Republicans are increasingly breaking from President Donald Trump over the war in Iran.

A growing number of GOP candidates are calling for an end to the nearly seven-month-long war on the campaign trail, even in traditionally red parts of the U.S. On Capitol Hill, the latest war powers resolution weighed by the House was approved with fresh Republican support. And recent polls show that as the conflict has stretched on and hit Americans’ wallets, approval of Trump’s handling of the war among Republican voters has dropped by double digits. 

The defections come as active hostilities in Iran have resumed in the last month after peace talks between Washington and Tehran stalled over the summer. Trump, who initially projected that the war would last a matter of weeks, has in recent days publicly floated the possibility that he could “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “blow the entire nation up.” 

At the same time, however, he has also recently predicted that the conflict will end after the midterms. And not long after levying a fresh threat in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly, he told reporters at the diplomatic gathering that he had a “very good” meeting with “mediators of Iran.”

“It's to their advantage to make a deal, and we can do that,” he said on Tuesday. 

Still, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have voiced concern that Trump has not laid out an exit strategy for the conflict and sounded alarm about the impact the war is having on fuel prices, which have spiked around the U.S. since it began.

With GOP fears over the pivotal November elections growing, more candidates and lawmakers in the party are choosing to distance themselves from the President on the issue—and though the defectors remain in the minority, Republican strategists tell TIME that GOP disapproval for the war in Iran will likely only continue to mount.

Here’s why.

Inflation concerns loom large ahead of the midterms

A handful of Republican candidates have recently pushed for an end to Iran on the campaign trail as the midterms near, including several in tight Senate races. 

“It's all about getting reelected,” Brian Darling, a Republican strategist and former counsel to Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, says about midterm candidates to TIME. “It's all about making sure that they can signal to their constituents that they have the same concerns about the Iran war."

Darling asserts that much of the discontent over the war in Iran stems from its inflationary impact within the U.S. A Congressional Budget Office report released last week found that the war has driven up energy prices in the U.S. mainly due to disruptions to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping route through which one fifth of the world’s crude oil flows, adding 2.3 percentage points to the annualized rate of inflation of 5.3% in the second quarter of 2026. The price of regular gasoline is up around 52% from the start of the war at around $4.48 per gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with diesel prices up 71% in the same period.

Read More: U.S. Diesel Prices Just Surpassed a Record $6 Per Gallon. Here Are Three Ways That Affects You

For many Americans, these rising prices are among the most important issues when voting in the midterms. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from late August showed that 47% of voters said the cost of living would be the single most important factor for them when deciding who to vote for in November. 

On top of that, support for the war is low, with only a quarter of Americans believing that it’s worthwhile, according to the same poll. And though Republicans still back the conflict in greater shares than Democratic and independent voters, surveys show that their sentiments toward it have notably soured in the months since it began. A YouGov poll conducted between Sept. 18 and 21 found that a slim majority of 53% of Republicans say that in hindsight going to war in Iran was the right decision, a drop of 15 percentage points from the 68% that said the same in April. Another recent poll conducted for CNN by SSRS found that Republican approval of the war fell from 73% in March to 60% in the latest survey period of Sept. 16-17. Among Republicans under the age of 45, 53% disapproved of the war.

Republican fears that the party could lose control of Congress in the midterms have meanwhile been on the rise, fueled by election forecasters shifting key battleground states and districts toward Democrats in their ratings and polls indicating that voters favor Democratic congressional candidates on generic ballots.

“The bottom line for most candidates is they want to talk about the Iran war and ending the Iran war as a solution to our high gas prices,” Darling says. 

Candidates calling for an end to the Iran war have explicitly pointed to its effect on prices in their remarks.

“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran,” Rep. Ashley Hinson, the GOP nominee for Senate in Iowa, posted on X on Monday, saying that “the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who is also running for Senate in his state, made his own call for ending the war in an ad this week in which was shown standing in a grocery store.

“The war with Iran needs to end, and end quickly,” he said, referencing ballooning gas and food costs. “Michigan families are struggling with the price of everyday life. Groceries cost too much. We have to bring prices down.”

“The war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices,” Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who is facing a tight race to retain his seat this year, similarly told POLITICO in an interview published on Tuesday. 

Trump has previously dismissed concerns about the war’s impact on gas prices, which he has called “a very inexpensive price to pay for what we’ve done” and “peanuts.” But on Tuesday, while speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the U.N. General Assembly, he said that his Administration is considering banning diesel exports to quell the increase in fuel prices.

Read More: What a Diesel Export Ban Would Mean for U.S. Consumers

“I’ve called for that, too. I said, ‘Let’s not send out the diesel.’ We make a lot of diesel. I’ve called for it—I’ve called for it with my people,” Trump said. 

‘There is seemingly no end in sight’

Although Darling holds that inflation is the main source of voters’ disapproval toward the war in Iran, he contends that many GOP lawmakers and voters are also fed up with U.S. involvement in armed conflict in the Middle East and around the world. 

“You have some Republicans who are anti-interventionists, and some who are realists, and look at the situation in Iran and just don't see an end game,” Darling says, making reference to the U.S.’s involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he said voters look to with fear as a “very similar circumstance” to Iran.

Trump, who campaigned on vows to put “America first” and not to get the U.S. involved in new foreign wars, has drawn backlash from his base for his military interventions in Iran, and in other parts of the world.

Doug Heye, a long-time Republican strategist who has worked in communications roles across Congress, says that the the opaque timeline and plan of action for the war in Iran has created a strong anti-Trump sentiment amongst Republican lawmakers and voters. 

“There is seemingly no end in sight, and so that combined with the increase in prices has presented a real problem for Republicans,” Heye tells TIME. “It's not a blip anymore.”

Michigan’s Republican nominee for governor, Rep. John James, told reporters on Tuesday that “we need to end this war quickly. Because war is terrible, and no one likes war.” 

Earlier this month, Republican Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who both are in the midst of close-fought reelection races in Iowa, cited concerns about the lack of a clear plan to end the conflict after voting for the first time in favor of a resolution to constrict Trump’s ability to continue military action in Iran without congressional approval.

“With the negotiating window closed, sustained combat operations now require congressional authorization,” Nunn, an Air Force combat veteran and colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, said in a statement. “Having deployed multiple times and flown over 700 combat hours in the Middle East, I will not support another open-ended war.”

Miller-Meeks, who served for more than two decades in the U.S. Army, voiced a similar sentiment in a post on X—as well as referencing the conflict’s impact on gas prices. “I said it in March: the mission had to stay focused and limited, because Americans do not want another forever war,” she wrote. “I will not vote to keep our soldiers in an open-ended war, with Iowans paying too much at the pump.”

The other Republicans who voted for the resolution were Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Tom Barrett of Michigan, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina. It marked the third time the House has voted to restrict Trump’s war powers in Iran.

Read More: The Republicans Who Have Broken With Their Party to Support Limiting Trump’s Iran War Powers

A majority of voters, including a number of Republicans, have recently indicated concerns about how long the war might last in recent polls. A Fox News poll conducted between Sept. 11 and 14 found that 71% of voters believe Trump lacks a clear strategy to end the war, with 43% of Republicans holding that belief. The YouGov poll taken in recent days meanwhile found that 52% of Americans believe the war will last at least another year. 

The share of people who hold that belief has slowly increased in recent months, from 50% in August, 46% in July, and 32% in March, shortly after the war began. According to the poll, however, just 28% of Republicans expect the war to continue on for that long.

SpaceX has not always distinguished itself as a good environmental citizen. Part of that is unavoidable. You can’t launch 170 rockets per year—as the company did in 2025—without releasing a lot of black soot into the upper atmosphere and creating a lot of light and noise around the launch site, which can be harmful to local wildlife. Environmental organizations have mounted multiple legal challenges against the company over the years to enjoin or minimize its freedom to launch until multiple corrective measures are taken. 

Now SpaceX faces another day in court. On Sept. 21 a judge ruled that a proposed land swap with the federal government that would allow the company to expand its launch pads, factory, and related infrastructure into a protected wildlife area in Texas could go ahead. That might have settled the issue but the environmental groups that sued to stop this, plan to appeal—and they believe they have a strong case.

Why did environmental groups sue to stop SpaceX’s land swap?

On June 10, a group of plaintiffs filed suit against the Department of the Interior to block a Trump Administration plan to cede SpaceX 725 acres of land in the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge hard up against the company’s Starbase factory and launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, in exchange for 692 acres the company owns in the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge about 20 miles north of Starbase. The land that would be annexed by SpaceX is not only home to thousands of species of plants and animals including the ocelot, which is endangered in the U.S.; it is also considered sacred by the Native American Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, which is a plaintiff in the suit. What’s more, the tract has cultural and historical significance as it includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield, the site of the last land battle of the Civil War.

The fact that the acreage that SpaceX gets will not be a gift, but rather an exchange for land the company currently owns—taking that latter plot off the table for development—does not solve the problem, says Laiken Jordahl, public lands advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. “The whole point of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge is to establish a chain of connected habitats along the river that allows for the migration of ocelots and other wildlife,” he argues. “This will cut out one of the key east-west areas of wildlife connectivity, and in return, we're getting a smaller amount of land in a different area.”

What did the Judge say in its decision that would allow the SpaceX land swap? 

On. Sept. 21, Judge Fernando Rodriuguez, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, denied the Center for Biological Diversity’s request for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the move, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. In their filing, the plaintiffs argued that the land swap would cause them irreparable harm since they would lose access to those acres and the freedom to observe wildlife there. The Interior Department countered that the land was already closed to the public as part of its wildlife refuge status, so the plaintiffs suffered no loss. 

The plaintiffs, in their filing, anticipated this finding and sought to rebut it in advance with 2014 case law. “[T]he affected individual,” they wrote, “need not always have direct access to the area at issue. Individuals can possess a cognizable interest ‘in observing the landscape from surrounding areas[.]’”

Rodriguez—appointed to the federal bench by President Donald Trump during his first term—was unmoved, and if anything, saw SpaceX as the potentially aggrieved party. The requested injunction, he wrote, “would impose uncertainty into and would result in modifications to SpaceX’s development plans, placing additional hardship on the company’s ability to meet milestones and contractual obligations.”

“We are obviously, extraordinarily disappointed in the judge's decision,” says Jordahl. “This effectively clears the way for the bulldozers to start destroying the refuge land. But the judge did not rule on our overall claims; it was just on the injunction. So yeah, the challenge will press forward.” (The denial of a preliminary injunction falls short of the judge actually ruling on whether the proposed land swap violates federal law—which the plaintiffs claim it does.)

What is SpaceX’s environmental impact?

It’s not for nothing that environmental groups worry about the impact of SpaceX’s south Texas site. That's where the company launches its massive Starship rocket—a 33-engine behemoth that stands 40-stories tall and puts out up to 18 million lbs of thrust, more than twice as much as NASA’s Space Launch System, the second most powerful rocket in the world.

Four minutes into Starship’s inaugural launch on April 20, 2023, it exploded spectacularly, raining debris downward—most of which fell into the Gulf of Mexico. But the mere ignition of the nearly three dozen engines on the concrete launch apron did plenty of harm of its own.

“Impacts from the launch include numerous large concrete chunks, stainless steel sheets, metal and other objects hurled thousands of feet away along with a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote in an email to the media at the time. “Approximately 385 acres of debris was found on both SpaceX’s facility and in the surrounding Boca Chica State Park, and a 3.5-acre fire burned on park land south of the launch site.”

Jordahl is not worried just about similar environmental damage, but the harm to be done when those bulldozers he mentions begin to roll.

“I've heard different things [about what SpaceX wants to do with the land], from additional manufacturing areas to warehouses to worker housing,” says Jordahl. “We haven't gotten any clear and obvious plans. But the way that they've been treating the land out there already is telling. They pave over everything. They turn it into an industrial manufacturing zone.” SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The harm won’t stop there. As SpaceX expands into the refuge, more land that is currently a comfortable distance from the complex will be exposed to the damage the launches can do. SpaceX claims it has cured the problems that made the first launch such a mess, installing a water-cooled metal deflection plate and a retaining wall to control debris. The other 12 Starship launches that have taken place since the inaugural one have indeed caused far less damage to the surroundings.

If that mitigates the environmental damage the rocket can do, however, the planned launch cadence exacerbates it. In August, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk told Aviation Week that he envisions daily Starship launches—carrying crew, satellites, and other cargo to space—as early as 2027. More headsnapping was his 2025 boast on X, that “In about 6 or 7 years, there will be days where Starship launches more than 24 times in 24 hours.” 

Clearly, not all of those launches could come from the Texas site, but SpaceX has other launch facilities at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and dedicated pads at the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. A company so large, with more than a $2 trillion valuation, could always build more launchpads at more coastal sites whenever it chooses.

What precedent could the SpaceX land swap set?

The Texas base is making news at the moment, not simply for what it means for this potential development site, but for others elsewhere in the U.S. The Trump Administration is currently pursuing a similar land swap with a private land developer, involving a strip of land in Yosemite National Park for an undeveloped parcel in California so that residents in a planned private housing complex near the park will have easier access to it. Yet another land exchange is under consideration that would open up a federally designated wilderness area on Georgia’s Cumberland island to the construction of luxury homes.

“This [Texas] land transfer is part of a broader scheme by this administration to give away public lands to private interests,” says Jordahl. “The precedent that this transfer will set is extremely concerning when it comes to corporations setting their sights on and taking over public lands across America.

Saudi Arabia will have assistance from a key Western ally in its fight against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, as Britain is providing military support to the Kingdom in a bid to help restore stability in the region and ease pressures on the global energy supply.

“We’re working with our friends to try and deliver that de-escalation,” British Defense Minister Luke Pollard said in an interview Tuesday. The “purely defensive” deployment of an RAF Voyager to Saudi Arabia is intended to “ensure there’s no further escalation in the Red Sea, which could further risk our fuel prices,” he added.

The international assistance comes following weeks of fighting between the Saudi-backed government of Yemen and the Houthis, which shattered a four-year informal cease-fire in the country's civil war. The Houthi rebels have made significant advances along the Red Sea coastline as they seek to tighten their grip on the Bab el-Mandeb, a critical maritime chokepoint that links Asia and Europe via the Red Sea and Suez Canal. With global energy supplies already under strain due to the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz amid the Iran war, the strangling of another trade route could further impact oil and fuel prices.

“Much of our trade, both in goods and in energy, comes through that part of the world. What happens in that part of the Middle East is absolutely vital for our own national security and our own economic security,” Pollard said, explaining why Britain responded to the Kingdom’s request for help.

When talking to reporters en route to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, ahead of his sit-down with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham also cited the cost of living “pressures” at home as a key reason for the support and said he was “acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region.”  

Burnham emphasized that it’s a “time-limited agreement in terms of the assistance that we will provide, but we will keep it under review.”  

The support extended to Saudi Arabia marks Burnham’s first military deployment since he became Prime Minister in July. However, it’s far from the first time the U.K. has offered assistance to Saudi Arabia, as the two nations share a close military alliance.

How exactly will the U.K. be supporting Saudi Arabia?

The Ministry of Defense on Tuesday confirmed it had agreed to “provide an RAF Voyager air-to-air refuelling aircraft to support Saudi defensive activity” in the region. According to the British Royal Air Force (RAF), a Voyager provides strategic air support by allowing jets and other aircraft to refuel while in flight.

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer in defense studies at King's College London, says the Voyager “basically allows the Saudi Air Force to stay in the air over Yemen for longer without having to fly a single sortie and then returning to base.”

“It increases the operational tempo in terms of targeting strikes and being more flexible, and more agile in responding to changing situations on the ground,” he tells TIME.

According to Pollard, the Voyager is set to operate from the British RAF base in Cyprus, which was targeted by Iran earlier this year, and will support the British-built Typhoon jets used by Saudi Arabia. “That will help them with their defensive actions against the Houthis, who have been attacking not just the capital of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, but also the Republic of Yemen as well,” he said.

Britain has historically held the role of “guarantor for maritime freedom of navigation all around the world,” says Krieg, describing the U.K.’s latest attempt to ease tensions over the Red Sea as an example of the government “stepping up to the plate.”

“We're not just helping a partner in the region,” he adds. “We're also helping ourselves, because the Houthis having the Bab al-Mandeb is not something that the U.K. can tolerate.” 

Krieg says the move signifies a small success for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states as they seek to strengthen bilateral security relationships beyond their traditional reliance on the U.S. This is “the worst security situation the Saudis have been in [for] a very long time,” he notes.

“Gulf states are trying to supplement the existing U.S. capabilities with all kinds of [other] agreements, like the Mecca pact,” he says, referencing a trilateral defense security pact made between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in August. “The U.K. wants to be seen as being active and being there when a friend is in need.” 

The long-standing alliance between the U.K. and Saudi Arabia

The U.K. and Saudi Arabia share an alliance that dates back to almost a century ago. 

“It's a very long, strategic partnership,” says Krieg. “It goes back to the early days of the current Kingdom, where Britain, at the time, was still the only superpower in the world, and was controlling the waterways and a lot of the territories in Arabia, including in South Yemen.”

Britain was among the first governments to recognize the independent territories of Saudi Arabia through the Treaty of Jeddah in 1927, which helped solidify the boundaries of the nascent kingdom ahead of the formation of modern Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Decades later, the U.K. supported the Saudi-led military coalition in its campaign against the Houthis from 2015 until the 2022 truce.

According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), the published value of U.K. arms export licenses to Saudi Arabia from the start of the bombing campaign in March 2015 through the April 2022 truce was £7.1 billion ($9.4 billion).

“The two main Western backers of the Saudi Kingdom are the Americans and the British,” says David Wearing, an assistant professor in international relations at the University of Sussex. “From the British and the American point of view, the Middle East is strategically important because it's a huge source of global energy suppliers, oil, and gas.” 

In late 2023, the Houthis started disrupted shipping in the Red Sea, targeting cargo ships they said were linked to Israel, in what they described as a show of support for Palestinians in Gaza. Amid concerns over the impact on the world economy, the U.S. and U.K. joined forces in January 2024, striking multiple Houthi targets in Yemen. In April 2025, the U.K. government participated in another joint operation with the U.S. against a Houthi military facility in Yemen.

In March of this year, the U.K. deployed a Sky Sabre, the army’s medium range air defense missile system, to Saudi Arabia to defend the Kingdom against Iranian missile and drone attacks.

The U.K. government's Strategic Export Controls Annual Report of 2025 described the military relationship with Saudi Arabia as a “longstanding” partnership providing “Typhoon, Tornado, and Hawk aircraft, mine countermeasure vessels, and associated munitions, infrastructure, logistics and manpower support packages.”

