change how it builds industry and absorb higher costs when doing so isn’t enough?

President Donald Trump has suggested renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait” amid renewed hostilities with Iran following a brief period of respite.

“Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to Trump Strait? Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before!” the President said Wednesday.

Trump floated the idea a day after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) launched a new wave of strikes against Iranian military targets.

The U.S. military said it struck air defense sites, radar systems, maritime assets and facilities, mine laying capabilities, and communications sites linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Iran’s Foreign Ministry on Wednesday released a statement insisting the U.S. had attacked civilian areas and service infrastructure in the provinces of Khuzestan, Sistan and Baluchestan, Hormozgan, and Kerman. It said a wedding ceremony in Kuhestak, Sirik County, had been struck, resulting in fatalities and injuries.

In a statement to TIME, CENTCOM spokesperson Navy Captain Tim Hawkins said: “We are aware of reports, which originated from Iranian state media. The U.S. military never targets civilians, unlike the IRGC.” 

The IRGC said it had launched retaliatory strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain, alongside an additional U.S. facility in Iraq, overnight Tuesday. 

The renewed hostilities and threats come after a roughly month-long pause in active hostilities between the two countries. On Sunday, the U.S. military struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island it said were preparing to fire rockets carrying naval mines into the Strait.

Trump’s attempt to rename the Strait underscores how both Iran and the U.S. have continued to vie for control of the vital waterway, through which roughly a fifth of global oil transited before the war.

The President has previously turned to name changes as a show of power and a way to undermine his perceived adversaries, most recently renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” during the U.S. trade war with Canada.

Meanwhile, although Trump has claimed the U.S. has near total control of the Strait, the tussle over the body of water—which reignited after both countries adopted different interpretations of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)—rages on.

With no clear path to a negotiated truce, Washington has doubled down on its “economic D-Day” threats against Tehran, increasing the pressure by tightening sanctions in addition to military action. 

Traffic falls once more amid renewed instability for the Strait of Hormuz

The latest round of strikes between the U.S. and Iran has further disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Kpler, a commodities data and analytics firm, shared data with TIME that shows only six ships crossed the Strait on Tuesday—a drop from 19 vessels on Friday last week.

Before the Iran war began on Feb. 28, 138 vessels typically passed through the vital trade waterway during a 24-hour period.

On Wednesday, U.K. Maritime Operations (UKMTO) reported an attack on a tanker transiting the Strait that resulted in two casualties.

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry reported that Iran had targeted a Saudi tanker in the waterway, with UKMTO later stating that two crew members had been killed.

Iran's Gulf neighbors condemn Tehran's “heinous” retaliatory attacks

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) described Iran’s overnight retaliatory strikes against U.S. bases in the region as a “heinous” act. Secretary General Jasem Mohamed AlBudaiwi said "these Iranian attacks represent a blatant violation of state sovereignty and a direct threat to their security and stability."

He stated that the GCC stands “firmly alongside” these countries “in all measures and actions taken to preserve their sovereignty, protect their security and stability, and ensure the safety of their peoples and residents.”

The council is made up of six countries on the Arabian Peninsula: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE, which suspended trade with Iran in August amid missile strikes, released its own statement condemning Iran’s strikes across the wider Gulf region.

“These hostile attacks constitute a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the brotherly nations and a threat to their security and stability,” said the UAE’S Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday.

What do we mean when we say a filmmaker has returned to form? Danny Boyle has made Oscar-winning movies (Slumdog Millionaire), great movies that people will remember forever (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), and superb, expressive movies that not many people think about anymore (Sunshine, A Life Less Ordinary). Boyle has been making movies for so long now—and has been making them in such varied textures—that it’s hard to say what form, exactly, there is for him to return to. But Ink, which opens the Venice Film Festival, somehow feels both old-school—in the brash, Trainspotting way—and invigorating and modern; it’s almost as if Boyle were taking inspiration from himself, revisiting his catalog of ideas and revamping rather than repeating them. This is a bold, entertaining piece of filmmaking that also brings us back, perhaps to the precise year, when newspapers and other media organizations began veering away from serious news and toward the on-ramp of nonstop entertainment and stimulation. For that, we have news mogul Rupert Murdoch to thank. But as Ink tells it, Murdoch learned how to be Murdoch from a lesser-known player you may never have heard of: who the hell was Larry Lamb?

