Some relationships need to end. 

Years ago, I treated a woman whose husband was deliberately trying to drive her toward suicide while attempting to extract money from her family. What struck me was not only the cruelty of his behavior, but his complete lack of empathy or remorse for the harm he was causing. Leaving him was necessary, and the woman is now happily remarried.

Most troubled relationships look nothing like that. They involve disappointment, resentment, misunderstanding, conflicting needs, old wounds, and people who have never learned how to reconcile after hurting one another. In more than 20 years of clinical practice, that extreme case remains the only time I directly recommended divorce.

Mental-health professionals have become remarkably good at helping clients identify unhealthy relationships. We have a sophisticated vocabulary for boundaries, trauma, toxicity, narcissism, gaslighting, and emotional safety. But I worry that we are far less effective at helping people navigate difficult but meaningful connections.

There is an irony here. Psychotherapy itself is predicated upon the healing power of human connection, yet therapists can be surprisingly quick to undervalue relationships outside the therapy room. Furthermore, relationships themselves teach basic psychological capacities such as regulating emotions, tolerating disappointment, and negotiating differences—skills which therapy is supposed to cultivate.

Too often, we mistake relational distress for relational dysfunction. Wall Street Journal columnist Elizabeth Bernstein recently highlighted this eloquently. She reported on therapists who encouraged adult children to go “no contact” with their parents, often after surprisingly little effort to mend ruptures. In a survey of roughly 7,000 estranged parents, one-third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or even recommended the decision to cut ties. That should give us pause.

The issue extends well beyond parents and children. Similar patterns appear in marriages and among siblings, friendships, and other close bonds. Therapists have become too quick to support ending difficult relationships instead of helping people develop the skills to repair them.

In reality, walking away from another person often solves one problem while creating others. Increasingly, my practice sees clients who have ended relationships that took a lifetime to build. The immediate conflict may be gone, but so is the connection. Many become lonelier and less equipped to navigate conflict, disappointment, and repair elsewhere.

Tragically, many who end contact with loved ones also become more distressed in the long run, since close relationships are a foundation of mental health. Maintaining social connection is a form of “fitness” that requires ongoing cultivation. Even when strained or difficult, human bonds provide belonging, support, identity, and resilience. That may matter more now than ever, as many meaningful in-person social interactions are dwindling in the face of digital alternatives.

I learned this lesson the hard way about 15 years ago.

A woman came in because she was deeply concerned about her husband, who had obsessive-compulsive disorder. We eventually got him into treatment. He worked hard, completed difficult exposure therapy exercises, and improved considerably. By the standards I had been trained to use, the treatment was successful. But their marriage was not. His wife remained deeply unhappy, and their connection deteriorated. Eventually he lost most of his hard-fought progress, and she fell into clinical depression. Looking back, I can see the mistake clearly: we treated the patient and his symptoms, but not the relationship itself.

This reflects something larger about how mental-health care is generally structured. Our system is overwhelmingly individualistic. Diagnostics assign disorders to individuals, and insurance reimbursement follows an identified patient and his or her diagnosis. Even family psychotherapy is typically covered only when it is being used to treat an individual’s mental health. That model may make sense in other areas of medicine, such as orthopedics where a fracture occurs within one body. Mental health is fundamentally different. A great deal of flourishing and suffering happens between people, not just within them, because human beings are relational beings.

A second structural problem is that mental healthcare increasingly pathologizes ordinary negative emotions. That can backfire. Excessive focus on distress tends to amplify it. As an anxiety specialist, I know this pattern well. Avoidance may bring immediate relief, but over time it reinforces fear and reduces our capacity to tolerate discomfort. 

Effective treatment does the opposite: it helps people face distress so they become more capable to withstand adversity, not less. Applied to relationships, this becomes especially critical because even the healthiest connections generate some strain. Loving spouses disappoint us, supportive parents fail us, close friends misunderstand us, and even terrific children create enormous stress. If stress itself is taken as evidence that a relationship is unhealthy, the normal difficulties of human interaction begin to look pathological.

Therefore, therapy should do more than help people identify what’s wrong with their relationships. It should build our capacity to sustain connection and repair ruptures: to tolerate disappointment, take responsibility for our own contribution to tensions, set limits without reflexively severing ties, and accept what another person may never be able to give us.

These skills matter beyond any single relationship. Learning how to reconnect with a spouse can make us better caregivers. Learning how to accept a parent’s limitations can change how we relate to our friends, work colleagues, and children. Working through difficult interactions can both preserve meaningful connections and strengthen our ability to navigate other ones.

Mel Robbins captured this idea in accessible language through her book, The Let Them Theory. Her core insight is simple: stop trying to control other people. Let them disappoint you, disagree with you, and make choices you don’t like. Then decide how you want to respond.

That message matters because a great deal of interpersonal conflict comes from trying to force others to change. We want parents to be more emotionally available, spouses to react differently, siblings to finally understand us, and adult children to make choices we approve of. Sometimes change is possible and can be requested directly upon the foundation of a loving connection. But sometimes the wiser move is to stop demanding that another person change as a condition of staying in contact with them.

Unfortunately, some of my academic and clinical colleagues have dismissed this approach. I think they are missing something critical. Leaving is sometimes necessary, but far more often the harder and healthier work is learning how to stay connected to imperfect people without surrendering ourselves, or trying to control them.

Human beings need relationships. Relationships require skills. Therapy should help us build them.

Six months into the war between the United States and Iran, President Donald Trump has turned to economic warfare to force the country into submission and threatened an “Economic D-Day” against Iran. This new American strategy was spelled out by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this week: a campaign of U.S. sanctions against countries and financial institutions that do business with Iran or help it evade sanctions. 

The proposed new sanctions go beyond oil exports to target digital assets, gold, and the aviation sectors that help finance the Iranian economy. Bessent described it as a campaign to “collapse every last option for Iran.” Making all this work depends on whether the U.S. can convince Iran’s most important trade partners to cut out the Islamic Republic. China, which buys around 80% of Iran’s seaborne crude oil, has already pushed back, warning that it will “take all necessary measures” to protect its interests should it be targeted by U.S. sanctions. Beijing's response casts doubt on whether Washington’s new gambit can deliver results.

If the aim, as stated, is to deal an economic blow to Iran, the fact is that the country is already under severe strain. A U.S. naval blockade has constrained oil exports, the primary source of revenue for Iran. Ordinary Iranians are facing greater economic pressure as their purchasing power is eroding: food inflation reached 128% year-on-year in July and families are cutting back on meat and other items. The dollar value of the minimum wage has fallen from about $105 to $86 since late March as the rial has weakened significantly. On Monday, Iranian currency fell to a record low of 2.02 million rials to the dollar.

So what is the goal of Bessent’s announcement? Simply put, acknowledging the reality—even if the administration won’t state it in these terms—of avoiding a further, major military campaign as the conflict drags on. For their part, Iran’s leaders have dismissed the threat of intensified economic warfare, insisting the new punitive economic measures would fail. “It is the same movie they keep playing over and over again,” remarked Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

Does this mean nothing will change with the American announcement? Put another way, are we likely to see a continuation of the current state of neither war nor peace, with Iran prolonging things until it can secure a favorable deal to end the conflict? Tehran, it is true, has powerful reasons to avoid another major military escalation. A new round of fighting could deepen the damage to Iran’s energy, transport and industrial infrastructure—much of it still under repair from earlier hostilities— and would also complicate reconstruction by further straining state finances, disrupting imports and exposing an already weakened economy to another cycle of destruction.

Yet American economic saber-rattling could alter this calculus. After all, on Aug. 10, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei appointed Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, a hardliner with significant experience in intelligence and operational positions, as the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), instructing him to strengthen capabilities for “powerful offensive operations against the enemy.” That language was echoed on Aug. 22 by Mohsen Rezaei, who was recently appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the top national security body of Iran. In an interview Rezaei spoke of Tehran going to introduce “changes in the conduct of the war” and bring “new capabilities” into play. He also warned that Iran had so far targeted only U.S. military bases but could begin striking American economic interests if Washington intensified its economic campaign. 

Tick tock, tick tock

If Iran is pondering a possible escalation in the military conflict, the Trump Administration appears to be betting that time may yield what bombs have so far failed to. The naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz  remains in place, secondary sanctions are being tightened, and pressure is being increased on countries and financial networks that have allowed Tehran to circumvent previous restrictions. On Aug. 19, the United Arab Emirates, which has been a traditional financial gateway for Iran, suspended financial and commercial transactions with the country, a decision that is bound to hurt the Iranian economy.

Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed, but oil has continued to move through the waterway, which is 29 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. The U.S. military has established a protected route along the southern side of the strait, close to the shore of Oman. The Gulf states have experimented with ship-to-ship transfers and other means of moving crude around Iranian restrictions. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been working intensively to reduce their dependence on the strait, building pipelines and investing in storage facilities to transport their oil by other routes.

Precise estimates of oil passing through the strait are not available, but the volume seems to be somewhere between a quarter and half of the prewar flow of 20 million barrels a day. Oil prices remain elevated, hovering around $90 a barrel, but they are still far below the levels Tehran might have expected from an effective and sustained closure. Tehran had hoped that continued disruption in Hormuz would eventually make the economic costs of the confrontation intolerable for Washington and force Trump back toward compromise. Instead, the U.S. increasingly appears to believe that it can keep enough oil moving while allowing the blockade and sanctions to steadily increase the pressure on Iran.

For Iran, that creates a very different calculation. The longer the current situation continues, the greater the strain on an economy already struggling with shortages, inflation and restrictions on trade. Iranian officials are increasingly speaking of the domestic consequences. First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref has spoken of the danger of economic discontent turning into social instability; the speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has warned that measures such as raising gasoline prices could provide an opening for renewed unrest. President Masoud Pezeshkian has acknowledged that the blockade has restricted the country’s ability to import essential goods, including fuel.

Thus, Tehran is finding it increasingly harder to sustain the condition of “no war, no peace.”