BAE Systems—a major British defense, aerospace, and security company—said in its own 2025 report that Saudi Arabia was its largest customer by sales in its air business.

How are Saudi Arabia’s other allies responding to the Houthis' advances?

Saudi Arabia has reportedly sought assistance from allies to stave off Houthi advances. France, Pakistan, and Egypt issued strong statements condemning the Houthi attacks, but have not publicly announced new military support for the Kingdom.

Trump is understood to have received requests from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to strike the Houthi rebels. According to the New York Times, Trump reportedly considered launching strikes against the Houthis over the weekend, before ultimately deciding against it. TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

Asked Tuesday why Washington has held back from striking the Houthis, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it’s “a very dangerous and complex” conflict.

“If it comes down to it, the United States will always stand with Saudi Arabia and support them because we have an agreement with them to do so,” he said, referencing the U.S. economic and defense partnership with Saudi Arabia signed last November, that deepened co-operation between the two countries.

Fears mount over global energy supply as Houthis advance

Global energy supplies have been under increasing strain since the start of the Iran war on Feb. 28, as Tehran has leveraged its chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz, through which around a fifth of global oil production flowed prior to the conflict.

In the past few weeks, the Houthis have captured Yemen’s port city of Mokha and the strategic Perim Island, which sits in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. If the Houthis were to assume control of the strait, shipping companies could be forced to travel via South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope—a longer, costlier route. 

The volume of crude oil and petroleum liquids moving through the Bab el-Mandeb increased earlier this year, with the route being used as an alternative to the Strait of Hormuz. The shipments surged from 5.6 million barrels per day in the first quarter of 2026 to 8.1 million per day in the second quarter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

However, recent crossings have been marred by uncertainty over the potential threat posed by the Houthis. Data shared with TIME by Kpler, a commodities data and analytics firm, showed an estimated 34 vessels transited the Bab el-Mandeb on Sept. 15, a drop from the estimated 53 crossings recorded on July 15th.

A spokesperson for the Houthis on Sept. 11 insisted the waterway will remain free to roam “with the exception of Saudi ships.” Yet concerns among global leaders and shipping companies remain.

Burnham and other U.K. officials have framed Britain’s defensive support partly around the potential economic consequences at home. The average price of petrol rose by 9.1 pence per litre between July and August 2026, compared with a rise of 0.3 pence per litre between July and August 2025, according to data from the Office of National Statistics.

Wearing says that because oil is traded on a global market, supply disruptions in one region can push up benchmark prices worldwide, with those costs cascading through the broader economy.

“What Americans call gas and what we call petrol, if that goes up, think how many goods to market are taken by heavy lorries on petrol. It can push up the price of everything: shipping, road transit, energy, all kinds of industrial production and many consumer products,” he says. “Oil is the lifeblood of the world economy, the longer you restrict the supply, the higher the price goes, the more inflationary pressure there is on everything, and that affects Britain, but it affects the whole system. It's like a heart attack in a human body, suddenly it's not being pumped round."

Sometime next year, the U.S. government will hit its debt ceiling again. It's a moment that often plays out as a high-stakes partisan battle, with lawmakers demanding concessions from the President under the threat of a U.S. default.

If Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress, the next debt ceiling vote could yield another standoff. Or, just maybe, it could be an unexpected moment of bipartisanship. 

President Trump has repeatedly called for eliminating the debt ceiling, putting him at odds with most of his party, but in line with a significant number of Democrats in Congress. The top Democrat on the House Budget Committee sees an opportunity to finally ditch the mechanism for good. 

“I will not vote to simply kick the can down the road again and just raise the debt ceiling for another 18 months,” Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania tells TIME in an interview. “My next vote on the debt ceiling will only be to permanently reform it to end the dysfunction around it once and for all.” After nearly a decade in the House, it would be the Philadelphia Democrat's first time voting against raising the debt ceiling.

Congress last approved raising the debt ceiling in July 2025, by $5 trillion to $41.1 trillion. The Treasury Department is expected to hit that limit some time in 2027, although estimates vary. One projection puts the likely window between late winter and mid-summer. Once the limit is reached, the Treasury can rely on cash reserves and “extraordinary measures” for several more months before reaching the so-called X-date, when it could no longer meet all of the government’s obligations on time.

While lawmakers often frame debt ceiling votes as tests of fiscal restraint, raising the debt ceiling doesn’t actually authorize new spending or determine how much the government borrows in the first place. The debt ceiling caps the Treasury Department’s ability to borrow the money the U.S. government needs to pay for obligations Congress has already approved. 

Past debt ceiling fights have led to credit downgrades and major drops in the stock market. Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who voted for the last increase, subsequently called the debt ceiling “a joke” and “a relic of a bygone era.” Other Republicans, including outgoing Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, continue to argue that the ceiling should be preserved as a negotiating tool.

During Biden’s presidency, Trump urged his party to preserve the debt ceiling so they could use it as leverage in negotiations. Since returning to the White House, however, he has repeatedly called for eliminating the ceiling.

“I am very pleased to announce that, after all of these years, I agree with Senator Elizabeth Warren on SOMETHING," Trump posted on Truth Social in June. "The Debt Limit should be entirely scrapped to prevent an Economic catastrophe. It is too devastating to be put in the hands of political people that may want to use it despite the horrendous effect it could have on our Country and, indirectly, even the World."

If Democrats win the House, Boyle is all but assured to be chairman of the House Budget Committee, which oversees the debt limit votes. He sees Trump’s willingness to act on the issue as a golden opportunity. His preferred approach would not abolish the ceiling outright, but largely transfer the responsibility of raising it to the Treasury secretary, who would be able to suspend the debt ceiling for up to two years. Congress would retain the ability to block the suspensions through a joint resolution that would have to be signed by the president.

Boyle says his solution, which he introduced as the Debt Ceiling Reform Act in 2023, has drawn support from members from both parties. “I've had a number of House Republicans quietly tell me that they want to see the debt ceiling finally resolved in a manner that I propose because they're sick and tired of voting on it,” he says. 

The White House declined to comment on whether Trump would be open to working with Democrats to eliminate or reform the debt ceiling.

History of debt ceiling fights

For most of its history, the U.S. did not have a debt ceiling. First adopted in 1917, raising the ceiling has become a bigger political headache in recent decades. In 2011, House Republicans used the approaching borrowing limit to force President Barack Obama into an agreement that imposed spending caps and created a bipartisan process for pursuing additional deficit reduction. But the standoff also brought the country close to default and was followed by the first downgrade of U.S. government debt.

Twelve years later, Republicans again used the debt ceiling to extract concessions from a Democratic president. The 2023 agreement negotiated by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden capped discretionary spending for two years, rescinded more than $27 billion in unspent pandemic aid and $1.4 billion in IRS funding, and tightened work requirements for certain SNAP recipients. In return, Biden secured a suspension of the debt ceiling through the end of 2024, removing the immediate threat of default. The agreement was estimated to reduce deficits by roughly $1.5 trillion over a decade, but it also temporarily spiked short-term borrowing costs and led to another credit downgrade by a different credit agency.

“It is inevitable that the next time there's a Democrat in the White House and there's a Republican-controlled Congress, they will do exactly what they did to Barack Obama and exactly what they did to Joe Biden,” Boyle says.

But the situation may be reversed next year, with Democrats potentially controlling one or both chambers of Congress and a Republican in the White House. Some Democrats are already discussing the prospect of extracting concessions from Trump to secure a debt ceiling hike. During a recent retreat of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Boyle was asked to give a presentation on the issue in order to encourage members to start thinking about the looming topic. 

While Boyle hasn’t spoken recently with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries about the party’s strategy around the debt ceiling, he notes that Jeffries signed a 2022 letter with him and other House Democrats urging Congressional leaders to “permanently end the threat that the federal debt ceiling poses to our economy and our standing in the world.” 

Preparing for a Democratic House and 2028

Boyle has already been laying the groundwork for a broader role on the House Budget Committee. During the current Congress, his office built a district-by-district database tracking the effects of Trump Administration policies on household costs and health coverage. The data played a central role in Democrats’ messaging strategy around healthcare and the 2025 government shutdown, as Democratic offices used the data to show voters in their districts how the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits could affect them. 

As chairman, Boyle wants the committee to work to overhaul a congressional budget process that has turned dysfunctional. He also wants to reassert Congress' constitutional power over federal spending, as the Trump Administration has repeatedly worked to withhold or redirect dollars lawmakers had appropriated. He intends to call Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a central player in that Administration strategy, to a hearing on the issue. “I think he's the most dangerous person in America that most Americans have never heard of,” Boyle says of Vought.

The potential chairmanship is also central to Boyle’s own calculation about his future in Congress. As Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has grown increasingly critical of his own party and more comfortable with Republicans, many in the party doubt he could win a Democratic primary if he were to run for another term in 2028. Several House Democrats from Pennsylvania are said to be circling the seat, including Summer Lee, Chris Deluzio, and Boyle. Boyle tells TIME he plans to make a decision after the November elections. He sees the choice partly in terms of where he believes he would have the greatest influence over legislation if Democrats control Congress and the White House—is it better to be a freshman senator or chairman of a House committee that has become a central gateway for major fiscal legislation?

“The prospect of being the chair of the budget committee, if you have a Democratic trifecta and you’re doing reconciliation, that’s the chance to be front and center,” Boyle says. “The quarterback on what could be one of the most significant pieces of legislation in our lifetime.”

For now, with a Republican in the White House, Boyle is focused on the possibility of tackling a problem he has spent years trying to change, even as he acknowledges that the debt ceiling is unlikely to be a major issue for most voters.

“Truly, you know, I leave this place and I’ve done one thing—if you can tell me I’ve left here and I was a major reason why we permanently ended this debt ceiling dysfunction and danger, I’d be very proud of that.”

With António Guterres’s nearly decade-long tenure as the Secretary-General of the United Nations drawing to a close amid rising conflict around the globe, the race to succeed him as the leader of the world’s most powerful diplomatic body is already underway.

Guterres this week delivered his final address to the U.N. General Assembly, in which he called for a greater focus on climate change, a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, “de-escalation and dialogue” in the Middle East, and regulations for artificial intelligence. 

At the end of his speech, Guterres bid goodbye to a crowd filled with many diplomats and world leaders who he has worked with over his two five-year terms.

"So, on January 1st, when ​I am no longer Secretary-General, be sure of this. Wherever I will be, whatever I will be doing, I will keep championing the conviction that peace is possible," he said. "I will continue ​to stand up for the values of the United Nations Charter and I will never, ever give up. Thank you."

Guterres’s successor is set to step in as Secretary-General at a consequential moment for global diplomacy. Research indicates that last year saw the highest number of active global conflicts since World War II and the greatest number of fatalities since the Rwandan genocide. Tensions in other parts of the world are threatening to boil over. Climate change is exacting a growing toll. AI's development is prompting increasing alarm. And the U.N. itself is confronting a growing funding crisis.

Read More: Make the U.N. Great Again: The Uphill Struggle Facing the Next Secretary General

Seven candidates are so far in the running to shepherd the U.N. through those challenges. Here’s what to know about the race. 

How will the next Secretary-General be chosen?

The process to choose the next Secretary-General began in November, when a joint letter from the presidents of the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council invited the nominations of candidates from member states. 

The initiation letter noted “with regret that no woman has ever held the position” and encouraged member states to “strongly consider nominating women as candidates.” 

Member states nominate candidates by submitting an application to the U.N. including a personal statement with that candidate’s vision for what they’d do in the role, a resume, and campaign finance disclosures. 

The General Assembly then holds “interactive dialogues” in which candidates express their hopes for the position and the U.N. in an opening statement, which is followed by questioning from the assembly. These televised hearings continue as candidates are submitted to the U.N.

Who becomes Secretary-General ultimately comes down to a decision from the U.N.’s 15-person Security Council, which recommends one individual to the General Assembly. The General Assembly then appoints that person to the position. 

As part of its selection process, the Security Council holds “straw polls,” in which members of the council select one of three options for each candidate: “encourage,” “discourage,” or “no opinion expressed.” This anonymized process is used to gauge whether candidates would be able to secure the nine votes needed for a formal recommendation by the Security Council. 

Who’s in the running? 

So far nine candidates have been nominated for the position of Secretary-General. Two of those candidates have withdrawn, leaving seven individuals vying to replace Guterres. 

Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett has been Guyana’s permanent representative to the U.N. since 2020 and previously served as foreign minister for her country and held senior roles at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Nominated by Guyana, her vision statement emphasizes refocusing on the U.N.’s core principles and “a more agile and effective United Nations.”

Rebeca Grynspan is the former vice president of Costa Rica, which nominated her for the position, and current secretary-general of trade and development for the U.N. She named three principles that define the mission she would undertake as Secretary-General: making the U.N. “more useful,” “more agile,” and “more accountable.”

Ivonne A-Baki, nominated by Tonga, is a long-time Ecuadorean diplomat who has twice served as the country’s ambassador to the U.S. She has also served as ambassador to countries including Qatar and France. Her platform highlights her involvement in the 1998 Ecuador-Peru peace settlement. “Where others speak of reform, I speak of renewal,” A-Baki’s vision statement reads. “An institution can be indispensable and in need of renewal at the same time, and ours is both. It is failing to live up to its own Charter, not for want of purpose but for want of focus and discipline.”

María Fernanda Espinosa is the former Foreign Minister and Defense Minister of Ecuador and served as President of the 73rd U.N. General Assembly in 2018. She was nominated by Antigua and Barbuda. Her vision consists of five pillars: “peace and security, development, digital and energy transformation, closing the delivery gap, and rebuilding credibility.” Garcés in her statement contended that “what is now in question is not the relevance of the United Nations, but its credibility.”

Rafael Mariano Grossi is an Argentine diplomat who has served as the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 2019. “The world does not need more declarations. It needs a United Nations capable of responding to the real demands of our time, with impartiality and a results-oriented approach grounded in facts,” Grossi, who was nominated by his country, wrote in his vision statement.

Olara Otunnu was Uganda’s permanent representative to the U.N. for five years and briefly served as the country’s foreign minister. He was also the U.N. under-secretary-general and the special representative for children and armed conflict. “Reform is no longer an optional choice. It is an imperative,” he said. 

Macky Sall was the president of Senegal for twelve years and has served as the chair of the Africa Union, a continental organization spanning 55 member states. He expressed a goal to “restore trust in multilateralism” if chosen as Secretary-General and said that “peace, security and development are intrinsically linked.”

Where does the race stand?

“We're at a moment right now where the race is entering a pretty pivotal phase,” says Daniel Forti, head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preventing deadly crises around the world. 

With just over three months remaining in Guterre’s term, it won’t be long before a successor is chosen. The Security Council, though, “is not especially enthusiastic about any of the current contenders,” Forti tells TIME. He cites the last three straw polls, which have favored Greenspan and Birkett, but without “a real consolidation of overwhelming support.” 

This lack of consensus, Forti believes, could suggest that other candidates may enter the race late in the game. Although there have been no formal announcements of new candidates, Forti has heard chatter surrounding certain individuals: Nickolay Mladenov, the former Bulgarian foreign minister and former U.N. Middle East envoy who currently serves as the Board of Peace’s High Representative for Gaza; U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed; and former Mexican Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena. 

“At this late stage, new candidates don't have the luxury of time to really socialize their candidacies, build out their visions, and elaborate very detailed policy platforms and bring them to U.N. member states, and try and win over the P5,” Forti says, referring to the five permanent members of the Security Council. The support of these members—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.

—is the most critical because they have the power to veto candidates before being recommended to the General Assembly.

Regardless of the outcome, Forti asserts that whoever is chosen to replace Guterres will inherit a fraught state of international affairs, and certainly be tested. 

“You have a really fragmented global landscape,” he says. “The challenges for whoever takes over the office are going to be immense.”

This month, Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, resigned, warning that AI companies are racing towards “self-improving superintelligence” and that he and those building it believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” And in July, a rogue swarm of AI agents escaped containment at OpenAI and hacked their way into another AI company just to cheat on a test. Over 1,000 employees at the top AI companies then implored the US government to ‘pace’ AI development.

Instances like these have shown that AI companies cannot reliably control their most advanced AIs. It is therefore clear to me that “pacing” while continuing on the same track is not the solution to the enormous risks at hand—and that the only way to keep humanity in control of AI is to prohibit the development of superintelligent AI altogether. 

AI companies are not just building chatbots. Their stated goal is to build superintelligent AI: AI systems that can fully replace and outcompete humans at any task. Because there is no way to keep superintelligence under control, Nobel Prize winners, AI engineers like Coxon, and even the CEOs of AI companies have repeatedly warned that it poses an extinction risk to humanity.

Let me be clear: AI is the crucial technology of the 21st century, vital for ensuring national defense and economic competitiveness. But unlike controllable AI systems that should be integrated to strengthen our security, superintelligent AI would pose unprecedented national and global security threats. It would not be a tool humans can leverage: it would be an adversary, able to autonomously pursue its own objectives and permanently evade human control.

We have only to look at the Hugging Face hack this summer to understand how close we are to losing control. A rogue swarm of hundreds of AI agents broke out of OpenAI’s systems, reached the internet, and then hacked into the multi-billion-dollar company Hugging Face, all to cheat on an “internal” evaluation. For almost two weeks, OpenAI had no idea that this was happening. In the company’s own words, this incident was a “‘warning shot’ for us and for the world” that demonstrated how advanced AIs can now “take dangerous actions that no human directed.”

Instead of waiting for another warning shot, governments need to act now to prohibit superintelligence. Luckily, we do not need to search far for a framework on how to tackle this threat. On Sept. 8, Alex Sobel MP introduced my organization ControlAI’s Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill into the UK Parliament, making it the first legislature in the world to introduce a bill prohibiting superintelligence. Rather than a verdict on all AI, this bill targets superintelligence development specifically: prohibiting it domestically and requiring the UK to pursue an international agreement prohibiting it around the world.

This legislative framework allows the government to monitor and restrict precursors to superintelligence, such as AI capabilities like hacking. Crucially, it enables the detection and shutdown of superintelligence development well before any project gets dangerously close, enabling the country to make use of such precursors for legitimate AI purposes. It is an actionable framework that governments should evaluate and adopt, particularly by accelerating international efforts toward a ban on superintelligence.

But what about China? If superintelligence is developed anywhere, every nation and every citizen is under threat. This means that any American ban on superintelligence needs to be paired with America and its allies brokering international agreements that prevent and deter the development of superintelligence anywhere in the world.

This does not require creating an international regulator. All we need is a strong coalition of countries that bans superintelligence at home, and ensures that no one builds it abroad. 

While announcing his resignation on Sept 8., the now-former Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon wrote, “I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race” toward superintelligence. We might not be today, but we can change course quickly.