Ink, adapted from James Graham’s stage play and drawn from real life, opens in 1969 London on Fleet Street, the heart of the city’s newspaper business. The young, Australia-born Rupert Murdoch—played, with almost alarming charisma, by Guy Pearce—isn't yet a mover and shaker in the news business. But he has a proposition for a brash Yorkshire newspaperman whose career has taken a nosedive. Would this guy, Larry Lamb—Jack O’Connell, crackling with roguish charm—like to spearhead the relaunch of a paper Murdoch has just purchased? The two meet in a tony London restaurant where newspaper deals are made, tussling like bulls as they outline their ideas of what news should be. Then they stride out into the night, and as they pass the paper’s offices, they drop down on all fours to feel the rumble of the printing presses belowground. Newspapers are in their blood; they can’t differentiate between their own heartbeat and the clanking of tomorrow’s edition rolling off the cylinders.

That image may sound corny, but as movie language, it works. Boyle and cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler (who also shot Sunshine) give the movie a zig-zagging, simmering energy. If Trainspotting mapped the euphoria and careless self-destruction of heroin addicts, Ink is the story of another kind of obsessive: guys in thrall to the big story, to power, and to money, maybe not even necessarily in that order. By 1969, London was already swinging, but not for these guys: In their trim but conventional Savile Row suits, they’re aware of the style revolution around them, yet they stay happily outside it, like gods smirking from Mount Olympus. It's as if they’d long ago decided that their main job was to observe and reflect the world rather than actually live in it.

The first half of Ink tells the story of the Sun’s ascension, from its lagging position behind its hugely successful rival, the Daily Mirror, to a tabloid that seduced readers with new kinds of coverage. What, exactly, were working-class Londoners interested in reading about, Lamb would ask his assembled staff, including a starchily old-school deputy editor imported from Liverpool (Patrick Kennedy), a possibly over-the-hill sports editor (Christopher Fulford), and, most notably, the crackerjack newswoman Jules (Claire Foy, fierce as a firecracker), who’s been sleeping with the married Lamb for years in an arrangement that suits them both. He’s now given her the luxury of editing a “woman’s page,” which she’s free to fill with whatever she likes, including the radical feminist ideas that drive her. (She ends up printing an excerpt of the banned-in-Britain book The Sensuous Woman, a manual written to help women navigate and understand their own sexuality—though she makes it clear that it's the guys who really ought to be reading it.)

In revamping the paper's coverage, the list of key categories Lamb and his staff come up with includes the usual suspects (sport, the weather) but also some surprises. Everyone, the staff concluded, loves watching television, but newspapers weren’t covering it—why not? And the men, of course, loved looking at naked women, and thus the “Page 3 Girl”—basically, a tasteful nudie image—was born. That’s how Lamb remade the Sun, and made his name. In the movie’s second half, in a gracefully executed tone shift, Lamb’s newly forged reputation as a wonder boy is tested; suddenly, Ink becomes a mildly grim true-crime thriller, based on a real-life case. (The principals involved are played by Jonathan Hyde and Lucy Russell.) Boyle presents the details as if he were splashing paint on canvas, not carelessly but with controlled strokes of energy.

Does Lamb want to help solve the mystery at the heart of this crime, or is his job to stay out of it and let the police do their job? He’s too addicted to sensationalism to know when to stop. In the story Ink tells, Murdoch is in thrall to Lamb and his instincts, even as he frequently recoils from them. He sees what’s unsavory about Lamb’s approach and, more than once, moves to restrain him; then he sees the uptick in the Sun’s sales figures and zips his lip. If you’d prefer to think of Murdoch as an individual wholly devoid of sex appeal, Pearce’s performance might rattle you; his Murdoch is shrewd but not inhuman—even monsters were young once. Foy's character is a composite and not based on a specific individual, but she avoids all the pitfalls of playing a symbol. Jules is a woman in an overwhelmingly masculine world, so devoted to her work she doesn’t want to be anywhere else, but she never makes it look easy. Foy plays Jules' moments of doubt with piercing clarity—she sees the moral cracks in her boss-and-lover's ambitious strategies, and she voices them, but there are no moments of obvious triumph. Jules lives and works in a space where standing your ground can only make you exceedingly lonely.