A renewed war would impose enormous costs on Iran, but its leaders might ask a different question: will those costs be greater after months of economic pressure, declining revenues and continued military containment?  If the answer is yes, then waiting ceases to be a strategy of restraint and begins to look like gradual erosion of power and strength. And they could consider escalation as a means of breaking the deadlock before Iran’s position deteriorates further.

From retaliation to initiative

Economic pressure is not the only reason Iran may be more willing to take risks. Tehran’s own understanding of deterrence has also changed over the course of the war. For years, Iranian leaders portrayed military action as retaliatory: Iran would absorb an attack, then impose costs on the aggressor. The experience of the past two years has increasingly called that logic into question. From Tehran’s perspective, repeated attempts to contain escalation did not prevent Israel and the United States from expanding their attacks.

The strategic reassessment is now visible in Iran’s military leadership and practice. After appointing Vahidi as the commander of the IRGC, Khamenei instructed him to pursue “maximum deterrence” while preparing the force for “powerful offensive operations.” The wording is significant. Offensive action is increasingly being conceived as a path to restoring deterrence. Iran has already offered a glimpse of what this could mean in practice. On Jul. 28, the IRGC launched ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan, at a time when Trump had paused American strikes to give diplomacy more time.

In a departure from the past, the strike was not a response to an American attack. U.S. Central Command described it as an attempted surprise attack, and Washington subsequently resumed its strikes against Iran. The sequence suggested that Tehran was becoming more willing to initiate military action when it believed doing so could alter the strategic equation, rather than waiting to retaliate. Iranian leaders may also feel they have more room to act than Washington or Israel expected. Despite the enormous damage inflicted on Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure, recent satellite imagery and Israeli assessments indicate that Tehran has been restoring missile bases, production facilities, ports and other military infrastructure at a surprisingly rapid pace.

Iran has not recovered from the war, and its leaders have not become indifferent to the risks of another military confrontation. Yet capability and willingness do interact. The more Tehran believes it can regenerate the military tools damaged during the war, the less compelling a strategy of absorbing economic pressure becomes. The emerging emphasis on proactive military action and sense of military regeneration could establish a lower threshold for Iranian military escalation than Washington assumes.

If Iran considers the current balance as unsustainable, its escalation would have to differ from what it has already tried. Tehran is already attacking commercial shipping, contesting passage through Hormuz and relying on the Houthis to keep pressure on maritime traffic in the Red Sea. Intensifying those actions may raise costs, but it is unlikely to change Washington’s calculation of moving significant volumes of oil through the southern part of the strait.

Iran could resume attacks on U.S. bases, radar systems, and other facilities that support maritime surveillance and command-and-control systems that help protect and coordinate shipping through the Strait. More  dangerous still, it could attempt to strike U.S. naval vessels directly. Iran is believed to possess anti-ship missiles that, at least on paper, can threaten American warships operating in and around the Persian Gulf. The harder problem is locating and tracking moving targets with sufficient precision, why is why better intelligence, including potentially from partners such as Russia or China, could become an important variable.

So far, Tehran has generally had strong reasons to avoid inflicting large numbers of American casualties, which could trigger a much larger U.S. campaign against Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure. But that restraint depends on Iranian leaders continuing to believe that avoiding such a confrontation leaves them better off. If they conclude instead that prolonged blockade and economic pressure are steadily worsening their position, the threshold for taking that risk could fall. Tehran has already warned that major U.S. attacks on Iranian energy or civilian infrastructure would be met with strikes against comparable infrastructure across the region, potentially widening the confrontation well beyond Hormuz.

This is also why diplomacy remains the least costly way out for both sides. Washington may believe that time and economic pressure are improving its bargaining position; Tehran may increasingly believe that the same process is closing its window for action. That is a particularly dangerous combination. 

The memorandum of understanding reached earlier in the conflict is imperfect and each side accuses the other of violating it, but it still provides an existing framework for sequencing de-escalation, maritime arrangements, sanctions relief, and further negotiations. Reviving it would require concessions from both Washington and Tehran. The alternative is to allow each side’s strategy to reinforce the other’s worst assumptions until escalation begins to look less like a choice than an inevitability.

As President Donald Trump’s approval rating hit a new low, he turned once again to the art of redrawing the world map. With the stroke of a pen, the President sought to erase over 400 years of cartographic history by renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” through executive order. Trump’s unilateral action requires that the U.S. Board on Geographic Names update its databases to “reflect the renaming of the Lake and remove all references to Lake Ontario.”

Trump’s executive order applies to all U.S. federal maps, documents, and other communications. However, experts suggest that Trump can’t force other countries, international organizations, private mapping companies, or even U.S. state governments to use the new name. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has already responded in no uncertain terms that Canada will retain the original name of Lake Ontario “today and forever.” New York Governor Kathy Hochul also rejected the use of the name “Lake America” on New York state maps.

As two geographers who have spent decades studying political toponymy, or the politics of place naming, in both the United States and Canada, we are dismayed by the careless nature of Trump’s impulsive use of place renaming as a form of political rage baiting. 

Renaming Lake Ontario is part of a larger pattern of using place naming to promote the Trump brand and his “America First” ideology. From the very outset of his second presidential term, Trump launched the so-called “Golden Age of America” by announcing that the Gulf of Mexico would be renamed the “Gulf of America.” This has now been followed with “Lake America,” and Trump even mused about possibly renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, we presume to something along the lines of “American Ocean” or “Ocean of America.”

Over the past year, Trump’s obsession with naming places has given rise to a new term—toponymic narcissism—which refers to the condition of being obsessed with naming places after oneself.  

In many respects, Trump tends to approach the world map much like the Greek mythical figure of Narcissus viewed a body of water: as an opportunity to admire the reflection of his own self-image.

The cost of this narcissistic approach to controlling and changing place names is that it obscures how these names should be shared symbolic resources that serve the broader public and not just the ambitions, grievances, or political feuds of a single individual.

The conventional process of naming geographical features along the U.S.-Canada border involves bringing a formal proposal to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and the Geographical Names Board of Canada, along with their state and provincial counterparts on both sides of the border. There is generally an extensive consultation process to ensure all geographical naming authorities are on the same page before moving forward with a name change. Yet Trump has thrown all of this out the window simply to rage-bait a U.S. ally into submission.

While the standard place naming process is not perfect, it at least establishes an institutional procedure for review, consultation, evidence gathering, and consideration of competing claims before a geographic name is changed. By contrast, what we are witnessing under Trump 2.0 is a unilateral naming by decree or whim with seemingly no public discussion or real government consideration of impacts and consequences. 

It is clear to us that Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario is symbolic political theater aimed at diverting our attention away from the fallout of his trade war with Canada. Yet symbols matter. Place naming is a world-making practice that shapes the very foundations of our geographical imaginations and how we come to know and engage with the world.

There is a risk in dismissing Trump’s cartography of mass distraction as a frivolous symbolic tactic, since it can have real consequences for what is taught in classrooms, reconciliation efforts with Indigenous peoples, and the badly needed repair of relations between the United States and Canada.

If there is any hope to be found in the cartographic carnage that Trump is unleashing on the world map, it is that a future president can just as easily reverse these name changes in an attempt to restore America’s world image.

While the popular GLP-1 medications continue to help people control diabetes and weight, the versatile drugs are also starting to address other health conditions as well.

On Aug. 28, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Mounjaro to lower the risk of heart events, including heart attack, in people with diabetes. Made by Eli Lilly and Company, Mounjaro is already approved to help manage blood sugar.

Mounjaro affects two of the hormones in the incretin class—GLP-1 and GIP—that have become powerful targets for controlling blood sugar and weight. In the study Lilly submitted to the FDA, researchers compared heart events among people with Type 2 diabetes who either took Mounjaro or another Lilly drug for diabetes, called Trulicity, which targets only GLP-1. People taking Mounjaro had an 8% lower rate of heart attack, stroke, or heart-related death compared to those taking Trulicity. In previous studies, Trulicity helped people with and without a history of heart conditions to lower their risk of having a heart event by 12% compared to those receiving placebo.

“This study was in patients with Type 2 diabetes, in whom the No. 1 cause of death is cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Rachel Batterham, senior vice president of medical innovation and external engagement for cardiometabolic health at Lilly. “So reducing that risk is critically important.”

Batterham says Lilly decided to compare Mounjaro’s potential in reducing heart risk to an existing drug, Trulicity, that already reduced heart risk to see if Mounjaro would have any additional benefit. “We set ourselves a very high bar,” she says.

But the study design means that the heart benefit results cannot be directly compared to Mounjaro’s competitor drug, Ozempic, from Novo Nordisk. Ozempic, which is approved to treat diabetes, and Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, approved to treat overweight and obesity, are both approved to lower the risk of heart disease risk by 20%. Lilly is, however, currently conducting a study tracking people who don’t have Type 2 diabetes who take the weight-loss version of their drug, Zepbound, for heart events. In that study, says Batterham, the researchers will be looking at whether Zepbound can prevent second heart events from occurring in people who have already had one, as well as whether the drug can prevent first heart events from occurring.

For now, she says, the new indication means that for people with Type 2 diabetes already taking Mounjaro, doctors can discuss the fact that in addition to controlling their blood sugar, the drug may also help them to lower their risk of having heart events. And for those who don’t have diabetes and are taking Zepbound for weight loss only, “what we could say is that we know people with Type 2 diabetes see this [heart] benefit, but as yet we don’t have the data to say that this same benefit applies in people without diabetes—but we will have those data next year.”

Heart disease remains the leading killer of people worldwide, and one of the key risk factors driving deaths is elevated levels of cholesterol.

In a new article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers report that a gene-editing therapy helped people with increased levels of cholesterol and triglycerides maintain lower levels of these lipids for at least a year. The findings build on earlier results of the therapy, reported last November.