The momentum behind an international ban on developing superintelligence is picking up speed. Over 200 cross-party lawmakers across the UK and Canada have been ahead of the curve on superintelligence risks by recognizing it as a global and national security threat as part of ControlAI’s campaign. In addition to the newly introduced UK bill, Vice President J.D. Vance told AI companies this week, "If you're building Frankenstein, stop." Further, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar announced in early September that they will introduce a bill prohibiting superintelligence development and calling for international agreements to prohibit it.

And in October 2025, a broad coalition called to prohibit superintelligence internationally. This was signed by the scientific “godfathers” of AI Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and bipartisan political figures like former President Trump advisor Steve Bannon, Ambassador Susan Rice, and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, former President Trump advisor Steve Bannon. 

Right now, many government officials and members of the public are hearing about the extinction risk from superintelligence for the first time. The warnings have reached millions. The next step is concrete action to address this national and global security threat.

This is a watershed moment, and we can’t afford to waste it. Governments have a clear choice: champion an international ban, or let the race to superintelligence reach its catastrophic end

Louisa Moats was at a conference in Daphne, Ala., earlier this year when she was approached by a group of teachers. For the 81-year-old, this was a relatively new occurrence. “They’re poorly paid, they don’t look very healthy, they certainly didn’t have an elite education and I feel this concern and admiration for them as they do this job,” she says, with her characteristic frankness. “They come up to me, with this glazed, starry-eyed look, and thank me as if I, personally, was the conduit to their renewed sense of purpose and competence. I get that a lot now.”

Moats has become a late-in-life heroine, at least in some circles, because of a teacher-training program she wrote decades ago that has become a buzzy property. She is not exactly basking in the attention. “I take it with a grain of salt,” she says, sitting in her remote Vermont lake house. “Behind that is my sense that what I would want them to do is probably not exactly what’s going on in their classroom, but it’s a reasonable enough approximation that it’s making a difference for kids.”

Her skepticism can be forgiven. For a long time, Moats found herself on the losing side of America’s so-called reading wars, the back-and-forth over the best way to teach kids to read. She and her cohort of researchers promote the idea that reading is a skill that must be painstakingly taught, first through an understanding of the way sounds make up speech and get represented as letters, then through explicit instruction on how language works. But the prevailing view, until a few years ago, was that most children would figure out how to decode the letters if given enough encouragement, stimulating material, and context clues, just as they do with speech.

“This is still something I ponder all the time,” Moats says, about why schools chose to teach the way they did. One explanation she has landed on: people did not keep up with the research. “Usually they have not sat down and looked at the evidence—the nature of the evidence, the scope of the evidence, the durability of the evidence—and so they don’t understand what the science is about.” 

Interest in “the science” has recently increased dramatically, alongside the level of panic about literacy rates in the U.S. About 4 in 10 American children have not mastered basic reading-comprehension skills by fourth grade, the worst result in 20 years, according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). A third of eighth-graders also fall below the reading level expected for their age. The average 12th-grader scores three points lower on a reading test than his or her peers did in 2019, and 10 points lower than those from 1992.

Some of that can be laid at the door of school closures during the pandemic. But it’s a problem with deeper roots: roughly a quarter of young adults (16 to 24) are functionally illiterate, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Professors bemoan having to assign ever-shorter reading assignments. Time-use surveys report that people from 20 to 34 spend no more than 10 minutes a day reading for pleasure. Grave declarations have proclaimed the “end of reading.”

To combat the decline, states have looked to the few education districts where students are showing improvement and followed their example by enacting what are known as science-of-reading laws. The laws, which have been passed in 42 states and D.C., mostly in the past seven years, mandate that schools use very structured techniques—including foundational instruction on phonics. Many teachers did not learn this approach in college and have to be retrained.

Moats’ program, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), has become the preferred way for schools to meet the requirements. The course is famously long and rigorous. Teachers must delve into language theory and cognitive science before any advice on instruction is given. It isolates 19 vowel sounds and 29 consonant sounds in U.S. English. Moats’ ideas are generally associated with phonology (how words sound), but the program goes deeply into morphology (how words are built of parts) and orthography (how words are written). It’s also relatively pricey. Public contracts and appropriations suggest statewide LETRS rollouts cost up to $1,700 per educator, before factoring in substitute teachers, planning time, coaching, and administration. And it’s not clear that all the knowledge translates into better teaching methods.

But that hasn’t stopped 23 states from purchasing the program, and at least one, Alabama, from paying teachers $1,000 if they did all of it. In 2020, fewer than 25,000 teachers had enrolled in the 155-hour course, according to Lexia, the company that now owns it. In 2025, that number reached 700,000, mostly lower elementary. (There are approximately 1.5 million K-5 educators in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) Michigan, whose recent standardized test results showed 38.2% of third-graders were proficient in reading, announced this summer it was spending $75 million so that every reading teacher could do the course. (It has already spent $44 million on teachers who did it voluntarily.) “The last three years, I have seen more money from this than I ever expected to see from it,” says Moats, who earns what she calls “a small royalty” on each sale.

Still, whether out of native New England reticence or because she’s almost sure she’s seen this movie before, Moats, now allegedly retired, regards this turn of events with mild suspicion. “It’s humbling, it’s a bit bewildering, it’s a bit surrealistic,” she says. Finally, when asked directly, she adds, “and yes, it’s very gratifying.” Educators may dismiss the idea of the reading wars, claiming teaching is not an us-vs.-them endeavor, but if they are real—and it looks like they are—it sure seems that Moats has emerged as a victor.

She intended to be a folk singer. But having graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in music, Moats needed a job, and her sister got her one in Boston, with a researcher in the emerging field of neuropsychology, who needed people to type up reports. He also needed a lab technician, so he gave Moats a white coat and trained her to administer tests. “That’s how I learned to think about the kids with learning disabilities who were sent to our clinic,” she says. “I learned how to think of them through this neurological lens.” 

When Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College offered one of the first fellowships for a master’s in learning disabilities, Moats jumped at the chance to move to Nashville. “I tromped up and down Music Row and got a contract as a songwriter and got a master’s degree in learning disabilities,” she says. “It was fun, and it was completely worthless as far as learning how to teach.” Armed with a balance beam, a chalkboard, and some visual aids, she was hired to “cure” learning disabilities in local schools. “The experience of the total disconnect between what I learned in a master’s program and the realities of the kids and their needs,” she says, has given her sympathy for teachers now realizing that the reading-instruction methods they learned in college might be flawed. 

Even though her music career was progressing (she had a songwriting contract with Screen Gems) and her career in special education was opening doors (she had a parent-teacher meeting with Johnny Cash), Moats was not a Nashville type. She found the music industry predatory and missed the snow. (Her daughter Charlotte would later become a Junior Olympics ski champion.) She moved back to her old job at Tufts–New England Medical Center and claims she more or less fell into a doctorate at Harvard, where she encountered the terrifying but brilliant linguist Carol Chomsky, wife of Noam, and Jeanne Chall, after whom Harvard’s reading lab is named. “Chall was the one who got me into understanding how to look at spelling errors in a very detailed and informed way,” says Moats. 

She began to observe that children who couldn’t read or spell just did not register the relationship between the sounds in a word and the letters. They struggled especially when the words sounded a little alike but were spelled very differently, as in juice and choose, or spelled alike but pronounced differently as in the s sound in was and saw. Moats came to believe teaching kids to read entails understanding a lot more about the brain and language processing than the average teacher knows.

In the mid-1980s, after a few years of helping struggling readers, from impoverished children to Dartmouth academics, in her private practice in East Thetford, Vt., Moats realized that earlier intervention was needed. So she began to teach teachers, at Harvard and at smaller Vermont colleges. She gave her incoming postgraduates surveys. “The results were appalling,” she says. “They didn’t know anything.” Many had been taught the whole-language theory of reading, which suggested that teaching students to decode words distracted them from understanding their meaning, and therefore students should learn the words as a unit, not by blending graphemes. She wrote an academic paper about it, which was republished by the American Federation of Teachers in 1995. 

A few years earlier, another literacy researcher, G. Reid Lyon, had been put in charge of creating and overseeing a federally funded reading-research network, a large multisite program that investigated how children learn to read and why some don’t. He asked Moats to help. “What I needed was a leader and a teacher and a teacher of teachers, which she was extraordinary at,” says Lyon, also now retired in Vermont. “A lot of professors can get up there and quack away, but they don’t really have the wherewithal to demonstrate it. She did.” Moats was assigned to the Washington, D.C., site.

“Boy, did I have impostor syndrome,” she says. “Here I was in this room full of eminences, and I had been reading their work, I’d been citing them, I’d been learning from them.” She also had some hard lessons to learn as a northeastern hippie in a majority-Black school district. “I just couldn’t believe the state of affairs in these schools,” says Moats. “Libraries with no books, no doors on the lavatory, no running water in the sinks.” She labored to get the teachers to trust her. Eventually, one of her assistants took her aside. “She said, ‘You’re the director, you’ve got to look like the director,’” recalls Moats, who favors denim and heavy glasses. “I said, ‘You have any advice?’ She said, ‘Go to Ann Taylor.’” The project was a success, her nine schools’ reading rates soared, and local politicians started to drop by for photo opportunities. 

Then national politicians took notice too. The No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in 2002 enshrined the work of Lyon’s team and the National Reading Panel. Moats was tapped to write the teacher-training component of the act’s Reading First initiative, which became LETRS. 

Reading First was expensive—about a billion dollars was spent on a few million children—and the law mandated that a report be made of how effective it was by 2008. The news was not great. While students had been taught in a way that research had said was most effective, and first-graders did decode words better, elementary students as a whole were not better at understanding what they read than the students who were not part of the initiative. An Institute of Education Sciences (IES) report on LETRS in particular found that while the training improved teachers’ understanding of language, it did not improve outcomes for students. 

Moats is still steaming about that analysis. “You don’t get an impact on student achievement after one year,” she says. “You’ve barely gotten through the professional-development material.” She also notes that after four years of Reading First, many state-level reading analyses showed improvement, especially in high-poverty regions. Nevertheless, Reading First’s funding was not renewed, and states were allowed to go their own way with reading instruction. 

It is perhaps reductive to boil this history down to a battle between two women. But it is also true that around the time Moats and her colleagues were doing their work, another approach was ascendant, championed largely by a figure with a lot of the kind of main-character energy that Moats lacks. The founder of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) at Columbia University, Lucy Calkins, promulgated the idea of balanced literacy, which purported to be a détente between the phonics camp and the whole-language advocates. Calkins, whose background was in writing instruction, believed that children first of all needed enticing books at a level they could manage and a ton of cheerleading. “I always knew phonics mattered,” Calkins says now. “When kids write, every single minute of what they’re doing shows their phonics.” Nevertheless, the curriculum materials she authored had little phonics, and suggested that teachers use a separate phonics course.

“A lot of people who have a casual acquaintance with the research have persuaded themselves that balanced reading instruction means a little of this, a little of that,” Moats wrote in a seminal essay about balanced literacy in 2000. “Take a cup of phonics from one cupboard, add a half-pint of whole language from the fridge, and the resulting blend will succeed with children while avoiding the battles and conflicts of the ‘reading wars.’ Everyone will be happy, and all will be well. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way.”

This was the world that Margaret Goldberg was introduced to after she completed her master’s degree at UC Berkeley. In 2015, she arrived at a Title I Oakland school and quickly found that the methods she used in higher-performing schools just down the road did not work. After discovering Moats’ essay via Google, she started using more structured literacy methods with some of her classes and took a balanced-literacy approach with others. “I didn’t realize that I was teaching on both sides of the reading wars,” says Goldberg, who co-founded the Right to Read Project in 2019. The results were stark. “All of the ideals of balanced literacy were happening with the kids who were being taught systematically and explicitly how to decode. The students I was teaching balanced literacy to—I was just trying to sell them on reading.” 

Eventually, parents, especially those with dyslexic children, who tend to need more explicit phonics instruction, began to protest. Mississippi, which gave all its K-3 teachers LETRS training starting in 2014, was the first state to improve its numbers. By 2019, its fourth-grade NAEP reading score had risen 10 points from 2013—the largest gain of any state during that period. LETRS wasn’t the sole reason for Mississippi’s success. The state also added new practices around teacher coaching and accountability, more student screening and intervention, and held back a bunch of third-graders. But the teacher training was key. 

Meanwhile, public-radio journalist Emily Hanford amassed enough evidence against the balanced-literacy methodology to publish a 2018 audio documentary that would become her influential Sold a Story podcast. Politicians, administrators, and even teachers’ colleges took heed. But change, especially to higher education, came slowly. Carol Tolman, one of the co-authors of later versions of LETRS, was an early trainer in the program. At one college, she says, “there was a letter on my podium, just saying, ‘We don’t need the likes of you here. As soon as you leave, this is all going to change and go back.’ I mean, it got really heated.”  

Alabama piloted the use of LETRS in 2018, and expanded it to the whole state in 2021, by which time South Carolina and North Carolina were also jumping on board. In 2022 they were joined by Kentucky and Arkansas. In 2021 North Carolina approved almost $50 million to train its K-5 educators using LETRS. Not all of them appreciated it. “I’m all for the science of reading. I’m all for providing structured sequence materials to teachers,” says John Davis, who did the training as a third-grade teacher. But he knew a lot of the material already. And the main curriculum used in his school was not aligned with LETRS methodology. “You spent all this money and time on this training, and it’s not showing up in our reading curriculum?” says Davis. “It just seems like a waste.” 

Even Calkins came around—a bit. She rereleased her curriculum materials a few times, adding more phonics emphasis, but criticism of some of the methods she recommended mounted, and after Columbia University detached itself from TCRWP in 2023, she founded her own institute. “I am all for what I’ve learned from the science of reading, and also the new relationships I’ve developed and the new organizations I belong to now,” she says. “All that’s been helpful, but it’s awful to have teachers teaching in ways they don’t believe in.”

Indeed, the prospect of yet more mandatory training brought many teachers zero joy. Lisa Anderson was one of them. She had been an elementary teacher in Minnesota for more than 20 years when she was required in 2022 to undertake LETRS. “Another hurdle, something more to jump through,” she says. “The pendulum’s swinging, we jump on, and let’s see where this one lands.” 

That feeling lasted until about halfway into Volume 2. Before she’d even completed the program, she began to implement some of its methods—the school was also using a different curriculum that was more aligned with LETRS ideas—and saw surprising results. Students were starting to read, even many who were floundering. A new emotion emerged: anger. Why had she never been shown this information before? She was moved to write to her alma mater, Bemidji State, and demand a refund of the fees associated with the courses she had taken on teaching children to read. “You didn’t do your job,” she says she told them. (A spokesperson told TIME that the college continually updates its curriculum in accordance with state standards.) 

While LETRS’ success has assured Moats a comfortable retirement, she is still hoping that it will pay other dividends. “I hope that maybe we’re getting beyond the reading wars,” she says, meaning that the correct way to teach reading has been established. “But I don’t feel that secure about what it is I’m trying to teach actually taking hold. I think people do the course, but they don’t realize the power of the information.” 

Sitting on a chair in her dining room, not far from the guitar on another one, is a spelling sheet from a second-grade child in California that a teacher has sent through asking for help. Moats sighs deeply as she reads it. (“She sighs a lot,” says Lyon.) The child has written all the -igh words (thigh, high, fight) like -ing words (thing, hing, fing). “He’s trying to memorize letters by their appearance. He has no idea about the correspondence between speech and print,” she says. Even today, five or more years after the science-of-reading revolution began and decades after the Reading Panel, “this teacher cannot look at these writing samples and recognize poor phoneme awareness.” (Surveys suggest that even with all the legislation and training, no more than half of K-3 teachers are using science-of-reading techniques.) 

LETRS is also hitting critical mass just as Moats cedes control over the quality of the training, to the consternation of some of the earlier employees. “The mission became the money,” says Leta Palmiter, a former LETRS trainer who joined the company shortly after Lexia was bought by the private-equity firm Veritas Capital in 2020. “Not the people who received the training.” A Lexia spokesperson says improving literacy “remains at the heart of everything we do.”

It’s too soon to tell—especially with the interruptions caused by the pandemic clouding the data—whether any of the states that have newly adopted LETRS have managed to improve the reading skills of their students. And even if they do, it will be difficult to tell how much LETRS is responsible. A $4 million five-year randomized study of its effect is under way, but the results will not be available until 2029. A recent analysis by the Kentucky Department of Education found that schools with higher rates of LETRS-trained teachers posted larger gains in reading proficiency than schools with lower rates, but it was an internal study. Meanwhile, NAEP reading scores ticked up a few points for 9-year-olds in 2025 (although not for 13-year-olds), and another national report showed improvement in K-8 reading skills from 2025 to 2026. “I think all this work can only help,” says David Liben, a literacy consultant and one of the authors of the 2010 Common Core standards. “I just don’t think that at this point we have the evidence that we can make a claim that we’re turning a corner now.”

Experts agree that teacher training alone is not a solution for America’s reading ills. “This idea that nobody was teaching phonics, it just is absurd,” says former director of reading for Chicago Public Schools Timothy Shanahan, whose recent book Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives takes aim at balanced literacy, but who is also not sold on its replacement. For every Mississippi, he says, there’s a state like Arkansas, where LETRS hasn’t seemed to make any difference. And the tight focus on teacher training has come at a cost to other urgent problems in education, like truancy. “Is it that the kids are getting poor instruction, or that our attendance levels are so low right now that kids just aren’t learning?” he asks. 

Mistakes in education take a long time to show up, and so do fixes. By the time the students who learned how to read from LETRS-trained teachers are in the workforce, the landscape for communication may be unrecognizable. Even now, reading is not as vital to thriving as it was a mere five years ago. There are remarkable new ways to glean information and disperse it. Generative AI can write for us, and books can be read aloud by machines, so some of the disadvantages of being illiterate may be overcome by technology. 

But the ability to recognize and manipulate written words will still be a critical skill, say most educators, because it is inextricably linked to thinking. Decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and education suggest that becoming literate changes how people reason, solve problems, organize knowledge, and deliberate on their own thinking. “The mental work that is reading,” says Moats, “is the essence of learning.”

California’s governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency ahead of a potentially historic El Niño. In a statement released Sept. 22, Newsom said the declaration is meant to ensure communities have the resources they need to handle the impacts expected this winter. 

“California is strongest when we look out for one another. That is what this action is about,” Newsom said. “Giving communities the support they need, giving first responders the tools to do their jobs, and giving families the confidence that their state is ready.”

Read more: How Should You Prepare For A Super El Niño?