And still, O’Connell’s Larry Lamb is a guy you want to root for, even if, as a modern person with a reasonable awareness of what’s happened to the news media in the internet age, you can see he’s making the snowball that starts the avalanche. O'Connell plays Lamb as somehow disreputable and principled at once; it’s simply that he’d rather be right than do right. He’s the kind of brazen, disreputable showman you want to creep closer to—even the young Murdoch feels it. Ink works as both a fictionalized snapshot of a lost world and a forensic exploration of what happens when you give the people what they want, instead of what they don’t know they want. It’s a movie about the beginning of an end, brought about by enterprising men who just wanted to sell papers. So thrilled by the lede they were writing, they gave zero forethought to the kicker.

Recreational cannabis use is now legal in 24 U.S. states. After Illinois legalized it, in 2020, James Swartz started to keep an eye out for any changes in public health that might stem from more widespread marijuana use. A professor of social work at the University of Chicago, he still remembers when he and his colleagues learned about the rise of a distressing condition that seemed linked to chronic marijuana usage. “We started seeing more and more clinical reports and case studies in the literature about this syndrome,” he says. “So we were curious: Is that happening here?” 

They found that indeed, cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS)—which can include a symptom colloquially called “scromiting,” a portmanteau of “screaming” and “vomiting”—seemed to be on the rise in emergency departments nationwide. In 2025, the condition even got its own ICD 10 code, allowing doctors to enter it more specifically into medical records. The condition is still poorly understood, and recently, physicians publishing in JAMA wrote a primer on the disorder.

What is cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS)?

An important backdrop to the rise of CHS is a condition called cyclic vomiting syndrome, or CVS, says Dr. Thangam Venkatesan, a professor at the Ohio State University who is an expert on CVS and an author of the new paper. “It has episodes of nausea, vomiting, belly pain, headache, and this affects both children and adults,” she says. During episodes, people vomit or retch four or five times an hour, and episodes can last several days, before abating for weeks or months. Understanding and avoiding triggers is key to treating the disorder.

CHS was first described in 2004 in Australia, when doctors carefully followed patients with cyclical vomiting who were habitual cannabis users. It presents similarly to CVS and usually occurs after people have been using marijuana for some time, sometimes as a treatment for other disorders, and involves abdominal pain and vomiting that recedes after people stop cannabis use. The pain can be so intense for some people that they may scream while they vomit. (About the “scromiting” label: Venkatesan doesn’t use it and calls it “a fairly derogatory term.”)

During episodes, people can seek relief by taking very hot baths and showers, though it’s not clear why this helps, says Venkatesan—nor is this coping method unique to CHS. “Close to half the patients with cyclic vomiting who have never used cannabis also exhibit the hot shower bathing behavior,” she says. “This is very peculiar.” 

Why is cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome on the rise?

It’s possible that some of the increase in documented cases comes from more ER doctors recognizing what they’re seeing as a cohesive syndrome, says Venkatesan. But the rise seems to coincide with a sharp increase in the potency of the forms of cannabis now available and an increase in cannabis use generally. Concentrations of THC, the primary psychoactive compound in marijauna, used to be around 1-3% in dried plants, and now they may be higher than 15%—and as high as 95%.

“It's a completely different product, even in medical dispensaries,” than before legalization, Venkatesan says. She notes that people may not be aware of the potential for syndromes like CHS when they start using cannabis, and the picture is complicated by the fact that many heavy users do not experience these symptoms, she says. 

What should people know about cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome?

Although most people with CHS tend to be young adults, there are patients of all ages. The main risk factors are prolonged use of cannabis with high concentrations of THC. 

“You really increase your chances of this with frequent use of high-potency products for an extended period of time,” says Swartz. “So I would say, be careful of the products that you're using, be mindful of the potency and the frequency with which you're using. It's not a fun condition to have.” 