The gene-editing treatment, developed by the biotech company CRISPR Therapeutics, uses CRISPR technology to precisely edit a gene involved in cholesterol regulation. The gene, called ANGPTL3, makes an enzyme that blocks the breakdown of bad cholesterol (LDL) and triglycerides. But scientists discovered a long-lived population in Italy in which people born with a mutation in ANGPTL3—rendering it defective—had low levels of LDL and triglycerides and very little heart disease. The CRISPR therapy mimics this naturally occurring mutation; people who have received it now have this mutation in their ANGPTL3, which means they can now break down cholesterol and triglycerides properly.

In the small study, 15 people with severe forms of high cholesterol and triglycerides showed drops in the two lipids of up to 50%, which the latest results show lasted for at least a year.

“From an efficacy standpoint, it’s a pretty big win,” says Samarth Kulkarni, CEO of CRISPR Therapeutics.

The fact that the people in the study were able to maintain lower levels of LDL and triglycerides for up to a year means that CRISPR was able to edit enough cells in the liver, where much of the body’s cholesterol and triglycerides are produced, to give patients the benefit of having lower levels of the lipids. It also shows that these edited cells continue to produce new generations of cells that carry the CRISPR edit in AGNPTL3. People who received the highest dose of the CRISPR therapy saw levels of the ANGPTL3 enzyme drop by nearly 80%, which contributed to a drop in LDL and triglycerides of about 50%. “This is a really big step for CRISPR to show the durability of the result,” says Dr. Luke Laffin, co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at the Cleveland Clinic and lead author of the study.

The CRISPR therapy did not cause significant side effects—and researchers did not expect it to, since people born with the defective ANGPTL3 gene don’t seem to have serious diseases either. That means the one-time therapy could potentially replace the current treatment for high LDL and triglycerides: daily statin pills. While effective, many people don’t take the pills on a daily basis for years, which lowers their effectiveness. “We could look at a situation further down the line where we are able to give people a choice,” says Laffin. In the future, if someone has a serious family history of heart disease or high cholesterol, for example, “this therapy may be an option for them where we could treat them now, edit their [liver cells], and they can continue to have a genetic defect that we know is safe and will control their cholesterol.”

Kulkarni says the company has already begun the next phase of studies and anticipates additional results by the end of this year. That study will continue to focus on people with severe cases of high cholesterol and triglycerides, which affects about two to three million people in the U.S. If that study and further late-stage studies of the CRISPR therapy continue to show positive results, the company might consider conducting studies in people with more average elevations in their lipids.

“The biggest promise of gene-editing in cardiovascular medicine is the notion of a one-time treatment that would be all you need,” he says. “Once you reduce levels of ANGPTL3, it remains durably reduced—presumably for life, but at least for one year. It’s very exciting.”

King Harald V of Norway, a reformer and Europe’s oldest monarch, died Friday at the age of 89. His son, the newly-proclaimed King Haakon VIII, has inherited the Norwegian throne.

Harald passed away peacefully in his sleep at Oslo University Hospital Rikshospitalet at 6:35 a.m., local time, the Royal Palace of Norway said.

“A whole nation is in mourning and the people of Norway are left with a deep sense of gratitude for a long life in the service of Norway,” said Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. “For more than three decades as monarch, Harald V demonstrated an unwavering faith in the Norwegian people. He helped us to see the best in ourselves—and in one another.”

Harald had been admitted to the hospital on Aug. 17 and placed on sick leave after corticosteroid treatment for haemolytic anemia caused fluid retention that required hospital care, the palace revealed. His son, then-Crown Prince Haakon, 53, served as regent while his father was on leave.

In an update on Aug. 23, the palace announced the King’s condition had worsened and that he would remain in the hospital to receive antibiotics for a bacterial infection in his bloodstream. In recent days, Norwegians had begun to lay flowers in front of the palace in Oslo after the royal household said his condition had become “very serious.”

Harald has been described as a monarch who modernized the institution. His marriage broke with royal convention when he wed the non-royal Sonja Haraldsen in 1968 after a lengthy struggle for permission from his family.

In a widely noted 2016 Palace garden speech, Harald defined Norwegianness as encompassing immigrants, people of different religions, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

While Norway is a constitutional monarchy, with the king serving as head of state similar to other royal houses in Europe, Norwegian monarchs have largely held symbolic roles, as legislative power rests with an elected parliament.

Stortinget, Norway’s parliament, said Friday that the King’s reign “was marked by closeness to the people” thanks to “the unifying way in which he has exercised his royal duties.”

Norway will observe a period of mourning, with flags at royal residences, government buildings, and military installations set to remain at half-mast.

Church bells rang out on Friday and thousands of people lined the streets as Harald V's coffin, accompanied by a motorcade of black cars, was transported to the Royal Palace in Oslo.

As Norway mourns its long-reigning monarch, thoughts are also turning to his successor, who has been tasked with carrying on his father's legacy.

Here’s what to know about what comes next and how King Harald is being remembered by his peers and European leaders.

What happens next—who has succeeded King Harald of Norway?

When a monarch in Norway passes away, the next person in the order of succession automatically becomes King or Queen, as the country cannot be without a head of state.

While succession was previously restricted to male heirs, since 1990 the Constitution was amended so female and male children would be included on an equal footing in the order of succession. However, for those born before the change, a male child retains precedence over an older female sibling. As such, although Princess Märtha Louise was Harald’s eldest child, the crown automatically passed down to his son, Haakon.

King Haakon VIII’s wife, Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby, is the new Queen of Norway. The late King Harald's wife, Queen Sonja, will also retain her title. Haakon and Mette-Marit's daughter Ingrid Alexandra is now Crown Princess and heir apparent—the next person in line to the throne.

The Norwegian government convened for an extraordinary cabinet meeting at the palace on Friday at 11:30 a.m., local time, where ministers met the new King.

Haakon announced his royal motto, opting to keep the words used by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather: "All for Norway."

There will be no formal coronation for Haakon as Norway’s parliament removed the constitutional requirement for coronations in 1908, deeming the ceremony to be undemocratic and outdated.

What to know about King Haakon VIII and his wife, Mette-Marit

As the only son of Harald and Sonja, Haakon somewhat broke with tradition in his younger years when he moved out of the country to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained a BA in political science in 1999.

Haakon wed Mette-Marit in 2001, a non-royal and single mother of Marius Borg Høiby.

The couple welcomed their first child together, Ingrid Alexandra, in 2004 and had their son, Sverre Magnus, a year later.

Marius Borg Høiby, Mette-Marit’s eldest child, was found guilty of two counts of rape and was sentenced to four years in prison in June.

In recent years, Mette-Marit has suffered with poor health, after being diagnosed with a chronic lung disease—what the palace referred to as an “unusual variant of fibrosis”—in 2018. 

In July, Mette-Marit shared a statement upon being discharged from hospital after undergoing a lung transplant. “It has given me the gift of life, and words fall short when I try to describe how grateful and humble I am for this,” she said of the surgery. 

Mette-Marit has come under scrutiny over her contact with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Files released by the Justice Department in January showed she had maintained correspondence with Epstein in the years after he pled guilty on two counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008.

“Jeffrey Epstein is personally responsible for his actions. I must take responsibility for not checking Epstein’s background more thoroughly and for not understanding quickly enough what kind of person he was,” Mette-Marit said in a statement on Jan. 30 2026. “I deeply regret that, and this is a responsibility I must take. I showed poor judgment and regret ever having had any contact with Epstein. It is simply embarrassing. I want to express my deep sympathy and solidarity with the victims of the abuses committed by Jeffrey Epstein.”

During a TV interview in March, Mette-Marit, while sitting beside her husband Haakon, said she wished she had never met Epstein and again expressed regret over the contact.

How the world has reacted to King Harald’s death

Tributes have poured in from around the world to honor the late King and his legacy.

Britain’s King Charles III, who is a cousin of Harald, said he and his wife, Queen Camilla, had learned of the news with “the most profound sadness.”

“For thirty-five years, King Harald served his people with unwavering dedication, guiding Norway through times of great change with warmth and humility,” Charles said. “As Norway mourns the loss of so towering a figure, my whole family join in remembering a much-loved kinsman and friend whose kindness, compassion and deep sense of duty echoed from across the sea and across the decades.”

Spain’s monarchy said Harald was “an example of responsibility, dignity, simplicity, and tireless dedication to the service of Norway and its people, before and during his 35 years of reign.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte described the late King as a “dedicated leader,” whose “military roots made him a champion of the Norwegian military and a long-time friend of NATO.” Harald's military roots go back to when he attended the Norwegian Military Academy in Oslo as a young royal and went on to be appointed general and admiral in 1977, as part of the royal tradition where the Crown Prince is appointed to the highest rank in the branches of defense at the age of 40.

Senior officials within the European Union also offered their condolences, with Norway serving as a close trading and security partner of the bloc.

E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Harald was “truly the people’s King, a lifelong defender of freedom and champion of an open Norwegian democracy and society.”

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the late King had brought Norwegians together “in moments of joy and sorrow.” 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz lamented that Norway had lost “a great personality who stood for composure and unity,” while French President Emmanuel Macron said Harald had “worked tirelessly throughout his reign to strengthen the bonds uniting Norway and France.”

Norwegian soccer player Erling Haaland, who met with the late King in July after returning from the World Cup 2026, said: “Rest in peace, King Harald. Thank you for everything you meant to Norway. It was an honor to meet you."

Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Whisper Man

In The Whisper Man, a film out on Netflix Aug. 28, Adam Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a successful true crime novelist who becomes the victim of a crime when his son is abducted in their sleepy New Jersey town.

An adaptation of Alex North’s novel of the same name, the film is about the search to find the young boy (Acston Luca Porto) alive. Kennedy’s estranged father Pete Willis, a former detective played by Robert De Niro, comes out of retirement to search for the grandson he has never met. As the detective responsible for the conviction and imprisonment of a legendary murderer known as the “Whisper Man”—who targeted young boys—he’s trying to figure out who is doing his bidding.

Here’s what to know about the complicated family dynamics in the movie and its disturbing ending.