The state of emergency allows the government to mobilize state resources: readying flood-fighting supplies such as sandbags and pumps, preparing the National Guard to assist with flood response and search and rescue efforts, and fortifying roads and infrastructure. State environmental and natural resources agencies will also fast-track permitting and engage in other efforts to better prepare for flooding and landslides. 

How will El Niño impact California?

El Niño typically brings wetter, more intense winters to California—which could leave the state more vulnerable to severe winter storms, heavy rainfall, landslides, and flooding. An El Niño year does not guarantee that these conditions will occur, but it does increase the likelihood. 

Climate change is also supercharging weather events, and El Niño is no exception. One study published in August found that El Niño events are now nearly 40% stronger than before the Industrial era. This year’s El Niño is predicted to be the strongest in recorded history. 

What impacts has California already felt from this year's El Niño?

The governor’s office noted that the state has already experienced coastal flooding attributable to El Niño. The state can expect to see Kelvin waves, slow moving pulses of water that can stretch thousands of miles and raise sea levels along the coastline—increasing the risk for coastal flooding and erosion, and offshore Pacific hurricanes. Climate scientists also warn that the Pacific can expect to see a temporary 6-inch to 2-ft. rise in sea levels this winter. 

A number of southern California towns, including Malibu, Laguna Beach, and Long Beach, have already seen significant coastal erosion due to El Niño and Pacific hurricanes this year. 

How can Californians prepare for El Niño?

The state has urged residents to take action to prepare for El Niño by signing up for emergency alerts and learning their flood risk, and having an evacuation plan and emergency kit at the ready. 

It’s all part of an effort to ensure that the state is not caught off guard by El Niño. “We are not waiting for this season’s storms to be on our doorstep,” Cal OES director Caroline Thomas Jacobs said in a statement. “By planning early and coordinating resources ahead of El Niño, we are working to ensure communities and first responders have the personnel, equipment, and support they need to prepare for severe weather, respond quickly when conditions change, and protect lives and property across California.”

“From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land,” President Donald Trump declared in his inaugural address in January 2017. “From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.” An insular, populist nationalism, coupled with an antipathy toward globalist ideas and institutions, became the central theme and the clarion call of both his terms in the White House.

President Trump has spent considerable energy lambasting the United Nations, an institution the United States helped create 80 years ago and has shaped ever since. He has derided it as an “unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy,” and little more than “a talking shop.”

A majority of Americans no longer agree with their president. In a Sept. 2025 global poll commissioned by The Rockefeller Foundation,  61% of American respondents agreed that their country should cooperate with others to solve global challenges, even if doing so meant compromising on some national interests. Only 16% responded with a no. Such American support for international cooperation has only increased. When the same question was posed in the 2026 iteration of the poll, which surveyed more than 35,000 people across 34 countries, support in the U.S. rose by four percentage points to 65%, while the opposition fell by two percentage points to 14%.

American public support for multilateral cooperation in 2026 exceeds that of Western Europe, where it stands at 61%. Despite President Trump’s attacks on the UN, 62% of Americans say they trust the institution—eight percentage points more than last year—while only 30% claim to distrust it. Nearly half of American respondents, 46%, say they comfortable with the UN playing a leading role on the world stage. Only 21% say they are uncomfortable.

As global stability has eroded and peace has grown increasingly fragile, the desire for cooperation across border has increased among Americans. In the same poll, respondents were asked to choose three priorities from a list of 13 global issues: among American respondents, 40% ranked preventing wars and conflicts among their most pressing concerns. 

The message to President Trump is clear. For most of the last 80 years, America has acted multilaterally, even during its unipolar moment. Americans do not want the U.S. to act unilaterally in an increasingly multipolar era. They want their country to practice the politics of consensus building rather than coercion.

A new call for international cooperation

I joined an initiative involving 100 former prime ministers and presidents from every continent that calls upon today’s leaders to build a stronger basis for cooperation in an increasingly fragmented and multipolar world. On Monday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, many of us came together to endorse core principles that could provide the basis for a new global consensus on solving shared problems and helping those in need.

As the poll commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation found, more than half of American respondents, 53%, would support their president publicly endorsing these principles of cooperation. This finding suggests that America is not a nation committed to an “America first and America only” ideology, but a nation with a strong sense of the enduring values that bind it to the wider world.

Yet as American support for cooperation with the rest of the world rises, the inclination across the rest of the world to cooperate with America hangs in the balance. For decades, people everywhere have looked to America for hope and inspiration. That faith is now being  questioned.

America’s appeal as global leader, the same poll found, has diminished. Only 39% of the respondents worldwide are comfortable with the U.S. playing a leading role on the world stage. And 34% of the respondents across the globe regard the U.S. as a major threat to their own countries. On that grim metric, Russia scored even higher, at higher 42%. China, surprisingly, fared better at 30%.

When respondents to the 2026 poll were asked which countries they would be comfortable seeing take a leading role in world affairs, America ranked in the bottom half of the table. Canada outpolled America, with 60% of the respondents globally comfortable with it playing such a role, the highest vote recorded for any country.

Several middle powers were viewed more favorably by respondents as potential global leaders: Japan (58%), Australia (55%), the United Kingdom (54%), Germany, Spain, and Italy (all 53%), France (51%) and South Korea (42%).

While none of these countries comes remotely close to matching American economic and military power, America’s soft power has certainly suffered in recent years. It is estimated that 900 million people want to live somewhere other than their own country.

Surveys asking people which country they would prefer to live in have consistently put America in the lead. According to Gallup data, 24% of respondents in 2009 named America as their preferred new home. By 2025, that preference had shrunk to a mere 15%.

Renewing American leadership

America can still regain its soft power. Americans have not lost their optimism or their sense of belief in a better future. In the 2026 poll, 55% of American respondents professed that, during a crisis, their own community would pull together. An even more decisive majority, 64%, believe that, as Americans they share a responsibility to help others, even in countries they don’t know. And 76% of American respondents believe it is possible to build a better future for the next generation.

Americans need to convey these convictions more clearly and widely. Under pressure from an affordability crisis at home and military overreach abroad, Americans may not any longer be prepared to “bear any burden or pay any price.”

But the values that underpin America are still embraced by a majority of its people. This suggests that America still has what it takes to resume the global leadership that is needed more than ever in our turbulent world.

As fuel prices at the pump reach record highs since the outbreak of the war in Iran, Washington is warming to the idea of a temporary diesel export ban as a way to lower costs.

“I’ve said let's not send out the diesel—we make a lot of diesel,” President Donald Trump said as he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York on Tuesday. “That could have a little bit of an effect on regular automobile gasoline because when you do that, you know, it’s a sort of a flow.”

Trump echoed what a cacophony of Republican lawmakers, many representing farm states, have called for in the past few weeks. Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa posted on social media Saturday: “High diesel prices ARE KILLING FARMERS INCOME.” Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska, meanwhile, said Tuesday that the cost of diesel “is just too damn high” and an export moratorium should be in place until the conflict in Iran ends.

Diesel recorded its highest average price on Tuesday amid the energy dearth caused by the war, averaging about $6.53 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. It is at least 90¢ higher than last month’s average, and a huge leap from the $3.75 mean just before the war.

Ballooning prices threaten to impact the global economy as diesel powers most heavy-duty farming and industrial machinery as well as transport like trucks and trains. Higher diesel costs also add to the cost of moving goods and could worsen inflation, which the Federal Reserve has tried to tamp down.

Trump referred to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said that the Administration is examining whether a diesel export ban is “feasible in terms of the overall refining capacity and whether a full or partial ban would work.”

It’s unclear if, or when, the Administration will decide on a moratorium on diesel exports. Trump’s own Energy Secretary Chris Wright showed more skepticism: speaking to CBS News earlier this month, Wright said the U.S. is considering “all options of how you can move prices that are favorable for American consumers,” but he also argued that to address a shortage, “you want to keep as much energy flowing as possible.”

Rising costs present a problem for an increasingly unpopular Trump heading into the November midterms, where the Republican Party he leads has to defend its slim majority in Congress. Disgruntled voters, according to some polls, believe the U.S. economy has suffered under Trump’s policies, with many from the GOP also souring on them.

Analysts say ban would give swift, but fleeting, relief

The U.S. is one of the world's largest diesel producers and exporters. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that American refineries produce about 5.3 million barrels of distillate fuel oils—referring to fuels that include diesel and home heating oil—per day. Diesel exports amount to about 1.5 million barrels daily, almost a fifth of the roughly 8 million barrels traded by sea each day. 

But since diesel is traded globally, prices in the U.S. are shaped by this balance of supply and demand. The recent price surge has been linked to production and shipping disruptions from the wars in Ukraine and Iran.

Many Republican lawmakers pushing for the diesel export ban argue that it could provide American consumers with some relief. Last week, Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee filed bills to address rising diesel costs through export controls and argued that such controls “drive down prices while also helping Americans keep more money in their pockets.” 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota also indicated that he was “open to exploring” a diesel export ban to lower prices.

Analysts from the Washington think tank Atlantic Council wrote in a Tuesday note that such an export ban “would likely create more problems than it would solve.”

While the ban is expected to “almost certainly” push prices down for consumers in the Gulf Coast and the Midwest, it may pull prices up for those on the West Coast. “If the global price of diesel rises and supplies in the heartland cannot be routed to the coasts quickly enough, then these regions could see higher prices,” the analysts wrote. They also warned of knockon effects including a possible uptick in grocery prices.

Garrett Golding, assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in a social media thread on Monday that even with the swift dip in diesel prices, a diesel export ban would tighten the global balance enough to cause price increases that “will boomerang back” onto the East Coast—and to a smaller degree, the West Coast.

Refineries will also have to reduce their run rate—the percentage of a refinery’s maximum capacity used to process crude oil into refined products, Golding added. This would lead to reduced production of gasoline, jet fuel, and other refined products, “which means higher prices.”

The Atlantic Council analysts also warned that an export ban would have follow-on effects outside of the U.S., including pushing international diesel prices up, which could similarly “boomerang” on the country.

The API opposes a ban and argues that doing so risks “making a difficult situation worse.” President and CEO Mike Sommers said in a statement, “We understand the administration is looking at every option to deliver relief, but restricting U.S. energy exports would only compound the problem—exacerbating refining challenges and ultimately hurting consumers.” 

Politics fuels energy policy

The diesel export ban has been a point of contention for GOP lawmakers ahead of the November elections. Some from oil-producing states argue against the proposal on the basis that a ban could push prices down for producers under their jurisdiction.

Outgoing Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the largest oil-producing state in the U.S., claimed that the ban is a “gimmick.”

Cornyn’s colleague, Senator Lisa Murkowski of major oil producer Alaska, cast her doubts on the export ban to the Hill: “We’re talking about global supply, so I worry that we do something in the short-term … that doesn’t really move the needle.”

Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota also expressed criticism and said he is instead looking to other options, including restarting idled refineries. “The bigger problem we’ve got right now is, as I understand it, in California, we’ve already lost two more refineries because of California’s strict environmental rules,” Rounds told the Hill. “I would like to get those back up and operational again.”

The reactions exhibit how keen Republicans are to appear that they are providing solutions to the rising costs of living. As Reuters’ energy columnist Ron Bousso put it, fuel costs are increasingly becoming a political liability, and for the wider GOP, “a politically popular ‘quick fix’ may prove difficult to resist.”

2026 has, without a doubt, been the year of IMAX. That’s due in large part to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which broke countless box office and IMAX records after its release in mid-July. But it’s not just The Odyssey. Films like Project Hail Mary and the year’s biggest blockbuster, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, played in the format, and IMAX theaters will be full through the end of the year, thanks to the final installment in the Dune franchise. In August, lines formed around the block at the AMC theater in New York City’s Upper West Side as people waited to secure coveted tickets to see Dune: Part Three in IMAX 70mm—even though the movie doesn’t come out until mid-December. 

But I would argue this fervor is misplaced. I would go so far as to say that IMAX is overrated. 

This trend didn’t come out of nowhere: IMAX has been on the rise in the past few years, as post-pandemic audiences are increasingly drawn to movie theaters for spectacle and eventization that can’t be replicated at home. In 2025, moviegoers flocked to see films like Sinners, One Battle After Another, F1, and the final Mission: Impossible in IMAX. The gold standard for cinephiles is the ultra-rare IMAX 70mm screening, which requires a projector large enough to play the giant 70mm film reels (unlike standard IMAX screenings, which use digital projection). Only 26 theaters in the United States can project 70mm IMAX, and the competition to get tickets to films like The Odyssey and Dune: Part Three at those theaters has created a resale market that rivals popular sporting events and concerts. 

IMAX’s popularity has been a boon for the box office and great for the movie industry, which has struggled to regain audiences after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it’s also caused feelings of FOMO in those who aren’t able to secure tickets, or who don’t live near an IMAX theater (let alone the rare theater that can project IMAX 70mm). And many so-called IMAX theaters in the country are not actually true IMAX, meaning people paying extra for those screenings in “LieMAX” auditoriums aren’t even getting all the benefits of the format. 

This summer, social media sites were flooded with people sharing photos and videos of their Odyssey viewing experiences, looking for advice on how to secure a coveted ticket, or searching for one to buy off of someone else. There was a pervasive feeling of: If I’m not seeing The Odyssey in IMAX, am I really seeing it at all? 

While seeing a movie in IMAX is undoubtedly a great experience, it’s not necessary to enjoy a movie—or to be a true cinephile. At the end of the day, you’ll still get all of the intended narrative and emotional impact in a “regular” theater, even if you aren’t getting the full IMAX screen ratio. A 2014 study by psychologists Andreas M. Baranowski and Heiko Hecht compared sizes of screens with regard to viewer immersion and found that, while larger screens were more immersive, when participants were asked to evaluate the movie they had just seen, the screen size did not affect their answer. 

Filmmakers understand this as well. Though they might prefer you to see their movie in IMAX, they ultimately shoot with all formats and audiences in mind, knowing that not everyone will see it in IMAX. (Some people will even watch it on the backside of a plane seat!) When framing shots—even on an IMAX camera—they keep anything essential to the narrative in the core ratio that most people will see the movie in. 

Despite all the jokes about “watching a movie as Christopher Nolan intended,” in a recent interview with 60 Minutes, the director said he didn’t mind people watching his movies on iPads. “I’m very much in favor of and in awe of the easy access that we have now to films, for people to be able to immerse themselves in film and film history,” Nolan said in the interview, drawing a comparison to his childhood spent learning about film through VHS tapes. 

In the 2020s, movie projection technology is the best it’s ever been. If IMAX isn’t your jam, or if you can’t secure tickets, there are plenty of alternative ways to see movies that are better than all of human history has ever had access to. Dolby is a great option, with its enhanced color and immersive sound, and 35mm and 70mm screenings are plentiful among theaters around the country if you prefer to get the film experience. 

So, it doesn’t make you less of a cinephile if you can’t get to an IMAX screen (especially one that can show 70mm IMAX), or if you prefer to not view a movie in IMAX. For people with sensitivities to loud noises or bright lights, it may not be the best option. 

There is a difference, but it isn’t enough to stop you from enjoying the film. I saw The Odyssey twice: once in IMAX 70mm, and once in 70mm on a “regular” screen, and enjoyed the non-IMAX experience much better, as it felt less visually and auditorily overwhelming. The same sentiment can be found on various subreddits devoted to moviegoing. 

At the end of the day, no matter what theater you choose to view a film in, as long as you’re having fun and actively engaging with the work, you’re doing it right.

This summer, the ocean sent us another warning. In August, global sea-surface temperatures reached their highest level on record. Days later, the most comprehensive assessment of coral reefs ever published showed that increasingly frequent marine heatwaves are leaving reefs less time to recover between bleaching events. Global hard coral cover has declined by 9.5% compared with the 1980-2009 average, driven primarily by human-induced climate change.

For me, this is deeply concerning, but also a reason to act. I come from Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands off the coast of East Africa where the ocean is inseparable from our lives, livelihoods, and future. It supports the food we eat, the jobs people depend on, and the resilience of our economy.

During my years in office, I saw what is possible when governments make ocean protection a political priority. In 2020, during my presidency, Seychelles designated 30% of its waters for protection, years before the world adopted the global goal of protecting 30% of land and ocean by 2030. That experience taught me that ambitious conservation is possible when political commitment is matched by action.

With fewer than four years remaining until 2030, the international community needs to bring that same determination to protecting the global ocean.

Since governments adopted the global goal in 2022, countries have made important progress. Nearly 20% of land and inland waters are now designated as protected or conserved, and existing commitments could bring terrestrial protection to around 27% by 2030.

But the picture at sea is very different. Around 10% of the global ocean is currently designated as protected or conserved, and existing commitments would raise that figure to only around 12% by 2030.

The next phase of this global effort must therefore put much greater emphasis on the ocean. Governments need to establish more marine protected areas, strengthen national commitments where ambition remains too low, and move rapidly from targets to protection in the water.

This matters far beyond conservation. Healthy marine ecosystems support fisheries and food security, sustain livelihoods and economies, store carbon, and help protect coastal communities from climate impacts.

The recent coral findings make the consequences of delay clear. Marine heatwaves are becoming more frequent, leaving reefs less time to recover. Recovery is still possible, but ecosystems need time and the right conditions to recover. 

Climate action remains essential, but reducing pressures such as overfishing, pollution and damaging extraction can give vulnerable ecosystems a better chance of recovery. Well-designed and properly managed marine protected areas can give nature the space and time it needs.

But drawing a boundary on a map is not enough. The 2026 Ocean Protection Gap Report finds that while around 10% of the global ocean is designated as protected or conserved, just 3.5% is assessed as effectively protected. A protected area cannot fulfill its purpose if damaging activities continue, management is weak, or long-term finance is missing.

In Seychelles, we are confronting this challenge ourselves. Having designated more than 30% of our waters for protection, we are now undertaking the harder work of turning those protections into results in the water. Our Marine Spatial Plan Initiative is legally binding, including no-take areas where extractive activities are prohibited. But effective protection also requires management, monitoring, enforcement and long-term resources.

The next four years, through the end of 2030, must therefore be about both expansion and effectiveness. Success should be judged by area on a map, and by whether biodiversity recovers and communities continue to benefit from healthy ecosystems.

National action alone cannot close the ocean protection gap. The high seas account for roughly two-thirds of the global ocean, yet only a very small share is protected. Species migrate across borders, currents connect ecosystems, and damage in one part of the ocean can have consequences far beyond it.

The High Seas Treaty changes what is possible. For the first time, governments have a global legal framework capable of enabling marine protected areas beyond national jurisdiction. Seychelles became the first African country to ratify the treaty because island states understand that protecting our own waters is not enough. Our future also depends on the ocean we share.

Governments now need to turn this legal breakthrough into protection in the water by advancing an ambitious first generation of high seas marine protected areas, supported by strong science, effective governance, monitoring, and sufficient finance.