The rise of legalized cannabis has also been accompanied by an increase in schizophrenia cases, research has found; one study in Ontario found that cases associated with cannabis-use disorder nearly tripled in recent years. Even before legalization, there was a known link between psychosis and prior cannabis use in young people, suggesting that in some, there may be a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia that is exacerbated by cannabis. Daily use of high-potency cannabis is associated with a nearly five-fold increase in schizophrenia risk, another study found.

Do people with CHS also have psychiatric conditions? Studies found that mental-health conditions and CHS do tend to co-occur, says Swartz. But whether that’s because people are self-medicating with cannabis and thus predisposing themselves to CHS, or whether CHS and mental-health conditions occur together for other reasons isn’t clear. 

Quitting cannabis isn’t always an easy process, Swartz says, even with a motivation as strong as resolving CHS. “It's more complicated than, ‘Hey, just stop,’” he says. “The question is: ‘Why are you using?’ And let's think of some other way you can address that, other than cannabis.” 

When it comes to personality, humanity contains all sorts, from people who thrive on socializing to those who’d prefer to have a quiet cup of tea at home. Psychologists have found that five dimensions of personality, often termed the “Big Five,” are reliable descriptors of temperament. Given regular questionnaires about their lives and attitudes, people tend to score consistently across their lifetimes on extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness (a tendency to go with the flow), neuroticism (a tendency toward anxiety and other negative emotions), and conscientiousness (like self-discipline and rule-following). 

Exactly how these tendencies arise, and the extent to which they are the result of nature or nurture, are areas of active research. Now, in a paper published in Nature on September 2, scientists who examined the genes of more than a million people who also took personality questionnaires have revealed a swath of genetic variants linked to each of the Big Five traits. This information opens the door to research into the intersection of personality and biology, helping to answer questions about how we become who we are.

What’s the relationship between genes and your personality?

Psychologists have long suspected that some aspects of personality must be genetic, says Denis Bratko, a psychologist at the University of Zagreb in Croatia who has studied this question but was not involved in the new research. Previous efforts to look for these links, however, did not uncover clear correlations—no particular gene or genes for extraversion, for example—likely because study sizes were small and because there are now thought to be many genetic variants, each with a subtle effect, involved in personality. “Several decades of studies have seen failures because they [have been] looking for one or a few genes which will have a huge effect,” he says. 

To overcome these problems, the authors of the new study reached out to scientists around the world who manage repositories of data that include both genomic information and information about personality. 

“We think that personality is super-important for health,” says Michel Nivard, a professor of genomic epidemiology at University of Bristol in the U.K. and an author of the study. Scores on Big Five traits have long been associated with risk for mental-health diagnoses; neuroticism, in particular, is linked to anxiety. Personality can also help predict certain health outcomes, including whether people will stick with taking medication or seek out medical help for a problem.

What did researchers find?

The study revealed more than 1,000 genetic variants that appear to contribute to personality. Because the data came with all sorts of information about the people in the study—including, in some cases, the area where they lived, how much they walked a day, how other people rated them on personality questionnaires, and other measures—the researchers could see links between personality traits, genetic variants, and other parts of people’s lives as well.

Looking at genetic profiles, the researchers could see that people whose variants were linked to extraversion were more likely to be infected with COVID early in the pandemic, says Nivard. “Which makes sense, right? Because when you loosen up rules around social interaction, then the people who will take advantage of those loosening rules the most are people who have been missing that interaction most,” he says.

Personality was also linked to where people lived in midlife, the researchers found, using information from the UK Biobank that included home location. Those with genetic profiles linked to greater openness to new experience tended to end up in cosmopolitan cities, while those higher on neuroticism gravitated to affluent suburbs.  

Overall, the study found that a relatively small but significant proportion of personality can be predicted by genetics—up to around 13%—reinforcing psychologists’ impression that personality is a combination of genetics and environment. And it’s not necessarily the case that personality is inherited: an extravert, for example, may not have extraverted children. The system is clearly quite a bit more complex than that. 

Many, many genes—more than were identified in this study—are probably involved, influencing a variety of pathways in the brain, Nivard says. “That must be the case, given how diffuse we find those genetic effects to be.” 