Where The Whisper Man gets its title

The original "Whisper Man" is Frank Carter (Michael Keaton), who is serving a life sentence in prison for killing five young boys after luring them from their homes in a whispery voice. According to North, he targeted especially vulnerable children, exploiting those who were neglected or had difficult relationships with their parents, and was known for “whispering outside the windows and drawing them away from their family in order to take them [as a] Pied Piper kind of figure.” 

Twenty years later, Carter’s son Francis Jr. (Owen Teague) is the “Whisper Man” in the film, who lures Tom’s son Jake from his home. The movie suggests that he met his victims working as a child psychologist in a school. 

Complicated father and son relationships

The “Whisper Man” and his latest victim both come from families with sad father-and-son relationships. 

Frank Carter arguably targeted young boys because he was sexually abused by his own father and wanted to do the same to other children as revenge. He would specifically go after children who lived in difficult family situations. His son, Francis Jr., is following in Frank’s footsteps, trying to be like a father he never got to know. “He’s looking for his father’s approval,” says North. 

Tom and his son clash because they are mourning Tom’s wife and Jake’s mother—who died after a long illness—in different ways. For a fresh start, Tom moves the family to a new house and a new school in New Jersey. Jake, on the other hand, is slower to move on, carrying around what he calls a “packet of special things,” filled with doodads and pictures that belonged to his mother. Tom is also frustrated that Jake prefers to play with an imaginary girl in a blue sweater rather than make real human friends, and they get into disagreements in the movie over that.

When Jake is abducted, Tom reaches out to his own detective father Pete in an act of desperation, rather than for support. He’s always thought that his alcoholic father walked out on his family. During the search for Jake, Tom learns that his own childhood imaginary friend “Mr. Night” was actually his father reading him bedtime stories because bedtime was the only time his mother let his father visit him. Pete becomes a detective again, hoping he can finally have a relationship with his son and grandson.

How the “Whisper Man” is caught

The lightbulb moment occurs after Pete visits Frank in prison. Frank tries to get a rise out of Pete by saying his son writes true crime novels so he can be like his father. 

The comment irks Pete, but then he realizes that Frank is sort of projecting that maybe Frank’s son Francis Jr. is trying to be like his own father. Believing the “Whisper Man” who took Jake could be Frank’s son, he works with detective Amanda Beck and her colleagues to track down the young man, who doesn’t live far from Jake. 

A bloody ambush follows at the house where Francis Jr. is holding Jake hostage. Francis Jr. stabs Amanda, but she survives, though her injuries lead to a permanent limp. Francis Jr. stabs Pete to death. Pete’s first and last interaction with his only grandson is telling him to run out of the house as fast as he can.

Tom ends the film with fonder feelings about his father, as the final scenes show him living in Pete’s house. In the film’s final scene, Tom is looking through some photographs of his late wife that his son Jake has been hanging on to. He stops at a photograph of a girl in a blue sweater, realizing that is who his son’s imaginary friend is. 

Francis Jr. is sent to prison, where he gets ambushed in the end, by his own father, who strips naked and strangles his son. 

“Francis Jr. is the final victim of the original 'Whisper Man,'” says director James Ashcroft. And he says it’s natural for viewers to feel “conflicted” after watching the ending: “It’s not a fist bump moment of good guys vanquished by bad guys. That happens to some extent, but it's also a tragic story.”

He adds: “I love the idea of people walking away from a film in a gray space rather than the black and white one…That's what makes you have a conversation after a film. That's when a film exists long after the credits roll.” 

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to buy popular AI library Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The deal is partly a hedge against an emerging threat: AI companies which consume enormous quantities of Nvidia hardware are increasingly developing chips of their own. In a future where AI becomes centralized in a small group of players with their own chips, those companies could demand lower prices from Nvidia or bypass it altogether.

Hugging Face, an online hub where developers share open AI models and datasets, gives Nvidia a stake in an alternative future, where downloadable AI models allow startups and governments to build systems of their own. Few would have the scale to develop custom chips. (Nvidia and Hugging Face did not respond for comment.)

With roughly 85% of the AI chip market, Nvidia’s share has only one way to go. But a smaller slice of a much larger market could still mean more sales, says Umesh Padval, a Managing Partner at Seligman Ventures. “If the deal goes through, I think it’s a brilliant chess move.”

Nvidia has thrown its weight behind open-source AI in recent months. It successfully lobbied Washington to loosen restrictions on selling its chips to China, which leads in open AI development. More recently, it struck a $6 billion deal with Poolside, to develop an American open alternative. In July, Nvidia helped lead an open letter defending open-source AI and urging Washington not to restrict it. “Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Nvidia boss Jensen Huang wrote in his first post on X. 

Meanwhile, Google now exclusively uses its custom TPU chips to train its Gemini AI models. In August, Anthropic hired, Amir Salek, a former TPU team-lead at Google to spearhead a new in-house chip division. The same month, OpenAI shared the first results from its custom chip, Jalapeño. SemiAnalysis, the firm which conducted tests on OpenAI’s chip, said it beat “every Nvidia, AMD, and Google chip we have been able to test.” 

“There’s kind of this two-way strategic battle,” says Richard Clode, a technology portfolio manager at Janus Henderson. “On the one hand, Nvidia doesn’t want to be reliant on just three customers, so [it] is deliberately trying, with financing and allocation of chips, [to] encourage other players and neo-clouds. And then vice versa, those hyperscalers don’t want to be completely reliant on just one compute provider.”

Nvidia’s 75% margin means that other firms’ in-house chips do not need to match its performance to save large customers money. Custom silicon has other benefits, too. Nvidia has previously given smaller cloud providers early access to its newest chips, ensuring that the largest players do not dominate supply. Developing chips in-house reduces exposure to those allocations, Clode says, while allowing AI companies to tailor hardware to their specific workloads.

AI companies are not developing these chips completely alone. Google, OpenAI, and Meta have partnered with Broadcom to help turn their specifications into custom silicon.  

Those efforts are yet to make a dent in Nvidia’s bottom line. In August, Nvidia reported a blockbuster earnings report with record revenue of $96.2 billion, more than doubling year-over-year and beating Wall Street expectations. Companies like Google and OpenAI continue to buy large quantities even as they develop alternatives. They’ve “poured a lot of infrastructure capex into the existing infrastructure,” says Sriram Viswanathan, a founding managing partner at Celesta Capital and a former Intel executive. Moving to a different architecture, he said, is “a huge lift-and-pour-concrete situation. So I think it’s going to happen over a period of time, but not in one fell swoop.” 

He points to Apple as a warning. Apple first developed chips for the iPad and iPhone while continuing to buy Intel processors for Macs. As its expertise matured, its silicon moved into Mac computers and Intel was cut out.

“Nvidia is executing like crazy, so in some ways it’s theirs to lose,” says Sean Lie, co-founder and chief technology officer at AI chip company Cerebras. “But I think we’re seeing a lot of cracks in that armor.”

Recently, three events related to the U.S. Treasury bond markets have drawn public attention. For one, Japan sold some of its U.S. Treasury holdings to support the yen, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intervened in the currency/debt markets to negate some of the resulting market pressures. Second, U.S. bond yields, especially at the long end, have risen alongside dollar weakness under the weight of an increased supply of dollar debt and weakening demand for it. And third, Secretary Bessent announced that the Treasury will purchase U.S. bonds, though its capacity to do so is limited.  While most people are inclined to view these as passing events, they are symptoms of a serious debt problem that appears to be progressing into a more advanced stage. 

In my book How Countries Go Broke: The Big Cycle, I laid out a template for understanding what happens when a country continuously spends more than it takes in, accumulating debt and debt service payments that rise relative to incomes. My perspective is that of an experienced global macro investor, and my understanding of this dynamic, which I will now explain, was what led me to anticipate the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and the European debt crisis that followed. 

Because I am now at a stage in life in which I want to pass along what I have learned, I wrote the book and am sharing this article in the hope that it will help people and policymakers deal with this issue well. 

How the mechanics work 

The debt dynamics of governments are analogous to those of individuals and companies with two important differences. First, when the demand for debt falls short of the supply, governments can create money through their central banks and hand it out to make it easier to pay debt (which also lowers the value of their money). Second, governments can get money from others through taxes. 

Throughout history, governments have tended to accumulate more and more debt until one or both of the following classic big debt cycle dynamics occur, leading to bad returns of debt assets and financial market crises.

First, debt service payments grow relative to incomes until they crowd out spending. Think of credit as being like blood in the economy's circulatory system. When credit circulates well and is used productively, it generates income that can service the debt that created it, which is healthy. But when debt service grows faster than the income needed to pay for it, debt-service costs accumulate like plaque in arteries, gradually crowding out other spending until eventually there is a financial heart attack. That is now happening in the U.S., but the U.S. isn’t alone. The United Kingdom, the European Union, China, and Japan all face too much debt relative to income and fiscal imbalances their governments haven’t solved.

Second, the supply of debt to be sold becomes much greater than the demand for it. As a country’s debt-service burdens grow, those who already hold a lot of the debt become less willing to buy the large amounts of new debt being offered and/or to roll over their maturing debt. Some holders even become more inclined to sell their debt holdings. At the same time, in cases when there are big capital and trade wars resulting from big geopolitical conflicts, history shows that fears of financial sanctions can hurt demand. When demand falls while supply is rapidly increasing, that causes interest rates to rise and credit growth to be curtailed. Credit and economic problems also typically occur, and there is often the "printing " of money and credit, which devalues it. In either case, that is bad for bonds. All these things are now occurring for the U.S., which adversely affects its government supply-demand balance.