Ambition must also be matched by resources. The new assessments estimate that around $16 billion is needed each year for marine protection under the 30% target, compared with only around $1.8 billion currently spent. Without the resources to manage them, protected areas risk remaining protected on paper rather than in practice.

As leaders gather at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, ocean protection should be part of discussions about climate resilience, food security, and economic stability. COP17 next month in Armenia will soon provide another opportunity for governments to confront where progress is falling furthest behind.

In 2019, I spoke from beneath the Indian Ocean because I wanted world leaders to understand that we could not leave the environmental problems we have created for another generation to solve.

That warning is more urgent today. But there are also reasons for hope. Countries have shown that ambitious conservation is possible. This June, French Polynesia announced an expansion that will bring 1.4 million square kilometers—around 30% of its waters—under full protection from extractive industries once implemented. Samoa and Portugal have also made meaningful increases in effective protection over the past year.

We now understand more about what effective protection requires. And with the High Seas Treaty in force, we have a powerful new means of safeguarding the ocean we all share.

The years between now and 2030 must be a turning point for ocean protection. We need to protect more of the ocean, protect it well, and seize the opportunity of the High Seas Treaty. If we do, we will not only safeguard biodiversity, but strengthen food security, climate resilience, and livelihoods for generations to come.

As a nation still mourning Dolly Parton is all too aware, there aren’t many entertainers left who are embraced by Americans across demographics and ideologies. Among the few A-listers with bipartisan appeal are Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, separately but especially as longtime best friends and occasional co-workers—two sons of Texas who, as you’ve probably heard, might also be sons of the same biological father. So it makes sense that Brothers, an Apple TV comedy that casts them as exaggerated versions of themselves, seems built to satisfy as broad a range of their fans as possible. Disjointed but breezy, it coasts on the chemistry between its leads.

Premiering with two episodes on Sept. 23, Brothers bills itself as being “based on a true rumor” whose plausibility Harrelson acknowledged in 2023: that McConaughey is the product of a tryst between his mom, Kay McConaughey, and Harrelson’s dad, the notorious contract killer Charles Voyde Harrelson, during her second divorce from James McConaughey. (Genetics aside, both families evidently have a flair for off-screen drama.) That’s certainly a big part of the show, supplying a central mystery and fueling tension between the stars after Kay, a.k.a. Ma Mac (Holland Taylor, playing delightfully against buttoned-up type as a hard-drinking, straight-talking, tanned-to-a-crisp matriarch), blurts out her secret to Woody. Can he bear to wound his bestie with the knowledge that Matthew might not share DNA with the late father he idolized? 

But there are a lot of other things going on. Too many, really. When Woody, his wife Joy (Brittany Ishibashi), and their two daughters roll up to the McConaugheys’ Austin estate in a psychedelic bus, it’s because Joy refuses to let her husband abandon their eldest child, Olive (Highdee Kuan), as she heals from a broken engagement. Matthew has his own family and challenges, writing a speech for a public event honoring his dad while trying to nurture a bond with his kids, especially timid teenage son Wyatt (Nolan Almeida). Brothers is most generic in these double-family-sitcom storylines, with the two wild, larger-than-life leads constantly testing the patience of their more grounded, long-suffering, emotionally intelligent wives. A subplot for, perhaps, True Detective fans, in which two sickly old-timer crooks (Jeff Kober and Barry Corbin) try to extract from Woody a debt his dad owed them, feels like excerpts from a different show.

What actually works is, not surprisingly, the buddy-comedy stuff—the sillier, the better. Matthew and Woody squished into a rideshare with too many rowdy, young fans? A treat. Woody and Matthew donning ridiculous Sunset Strip rocker disguises, complete with facial prosthetics, to play an acoustic set at a coffee shop? Classic. Showrunner Lee Eisenberg (Stick, The Office), who created Brothers alongside McConaughey, Harrelson, and Schitt’s Creek alum David West Read, understands his leads’ personae, and they’re more than game to laugh at themselves. The series opens by showing us the versions that live in the public imagination; Woody enters smoking a joint and holding a surfboard, while Matthew roams the sun-dappled fields of Texas, sipping whisky in a cowboy hat as he recites an excerpt from his megahit memoir Greenlights in voiceover. He plays the charismatic, image-conscious, golden-boy straight man to Woody’s free-thinking hippie, a guy who doesn’t let fame stop him being as weird as he wants to be.

Then it pushes those archetypes without fully puncturing them. Woody’s discovery that they might literally be brothers from different mothers adds some useful pressure—though, truth be told, the storyline is less effective as a driver of plot than it is as a showcase for Taylor, who disappears into her role, making Ma Mac a spitfire but never a cartoon. Brothers gets more juice out of another ripped-from-the-headlines narrative: McConaughey’s political ambitions. While in real life he decided, after months of speculation, not to enter the 2022 Texas gubernatorial race, the show puts Matthew on the campaign trail. (What it carefully doesn’t do is align him with any party or cause. But boy does he love Texas!) It’s a fun reality check for a guy who’s great at kissing babies but can’t answer a simple question about housing policy. His jaded campaign manager, played to the hilt by Lisa Gilroy, gets the series’ most self-aware jokes (“Your Achilles’ heel is that you have been a celebrity for so, so long that your brain has turned into a big old sloppy pile of goo”). A cynical, Type A Armando Iannucci character in the land of alright, alright, alright, she’s deployed sparingly enough to add some edge without killing the laid-back vibe.

Really, though, the campaign could have been the whole show. It’s the perfect context for contrasting the stars’ personalities, pitting Matthew’s traditionalism and discretion against Woody’s unapologetic outlandishness. When the former announces he’s running, his old friend doesn’t mince words. “I’m a f-cking anarchist, and I think this is the stupidest, craziest f-cking idea you ever had,” Woody exclaims. But will he support Matthew on the trail anyway? Of course he will. Because, regardless of what any DNA test says, that is what makes a brother.

Hurricane Polo has become one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the western hemisphere.

Polo, off the Pacific coast of Mexico, evolved from a weak tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane on Tuesday. Category 5 hurricanes, the most powerful level on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, are rare, although rising ocean temperatures have made them more frequent in recent years.

The hurricane was drifting northeast at 1 mile per hour in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Tuesday night, about 210 miles south of Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Forecasters expect it to begin turning northwest, and move west-northwestward near the Mexican coastline over the next few days, with its core remaining offshore.

But even if the hurricane does not make landfall, forecasters expect heavy rainfall over parts of southwestern Mexico that could trigger life-threatening flooding and mudslides. In the Mexican state of Guerrero, local media has reported damaged roads, downed trees, and rough seas that forced authorities to close ports to small boats. Polo is also expected to create hazardous ocean conditions, including potentially deadly rip currents and dangerous surf. Conditions in waters off Baja California Sur are expected to deteriorate this weekend as swells from Polo spread toward the peninsula, according to the National Weather Service.

Here’s what to know about Hurricane Polo.

How strong is Hurricane Polo?

Hurricane Polo sustained winds of 165 miles per hour as of Tuesday night, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC). Earlier Tuesday, its wind speeds reached 180 miles per hour, tying with super typhoons Sinlaku and Bavi in the West Pacific for the world’s strongest storm by wind speed this year. The strongest ever hurricane was Patricia in 2015, which sustained wind speeds of 215 miles per hour and made landfall near Cuixmala, Mexico.

Forecasters said that they expect Polo to remain a powerful major hurricane for the rest of the week. A Category 5 hurricane packs the fastest sustained winds and carries potential for catastrophic wind damage. They have historically been rare phenomena because they need a “perfect storm” of warm ocean water, low wind shear, and high atmospheric moisture to form, experts previously told TIME, although they have become more common in recent years especially in the Atlantic basin.

It’s not just Polo’s strength that forecasters consider remarkable, but also its rapid intensification. Polo’s maximum sustained winds increased from 50 miles per hour on Monday morning to 160 miles per hour by Tuesday morning, a gain of 110 miles per hour in 24 hours and one of the fastest intensification rates recorded in the Eastern Pacific. That increase far exceeds the threshold of 58 miles per hour in 24 hours used to describe “extreme rapid intensification.”

Polo’s intensification is similar to Hurricane Otis in 2023, which had a wind increase of 105 miles per hour in 21 hours before it made landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, and caused catastrophic damage.

What areas are affected?

Mexican authorities have issued tropical storm warnings along Mexico’s southwestern coast from Tecpan de Galeana to Punta San Telmo. The outer bands of Polo are expected to bring heavy rainfall of 3 to 6 inches to coastal Guerrero and Michoacán through Thursday, with isolated totals of up to 8 inches of rainfall. Coastal areas in Oaxaca, Colima, and Jalisco could receive 2 to 4 inches of rain.

The rainfall could cause severe flooding and mudslides, especially in steep terrain. The region has suffered devastating flooding caused by a hurricane before, when Hurricane John produced deadly flash flooding and mudslides in southern Mexico in September 2024.

Swells from Polo are also expected to produce life-threatening surf and rip currents, as well as coastal flooding, along the southwestern Mexican coast over the next few days. Waters off Baja California Sur are forecast to see worsening conditions beginning Friday, as the hurricane may approach the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula over the weekend, according to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. NWS San Diego said there could be “at least some peripheral impacts” to parts of Southern California, including possible coastal flooding and erosion.

Why is Hurricane Polo becoming stronger?

Polo intensified rapidly as it encountered warm water, which supplies heat and moisture to its thunderstorms, and low wind shear, which allows those thunderstorms to remain clustered around the hurricane’s core.

Hurricane Polo’s rapid strengthening comes amid a so-called “super” El Niño this year. El Niño, a natural weather pattern that often peaks late in the year, generally favors hurricane activity in the eastern and central Pacific by bringing warmer ocean waters and atmospheric conditions that help storms develop.

How is ‘super El Niño’ affecting hurricane season?

The “super” El Niño is shifting conditions that govern hurricane activity across oceans. Warmer waters and reduced wind shear in the eastern and central Pacific have increased the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Polo became the eastern Pacific’s third Category 5 hurricane since May 15, following Genevieve and Lowell, tying the record for the most number of Category 5 hurricanes in a season. With El Niño forecast to further strengthen through the end of the year, conditions could continue to favor hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific.

El Niño also tends to shift typhoon formation in the western Pacific farther east, giving storms more time over water to intensify. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast above-normal tropical cyclone activity around Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and parts of Micronesia this year.

But a stronger El Niño does not mean more hurricanes everywhere.

In fact, the super El Niño has suppressed hurricane activity in the Atlantic. No hurricane has formed so far this hurricane season, which runs from the start of June to the end of November. It’s the latest start to hurricane activity in the satellite era, which began in 1966. That’s in part because El Niño increases disruptive wind shear in the Atlantic, breaking up developing tropical storms before they can develop into hurricanes.

Still, El Niño does not rule out Atlantic hurricanes. Storms can still develop when there’s a lull in wind shear, and climate change can make them more intense, even in a season with fewer hurricanes.

Beyond hurricanes, this year’s developing El Niño has also contributed to extreme heat, drought and flooding around the world, with deadly consequences and growing risks to food and water supplies.

First came the mirror. Before Min Aung Hlaing enters the room for his first Western media interview since seizing power in a 2021 coup d’état, aides maneuver an ornate Rococo revival looking glass into place for preening. Then come requests for his portrait: light him from the left, the better to disguise a thinning hairline no longer hidden beneath an olive cap.

Myanmar’s former commander in chief now calls himself President, following January elections widely condemned as fraudulent. His fitful transformation from generalissimo to civilian statesman extends even to awkward attempts at bonhomie. He confesses to loving golf—he plays off an 18 handicap—though a bad back has lately kept him from the fairway.

Yet the makeover has limits. The geniality fades when questions turn to human rights, narcotics trafficking, or sanctioned relatives. Even his birthplace remains classified. “I used to revisit my township very often, so if you can carefully watch the news, you can figure out where I’m native,” he says cryptically.

Min Aung Hlaing may have swapped his uniform for a silken longyi sarong, but the barracks instinct to conceal, deflect, and command remains firmly in place. “Some of my responses didn’t directly touch upon your questions, but I hope they were still useful,” he offers after our hour together.

Obfuscation is a curious tactic for someone fixated on ingratiating himself with the international community. While his coup was widely condemned, Min Aung Hlaing has now ruled Myanmar for five years, and there is a growing realization that he is going nowhere. He has now been welcomed on official visits to nine nations, and while autocracies like Russia and China might warrant an eye roll, trips to broadly democratic Thailand and India indicate a wider thaw.

For neighbors, engagement is born of necessity: Myanmar is not only the world’s top producer of methamphetamine and opium, but also the nerve center of a global “scamdemic” that loots unsuspecting bank accounts to the tune of $15 billion annually. “The situation in Myanmar is having a global impact,” says Jeremy Douglas, deputy director of operations at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. “It’s off the charts, and the region needs to intervene before it gets worse.”

The quandary facing Western powers is whether to follow suit. Myanmar is also among the world’s most resource rich nations, boasting vast deposits of jade, copper, coal, teak, gemstones, tin, and gold. And it is the world’s third largest producer of heavy rare earths—arcane materials over which Washington and Beijing continue to spar.

Yet the reputational stakes of cozying up to Min Aung Hlaing may eclipse these riches. The Southeast Asian nation of 55 million, formerly known as Burma, remains racked by civil war between forces loyal to his government, ethnic rebel groups, and a National Unity Government (NUG) spawned from the ousted administration of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains in detention. Today, Min Aung Hlaing controls less than half of Myanmar’s total landmass.

“Our strategy has been expanding our territory and providing necessary social welfare and essential services,” says Duwa Lashi La, acting President of the NUG. “We also protect the public from the junta’s attacks.”

The conflict has so far claimed more than 100,000 lives, displaced 3.6 million people, and sent countless others fleeing across Myanmar’s borders. Troops under Min Aung Hlaing’s command stand accused of torching villages, massacring civilians, and committing sexual violence, while fighter aircraft and drones have targeted schools and temples. U.N. investigators have accused him of genocide, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. He denies wrongdoing.

While the Biden Administration rhetorically backed the NUG, U.S. President Donald Trump has anchored foreign policy in transactional interests. On June 25, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Michael DeSombre noted that Washington is “very open to working with all stakeholders” to combat “mass displacement and trans-national crime.” Last year, the Trump Administration withdrew sanctions on several junta allies amid a Myanmar policy review that looks likely to advocate revived ties. It has already ended temporary protected status for nearly 4,000 refugees. “It is safe for Burmese citizens to return home,” then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in November. 

Fulsome engagement will “infuriate a large portion of the Myanmar population,” says Scot Marciel, U.S. ambassador to Myanmar from 2016 to 2020. “But I don’t think Trump and company care.”

As ever, a key driver is countering the growing clout of China, which covets Myanmar’s resources as well as strategic access to the Bay of Bengal. But Beijing’s approach has been scattergun: it considers Suu Kyi an “old friend,” yet has supplied rebel forces as well as backing Min Aung Hlaing—a diplomatic fudge critics say underscores the perils of replacing a values-based U.S. approach with a transactional, Chinese-led regional order.

“It’s hard to ascribe a clear strategy for China in Myanmar,” says Drew Thompson, a former U.S. defense official now at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “It’s contributed to instability by not creating a preponderance of power in any one place.”

The gamble is whether engagement could tease Myanmar from China’s orbit and achieve more than years of condemnation has. Sanctions, the argument goes, have not prevented foreign firms from operating in the country, nor would they block U.S. companies from re-entering. Under this real-politik, Washington’s demands would be concrete: lower tariffs on American goods, curb scam networks targeting Americans, and deny China access to critical infrastructure. Political reform, meanwhile, would be back-burnered.

A revised Myanmar policy is far from a priority for the U.S. “There would have to be some tangible economic benefit to really bother,” says Marciel. Min Aung Hlaing has enlisted influential people to make that case; lobbyist Roger Stone—a Trump confidant—is being paid $50,000 a month to help “rebuild” relations with D.C., according to official filings.

“I’d be very surprised if the U.S. doesn’t re-engage with the junta,” says Jonah Blank, a Southeast Asia analyst and former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer. “None of the things that held back previous administrations, like human rights or democracy promotion, mean a thing.”

Yet engagement would also erase much of America’s moral authority in the region. Min Aung Hlaing isn’t shy in his hope that America First nativism offers him a lifeline: “It would be ideal if the U.S. could cooperate with us in fostering the peace, stability, and development essential for our people to successfully realize a fully democratic state.”

The last phrase hangs awkwardly here in the capital Naypyidaw, a labyrinthine citadel built by the military in 2005 to insulate itself from unrest. “There are various forms of democracy,” Min Aung Hlaing says with a thin smile. “There is American democracy, there is European democracy. I will ensure that Myanmar achieves a democratic system that truly aligns with our own culture, customs, and traditions.”

Those traditions are on full display a short drive from Min Aung Hlaing’s office, where Myanmar’s Defense Services Museum sprawls across 600 manicured acres. Buses of schoolchildren streaked with golden thanaka paste—a traditional sunscreen and beauty adornment—clamber over decommissioned fighter jets, tanks, and anti-aircraft guns.

The Myanmar military’s suffocating political role calcified after General Ne Win staged a coup in 1962. Min Aung Hlaing was 5 at the time, growing up in the northern city of Mandalay. He says he wasn’t always keen to attend school, “but my mother made absolutely sure that I did.” This inculcated a love of literature, he says, but after attending university in Yangon, he abandoned his law studies to pursue a military career, gaining admission to the elite Defence Services Academy on his third attempt in 1974.

Min Aung Hlaing’s formative environment was Ne Win’s military machine—an institution that regarded itself as sole guardian of unity, sovereignty, and political order. “The military is an integral part of the nation,” he says, “and military personnel and their families are a part of the people.”

Former classmates recall an average cadet of below—average charm—a reserved, disciplined, and politically cautious officer who accumulated influence through institutional loyalty, bureaucratic persistence, and the careful management of military elites. His profile rose in 2009 when he led a campaign to subdue ethnic insurgents in the Kokang region along the Chinese border. The offensive ended a two-decade cease-fire and sent some 30,000 people fleeing into China. While the episode angered Beijing, it burnished Min Aung Hlaing’s leadership credentials and spurred successive promotions.

It was a strange moment in Myanmar. The old junta run by another military dictator, Senior General Than Shwe, was nominally stepping back, easing censorship, and releasing political prisoners, including Suu Kyi, who eventually assumed executive power as state counselor. Min Aung Hlaing presented himself as a professional soldier supporting a carefully managed transition. He cultivated foreign military relationships, met diplomats, and posed with monks. The once taciturn officer increasingly behaved like a politician.

When Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won a landslide in 2015, President Barack Obama lifted all remaining U.S. economic sanctions. The country Suu Kyi inherited had been hollowed out by half a century of dysfunction. Southeast Asia’s richest economy upon independence in 1948, Myanmar had become by some metrics its poorest—its banks insolvent, bureaucracy broken, and corruption endemic. Suu Kyi tapped Australian economist Sean Turnell to help reverse that decline. Reforms curbed inflation and deficits, opened the country to investment, and expanded micro-finance to 6 million borrowers, overwhelmingly women.

Yet civilian control was a mirage: the 2008 constitution guaranteed a quarter of legislative seats for the military, which also nominated the ministers of defense, home affairs, and border affairs. Reform unfolded inside a constitutional cage. Civilian leaders could redirect spending toward schools and hospitals, but they could not restrain the generals, overcome weak institutions, or decentralize power. “There was still a military mindset that Burma is a victim, and the perpetrators are always invidious foreigners,” says Turnell. “The international economy was an arena of threat rather than opportunity.”

A nadir was reached in 2016 with military operations that the U.S. subsequently deemed genocide against the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority concentrated in Rakhine state. Myanmar denies the Rohingya constitute an Indigenous ethnic group, commonly referring to them as “Bengalis” and portraying them as interlopers from Bangladesh.

Attacks on security posts by Rohingya militants the next year prompted counterterrorism “clearance operations” that saw hundreds of villages burned amid accusations of mass executions and rape. More than 700,000 fled across the Bangladeshi border, while a U.N. fact-finding mission conservatively estimates up to 10,000 were killed. An International Criminal Court prosecutor sought Min Aung Hlaing’s arrest for crimes against humanity, while a separate Argentine warrant also accuses him of genocide. “We have not committed any such acts against the Bengalis in Rakhine state,” he says. “Our actions were strictly limited to safeguarding our country’s sovereignty. Our conscience is entirely clear.”

Min Aung Hlaing had an incongruous ally in Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, who took the remarkable step of defending Myanmar’s military at the Hague, where she urged the bench to “bear in mind this complex situation and the challenge to sovereignty and security.” The international community was aghast and stripped her of numerous honors. “She was desperately trying not to rock the boat,” says Mon Mon Myat, a former democracy activist and Suu Kyi biographer.

Yet Suu Kyi’s performance also angered Myanmar’s top brass, who deemed her defense lukewarm after she raised the possibility of courts-martial for military transgressors. “It was the wrong strategy,” says Aung Zaw, a former student activist and founder of the Thailand-based magazine The Irrawaddy. “She was seen as defending the regime at the Hague, but then the military also weren’t happy.”

That animosity exploded in November 2020 when the NLD won another landslide. While the Carter Center rated the process “very good” or “reasonable” at 95% of observed polling stations, Min Aung Hlaing alleges rampant fraud, calling it “one of the most disgraceful elections in democratic history.”

On Feb. 1, 2021, a convoy of black military vehicles rolled through Naypyidaw to detain top NLD leaders. Suu Kyi was sentenced to 33 years (now reduced to 18) on charges ranging from corruption to illegally possessing walkie-talkies. “I have been extremely lenient toward her,” Min Aung Hlaing says with a straight face. “We made every possible effort to prevent the situation from reaching this point.”

What really drove Min Aung Hlaing to seize power dominated discussions among officials in squalid detention. “We talked about it a lot,” says Turnell, who spent 650 days in custody. “There was certainly a part of the military that didn’t want any loosening of the sort under way.”

The coup is best understood as a reaction to a regime losing control. According to a leaked 2004 military dossier, the junta engineered reforms to hedge against Beijing’s overbearing influence and leverage Suu Kyi’s freedom to win Western trade, aid, and diplomatic legitimacy. But the generals miscalculated the public’s fierce devotion to “The Lady,” whose popularity proved fundamentally incompatible with the military’s absolute power. Myanmar’s military also has sprawling business interests spanning banking, mining, gems, construction, manufacturing, tobacco, tourism, transport, telecoms, and real estate. Reforms threatened this gravy train.

It is also true that Min Aung Hlaing was facing mandatory retirement when he seized power in 2021. One regional envoy also pointed to how Trump had normalized complaints of voter fraud amid his own election defeat just five days before Myanmar’s ballot. Moreover, Thailand’s generals had staged a coup seven years earlier which, after a period of protests and civil disruption, had been begrudgingly tolerated.

But in Myanmar, a defiant Gen Z refused to submit. Millions joined nationwide general strikes, doctors and teachers walked off the job, and young citizens formed the People’s Defense Forces (PDF), bringing armed resistance from rural borderlands into urban strongholds. The military responded with summary executions, mass arrests, and airstrikes. By late 2023, three ethnic armed groups launched Operation 1027 in the country’s northeast, overrunning more than 200 military outposts. Analysts openly predicted the regime’s collapse, and rumors of an internal military revolt circulated.

Min Aung Hlaing responded with ruthless efficiency. He purged disgruntled brass hats, imposed forced conscription for young adults, and implemented a devastating “four cuts” strategy—severing resistance forces from food, funding, intelligence, and recruits, by burning villages and leveling contested zones. Volker Türk, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned such collective punishment “may constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

Yet Min Aung Hlaing’s ultimate salvation came from Beijing, which was initially angered by his power grab and refused early requests to meet President Xi Jinping. To save face, Min Aung Hlaing instead flew to Moscow. “Whenever we have faced crises due to our political situations, Russia has consistently supported us,” he says.

But Asia’s superpower wasn’t going to be embarrassed by an upstart tyrant on its impoverished periphery, especially when junta-connected scammers were brazenly fleecing millions of Chinese citizens. So Beijing began arming the rebels.

A panicked Min Aung Hlaing pivoted to full cooperation with China, handing over the scam bigwigs as well as tens of thousands of lowly fraudsters. In response, Beijing has entered a cautious détente, welcoming Min Aung Hlaing to Beijing, strong-arming rebels into cease-fires, and supplying military hardware—all on the strict condition that he safeguard Chinese economic assets and rein in criminal syndicates.

“We have achieved a certain degree of success [tackling] challenges regarding peace and stability in the ethnic border regions,” says Min Aung Hlaing. “Though some matters are still being negotiated.”

Myanmar’s lopsided reliance on China glitters in plain sight at Mandalay’s jade market. Each morning, heavily tattooed Burmese traders lay conflict-zone stones across folding tables for Chinese merchants to probe with flashlights. Once cut and polished, the jade is sold to buyers across greater China, often via TikTok and RedNote.

Mei Mei, who arrived here from Yunnan province three years ago, says she earns $150,000 annually trading jade online. Yet war has crushed supply routes and trade has plummeted. “Chinese people don’t have much money,” she says. “And the fighting makes it difficult to transport jade here.”

It’s not just Chinese traders feeling the pinch, with total cross-border trade plunging by around half since the coup. That decline stokes frustration not only with the government but also the NUG, amid growing fatalism toward the prospect of meaningful change. “The PDF are gangsters,” says one dad of two in Mandalay. “Now we must pay money to both the government and rebels. They should stop fighting. Democracy is best, but stability is better than war.”

Yet it’s a conflict that will keep rumbling on. Despite losing Chinese backing, the NUG controls enough territory to fund itself indefinitely via taxation and resource extraction. The harder it fights, the tighter Min Aung Hlaing turns the screw on ordinary people. TIME met one 5-year-old girl sleeping rough by a roadside near Mandalay after her father was forcibly conscripted. The well-heeled of Yangon, meanwhile, pay monthly levies to dodge the draft, filling officials’ pockets.

But across this social chasm the great unifier is animus toward Min Aung Hlaing; a mere mention of his name will elicit a sneer, headshake, or crimson jet of betel spit. Outside the country, people are more explicit. “He’s a clown,” says Mon Mon Myat, the biographer. He’s the “worst of all Myanmar’s military dictators,” says U Gambira, a prominent monk and activist. “People are disgusted by him,” says Aung Zaw, the journalist.

Unlike authoritarian regimes in China or Vietnam, Myanmar’s military offers no compelling economic vision. Min Aung Hlaing speaks vaguely about “transitioning from basic raw material production to manufacturing finished goods.” But since his coup, GDP has shrunk 13%, poverty has almost doubled, the kyat currency is 60% weaker, foreign direct investment is down 90%, while inflation averages 20%. “There’s no development focus, which really sets them apart,” says Turnell. “There’s just no vision for the economy except as a vehicle for control.”

Min Aung Hlaing is pitching sanctions relief as a win-win, dangling carrots to coax the international community back to the table. An earlier bilateral agreement to repatriate the Rohingya is dependent on rolling back legal challenges, he says. Otherwise, “it becomes an impossible situation for us to resolve.” A potential amnesty for Suu Kyi “depends on her,” he says, though suggested that could change if “grounds for reconsideration emerge on our part.”

Beneath these overtures lies an enduring paranoia regarding Chinese domination, reviving the same impulse that drove Myanmar’s last, abortive attempt at rapprochement with the West. Though Min Aung Hlaing also stands to benefit personally from any loosening; he and his children have been targeted by the Treasury Department for their business dealings. “I urge the U.S. government to review [sanctions] objectively,” he says.

Such demands would be dead on arrival in an era governed by values-based foreign policy. Today, they may find a market. “The key thing to understand is, whether you engage with the military or not, their behavior will not change,” says Marciel. “That said, isolation has limited value as well.”

As global powers weigh strategic leverage against democratic ideals, Myanmar’s people remain trapped in a grim deadlock—a despot that cannot conquer, a resistance that cannot win, and foreign capitals reluctant to tilt the scales. The tragedy of Myanmar is not just that it burns, but that every player can feed the flames, while none can build a nation from the ashes.

Trump Administration officials on Tuesday announced that they would terminate the Obamacare coverage of 760,000 enrollees, alleging widespread fraud in enrollment. 

Vice President JD Vance, who leads a White House task force aimed at eliminating fraud, said while speaking to reporters that $2.2 billion in taxpayer funds would be saved by removing the hundreds of thousands of Affordable Care Act (ACA) enrollees from the public insurance marketplaces.

“We expect that most of these people are fraudulently enrolled,” Vance said. He added that the Administration would also work to verify the eligibility of roughly 419,000 additional enrollees by ensuring that they are legal residents of the U.S. and meet the income threshold to receive Obamacare coverage. 

The Administration will also place a six month moratorium on new health insurance brokers and agents, who help individuals sign up for health plans, Vance said. 

Read More: Trump Pledges to Issue $500 Refunds to Nearly a Million Obamacare Enrollees. Are You Eligible?

The Administration’s move to eject fraudulent enrollees from the Obamacare insurance marketplaces is the latest in its broader efforts to crack down on fraud. An online “ledger” maintained by the White House asserts that the Vance-led anti-fraud task force has uncovered nearly $250 billion worth of fraud since Trump returned to office last January, including almost $100 billion at the Department of Health and Human Services.

That crackdown also saw the Administration pause $867.5 million in Medicaid payments to California and $199 million in Minnesota in July, an action for which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cited “suspected fraud and noncompliance.” Both states have pushed back on the claims.

The Administration has additionally targeted alleged fraud in food stamps, childcare facilities, COVID-era relief funding, student loans, and homelessness funding, among other areas. Critics have accused it of disproportionally focusing on Democratic-led states in its crackdown.

An analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released last August estimated that 2.3 million Obamacare enrollees improperly claimed premium tax credits by intentionally overstating their income in 2025. The Trump Administration has also claimed that agents and brokers have been responsible for illegally enrolling tens of thousands of people in ACA plans.

The 760,000 enrollees now being removed from the ACA rolls by the Trump Administration represent about 4% of the estimated 19.2 million people receiving coverage through the marketplaces in 2026.

That total has sharply declined from its peak of more than 24 million last year as ACA premiums have surged following the expiration of subsidies that helped reduce costs for millions of enrollees at the end of 2025.

A poll conducted by health policy research group KFF in June found that most voters believe there is at least some fraud in government health programs, and that more than 70% feel it is an extremely or very important issue for candidates to discuss ahead of the midterm elections. For Republican voters, fraud topped all health care issues asked about in the survey, including costs.

But health care costs, which have become increasingly expensive in the U.S. in recent years, weighed more significantly for voters overall, and the poll found that only a minority of those surveyed believed that reducing fraud in government programs would reduce such costs for them personally.

Amid the Trump Administration’s moves to withhold millions in Medicaid payments, 71% also voiced the belief that preserving access to coverage through the insurance program was more important than rooting out fraud. Meanwhile, 65% believed that the Administration’s Medicaid payment deferrals were mostly politically motivated.

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump spun a familiar web of rhetoric regarding U.S. foreign policy—one that highlights force as a method of achieving peace. 

In a speech that moved from Iran to Venezuela, Cuba, and beyond, Trump presented something approaching a foreign-policy doctrine: American military might is not the alternative to diplomacy but the leverage that makes it possible.

Read More: Iran War Has Cost U.S. Nearly $40 Billion and Fueled Inflation, CBO Finds

David Satterfield, Director of Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy, tells TIME that the speech Tuesday demonstrates a position held by the Trump Administration that “force is the only currency of value.” 

“The strong do as they will and the weak suffer as they must,” he says, further characterizing the approach. 

In Trump’s telling, strength is not merely a deterrent. It is something to be used—through military action and economic isolation—to force negotiations or impose an outcome.

How Trump defines ‘peace through strength’

Trump has repeatedly distilled his foreign policy strategy into three words: “peace through strength.” The examples he gave of this policy in action illustrate how he may see the U.S. functioning as a global enforcer going forward. 

His definition of the phrase has previously been suggested by its use in Department of Defense ads and in his online endorsements of fellow Republicans. He recently credited this approach for the joint U.S.-Israel strikes that initiated the current conflict with Iran, posting to Truth Social in March: “PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH TO PUT IT MILDLY!!!”

Trump’s approach also encompasses economic coercion. In the case of Iran, he said the U.S. had initially offered economic cooperation, turned to military action when Tehran refused, and was now seeking its “complete economic isolation” to push it back toward negotiations.

Trump grouped Cuba among those affected by U.S. economic pressure campaigns on Tuesday. He described a government under mounting strain and predicted political change, declaring that Cuba was a “failed” nation but that “freedom will be coming.” Cuban delegates departed in protest.

Yet Trump presented such coercion as compatible with his role as a global peacemaker. He claimed credit for resolving eight wars since returning to office, although that claim has been widely disputed.

In tandem, these elements suggest that Trump sees taking action as a superior means of enacting change. He proposes the approaches as being almost diametrically opposed: While others only speak of making a difference, he acts. 

“While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace. While others have ignored threats, I have confronted them,” Trump said in front of the General Assembly. “While others have talked of courage, America has shown it.”

Satterfield says that this speech is mostly “old wine rebottled” for Trump. But it clarified how the President is applying his longstanding ideas today: using military action and economic coercion not merely to deter adversaries, but to force negotiations and shape political outcomes.

Trump defends military force against Iran and drug cartels

While Trump sees Iran as an example of his “peace through strength” ethos, the conflict is ongoing, and it remains to be seen how it fits into the pattern that he is hoping to establish.

Addressing the topic seemed all but unavoidable heading into the General Assembly. In doing so, Trump said that he had a choice ahead of him: Move forward with a peace deal or “annihilate the Islamic Republic.” 

The comments came amid stalled negotiations in the war that the U.S. and Israel launched in February.

“Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world?” he asked. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?”

Members of Iran’s delegation walked out during Trump’s remarks, an immediate demonstration of the gulf between his coercive message and the adversary that he may hope to persuade by it.

In his speech, he also issued threats against cartel leaders, defending his campaign of drone strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean. These strikes have been criticized by international organizations, legal experts, and human rights groups, which state that the military actions violate international law and constitute extrajudicial killings.

“The cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere—not good people,” he said. “Like ISIS, they should be killed, exiled, or detained as enemy combatants without the possibility of release, which is what we’re doing.”

But while these messages are largely meant to promote the very strength that Trump relies upon in his endeavors, the potency of his remarks may be dwindling amid contested claims of success. 

Venezuela is Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ model. But Iran is testing its limits

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute, tells TIME that Trump’s speech seems “consistent with the narrative of American dominance” that he has long used to justify military action.

Trump suggested Tuesday that he considers Venezuela a leading example. In January, the U.S. military launched Operation Absolute Resolve—a nighttime raid in Caracas that captured Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Both were transported to New York City to face federal drug-trafficking indictments.

The move paved the way for a transition of power in Venezuela, with former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez ascending to the role of acting President. It also led to an August agreement giving a U.S.-linked venture a controlling stake and long-term development rights in fields containing an estimated 65 billion barrels of oil. Trump said the deal “more than doubles” American oil reserves. 

“We’re working closely with the leaders of Venezuela to forge a much better future for the Venezuelan people,” Trump said in his speech. “Last month we signed the largest oil deal in history, covering 65 billion barrels of oil, which will benefit both Venezuela and the United States enormously.”

Trump also suggested that U.S. actions had established peace and a route to prosperity for Venezuelans. However, with an acting President who is yet to be elected making deals that may take years to reach fruition, and are likely to draw legal challenges in the meantime, the full picture remains to be seen. 

But there is one thing the Venezuela operation might have helped accomplish, which is to establish a potential pattern of a U.S. foreign policy that is defined by unilateral intervention. Following a large show of force, Trump has been quick to claim victory, even while the impact of U.S. involvement is still playing out for the people whom it directly affects.

Another example is the conflict between Israel and Hamas. In his remarks, Trump gave himself credit for ending the war in Gaza, even though key aspects of the peace deal Trump helped broker in October 2025—including Hamas’s disarmament, a long-term governance plan, and the delivery of needed humanitarian aid in Gaza—are largely stalled.

Perceived success in Venezuela “arguably triggered the overreach that we saw in the decision to begin military operations against Iran without a Plan B if initial objectives were not achieved,” Ulrichsen says.

But the limitations of such rhetoric are most “visible” in the Iran conflict, according to Ulrichsen, who says the U.S. has not been able to “translate rhetoric into gains on the ground.”

Trump has repeatedly predicted that the war would end after the November midterm elections, saying last week that it would end “immediately after” them. He endorsed this belief on Tuesday, as well. Trump initially told reporters that U.S. envoys had held a “very good” three-hour meeting with “mediators of Iran."

“They had a very good meeting, and we'll see how it turns out. But certainly, it's to their advantage to make a deal, and we can do that,” he said.

Negar Mortazavi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy, emphasized the point that concrete outcomes in the Middle East may prove critical for Trump.

“President Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ approach has yet to produce the agreement he wants with Iran,” Mortazavi says. “Trump’s argument leaves a central question unanswered: How does further destruction secure an agreement on Washington’s terms when the pressure so far has not?”