“It's a wonderful paper,” says Tena Vukasović Hlupić, a psychologist at the University of Zagreb who was not an author on the new study. “It's finally empirical evidence that there is not one gene for whatever personality trait.”

What’s next for genetics and personality research? 

Understanding the genetic variants playing into each trait may help psychologists and neuroscientists further explore the basic neurobiology of personality. “There’s this endless debate on whether our body and our experiences shape our personality, or whether personality shapes our experience. I'm super excited to go and use these results to dig into those kinds of questions,” says Nivard. 

This information also raises the possibility of using such variants as a way to screen for problems down the road, says Hlupić. The variants themselves are only a small part of what might give people a predisposition to a certain mental-health condition, for instance, but if they can be used as an indicator of risk, and early interventions can help, they might be useful tools beyond basic research.  

If you’d like to find out more about your own personality, the best way is still  an academically validated Big Five test, Nivard says—not a genomic test. “There is no better way to know about your personality than to take a personality test,” says Nivard. “They're really good. They're not perfect, but they're way better than anything we could ever do with genetics.” 

An alleged Russian drone plot at a German airport last month had “all the hallmarks of state-sponsored terrorism,” European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas asserted Wednesday, a day after Germany said Russia was responsible.

“We have already summoned Russian ambassadors,” Kallas told reporters in Ireland, ahead of a meeting with European foreign ministers. Kallas said E.U. member states would consider adding further sanctions on Russian military assets, in addition to working with Ukraine on efforts to put additional pressure on Moscow to end the war.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said Russia was responsible for the attempted drone attack at Leipzig/Halle airport in early August, which saw the discovery of an explosive-laden drone close to a runway. Germany's Bild newspaper reported that the drone had been found lying near a Ukrainian cargo aircraft. Federal police and a bomb disposal unit were deployed to safely dispose of the drone.

Leipzig/Halle has served as a European base for Ukraine's Antonov jets since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The airport is also used by NATO for transportation needs, as well as by the German military.

Wadephul said “the means used to commit the attack, including the drone’s configuration, various components, explosives and ignition technology, are familiar to us from other Russian hybrid operations and from Russia’s war against Ukraine.”

He described the technology found at the airport as “professional” and said the drone’s components demonstrated “a high degree” of technical expertise. “Through the attempted attack in Leipzig, the Russian leadership consciously chose to damage further our already severely strained bilateral relationship,” he alleged.

Wadephul announced retaliatory measures, relaying how Germany intends to close the Russian consulate in Bonn from Sep. 18. The lease for the Russian House in Berlin, an institute showcasing Russian culture, will be terminated.

There will also be tighter entry controls for Russian nationals and additional pressure will be placed on Moscow's shadow fleet.

Russia has denied responsibility for the drone plot.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that no evidence for the allegations had been presented, and that “under a completely far-fetched and far-fetched pretext, Berlin has once again escalated bilateral relations,” according to Russian state news agency TASS. 

In response to the retaliatory actions taken by Germany, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told reporters Wednesday that Moscow “will respond as we deem necessary, when we are ready for it.” This came after Russian President Vladimir Putin called the German response a “grave mistake” that “clearly runs counter to the interests of the German people,” according to TASS reporting.

TIME has approached the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin for comment. 

European officials lead support for Germany

Europe has rallied behind Germany and vowed to display a strong, united front.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said “the United Kingdom stands in full solidarity with Germany following Russia’s egregious and reckless attack in Leipzig. Russian attempts to undermine our united resolve and our willingness to support Ukraine are futile and doomed to fail.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said Russia's alleged involvement “cannot go unanswered,” calling for European allies to remain united and stand in support of Ukraine.

Further afield, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said "attacking a Ukrainian cargo plane on German soil was an egregious attempt by Russia to weaken our resolve and our collective defence—and it will fail."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had discussed the incident with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “This is yet another Russian escalation, and it is important that Germany responded,” Zelensky said. “I assured him that Ukraine is ready to help—with expertise, experience, or in other areas where Germany may need it.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, meanwhile, expressed “full solidarity” with Germany. “The evidence is clear,” he said, voicing his backing of Berlin’s measures against Moscow. “Russia’s attempts to intimidate us, to undermine our unity and our willingness to support Ukraine are futile and will fail.”