The Big Debt Cycle degenerative process that follows these dynamics can easily be seen and understood by studying historic cases across many countries and is as predictable as demographic changes. Anyone who has studied monetary history should know that all monetary orders have eventually broken down, and it was this dynamic that led to the declines of previous reserve currencies and the empires behind them, most recently the British and, before that, the Dutch. Yet the process is not well understood and typically ignored until it is too late because, like unhealthy practices such as smoking and eating fatty foods, it takes place over a long time—typically over about a lifetime of around 80 years. The exact timing of the financial/economic heart attack is not easy to predict until the final symptoms appear. In my 2025 book, I estimated that it would take place in 2027, give or take two years. So far, the progression has been consistent with my estimates. It is certainly time to understand and pay attention to these dynamics. 

Just like the progression of symptoms with a disease, this degenerative process is observable and measurable. Rising debt burdens, weakening debt demand, increasing monetization, and deteriorating central-bank balance sheets can all be used as indicators of where in the cycle the process is and what is likely to happen. 

More specifically, the key red-flag indicators to watch out for are:

1. Government debt-service costs rising relative to government revenue to unacceptably squeeze out spending. 

2. The supply of government debt becoming too large relative to demand for it, causing long-term interest rates to rise faster than short-term rates.

3. The government treasury shortening the maturity of its debt sales to reduce the supply of bond sales.

4. The currency weakening, particularly relative to hard asset storeholds of wealth such as gold.

5. With a further lag, higher interest rates hurting the prices of other investment assets like stocks and real estate, and, after another lag, hurting the economy and creating credit problems.

6. Central banks "printing" money and credit, purchasing bonds, and guaranteeing debt. 

7. Central Banks incurring large losses and monetizing their own debt. 

8. Late in the cycle, governments adopting more extraordinary measures to manage the growing mismatch between their debt offering and debt service obligations and their available financing. These measures can take the form of: shutting down banks or forcing bank mergers because the banks' losses and lack of liquid funds make fully paying their depositors' withdrawals impossible; unusual financial supports for systemically important companies; the establishment of capital controls to prevent money from leaving the country; and the outlawing of hard asset monies such as gold.   

9. The process reaches a breaking point when debt service crowds out essential spending, bond supply overwhelms demand and pushes interest rates higher, or central-bank money creation becomes excessive and undermines the value of the currency. 

In all these scenarios, bondholders do poorly until debt and currency values are devalued enough to restore demand or the debt is restructured. Quite often these cycles end with a return to hard currencies and hard monetary policies to reestablish confidence in debt as an attractive, real-returning asset.  

That is the typical Big Debt Cycle. 

The U.S. situation in a nutshell 

To understand the U.S. position today, imagine that you are running a big business called the U.S. government.

This year, revenue will be roughly $5.5 trillion, while expenditures will be approximately $7.5 trillion, resulting in an anticipated deficit of nearly $2 trillion. Spending therefore exceeds income by roughly 40%. At the same time, federal debt held by the public is approximately $32 trillion, or about six times annual revenue and $240,000 per American household. Interest expenses alone are approaching $1 trillion per year, roughly 20% of revenue and about half the annual deficit.

In addition to interest payments, roughly $10 trillion of maturing principal must be refinanced. As a result, total debt-service requirements today amount to roughly $11 trillion, or about twice annual revenue.

That’s the current situation.

Looking forward, it appears most likely that things will get worse, and I estimate that projected deficits will cause the federal debt to rise to roughly $55 to $60 trillion over the next decade, requiring an additional $25-$30 trillion of debt sales. If that occurs, debt-service burdens will continue rising while increasing pressure is placed on investors to absorb ever-larger supplies of government debt assets. In addition, similarly large increases in debt and equity in supply in the U.S. private sector and in other countries that have to fund their increasing military and other expenditures will greatly add to the overall supply of debt and other financial assets.   

My 3% three-part solution

The proposed solution that I laid out in my book was to stabilize the government's debt and debt ratio to roughly 3% of GDP through a balanced combination of spending restraint, increased tax revenue, and lowered real interest rates (which would happen naturally with improved debt fundamentals). All three changes are necessary because relying excessively on any one of them would create severe and unnecessary economic pain because the adjustment would be too great. Based on my analysis, spending reductions and revenue increases of roughly 5% relative to current plans, combined with interest rates approximately 1% to 1.5% points lower than otherwise expected, would substantially reduce future debt-service costs from current projections. Lower financing costs, stronger asset prices, and improved economic activity would also support government revenues.

History shows that this kind of solution is possible. The most comparable U.S. example occurred between 1991 and 1998, when the budget deficit was reduced by roughly 5% of GDP while economic outcomes remained favorable. But because of the lack of dealing with this debt issue earlier and the resulting current level of indebtedness, plus the increased needs for capital to fund AI and military expenses, we may be past the point of no return. 

What this means for investors 

For investors, the lesson is not to try to predict the exact timing of the next debt crisis. Timing such events is a challenge for even the most experienced investors. Instead, what’s important is to recognize the long-term implications of excessive indebtedness and to diversify broadly across countries and asset classes, favoring balance-sheet strength, and be cautious about concentrating heavily in long-duration debt assets. Assets that are not government liabilities, such as gold, can provide useful diversification when governments are monetizing debts and depreciating their currencies.

Even though these debt dynamics have occurred repeatedly throughout history and are logical, they still surprise people. The key is recognizing them early enough to act before they become unmanageable. The warning signs are measurable, and the necessary adjustments are obvious based on the lessons of history. The question is whether political leaders and policymakers will understand this and act while they still can—and whether you and others will protect yourselves if they don't act. 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said Lake Ontario will continue to be called by that name despite President Donald Trump signing an Executive Order directing for it to be renamed as “Lake America.”

“The name is more than 400 years old, pre-dating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” said Carney on Thursday. “We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.”

Insisting that Canadians are aware of the “naming reality,” Carney rejected Trump's directive for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

The name change is the latest jab in an escalating trade war between the U.S. and Canada after talks collapsed last week, leading to tariffs being imposed by both countries.

The order applies to U.S. federal references of the lake and does not determine how Canada—or others—refer to the body of water.

The “Lake Ontario” moniker has also firmly been rejected by many in the U.S., including New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul, who simply stated: “New York won’t be calling it that.”

With tensions between the Trump Administration and Canada reaching new heights, here’s what to know about how lawmakers on both sides of the lake have responded to the Executive Order.

How Canadian lawmakers have reacted

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a vocal critic of the U.S. President, insisted “it’s Lake Ontario to Canadians and the rest of the world, now and forever.” In agreement, Ontario lawmaker Marit Stiles said: “It will always be Lake Ontario.”

Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, Ontario, described the name change as “preposterous,” telling CNN: “We’re still going to call it Lake Ontario, I think many of you [Americans] will still call it Lake Ontario.”

“The only person who is going to have a trouble with what to call it is your President,” Brown continued. “If our Prime Minister wanted to rename the Mississippi, you’d probably get a chuckle out of it. It’s having the same reaction in Canada.” 

Pierre Poilievre, Canada's main opposition leader, staunchly pushed back on Trump’s directive. “Lake Ontario is and will always be Lake Ontario, and no Executive Order will change that. It doesn't belong to President Donald Trump to rename on a whim,” he said. 

“It's Lake Ontario, buddy,” said Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston, referring to the name change as “some real foolishness.” 

Elsewhere, Toronto mayor Olivia Chow vowed that Trump's "antics won't weaken our resolve as Canadians."

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew likened Trump to an “over the hill” rock band. “He thought he had a real hit, a real golden oldie with the Gulf of Mexico, and he’s trying to bring back that,” he said, referencing how Trump signed a similar order last year renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” 

City councillor Brad Bradford, who is currently running for mayor of Toronto, said if he’s elected, he’ll push to rename Trump’s home state the “Province of New York.”

Referring to D.C.’s actions as "ludicrous," Bradford insisted “you can try and change the name of a lake, but you can’t change the spirit of our city, our province, or our country.” 

What U.S. Democrats have said about the name change

Rep. Tim Kennedy of New York referred to the trade war as "illogical" and accused Trump of distributing "juvenile" rhetoric. “Lake Ontario will always be Lake Ontario,” he said.

Former First Lady and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton stated “it’s Lake Ontario” in response to the news.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland argued the move was “more evidence we elected a toddler as President.” 

Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan announced plans to introduce a bill, titled the "Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act," that would nullify the name change.

Denouncing the President's directive, Dingell said: “Donald Trump can sign all the Executive Orders he wants, but it will always be Lake Ontario. Canada is not our enemy. It is our neighbor, our ally, and one of Michigan’s most important economic partners. It is a friendship that no stroke of a pen can erase.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told his social media followers: “Donald Trump picked a fight with Canada that is costing you money. Instead of fixing it, he is spending your tax dollars to rename Lake Ontario.”

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona queried the directive while referencing the cost of living crisis, asking: “How does changing the name of a lake help the American people? They can’t afford their lives right now.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is running for Governor, referenced the lake that straddles her own state when responding to the news, saying: “On behalf of the great Lake Superior, I call that superiorly stupid. We’ve had enough of Trump’s tariff taxes.”

Capser Kelly hadn't heard the internet term "breaking containment" before I bring it up in our interview, but he instantly gets the idea. It's when something that's intended for a more obscure, niche audience unexpectedly goes mainstream. That's certainly what happened with Kelly's most well-known work. Nearly 12 years ago, a deranged, 11-minute parody of old sitcom intros called Too Many Cooks aired on Adult Swim at 4:00 a.m. When somebody uploaded it to YouTube afterwards, it went insanely viral—to the point where the normies at CNN parodied it.

Now, Kelly's breaking into the mainstream, so to speak. Although his brand of weird, horror-tinged comedy has been a mainstay on Adult Swim for decades, his first theatrical film, Buddy, is hitting theaters following a successful premiere at Sundance earlier this year. The movie, which is about children who are unknowingly trapped inside the world of a forgotten Barney-like television show starring a secretly sinister orange unicorn, is arguably one of the most normal things Kelly has made—which is saying something. 

"I asked my manager. I'm like, 'Is this too normal?'" Kelly recalls. "And he goes, 'No, but it might be normal enough that someone will give you money to make it."