“For now, Trump can point to the damage U.S. forces have inflicted, but the war’s central political disputes remain unresolved,” she adds.

The outcomes of these most recent efforts—and whether they moved the needle on peace efforts—remain undetermined. Subsequently, Trump turned to the same takeaway that he shared in his speech, which is that Iran is facing either “potential greatness or obliteration.”

“It does seem as if such rhetoric is producing diminishing results as his tone gradually loses its shock value,” Ulrichsen observes.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of America’s foremost chroniclers of curious social phenomena and what’s behind them. In The Tipping Point, he examined why things seem to suddenly change. In Blink, he scrutinized the power and limits of snap judgments. In Outliers, he delved into why some people achieve extraordinary success. In his first book set entirely in the U.S. (out Sept. 29), The American Way of Killing, which is based on a 2023 season of his podcast Revisionist History, he probes into America’s continuing struggle with gun violence. On the eve of his 12-stop book tour, Gladwell told TIME that Americans on both sides of the gun-control argument are not being honest—about the police, about the Second Amendment, and about what really causes gun homicides. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.   

You’ve been interested in crime for some time. Why did it take you so long to get to guns? 

My early books were about the importance of environment and context in shaping our behavior. You don't really get to guns from that perspective. I had to work through a lot of my interests in the environment before I could turn around and say, "Now wait a minute, what about this?” Also, I was much more interested in understanding universal questions about criminality, and this book is really about very America-specific things.

You've subtitled it The Invention of an Epidemic. Is gun violence not an epidemic?

What I mean is, it's an epidemic we invented. There are certain traits that countries have that are inherent; the Swiss are shaped by their geography, Jamaicans will go on and on about how the fact they have no snakes shapes who they are. I don't think American criminality is about anything inherent to the United States. I think it's a problem that was brought about by a wide set of very specific choices, misapprehensions, and errors. There's no reason why the United States cannot have the same level of homicide as its Western European peers. It just chose a different direction.

Do you think assault-rifle bans work?

No. Assault-rifle bans of the sort that have been passed and contemplated in the United States are completely pointless. They're just a charade, and they are a distraction from the real issues. I think gun control can play an important role in violence prevention. But empty theatrical exercises in removing a class of rifles because they look a certain way do not move the needle.

Would pistol regulation be more effective?

I don't know how practically you would do that. But if I could wave a magic wand and remove all the handguns in the United States, the country would be dramatically safer overnight. There's no question about that. In places where there are vanishingly few handguns, when people get into an argument, they don't shoot each other. At worst, they stab each other, and when you stab someone, you have—what is it, one-sixth?—the chance of killing them as you do if you shoot them.

You suggest that Americans have profoundly misunderstood the real history of the Second Amendment. What is it really about?

Slavery. The reason the Second Amendment begins with that clause about the militias is that the people who were called upon to ratify the Constitution were worried about their slaves. In many parts of the South, slaves greatly outnumbered their white masters, and as a result, the white masters were terrified of uprisings, of being killed in their beds. To deal with that, they had a whole system of slave patrols, armed militias who went around and kept slaves in check, and they were extremely concerned that this new thing called the United States would limit the ability of Southern plantation owners to run their slave patrols. So they said: because slave patrols are so important to us, you can't take all our guns. That's the Second Amendment, and we have somehow erased that particular history from our consideration of it today.

Is this a majority enough view that it would stand up in, say, a very originalist-minded Supreme Court?

This history has been known for decades now. The originalists are not nearly as serious in their consideration of history as they claim to be. They're just using it in an extremely selective way to support a predisposition they have towards gun ownership.

Are trauma surgeons one of the reasons that Americans don't care more about gun violence? 

Murder statistics go down year after year. Some of that is a legitimate decrease in violence. Some of it is the fact that a lot of people who would have been dead are now being kept alive by virtue of very skilled doctors. There’s a statistic I use in the book that says that if you held the level of medical care constant at 1960 levels, we'd have 75,000 homicides every year in the United States, and we have 12,000. It's a huge difference. I don't think we would be as blasé about homicides if there were 75,000 of them every year. 

How much of the gun-violence problem is actually a crime problem?

This is where popular understanding and facts diverge. A lot of people think that gun violence is something that is used in the commission of some other criminal act—to defend the drug trade, to rob someone's house. In fact, the overwhelming amount of gun violence is young people arguing with each other and using guns to resolve some grievance or exact revenge. We design our system on the assumption that gun violence is a rational thing that people do to get something. It doesn't work, because that's not what it is. It's kids with beefs, trapped in cycles of revenge and retaliation, who don't have any other means of resolving their conflicts.

Somewhat controversially, considering your usual audience, you advocate for a lot more cops. Why is that?

Because America doesn't have any police officers. It's not controversial. It's just a fact. European countries have twice as many cops per capita as we do. The central statistic is that as a share of GDP, Western Europe and the U.S spend about the same amount of money on public safety, but in America, the bulk of that money goes to prisons, and a little bit goes to the cops. And in Europe, a little bit goes to prisons, and a lot goes to the cops. If police can in fact prevent crime, which I believe they can, you'd rather spend more on them and promote public safety and prevent crime than spend your money after the fact locking people up under heinous circumstances for decade upon decade. Los Angeles has 8,500 police officers. Berlin has 18,000. It's just absurd, and any American police chief you talk to, their No. 1 complaint is that their police are just completely overmatched.

And does that then, in your view, lead to the police being more scared and therefore themselves overreacting?

This is an argument made by two sociologists at Harvard, Chris Lewis and Adaner Usmani. They think there is a direct correlation: the fewer police you have, the more violent they have to be. The most violent police are in the countries that have the fewest police. The least violent police are in the countries that have the most police. The logic is obvious. If you are outnumbered, the only way you can project authority is by being forceful, by being extravagant in the way you flex your muscles. 

You're not worried at all about an over-policed state? Black communities have talked about how they feel over-policed.

I don't buy the assumption that people think that they are over-policed. I think that there's probably far more African Americans in poor neighborhoods who believe they're under-policed, that they can't find a police officer when they need one. To the extent that people use the phrase "over-policed” in America, they're referring to the conduct of the police, not the number. They are responding legitimately to the fact that American police are more violent than their peers around the world. That violent behavior is a symptom of how small the police force is.

Do violence-prevention programs in schools actually work?

They do. I'm just doing a podcast now about this project going on in Baltimore that has had extraordinary success in lowering the homicide rate there. It's a kind of community-level intervention that identifies those most at risk for homicide and reaches out to them on a personal basis, talks to them, helps them. These things are insanely successful. We've known this for 30 years. Baltimore has gone in the space of three years from 330 homicides to 130. They work. There's no mystery about that. They're hard to do, but absolutely, they work.

They're hard to do because…?

They're hard to do institutionally. They require the police to work with social workers, with clergy, with the need to reorient police away from arresting people and more towards psychological interventions. They require the police to predict where conflict is heading, which is a very different kind of mind space than responding to conflict. So it's just a difficult institutional learning process.

Polls suggest a lot of Americans believe that guns should be more regulated. In your mind, what is preventing it?

There's the obvious political thing that people with guns are the most motivated to fight hardest politically. The Supreme Court currently has been captured by a majority of people who believe very strongly in gun rights. I don't know how many hundreds of millions of guns there are in America, but there's a lot. Practically speaking, I don't know how you get rid of them. No one's ever answered that. I'm as big an advocate of gun control as anyone else, but I have no clue about how it would work if it was passed. I mean, are you going into people's homes to remove their guns? Very few gun-control advocates have a good answer to that question.

How much do you think the inertia is because gun violence particularly bedevils Black communities?

As is the case with any problem which strikes the bottom of the social economic ladder, it's very easy for everyone else to ignore. It's striking to me that when you talk to middle-class people about gun violence, they speak instantly about school shootings. School shootings, comparatively, are a tiny, tiny, tiny, problem. The idea that you would look at America and that would be the thing that you single out as the biggest problem is absurd. I mean, they're horrendous, but more people are killed by gun violence in a month in America than have been killed in the history of school shootings or mass shootings.

You write that one of the reasons that Americans have a gun issue is a deficiency in the national character. What do you mean?

I talk a lot about this fundamental dishonesty in the way Americans conduct this conversation. That's a deficiency in national character. If the Second Amendment is really about slavery, and you can't admit that, that's a problem. This was an amendment conceived with the intent to prop up the most heinous institution in American history, and we can't be honest about that. No one's honest about an assault-rifle ban; they don't read the fine print, which says that all we're really banning are cosmetic additions to the barrel of an assault rifle. The laziness of confusing crime and weapons—we wouldn't tolerate this imprecision of thought in any other pressing issue, but we do when it comes to gun violence. It's maddening. 

Is it partly because of the thing you've identified, which is we don't have a good solution, so we minimize the problem?

I would quarrel with “we don't have a good solution.” There are solutions out there. The issue is that they're uncomfortable with the solutions. I think in their hearts, people know we have a big guns problem, but the solutions make them so nervous and uncomfortable that they don't want to do them.

Could it also be the fact that there are actually many legitimate uses for guns in civilian hands, such as farming and hunting? And guns can be fun, like at the Olympics. Is the issue that people just enjoy guns?

No. I hung out with a guy in North Carolina, he has a bunch of guns. He's an expert and takes it very seriously. He knows how to deal with them. That's not the context in which guns are problematic. They are problematic in the hands of angry young men with a grievance, who don't have the psychological wherewithal to resolve their disputes in a peaceful manner. That's what the problem is. We should be focused on guns in that setting.

So, “Guns don't kill people. Young men with psychological issues kill people, but guns make it too easy.” Is that the summary?

One of the many annoying things about the gun debate in America is the extent to which liberals roll their eyes at “Guns don't kill people; people do." I understand their aversion to it because it was dreamt up by people who wanted to escape any responsibility at all for the presence of guns in America. But the truth is, there's a really important point in it. Addressing the behavior of people who own guns is the best way to curb gun violence, given the constraints we're living under. There is ample evidence for this. If, for the next five years, we focused only on the behavior of those people who are likely to use guns in an irresponsible manner, we would bring the homicide rate down by a huge number. One of the irresponsible things about progressive views on gun violence is the extent to which they use their legitimate antipathy towards guns as an excuse not to address more fundamental issues about human behavior.

Some gun-control advocates gave up after the elementary-school shooting at Sandy Hook. Do you ever feel like you're shouting into the void on this issue?

No. I write books because I'm interested in the topic, and I feel like if I'm interested, there'll be some people who'll be interested in it too. I've never thought about that notion of shouting into the void. Sometimes maybe you have to shout into the void.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a deal on the security of the semi-autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, in a bid to end the standoff over the strategic island. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen joined Trump at the United Nations General Assembly in New York for the trilateral signing ceremony.

The deal follows Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland—a move he insisted was a matter of “national security,” on account of the mineral-rich Arctic territory’s positioning between the U.S., Russia, and Europe. Trump has long argued that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect the island. Tensions reached a critical point earlier this year, when he threatened to tariff European allies until Greenland fell under U.S. control, and suggested he may pull the U.S. out of NATO over the tussle.

The signed agreement notably stops short of Trump's call for the U.S. to ​take over Greenland as a U.S. territory.

Instead, in a speech at the U.N. gathering, Trump said the deal gives the U.S. "permanent control over security and all other needs on that territory" and emphasized that "no U.S. adversary will ever be permitted to establish a military ​presence in Greenland ​any more, or ⁠make sensitive investments there without our express written approval."

Trump added that the new text “greatly protects” Europe and “very much enhances NATO."

Danish and Greenlandic officials have emphasized that the U.S. military arrangement will not compromise the territory’s sovereignty—a fear expressed by many Greenlanders following Trump’s pressure campaign.

Some critics have questioned whether the new deal differs much from the existing 1951 defense agreement that gave the U.S. military extensive rights in Greenland.

The U.S. already has one base in Greenland, the Pituffik Space Base, which is located in the northwest of the territory and provides missile warning and space surveillance capabilities. Per the new deal, the U.S. will be allowed to establish additional "defense area[s]" on the island, specifically at "Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig."

Upon the announcement of the deal on Friday, Trump had said the U.S. will "immediately begin the process of developing a large military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland, of which there are many" and specified that this is an "infinite life agreement, there is no end." A State Department official told TIME the deal ensures Greenland will forever be a part of the strategic defense area of North America.

Torrey Taussig, director of the transatlantic security initiative at the Atlantic Council, says the deal is a positive step for U.S. relations with its Western allies.

“This is a significant feat for Danish diplomacy in that they got this deal, in this form. They've taken the temperature down with this [Trump] Administration in a way that I don't see it really flaring up again, because the President is viewing it as a win," she tells TIME.

Here's what to know about the high-stakes agreement, what it means for Greenland’s sovereignty, and if it stands to end the standoff over the island.

What do we know about Trump's Greenland deal?

The deal marks a notable expansion of U.S. military infrastructure on the island, with plans for new "defense areas."

Trump has stressed that the agreement gives Washington “permanent control” over Greenland’s security, concerns over which he has positioned at the center of his campaign for the U.S. to control the island. “World peace is at stake,” he claimed, earlier this year, insisting that “China and Russia want Greenland, and there is not a thing that Denmark can do about it.”

Russia and China have eyed up emerging shipping routes in the Arctic and possibly new avenues to critical minerals.

The agreement, according to a State Department official, establishes “permanent” guarantees that “only the U.S. and our allies can make sensitive investments in Greenland, eliminating the previous status quo in which adversaries have been investing in Greenland's sensitive sectors without investment screening.”

The deal's permanence marks a shift from what was in place before, experts tell TIME.

“The old 1951 agreement was tied to the NATO treaty, and therefore contained the possibility that either NATO disappears, or Greenland or Denmark leave, and the agreement ends,” says Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, the new agreement’s provisions regarding future investments in Greenland are noteworthy, but not groundbreaking, according to Taussig.

“On paper, it has advanced a few important security interests on behalf of the [Trump] Administration,” says Taussig of the terms. “But in substance, it's not like the Danes were looking to move out on significant Russian or Chinese military infrastructure projects in the near term.”

Some previous attempts at foreign investments in Greenland were reportedly thwarted by the U.S.

According to a 2019 report from the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. urged Denmark to finance airports in Greenland to counter a Chinese proposal for two airport projects, which was ultimately withdrawn.

What have Denmark and Greenland said?

Officials from Denmark and Greenland expressed their full backing of the new agreement at the signing ceremony.

“In the kingdom of Denmark, the United States has a friend that has always kept our word. An ally you have always been able to rely on.” Frederiksen said. “Seventy-five years ago, we entered into an agreement about the defense of Greenland; today we are signing a bigger and even better agreement. A deal that can last forever.”

In a statement to TIME, Frederiksen's office elaborated that the deal “recognizes the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom and the right of the Greenlandic people to self-determination" and "strengthens our common security in the Arctic and the North Atlantic area and is therefore also great for NATO and Europe.”

Nielsen said the new deal “takes into account the people of Greenland, our rights, our livelihoods,” and “is about taking shared responsibility for a secure America, a secure Greenland, with mutual respect and a peaceful Arctic.”

Before travelling to New York, the Greenlandic leader acknowledged the fresh start and said he hopes there can now be more “peace around our country.”

The deal has also been welcomed by European leadership.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, shortly after the signing, celebrated the agreement for "strengthening security in the Arctic and North Atlantic."

Reflecting on her recent visit to Greenland, during which the E.U. extended a major investment boost in the territory, von der Leyen said her stay only underscored the "strategic importance of the region and the scale of the challenges."

While in Greenland, von der Leyen had commented on the “visible scars of climate change on the ice sheet,” and noted that a “new reality is taking shape” as the ice melts. “New trade routes, new security risks, new environmental concerns. Europe stands with Greenland. We will navigate these changes together,” she vowed.

Read More: E.U. Extends Major Investment Boost to Greenland and Vows 'Full Solidarity' Amid Trump’s Annexation Threats

How is NATO involved?

The agreement highlights NATO's significance, stipulating that "through enhanced presence, improved surveillance and increased cooperation and interoperability with NATO-Allies, the Kingdom of Denmark shall continue to address emerging threats and contribute to collective stability and security in the Arctic region."

Speaking at the signing, Nielsen insisted: "NATO matters. We believe that it is vital to keep NATO strong, also in the Arctic, where the alliance has a key role to play."

“The Arctic and the North Atlantic are essential for our collective security, and this agreement will help advance security, stability, and cooperation in this vital region,” NATO spokesperson Allison Hart told TIME.

No state that is not a member of NATO will be allowed to establish its own manned or unmanned military installations in Greenland, per the agreement text, nor shall they be allowed a persistent presence of military forces in Greenland, unless otherwise agreed by the parties.

“I do not see much changing for NATO with this deal,” says Taussig. “This is a good news story for the alliance—the fact that we now have a deal that takes away the political irritant [of annexation threats].”

NATO has bolstered its posture in the Arctic this year, with the launch of the Arctic Sentry in February, bringing military drills, surveillance, and presence in the region under one command.

In June, the alliance also established Forward Land Forces (FLF) Finland. Led by framework nation Sweden, "FLF Finland will enhance deterrence and the defence on NATO’s northeastern flank and contribute to the security of the Arctic and the High North," NATO said at the time of the launch.

Taussig says she expects this increased NATO presence in the Arctic to continue, not just because of this deal, "but because of the [Trump] Administration's rightful attention on Greenland, and also the reality of the security environment,” as Russia has ramped up operations in the region in recent years.

What did the 1951 agreement between the U.S. and Denmark give Washington?

Barring the permanence of the fresh agreement, and its tighter restrictions on investments from adversaries, Wæver says: “The reality is that the new deal is indeed very close to the 1951 treaty.”

The 1951 deal, titled the Defense of Greenland Agreement, was signed two years after both the U.S. and Denmark joined NATO as founding members. It provides the basis for Washington’s military operations and presence in the Arctic territory.

Per the agreement, the U.S. can establish and operate military bases on the island that Washington and Denmark both agree is “necessary for the development of the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area.”

The Pituffik Space Base, the last active American military installation in Greenland, has around 150 troops stationed there, according to the Wall Street Journal. Vice President J.D. Vance visited the base in March 2025, weeks after key elections in Greenland and amid heightened U.S. interest in the territory. He was met with signs of protest and opposition from residents of the territory.

Alongside general military operations, the 1951 arrangement also stipulated that the U.S. can station and house U.S. military and civilian personnel within said bases, control related aircraft and shipping, as well as develop necessary infrastructure. “The 1951 agreement already gave the United States relatively unfettered military access to Greenland,” says Taussig.

The 1951 agreement also confirmed Greenland’s and Denmark’s sovereignty over the island, and stated that military operations must follow local laws and regulations.