The U.S. ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said the U.S. "stands in solidarity with Germany and all allies in the face of efforts to cause harm and chaos on NATO territory."

Since President Donald Trump’s return to Office, Washington has maintained that European allies must do more to prop up its defensive capabilities, rather than relying heavily on the U.S.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a review of U.S. troops stationed in Europe in June, expressing the Trump Administration’s disappointment over the “shameful” response from allies to the war with Iran and the lack of support for Washington’s military actions.

NATO has largely heeded the call, with members pledging higher defense spending, but there have still been clashes over key issues, such as Trump’s expressed interest in annexing Greenland.

The U.S. Mint began selling $1 coins bearing a likeness of President Donald Trump on Wednesday, making him the first sitting president in a century to have his face on currency.

Celebrating the nation’s semiquincentennial, the gold-colored coins feature a portrait of the president on one side, along with inscriptions of “LIBERTY,” “IN GOD WE TRUST,” and “1776 ~ 2026.” On the other side is an illustration of the presidential seal and inscriptions of “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “ONE DOLLAR.”

Read More: All the Things Trump Has Put His Name and Face on as President

Certain coins will feature an additional commemorative emblem. The U.S. Mint said that 250,000 of the coins were struck on July 4 in Philadelphia, and those are embellished with a special “July 4th” privy mark. The coins have been distributed at random among the rolls and bags that are available for purchase. 

The coin, which is being pressed at the Philadelphia Mint, was first announced in July by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He wrote on X that the coin “celebrates the strength of American values, and the promise of a nation dedicated to preserving freedom for all.”

Although this is the first currency featuring Trump to enter production, it is not the first proposed by the Treasury. Earlier this year, Bessent unveiled plans for Trump to appear on a commemorative $250 bill, and the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts voted to approve a 24-karat gold commemorative coin featuring Trump’s face in March.

Can the Trump semiquincentennial coin be used as currency?

The semiquincentennial coin can be used as currency, with a face value of $1 under federal law. However, the U.S. Mint is promoting the item as a collectible, referring to its “once-in-a-generation anniversary design destined to become a standout addition to modern collections.”

Accordingly, they are sold at a premium: Collectors can purchase a 25-coin roll for $61 or a 100-coin bag for $154.50. There is a limit of two of each product per household in place through 2 p.m. Thursday. 

The Treasury has also clarified that the 0.286 oz. coins do not contain any precious metal; the golden coloring is derived from manganese brass. The composition of the coins consists of 6% zinc, 3.5% manganese, and 2% nickel, with copper forming the remaining balance.

The coin is legal tender, but federal law does not require private businesses to accept it as payment for goods or services. Businesses may generally establish their own payment policies unless state or local law provides otherwise.

Are Trump $1 coins legal?

Democratic lawmakers have questioned the legality of putting a living president’s face on a coin, pointing to federal law that states: “Only the portrait of a deceased individual may appear on United States currency and securities.”

Lawmakers and experts have also cited the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005, which prohibited coins issued under that presidential series from depicting a living current or former president—or a president who had died within the previous two years.

In December 2025, Democratic Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada introduced a bill seeking to block Trump’s likeness from appearing on the $1 coin. In April, seven Democratic senators also urged leaders of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government to prohibit funding for coins or currency bearing a sitting president’s image or signature. The letter pointed to how George Washington “strongly opposed having his image on U.S. coins during his presidency, viewing it as a contradiction to the war for independence from Kings.”

“Placing the bust of a living president on a commemorative or circulating coin contradicts who we are as a nation,” the senators wrote.

Bessent has acknowledged federal law, but has argued that there is precedent for Trump’s likeness on the coin.

"During the 150th there was a Calvin Coolidge coin," Bessent said on Fox News in July. "So we can put living presidents' images on a coin."

Bessent was referring to a half-dollar issued for the nation’s 150th anniversary that featured then-President Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge is the only previous sitting president to appear on a U.S. coin.