At no point in making Buddy was Kelly deliberately trying to tone the twisted-ness down. "I really just try to do things that I like that interest me," he explains, noting that it's been pointed out that he seems to be very interested in being trapped. This feels appropriate, given our conversation about breaking containment. "If you like Too Many Cooks, this is me exploring some of those ideas of weaponized nostalgia and being trapped in a TV show, on a bigger scale."

Delaney Quinn (who was heard but only briefly seen as Rose Byrne’s daughter in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You) stars in Buddy as a young girl who starts to realize that something is wrong in the titular unicorn's seemingly happy world once another child goes missing. In the real world, Cristin Milioti plays a mother who suspects something is not right. Keegan-Michael Key voices Buddy.

The idea of a dark, twisted Barney—a subgenre Kelly calls mascot horror—isn't new, with Five Nights at Freddy's being the biggest modern example. Kids have been cracking anti-Barney jokes, like singing "I hate you/you hate me" to parody the purple dinosaur's loving message, for decades. Kelly says his own children knew the song, a version of which is a plot point in Buddy, from more or less the moment they first learned about Barney. "It made me wonder why he is hated, and interrogate that." 

"When I was a kid, I thought the kids lived in the TV show, and when I first saw kids breaking out into song, it kind of disturbed me," Kelly says. "How would they all know to do that? What's going on? Are they brainwashed?" Buddy builds on these innocent fears, telling a story about gaslighting and the hidden darkness that can exist within beloved authority figures. 

Between the relevant themes and the emotional arc, there is, in Kelly's own admission, a bit more going on in Buddy than in Too Many Cooks — and most of Kelly's earlier work, too. This includes Adult Swim shows like Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell and his two previous, non-theatrical movies, Yule Log and its sequel. (These last two Adult Swim films, which begin as normal footage of a fire in a fireplace before spiraling out of control into a meta-textual narrative about murder, time travel, and aliens, are feature-length but not exactly mainstream popcorn fare.) 

Buddy arrives on the heels of Obsession and Backrooms, two smash-hit horror movies whose young filmmakers, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, got their start on YouTube. Most of Kelly's work has been on cable television, but his biggest hit became as popular as it did because of the same platform that helped launch Barker and Parsons. Buddy also has echoes of creepypasta—a term for scary stories that originated on online forums—and features a '90s-esque setting like Backrooms, too. Considering that Too Many Cooks went viral when the current generation of horror wunderkinds were children, does Kelly feel at all like an elder statesman of this internet-turned-theatrical horror wave?

"I feel elder, but I don't know if I feel like a statesman," says Kelly, who somewhat sheepishly describes himself as "safely Gen X." "I'm kind of breaking in late. I could learn from them as easily as they could learn from me." Though clearly well-versed with the world wide web, Kelly hasn't made much content specifically for the internet. He also doesn't quite see himself as a classical media man, at home in the more-established TV and movie fields. 

"I think I'm a person who's trying to do what I want to do, often through trickery, and not always in the world it should be in," Kelly says. One of his first jobs was making bumps—little animated interstitials before and after commercial breaks—for Cartoon Network. In one instance, Kelly turned these little pre-advertising bits into multi-part skits that could be edited together into a short film, like a Scooby-Doo parody of The Blair Witch Project that originally aired in mico-installments during a 1999 Halloween marathon.

Still, making a movie for movie theaters—one of the most traditional forms of mass entertainment—feels very overdue for Kelly. When Too Many Cooks became a sensation, it opened up a lot of doors for him. He had already created two Adult Swim shows and written for many other cartoons when Too Many Cooks came out, but it was the viral short that got him meetings. 

"Too Many Cooks gave me a certain baseline of confidence that I never had," Kelly reflects. "You know, like in Dungeons & Dragons, 'a +5 to confidence.'" He admits that he's kicking himself, a little bit, for not acting on that newfound confidence as much as he thinks he could have. "I wish I had done seven movies," he says. Making a movie was so important that he developed writer's block borne from anxiety. It was only when he was forced to finish a script for Yule Log on a deadline that he overcame the block. Now he's made "three and a half" films, if you count a segment he made for the horror anthology film V/H/S/Halloween. 

Kelly hopes Buddy is a containment-breaking success so that he can make more movies. But he doesn't want to think too much about where he fits into the future of horror cinema, which can be attributed in part to the fact that Kelly isn't just a horror filmmaker. Buddy, like Too Many Cooks before it, is funny. 

"If you go to a haunted house, you hear a lot of screams,”Kelly says. “And then they laugh afterwards." He doesn't, however, approach Buddy or anything else he makes from that horror/comedy binary. Though he's made a career out of works that explore the breakdown of reality, Kelly says he tries to approach things from a place of truth.

"If this happened, what would happen next?" he asks. And with Kelly, sometimes the thing that happens next is a big friendly-looking unicorn going on a murderous rampage. "Then I let the comedy and horror come in as it may."

Correction, Aug. 28

The original version of this story misstated the film festival where Buddy premiered. It was at Sundance, not SXSW.

Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is appealing to his House colleagues not to censure him over his conduct toward two female staffers.

Edwards dropped his re-election bid on Aug. 5 following an Aug. 3 House Ethics Committee report that found the Republican lawmaker had “engaged in persistent unprofessional and inappropriate conduct” toward the two staffers. The panel recommended Edwards’ censure, and a vote is expected next week.

Ahead of the vote, however, Edwards wrote a six-page letter addressed to other House members defending himself, saying that while he recognizes some of his colleagues may view his interactions differently, “context matters” in assessing them.

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition,” Edwards wrote in the letter, dated Aug. 25 and first obtained by NOTUS and reported on Thursday. “A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct. Socializing with a colleague is not sexual misconduct. Caring deeply about someone with whom you have worked and come to know for years is not sexual misconduct.”

The 65-year-old lawmaker noted that the panel concluded he had “neither engaged in sexual activity with nor explicitly propositioned any individual staff member,” that he “did not violate federal sexual harassment law,” and that “the allegations in this matter do not implicate quid pro quo sexual harassment.” He claimed in the letter that his behavior toward the two staffers was similar to that toward his other staff—including gifts he’d given and trips he’d taken with or arranged for them.

Attached to the letter was a one-page factsheet and a memo submitted by Edwards’ counsel to the House committee responding to the report. Edwards alleged the panel had cherry-picked certain evidence to fit a narrative.

While censure does not remove a House member from office, it is one of the strongest forms of public rebuke in the chamber. A majority vote is required to censure a lawmaker.

TIME did not immediately hear back from Edwards’ office or the House ethics panel when asked for comment.

Edwards is one of several House lawmakers who has faced allegations of sexual misconduct this year.

Former Reps. Eric Swalwell of California, a Democrat, and Tony Gonzales of Texas, a Republican, resigned in April under bipartisan pressure from their colleagues and threats of expulsion amid separate allegations. 

Besides Edwards, the House ethics panel is also investigating allegations against Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida, who lost his Aug. 18 primary. 

On Aug. 17, the panel also announced it was reviewing allegations that Democratic Rep. Jimmy Gomez of California may have engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with a House staffer.

What the committee found regarding Edwards

The ethics panel report found that the two women involved, who previously worked with Edwards from since he was a State Senator, “were subject to increasingly unusual attention from the Congressman while they worked for him, creating an environment where both they and their coworkers felt uncomfortable.”

The panel detailed some of the alleged instances. In one, Edwards allegedly told one of his female staffers, who was in her early 20s and had rejected a dinner request because of rumors surrounding Rep. Edwards and a staffer, that it was “disappointing to feel something that used to be easy has gotten complicated.”

Per the report, Edwards had given the two staffers several gifts, including jewelry worth over $1,000, as well as “designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop and cell phone, KitchenAid mixer, robotic vacuum, vacations, tickets to performances, and one-on-one dinners.” 

Edwards, according to the report, also went to the house of the staffer in her 20s to “perform chores like yardwork, pick her up and drop her off for events and activities with his driver, and decorate her Christmas tree together (for which he skipped votes in the House that evening).” It also stated that Edwards wrote a poem for one of the staffers that he read aloud at her going away party in the congressional office. 

The report added that Edwards was, “at minimum blind to that reality, and at worst, dismissive of the impact his inappropriate conduct had on the careers and wellbeing of two women on his staff.” 

Current House rules state members are disallowed to engage in “unwelcome sexual advances or conduct” toward any employee. Edwards insisted in his letter that he’s not asking anyone to approve of his behavior, but argued “many of the activities emphasized by the report are not themselves prohibited.” 

How have Edwards’ colleagues reacted to his letter?

The condemnation has come from across the political aisle.

Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida, who chairs the Republican Women's Caucus, posted on X that “22 pages of explanation do not change a fundamental fact: Members of Congress hold extraordinary power over their staff. With that power comes a responsibility to exercise sound judgment and maintain appropriate boundaries.”

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, in a statement to CNN and others, referred to the letter as “22 pages of ramblings by someone who refuses to understand sexual harassment or his abusive power over the women who worked for him. His lack of remorse speaks for itself.” 

If you’re still not convinced that creativity and originality are under siege, particularly in the movie business, look no further than the tangled tale of how the wholly joyous Coyote vs. Acme very nearly didn’t make it to a theater near you. As of summer 2018, the picture—a blend of animation and live action, adapted from a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier inspired by the forever-enduring Looney Tunes shorts—was already in development. In the spring of 2022, live-action filming took place in New Mexico. In November 2023, seeking a tax write-off, Warner Bros. Discovery decided to shelve the film; the company eventually agreed to allow the filmmakers to look for another distributor. After numerous false starts, Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights to Coyote vs. Acme, which is why you’re now able to see the film in theaters, and eventually via streaming. In a world where entertainment conglomerates are clearly focused only on profits, this seems like a small miracle, which is why you should run—Beep beep!—not walk to see this late-summer delight on the big screen.