The terms of U.S. military presence were developed further in 2004 under the Igaliku agreement, in which Washington committed to consulting with and informing Greenland and Denmark of any significant changes to military facilities or operations within the territory.

If you’ve ever sat up quickly or rolled over in bed abruptly and felt like the room was spinning or whirling around you when you’re actually still, you may have experienced a condition called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) without knowing what it was. This vestibular disorder—one that affects the inner ear—is one of the most common causes of vertigo, and it can make people feel very dizzy, unsteady, sweaty, even nauseous. Individual bouts tend to be brief—usually lasting 15 to 60 seconds at a time—but they can recur with certain head movements, make it difficult to function, and increase the risk of falling.

“The term ‘benign’ is the first part of the phrase—it does not feel benign when you experience it,” says Dr. Nedim Durakovic, an associate professor of otolaryngology and neurotology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Before the condition was well understood, “people thought that patients were having strokes when they had vertigo, [but] this is not the stroke form of vertigo.”

Here’s what to know about BPPV.

What causes BPPV?

With BPPV, tiny calcium carbonate crystals—called otoconia—that usually sit on hair cells in the inner ear get dislodged from where they belong and travel into one of the three semicircular canals of the inner ear. A change in head position, such as while rolling over in bed or tipping your head back in the shower, is what usually triggers BPPV symptoms.

It’s natural for these crystals to be in the ear. “They are part of your normal anatomy for your balance function,” says Dr. Gail Ishiyama, a professor in the departments of neurology and head and neck surgery and director of the Vestibular Clinical Laboratory at the UCLA School of Medicine. With BPPV, “they’re just in the wrong place, and that can cause vertigo.”

BPPV affects twice as many women as men, and it’s particularly common between the ages of 40 and 70. It can happen anytime, but head trauma or dental procedures involving drilling are two of the more common triggers, Ishiyama says.

People who have Menière’s disease (a chronic inner ear disorder), diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, hypothyroidism, migraine, anemia, osteoporosis, or peripheral neuropathy are particularly susceptible to BPPV, research has found. And research increasingly suggests that low vitamin D levels are a risk factor for BPPV.

How is BPPV diagnosed?

Getting the right diagnosis for BPPV isn’t always straightforward. “One of my frustrations with patients who experience this is they’ll go to the ER or they’ll get an MRI scan or a head CT scan—this whole [expensive] workup—when somebody just needed to lay them down and look at their eyes,” says Durakovic.

That, he says, is the easiest way to diagnose BPPV. Using something called the Dix-Hallpike maneuver, a health care provider will have the patient move between a seated and supine position and move their head in different directions while the provider examines their eyes. If the person’s eyes rapidly, repetitively, and involuntarily move up and down or in a twisting motion, these are signs of nystagmus, a condition involving sudden eye movements. Nystagmus often accompanies vertigo caused by BPPV, and if it does, the diagnosis is clear. If the patient doesn’t exhibit nystagmus, other diagnostic maneuvers may be used to trigger telltale symptoms.

What’s the treatment for BPPV?

The first-line treatment for BPPV uses a different maneuver called the Epley maneuver, which involves a series of specific head and body movements to remove the wayward crystals from the semicircular canal in order to relieve symptoms of vertigo. Sometimes the maneuver needs to be repeated several times, notes Durakovic. But research has found that it does the trick in more than 80% of people with BPPV.

There are other repositioning maneuvers, too, depending on which of the semi-circular canals is affected. “The positional maneuvers move the crystals along the pathway out of the canal and back to where they belong,” explains Dr. Cameron Wick, an associate professor of otolaryngology and neurotology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. If the maneuvers don’t provide immediate relief, people are advised to do them one to two times per day while they’re symptomatic, according to Wick.

In the instances when repositioning maneuvers don’t effectively relieve BPPV, the condition may resolve on its own over time. Other treatment options may include vestibular rehabilitation therapy—which is designed to treat dizziness, vertigo, and balance disorders—or surgery, which involves inserting a plug to block the part of the inner ear that crystals are flowing into.

Sometimes doctors prescribe vestibular suppressant medications, such as benzodiazepines or antihistamines, to calm the vertigo associated with BPPV. But Durakovic and Wick advise against these because they don’t address the underlying cause; they simply mask the symptoms temporarily. What’s more, these drugs are linked with an increased risk of falls when they’re used to treat dizziness.

Even when BPPV is successfully treated, recurrences occur in about 20% of people who’ve experienced it. “If you take vitamin D supplements, you’re less likely to get a recurrence of BPPV,” says Ishiyama. Staying hydrated and doing regular aerobic exercise can help, too, she says.

If, despite these measures, you find yourself experiencing recurrences of unexplained vertigo, it’s a good idea to see a neurotologist, an otolaryngologist, or a vestibular therapist to make sure that you are getting the right diagnosis.

When Donald Trump arrived in Beijing in May, Xi Jinping was already on the offensive. The Chinese leader wasted zero time in rebuking his U.S. counterpart over arms sales to Taiwan directly warning that simmering tensions over the self-ruling island could ultimately cause the superpowers to “enter into conflict.”

Trump acquiesced. He delayed a $14 billion arms package to Taiwan, said future weapons would be discussed as a “very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, questioned the island’s sovereignty as something “nobody knows how to define,” and stressed that he was not looking to fight a war “9,500 miles away”—all without securing any apparent reduction in Chinese military pressure in return.

While this response alarmed many in democratic Taiwan, many people around the globe hope that Xi can prove similarly persuasive on another issue of grave importance when he travels to the White House on Sept 24: artificial intelligence.

“Taiwan is not a priority anymore,” Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Beijing's Renmin University, says of Xi’s impending visit. “The priority is definitely AI.”

In recent days, warnings from a whistleblower researcher and reports of rogue agent swarms have intensified fears of a doomsday scenario born of unbridled AI development. On Sept. 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled We Must Pace the Frontier calling for embedded independent evaluators, common safety standards among democracies, and eventually verifiable global coordination to slow dangerous frontier-AI development. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk also voiced broad support for slowing frontier development.

However, one major skeptic is Trump, who responded on Truth Social that “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.” Moreover, he insisted that “President Xi, of China, just announced that China will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI, or its future.”

That characterization is misleading. China regulates AI more stringently than most other countries, and already enforces AI security guidance, ethics review requirements, and binding obligations on consumer AI services. Xi has also publicly called for legal, technical, and ethical guardrails that keep AI under human control (albeit while resisting restrictions that could impede China’s technological rise). “We should strengthen risk-awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable,” he told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17.

The hope among safety advocates is that Xi and Trump might strike a deal on AI. While Trump’s first term was anchored in antipathy to China, he posed a notably different tone in Beijing, calling Xi “a man I respect greatly” and telling him that “it’s an honor to be your friend.” Although that cordiality does not erase the national competition that makes either side hesitant to constrain its technological development, it may put  narrower cooperation on the table.

Certainly, the moment is ripe to build a framework built on competition, cooperation, and strict guardrails. Beyond economic rivalry, both Washington and Beijing share an urgent interest in mitigating catastrophic miscalculations, particularly surrounding AI integration into defense architectures and nuclear command and control systems. 

Trump also enters the summit under pressure, with soaring energy prices from the Iran war adding to voter discontent ahead of the midterms. “Trump needs a win more than Xi does,” says Jonathan Sullivan, head of China programs at the Asia Research Institute at the University of Nottingham.

Still, Xi’s motivations require clear-eyed scrutiny. Last week, Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, published an article in China Cyberspace Magazine that expounded upon the opportunities and challenges of AI. The top “risk,” he said, was “political security, institutional security, and ideological security.”

While the deeply paranoid Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won’t allow its people to access Google or Facebook, it cannot countenance AI exhibiting the kind of autonomy that was on display in July. That month, a “swarm” of OpenAI agents circumvented sandbox controls, communicated through unauthorized channels, gained access to AI platform Hugging Face, compromised credentials, and accessed internal datasets while trying to game evaluations. It’s enough to give a regime built on control pause.

But while China’s motivations may be driven as much by safeguarding party control as by addressing broader risks to humanity, these objectives can overlap. “If they go beyond bilateral competition and address so many concerns about AI development, that would show the co-leadership of China and the U.S.,” says Wang. “Not just two superpowers, but also two civilizations.”

However, any agreement requires overcoming profound distrust. Even as Amodei argued for pacing frontier AI development, he framed it in terms of competing with China, whose “lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world.” On that score, he advocated stronger export controls on advanced semiconductors, a crackdown on chip smuggling, and greater efforts to prevent Chinese companies from “distilling” the capabilities of Western models.

The contradiction of calling for a slowdown while talking up the “race” narrative wasn’t lost on critics (who also pointed out that Anthropic could temper its own research without external intervention). Others suggested that because cheap, open-weight Chinese AI models are among the chief rivals to Anthropic’s proprietary models, its CEO’s call to crack down on Chinese AI development could be seen as commercially motivated rather than altruistic—especially as the firm eyes a potential record-breaking IPO that could value the company at $2 trillion.

Indeed, China was quick to leap on Amodei’s essay as an example of “fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition [that] will only hamper efforts toward sound global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said last week. A flurry of strident op-eds in state media followed, with the CCP mouthpiece Global Times calling the essay a “‘Cold War script’ for the AI field.”

Amodei has long been a bête noire in Beijing for painting AI as a tussle between democracies and autocracies that casts China as the principal threat. “If there's ever a proposal that requires Chinese buy-in, the last person on earth that would be a good salesman is Dario Amodei,” says Ryan Hass, an expert in U.S.-China relations at the Brookings Institution. 

But Amodei’s framing of AI as a zero-sum contest is far from an outlier—it is shared by a large chunk of the Trump administration. “There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sept. 8. “If they were to pull away from us on AI, then nothing else would matter.”

A grand bargain to slow AI development is unlikely, and grievances over distillation or export controls could stall negotiations. But experts see room for narrower cooperation. Both countries face threats from non-state actors using AI to sabotage infrastructure, mount cyberattacks, or create biological weapons, argues Alvin W. Graylin, a digital fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. Sharing information about those threats could benefit both sides. 

When Bessent met Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng and chief trade negotiator Li Chenggang on Sunday to thrash out summit objectives, he reportedly proposed a formal AI dialogue and a mechanism for each side to notify the other of AI incidents which threaten national security. Modest a measure it may be, it would be an important step towards avoiding some of the worst risks, says Scott Singer, a fellow and co-director of the China AI Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I wouldn’t take these small but critical steps for granted.”

Such a channel could help either side respond during a crisis, and reduce the risk of mistaking a non-state actor or rogue AI as an act of aggression. Reminiscent of the “red phone” that connected Washington to Moscow during the Cold War, experts have floated the idea of a literal fax machine to avoid mistranslations.

To be sure, Beijing has not publicly endorsed the proposal. Even if it does, important questions remain. What, for example, would classify a national security threat? Its effectiveness would also depend on whether governments learned of serious incidents. OpenAI only reported its agents' autonomous cyberattack after Hugging Face, the target of the attack, reported the breach to the FBI. Independent researchers have since uncovered other apparent instances of OpenAI agents compromising websites. 

Beyond the proposed channel, Bessent has said the two countries have agreed to establish a recurring dialogue. Who will staff those talks, and how often they will meet, remains unclear. More than two years elapsed between the last official AI dialogue and Sunday’s meeting.

With the stakes quickly rising, Singer says another prolonged hiatus from the negotiating table could prove disastrous. “Who knows where we’re going to be in June 2027,” he says with respect to AI development. “This cannot go off the rails.” 

Between us, we have six children. The oldest is 12. None of them has a phone yet, and none has asked us whether artificial intelligence is going to ruin their lives.

They will.

They will learn that some of the people building the most powerful AI systems have warned that the technology could become dangerous in ways we cannot yet control. They will hear predictions that many of the jobs they might want in the future may disappear. They will encounter arguments about truth, power, safety, and whether our institutions can possibly keep pace with machines advancing faster than our ability to govern them.

We will not be able to tell them that any of it is nonsense. We don’t think it is.

But another danger looms over this moment. As the conversation around AI grows darker, we risk becoming so consumed by what might go wrong that we stop paying attention to what is beginning to go right.

That is not an argument for complacency. The risks are real and demand immediate action. It is an argument for something we think is becoming equally necessary: pragmatic optimism.

We work in one of the most failure-prone fields there is, trying to understand disease and determine which medicines might work in human beings. From where we sit, on the front lines of investing in and creating medicines, we are beginning to see AI change what is possible.

Drug development has always been a brutal business. Historically, roughly nine out of 10 therapies entering human testing fail. A successful medicine can take a decade or more and billions of dollars to develop. But of course, those statistics obscure the real cost. A failed or missing medicine is a patient still waiting.

For most of modern drug development, scientists have started with a hypothesis about biology, searched for a molecule that might affect it, tested that molecule and, overwhelmingly, discovered along the way that they were wrong. AI is beginning to change that story.

We have had the wonder of watching this shift in human insight and discovery direction being force-multiplied by AI up close.  We recently watched a team of researchers use AI to design antibodies from scratch against some of the hardest targets in medicine, unlocking approaches that have stymied some of the most sophisticated groups in pharma. Nearby, another group of only five scientists used an AI-driven experimental system to move from an idea for a challenging new medicine to demonstrating what we believe are unique cancer-treating capabilities in a primate in less than six months. Programs with these ambitions would conventionally require teams of specialists working for years.

What is changing is not simply the tools available to help us make predictions about human biology. It is the speed of the discovery process itself: propose an idea, build it, test it in the physical world, learn from what happened, and begin again. The scientific method itself is beginning to accelerate, and the number of scientific inquiries, opportunities to advance health per dollar spent, is beginning to scale. 

Last month, Merck and Moderna reported that a personalized cancer vaccine for melanoma significantly delayed the disease from spreading. The result is remarkable on its own, and studies are already underway in other settings. What we find particularly exciting is how this growing clinical evidence, combined with AI tools and automated labs, can open the field to more competitors. The evidence reduces uncertainty about the approach, while these tools can lower the cost and time required to pursue it. Together, they can bring more teams and more capital into our fight against cancer and expand the number of promising ideas that will be tested at an unprecedented rate.  

We are at the very beginning.

Anyone claiming that AI has solved drug discovery is selling something. Of the 117 AI-enabled drug programs in human trials last year across 63 companies. Not one has been approved. Biology has humbled generations of brilliant scientists, and AI will not repeal biology. Models will be wrong. Drugs will fail. Patients will respond in ways nobody predicted.

But we see green shoots and a remarkable new calibration of direction, not a destination. Direction is the whole game in fighting disease and improving human health. AI is beginning to give us better ways of finding it.

That is the source of our optimism. Not the belief that the dangers surrounding AI are exaggerated, or that medicine is about to become easy. We believe neither. It comes from watching a technology begin to alter a field in which meaningful progress has historically been painfully slow.

Our children will inherit all of this. They will live with the disruptions we are debating now and others none of us has anticipated. They deserve leaders who take those risks seriously and institutions willing to act before every consequence is known, and before some of the most dangerous become irreversible.

They also deserve to know what else was happening at this moment.

Diseases we could not understand are now yielding more of their secrets. Machines can now search for possibilities no human mind can find alone. Medicines are being designed differently. Diseases too rare or complicated to command sufficient attention are becoming more tractable.

And if all of that started to compound, the baseline of human health our children inherit started to be different from the one we inherited ourselves.

We don’t yet know what AI will take from our children’s generation. From where we sit, we are beginning to see what it might give.

And that is a story worth telling too.

The heat waves Europe has seen in recent years were made measurably more intense because of the greenhouse gasses emitted since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, according to a new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters.  

“We found that the emissions released since the signing of this Paris Agreement in 2015 have substantially and significantly increased the intensity of Europe's recent individual heat waves,” says lead author Jared Trok, a PhD student in Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. The study also determined that that held true for Europe’s hottest week in every individual year since at least 2021.

Their findings come on the heels of this summer's back-to-back heat waves on the continent, which broke heat records and contributed to at least 35,000 excess deaths. 

Read more: In Europe, Today's Children Will Live Through Nearly Twice as Many Fire Weather Days Than Their Grandparents

The Paris Agreement was a legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted by nearly 200 countries in December 2015, with the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. A decade later, the world is expected to blow past that 1.5°C target, with optimistic estimates finding that temperatures will peak at 1.8°C under current climate policies. 

Beyond the 1.5°C  threshold, every extra fraction of a degree matters. The world can expect to see intensified extreme weather, ecosystem loss, and flooding in coastal cities and island nations, along with far-reaching impacts to human health and food security. 

Europe is particularly vulnerable in the face of a warming climate. The continent is heating up at more than twice the global average rate. The June and July 2025 heat waves broke records across the continent—only to be surpassed by 2026 heat waves. Surface air temperatures exceeded 40°C (104°F)  in several countries, and up to 46°C (114.8°F) in Spain and Portugal. 

The researchers created a generative AI model known as a diffusion model using simulated weather data from 10 global climate models to predict how extreme heat waves in Europe could have unfolded under different global emissions levels.

“This is a purpose built machine learning model that we trained on large amounts of climate model data…to make predictions about how individual heat waves might have unfolded differently if those same weather patterns had occurred under different levels of human emissions,” says Trok. 

The team gave the model the observed weather conditions that caused Europe’s most intense annual heat waves from 2016 to 2025, which typically coincided with a persistent, high pressure system known as a heat dome. They had the model predict daily temperatures under emission levels at the time of each extreme heat event, and under the lower emissions levels of 2015. 

They found that the emissions from the last decade increased the intensity of 2025 heat waves by roughly a third of a degree Celsius. “That third of a degree might seem very small, maybe imperceptible to us walking around, but there's a large body of scientific literature that suggests that even small increments of temperature on a hot day can have these disproportionate impacts on the damages caused by those heat waves,” says Trok.

Scientists have long known that the burning of fossil fuels trap greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, raising global temperatures. In recent decades, researchers have developed methods to study how historical emissions have affected heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. The researchers say that the methodology represents a step forward for climate modeling. 

“This research shows that we can systematically and objectively ask questions about subsets of historical emissions, including individual heat waves,” says co-author Noah Diffenbaugh, professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “A key part of what we've identified here is we've been able to say with high confidence that this subset of emissions has shifted the distribution of temperatures that could occur during this individual heat wave to such an extent that we can say we are very confident that this individual heat wave would have been cooler if the same weather patterns had occurred without this subset of emissions.” 

It also serves as a warning, says Diffenbaugh, noting that the emissions that have already been released will impact our climate regardless of any mitigation efforts we take going forward. “Even in the context of the most optimistic, ambitious future for reducing emissions, there's still more intensification of extremes that is essentially committed.”