The Trump Administration has also pointed to an act from Trump’s first term, the Circulating Collectible Coin Redesign Act of 2020, which explicitly prohibits portraits of living people on the reverse of semiquincentennial coins but does not explicitly impose the same restriction on the obverse, where Trump’s portrait appears. Coolidge’s portrait likewise appeared on the obverse of the 1926 Sesquicentennial of American Independence half-dollar.

But the controversy is a bit more nuanced. The 2020 statute defending the legality of the coin also says each semiquincentennial design “shall be selected by the Secretary after consultation with the Commission of Fine Arts and review by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee.”

The Commission of Fine Arts—made up of seven Trump appointees—did suggest a design that is different from the one that currently appears. The advice was meant to be advisory only, so a failure to use the recommended design is not considered a violation of the statute.

The CCAC, which is an 11-person committee established by Congress, did not review the design. The Mint maintains that it repeatedly gave the committee multiple opportunities to review the portfolio and was entitled to proceed after committee leadership declined. Some CCAC members dispute whether the compressed schedule provided a meaningful opportunity to conduct the statutorily required review. One member said the committee received the Trump coin designs five days before a planned meeting, substantially less than the recent average, while the Mint noted that the committee had sometimes reviewed designs on only two or three days’ notice.

The resulting question of legality centers on whether the Mint satisfied the statute by providing the CCAC an opportunity to review the designs—or whether the law required an actual committee deliberation and input.

According to Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, says that the coin “violates both federal law and historical practice.”

“The Department of Treasury is bound to follow federal law. Its efforts to maneuver around federal law are illegal,” Gerhardt tells TIME. “The fact that the coin is commemorative does not immunize it from being covered by relevant federal law.”

Daniel Weiner, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, sees this as an issue that goes beyond law, and is much more about an Administration that has continually stretched the bounds of executive power.

“To some extent, its legality is kind of beside the point,” he tells TIME. “There’s the broader context of removing checks on the President’s ability to dominate every action of the Executive Branch. The question is: What are we supposed to do in this situation?”

“In the past, it's not that this kind of thing would be illegal,” he continues, “but it would be unthinkable.”

The legality of the coin is based on a “hodgepodge of different statues,” Weiner says, but the issue is more about restoring a “tradition of restraint among Presidents.”

Weiner and Gerhardt both point out that even if Trump’s coin is illegal, it would be hard to find plaintiffs that could show they are being harmed by the move, which is required in order to file a lawsuit challenging the issuance of the coin. 

“Ultimately, this is a question that's as much about unwritten rules as written rules,” Weiner adds. “Because the written rules kind of contradict each other, and it's unclear who is supposed to enforce them.”

We are still burying or cremating our dead. We are still searching for our missing people. We are still gasping at the emptiness where our homes stood.

And we know something: the furious deluge that came crashing down from a mountain peak in northern Nepal, like a scene from an apocalyptic movie, and tore through the valleys of the Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts of our country was not a freak accident.

It was a warning from the Himalayas. Our majestic mountains and their glaciers are warming because of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized nations that have been burning fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution. We, in Nepal, produce a mere 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And it is time for the industrialized nations to take responsibility for it.

On Monday, Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority estimated that at least 1,050 people have died in the floods, 292 are injured and 3,916 are missing. More than 90,000 people have been affected. Around 600 of the missing people are foreign nationals from 39 countries.

The first reports, which pointed toward an earthquake setting off the glacial rage, were quickly reversed. What the seismometers registered was a warming glacier shearing off Langtang Lirung mountain peak and slamming into the valley floor with enough force to register a magnitude 5.2 shock, sending a wall of rock, ice, mud and water thundering down the Bhotekoshi-Trishuli River valley at a ferocious speed that gave communities along the riverbanks almost no warning.

Chinese monitors clocked just six to seven minutes between the collapse and the moment the surge hit Gyirong Port at the China-Nepal border. In Rasuwa district, officials recorded the Trishuli River rising as much as nine meters in 30 minutes.

Nepal is familiar with a pattern of extreme climate events induced by climate change. In July 2025, a smaller flood washed away the Friendship Bridge, which connected Rasuwagadhi in Nepal with Gyirong on the Chinese side of the border. In Aug. 2024, a glacial lake let go near Mount Everest, tearing through Thame village and destroying homes, a school and a health post overnight. These natural calamities are becoming more frequent and fiercer.