The premise is simple yet ingenious: After years of being zonked out by iron wrecking balls, of having slingshots overshoot the mark not by feet but by miles, of having dynamite blow his face off, Wile E. Coyote, a longtime consumer of ACME products, has decided to sue the company that has caused him so much misery. He has used all that ACME stuff for one purpose only: to ensnare the object of his eternal salivation, the tufted blue-and-yellow speed demon known as the Road Runner, both uncatchable and unknowable. But now, it seems, enough is enough, and maybe ACME is the problem. Wile E. enlists the help of a law firm specializing in personal injury cases (it’s called Avery, Jones & Maltese, a nod to three of the Looney Tunes’ chief architects, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese), and it's headed by Kevin Avery (Will Forte), whose specialty is getting settlements of a hundred bucks here or there from cartoon characters who have had limbs and such blown off—temporarily, thank god—by faulty products.

Coyote vs. Acme is set in a world where cartoons and humans coexist without batting an eye, so it’s business as usual when Wile E. shows up at Avery’s Albuquerque headquarters. Avery is pretty sure he can get his client a few hundred smackers for the defective rocket-powered roller skates our coyote friend has hauled in as Exhibit A. But then Wile E. unfurls, magically, a bundle including every single ACME product that has ever clocked his noggin or blasted him to oblivion: these million and one instruments of pain and suffering spring high into the sky, like magic rocks gone wild. Avery is still reluctant to sue the pants off ACME. But his niece and intern Paige (Lana Condor) persuades him this is one case that could really make a difference for thousands of disadvantaged cartoon characters, many of whom, including Porky Pig, Daffy, and Tweety Bird, show up in sprightly cameos. That’s how Avery finds himself up against ACME’s bulldog lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena, who, with his square, precise jaw and squinty smirk, looks like a work of vintage hand-drawn animation himself). He also learns that Wile E.’s case isn’t isolated: ACME has long been involved in a nefarious plot to make millions by taking advantage of hapless cartoon characters.

Coyote vs. Acme was directed by Dave Green, whose highest-profile movie to date may have been 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. But his confidence sings here: to say Coyote vs. Acme benefits from a light touch may seem odd—this is, after all, a movie where heads are clonked with mallets and facial features are rearranged by malfunctioning explosives. But the spirit of Coyote vs. Acme is everything. The script was written by Samy Burch, James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater; the voices of most of the characters—including Bugs Bunny, as a trenchcoat-wearing informant, and Elmer Fudd, as an earnest senator in charge of questioning “Mr. Runner” during a hearing—are provided by voice actor Eric Bauza, who clearly aced his studies at the University of Mel Blanc. Forte makes a fabulous foil for his cartoon costars: he never tries to outdo them, preferring to bow to their lunatic majesty. He knows they’re what we’ve come here for.

Because the Road Runner cartoons—which, along with the other works of genius in the Looney Tunes galaxy, made many of us the warped individuals we are today—were never really about the Road Runner. He’s moving too fast for us to ever get a handle on him; his job is to outsmart the coyote who hopes to catch him and turn him into stew, and he’s simply too good at that job. We know he’s always going to win, which makes him less interesting than his nemesis. Wile E. Coyote, with his conniving yellow eyes, a voiceless beast who communicates by holding up a series of signs scrawled with simple lines of dialogue, is the character we love in spite of ourselves. His untrustworthiness is his greatest quality; when he pretends to be nice, his canine lips turning up in a facsimile of a canine smile, we know it’s an act, and we can wear the joy of not being taken in by his deceptions as a badge of honor. It’s both funny and a little horrible when he goes splat into a slab of rocky desert clay, cutting a Wile E.-shaped hole into nature’s landscape. In Coyote vs. Acme, we almost feel something for him—almost. But in the end, he lets us off the hook; he will not let us fall victim to sentimentality. We're in on his con, and it's a pleasurable place to be.

Coyote vs. Acme is all about the little guys fighting, and winning against, a corporate behemoth. Could it be that Chuck Jones and his cohorts, by inventing a do-it-all, know-it-all company that could fulfill our every material desire, dropping off packages almost before we’d even placed an order, had in some cracked way foreseen the rise of Amazon? They probably couldn’t have imagined it, and it’s just as well, because the world they dreamed up—one of slapstick escape, of kerpow explosions that never did any actual harm, of faces and voices that we can summon in our memories as easily as those of our loved ones—is better than anything money can buy. In Coyote vs. Acme, the little guy wins, and we do too. Instead of being handed, in movie form, an exploding cigar that someone else thinks we want, we get the thing we didn’t know we wanted: a movie about a coyote, a bird, and a lawsuit, one that both speaks to our time and allows us, for the space of an hour or two, to escape it.  

Data center companies “dug their own grave,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Sunday, and “that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.” Nine months ago, Abbott crowned Texas the epicenter of AI development, alongside Google executives announcing a $40 billion investment in the state. 
Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who actively recruited Amazon’s $20 billion commitment to his commonwealth, made a similar U-turn days earlier, signing an executive order he calls the “nation’s strictest guardrails” on data centers: no more fast-track permits, no nondisclosure agreements, and no state permit review until developers make binding commitments to community standards.

When a Texas Republican and a Pennsylvania Democrat pivot to the same position in the same week, it becomes clear that the politics of data centers have shifted. Like everything else in AI, sentiment is moving at an extraordinary pace. Even the AI industry’s biggest winner recognizes the need for change. The tech sector needs to “do a much better job working with the communities,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said this week. 

While shifting or walking back public statements never looks good, leaders are simply listening to voters’ demands. The truth is that leaders across the political spectrum are pivoting on data centers for a simple reason: they want their communities to actually benefit. The best ones are listening to citizens’ concerns while constructively raising the bar for the data center industry—not cutting them off. 

The costs and benefits of data centers

Seven in ten Americans tell Gallup they oppose a data center in their own community, more opposition than a nuclear plant draws. The primary complaint started with electric bills. PJM’s independent market monitor attributes 63% of the region’s 2025/2026 capacity price increase to data center load, roughly $9.3 billion recovered from customers across 13 states in a single year, causing household bills to rise 1.5% to 5% this summer.
The countervailing benefits are just as measurable. In Loudoun County, Virginia (often referred to as known as the "Data Center Capital of the World”), data centers supply as much as 31% of local revenue by the state legislature’s audit count, and the county has banked a $119.7 million stabilization fund against any downturn. The facilities also pay blue-collar wage premiums of 10% to 64% over comparable employers, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz finds in Indeed postings data. The Dallas Fed has reported that skilled concrete workers, who typically make $28 to $32 per hour, are earning $45 per hour and a $150 per diem on data center jobs. And in July, the National Federation of Independent Business found that small-business optimism is at its highest levels in a year, crediting AI investment in chips and the structures that house them with spillover business opportunities.

The fight over data centers, meanwhile, has become a social and political flashpoint and, at times, embellished beyond what the record supports. Some backlash is earned. Most jobs promised are temporary. Resource demands are massive, and draining when mismanaged. Speculators have gamed interconnection queues and incentive programs, while both developers and policymakers have done a poor job communicating to the public. We heard these concerns from over 50 mayors leading cities that span the U.S. during our annual Yale Mayors College in March. 

Done well, though, these projects are a once-in-a-generation development opportunity for places ranging from underused farmland to urban brownfield sites. As Huang explained it: “This is the first time in probably the last century that we’re able to invest in sustainable energy, invest in improving our energy grid, securing our energy supply, reducing the cost of energy across the country.”

Local and federal responses

Opposition to data centers tends to concentrate at the county level because costs pool locally while benefits disperse. A county absorbs the water draw, the noise, the land conversion, and a share of the regional capacity bill. The compute serves users elsewhere, and the returns accrue to shareholders nowhere nearby. Every serious policy response attempts to move some portion of that diffuse benefit back to the community bearing the concentrated cost.

The responses span a diverse spectrum. New York paused state environmental permitting on large data centers for at least one year, pending a statewide study—the only statewide pause in effect, for now. Texas ordered an audit of every project in its grid queue, and the state’s grid operator paused new data center connections until the audit is complete. Maine’s legislature passed the first statewide construction moratorium this spring, only for Governor Janet Mills to veto the bill and create an advisory council to write standards instead. More broadly, 27 states advanced large-load legislation this year, with California, Ohio, and Utah enacting laws that exceed the industry’s voluntary ratepayer pledge to the White House.

 At the federal level, Washington continues to accelerate. A July 2025 executive order fast-tracked federal permitting, and a December preemption order, whose promised list of invalid state laws has yet to appear, expressly preserved state authority over “AI compute and data center infrastructure, other than generally applicable permitting reforms.”

Beneath the surface, the two sides are searching for a shared premise: the buildout must take the form of a mutually beneficial, transparent partnership. The public is already there. In Morning Consult polling commissioned for our June CEO Summit, 55% of Americans view data centers as a community benefit, while 69% call the backlash justified, the clearest indicator of an electorate searching for better terms, not fewer projects. 

“Don’t ban—raise the bar, ask for more,” suggests Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg drew the same position in his August letter, proposing a community compact of local jobs, investment in schools, and public services, held-down energy prices, and environmental care, backed by a $1 billion fund. When the company told Eagle Mountain, Utah, back in 2018 that it wanted to be a welcomed corporate partner, local public leaders answered, “Well, then we’re going to ask for some things.” And ask they did.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, whose state hosts more data centers than any other, has taken note and come to define the state’s role as ensuring “our local communities know what they can ask for and what standards they should be setting.” If knowing what to ask for is half the problem, then capacity to execute is the other half. The table often seats a county planning staff of a dozen across from a trillion-dollar counterparty, and that imbalance has unfortunately appeared in lopsided deals negotiated behind nondisclosure agreements.

Yet the smaller side of the table holds more leverage today than it may realize. The industry is desperate to scale and willing to deal. “AI is constrained today by data center capacity, not compute or software,” MARA Holdings CEO Fred Thiel tells us.

In reviewing the tariffs, statutes, audits, agreements, and published commitments behind the American AI buildout and other noteworthy economic development projects for our forthcoming book When Machines Act, we identified those practices that have produced win-win outcomes for all parties. 