Nepalis are resilient. Every time a disaster hits, we mourn our dead, rebuild, and carry on. We call it karma, or fate, or the mountains doing what mountains do. But this isn’t karma. The climate is changing, and human activity is changing it. Our resilience becomes a quiet abandonment, a way for the rest of the world to admire how well we absorb losses it helped create.

A Himalayan warning

In Oct. 2023, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stood near Mount Everest and pleaded, “I am here today to cry out from the rooftop of the world: stop the madness…The glaciers are retreating, but we cannot. We must end the fossil fuel age.” 

The Hindu Kush Himalaya is warming faster than the global average. Go up to the mountains and you can see it: bare grey rock where there was snow and ice just a decade ago. The region is often called the “Third Pole" because it holds the largest volume of ice outside the two poles. It is also one of the planet’s most important water towers, feeding ten major river systems and sustaining nearly two billion people downstream.

In March, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), an intergovernmental group working in the Himalayan region, confirmed what mountain people already feel: glaciers across the Hindu Kush Himalaya are now losing ice at roughly twice the rate they did before 2000, and have disappeared 65% faster between 2011 and 2020 than in the preceding decade. Nepal alone holds more than 2,000 glacial lakes.

An assessment by the Nepal government and ICIMOD identified 21 glacial lakes across the Koshi, Gandaki and Karnali basins of the country as potentially dangerous and capable of producing a damaging outburst. In 2016, the government of Nepal and UNDP worked together to lower water levels in Imja Tsho, one of the largest and most closely watched glacial lakes in the Everest region. The initiative successfully drained Imja Tsho to a safer level and installed community-based early warning and response systems.

But new lakes keep forming, and old ones keep growing, faster than any single country can monitor them. Imja took years of international effort and millions of dollars to make it safe. Nepal has dozens of glacial lakes like it. We don’t have a fraction of the money required. 

The arithmetic of climate injustice

And here is the arithmetic of the injustice: Nepal is one of the smallest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet its people, from remote villages to the Kathmandu Valley, keep paying the price for it. Nepal has grown its forest cover to nearly 46% of its land and draws around 90% of its electricity from clean hydropower. The climate disasters we face are the essence of climate injustice: those least responsible for the crisis are the first and worst affected, and too often the least equipped to recover.

Just as Nepal was turning a corner, under a reform-minded government promising good governance and attracting foreign investment, this disaster could set this part of the country back by about a decade. Our finance minister, Swarnim Wagle, estimates that rebuilding will cost between four and five billion dollars, close to a tenth of our entire economy, against a national budget of around $14 billion for the year.

Every major disaster forces the country to divert scarce resources away from education, healthcare, infrastructure and development and back into rebuilding what was lost. A country that spends its future paying for someone else’s emissions cannot develop. It can only tread water. Nepal doesn’t need another pledge recited at another international conference. We need the international community to move from symbolic gestures to real action.

We need climate finance that actually reaches Nepal. We need a Loss and Damage Fund that pays out when a village needs it, not years after the water has receded. Nepal also needs investment in early warning systems, continuous monitoring of glaciers and glacial lakes, and disaster preparedness that reaches the most remote mountain communities. Six minutes of warning is not a policy failure of Nepal’s alone; it is what underinvestment in mountain monitoring buys.

And finally, the people who live in these mountains and the billions who depend on the water flowing from them deserve a voice in climate policy. Nepal should be central to that conversation. We are not debating what climate change might do. We are already living it.

Nature has a way of reminding us just how interconnected and interdependent we are. A glacier destabilized in one country can, within minutes, devastate villages, infrastructure, and livelihoods in another, while the bodies of the dead are found hundreds of kilometers downstream in another country. Nepal, China, and India share not only mountains and rivers, but also a common exposure to the accelerating risks of climate change. We need more regional cooperation, and Nepal, sitting at the head of these shared watersheds, must play a central role.

Nepal’s mountains are our identity. They feed our rivers, our tourism, our sense of who we are. Now they are also ground zero for the climate emergency. The world needs to heed this warning: we need shared, urgent, and just action before more mountains give way.