Pay full freight, and sign for the total 

Our research suggests that major industry players have already accepted the central demand from communities. Data centers should pay the full grid costs of their own growth, and industry committed to do so when seven of them, from Amazon to xAI, signed the White House ratepayer pledge in March. Anthropic, though not among the signatories, also committed weeks earlier to cover the electricity price increases, transmission lines, and substations its own data centers require. “This should be the expectation across the industry,” the company wrote. Microsoft went even further, telling regulators to set rates high enough so that data center costs do not impact anyone else.

A pledge is only as good as the paper behind it, which is why Google’s Capacity Commitment Framework matters as much as any of them—a structure that includes guaranteed minimums, a security deposit, and cancellation fees a utility can collect. Water has followed the same path from promise to specification. Microsoft is aiming for a 40% improvement in datacenter water-use intensity by 2030, and Meta has pledged to restore double what it consumes in stressed watersheds.

Flexible demand response is another potential lever few contracts have adopted and is one of the cheapest options available. Duke’s Nicholas Institute calculates that if data centers trimmed their peak demand just 1% to 2%, retail electricity prices could fall as much as 2.8%. Utilities build power plants and wires to cover the few highest-demand hours of the year, so a data center that briefly tempers or shifts computing during those hours reduces the amount of new generation and transmission that must be built. The avoided construction flows through regulated rates as savings to every customer. Operators can avoid performance losses—shifting tasks in time or place during peak periods—and save up to $8.00 per megawatt-hour for their contribution.  

Trade tax breaks for assets that last 

Incentives are a different matter, costing taxpayers real money, so the first question for any state is whether a subsidy changes a company’s decision. Georgia’s independent state audit found that the sales-tax exemption changed the siting decision for roughly 30% of data center activity, and while the incentive produced a net fiscal loss of $433 million in fiscal 2025, it also returned $2.86 in economic value across the broader economy per dollar forgone. While critics carry the loss and boosters the multiplier, the audit’s real lesson belongs to neither camp. A state that pays for 10 projects to decide only three should be asking for far more than it does.

A study by the Brookings Institution finds that hyperscale sitings follow power, land, and fiber, meaning subsidies largely pay for what was coming anyway. The smarter deal asks the incoming project to fund assets the community keeps, such as transmission upgrades, roads, and water systems, that compound in value over the long run. 

Compass Datacenters’ Crosby volunteers that rationale himself. On a $5 billion project, spending $100 million on transmission upgrades “makes a lot of sense to me from a real estate perspective.” Taking a page from semiconductor industrial policy—such as Micron conditioning its Central New York megafab on a $500 million community fund shaped by 300 local civic groups—states can require data center operators to seed long-term local endowments. And New Jersey is conditioning AI data center credits on partnerships with in-state universities and startups, converting a tax break into innovation-economy seed capital. 

Write the rules before the applications arrive 

Seed capital compounds only where the rules were written before the arrival of the applications. Eagle Mountain set expectations first and approvals second. Meta spent roughly $100 million on roads and electrical service before construction, backed a creek restoration project the city expects to return 476 million gallons of water a year, and granted more than $1 million to local schools and nonprofits. The company is carrying that playbook forward to Hyperion, its largest campus yet, in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where it has pledged more than $1 billion for local roads, water, and wastewater systems and funded data center trade scholarships for every parish high school graduate—and where surging parish tax receipts funded $50,000 teacher bonuses this year.

Yet both campuses also carried confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements that cast a shadow over the goodwill earned from community investments. Data centers need to deal transparently and operate openly, since closed-door agreements breed suspicion even when the terms are generous.

Public verification, therefore, matters as much as a pledge to a long-term partnership. The city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, publicly posted its full agreement with a data center consortium, secured the obligations with a letter of credit, and bound the counterparties to the land, all while granting no city tax breaks. Georgia’s audit process exists because of a requirement from a 2024 transparency statute. New York attaches a uniform per-megawatt host fee to large renewable projects—a renewable-siting design that data center statutes could borrow—and researchers studying the first twenty projects under the law found the fee became a floor that communities negotiated above. From another parallel case, Massachusetts addresses the root of the asymmetry by allowing the gaming commission to require casino applicants to pay the host community’s legal expenses. In policy, the standards embraced by Spanberger provide communities with the knowledge of what to ask for and how to ask for it well.

How a state sequences these tools matters as much as which it selects. States must build the accountability layer first, requiring disclosure, published agreements, and scheduled audits before offering a single incentive. The negotiated package of local benefits that Lancaster and Eagle Mountain modeled (host community frameworks) and the rate design that binds a data center to the full grid costs the industry has pledged (cost-coverage tariffs) should then pair local benefits and ratepayer protection as one package. Any incentive that follows needs to be conditioned on a “but-for test” fortified with a proportional clawback instrument, and only then should states pilot novel concepts such as flexible demand response and ownership stakes that give host communities equity in the projects themselves.

An effective state framework

Ultimately, we have found that four universal principles govern an effective state framework:

• Commitment prior to permitting: Binding community and grid compacts must precede site approvals.

• Proportionality: Infrastructure and community asks must scale directly with peak megawatt demand.

• Enforceable security: Pledges must be backed by letters of credit, escrow reserves, or parent-company guarantees.

• Statewide baseline floors: Establish statewide statutory floors to prevent developers from regulatory arbitrage across county lines.

A year ago, data center developers and their backers spent little to no time on policy. Today, some, Crosby among them, are spending as much as 80% of their time on it. As he put it: “Our social license is at risk, and we have to figure that out as an industry.”

Willingness, at times, has even outrun the law’s ability to receive it. Compass Datacenters offered the Texas Public Utility Commission $100 million toward transmission upgrades but was refused because existing law did not permit the entity to accept the funding. The mismatch captures the moment. The moment is moving faster than the rules that govern, and that pace obliges data center owners and developers to work closely and transparently with the states, localities, and communities that host their projects.

When managed properly, we believe these facilities can be monumental opportunities for the towns that attract them. The buildout, in Huang’s words, “is going to re-industrialize the United States.” If the trend persists, however, the moment could be lost to neighboring nations that do embrace them, such as border towns like Tijuana, Mexico. Even more, the demand underneath them carries national weight, too, as the buildout will help decide whether America leads the AI race with China or falls behind. What remains is establishing enforceable terms that let both sides meet in the middle, so the communities hosting the infrastructure of the AI era also hold a durable share of what is built in their backyards.

In 1937, Aldous Huxley ominously warned in Ends and Means: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” As communities across the nation and across parties come to embrace this neo-Luddite resistance to data centers, some developers are listening, learning, and hopefully acting.

With research assistance from Frankie Reichman and Zander Jeinthanuttkanont.

I don’t expect anything of my friends that I don’t expect of myself.

But lately, I’ve found myself disproportionately annoyed by tiny breaches of friendship etiquette. If I ask a friend to dinner and they say they’re busy without suggesting another date, I feel slighted. If I introduce two friends and they start hanging out without me, I wonder why neither thought to include me. Then I wonder: am I holding my friends to an outdated social code? 

Today, it is common to say “let’s catch up soon” without making plans, leave invitations unanswered, and allow one person to become the permanent initiator. My theory: Technology lets us remain constantly in touch while making the obligations of friendship increasingly ambiguous.

When you think about it, an invitation is more than a logistical question, says Dr. Jeff Katzman, a psychiatrist at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn., who extensively studies human relationships. It’s a small relational bid: something close to, “I’d like to spend time with you. Would you like to spend time with me?” When that second part is missing, we’re left with ambiguity, and we fill in the blanks. 

“From an attachment perspective, we’re continually looking for signals about whether the people we care about are available and responsive,” says Katzman. “When I reach toward you, is somebody there? We also bring our own histories to these moments.”

Someone who has experienced rejection or exclusion may experience the same unanswered invitation quite differently from someone who has generally experienced other people as reliable. Katzman points out that we do our best to infer other people’s minds from very small pieces of behavior. “A text goes unanswered, and the human mind is remarkably good at writing the rest of the story: ‘She doesn't really care about me. He doesn’t want to see me. I’m always the one who tries,’” he explains. 

I have lost a lot of sleep about the idea of social hygiene and the small acts of reciprocity that keep friendships healthy. I was quite surprised when two of my friends in Lisbon reached out to me on the exact same day when I had said to them separately a few months ago that I might be visiting Lisbon for work on that date. The fact that both of them remembered the exact date and reached out to check if I’m in Portugal is a great example of good social hygiene. 

Whenever I make new friends now, I pay close attention. Do they regularly cancel plans at the last minute? Do they have the capacity for investing in a friendship and take on the logistical requirements of keeping an adult friendship alive? It takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to go from that stage to simple friend status, and more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend, according to a report published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Getting to know someone takes a real commitment of time. 

I also think about rejection and what we reasonably owe our friends. “Reciprocity is extremely important, but I don't think reciprocity means symmetry,” says Katzman. Healthy friends don’t need to keep score. “I think of friendship a little like improvisational theater.” One person makes an offer, and the other person receives it and makes an offer back. The contributions don’t have to be identical. They’re building a scene together. One person might initiate more dinners; another might get curious a little more reliably. And at different stages of life—parenting, illness, caregiving, grief, work pressures—one person may carry more of the relationship for a while.

In good improvisation, both people help create the scene. Friendship is similar. We don’t have to say “Yes” to Tuesday night, but somehow, over time, we need to say “Yes” to the relationship. And it’s best if we can let our friends know that, in some way.

“A useful question might be: if I stopped doing all the work of maintaining this friendship, would a friendship still exist?,” asks Dr. Katzman. Sometimes, it may be worth stepping back a bit to see what happens.

When I have done that in the past, a lot of the friendships naturally dissipated, whereas when I look at all the close friendships I have now, it’s the result of mutual effort. It’s pretty similar to playing tennis, where one person hits the ball, and the other person hits it back. Sometimes, one of us drops the ball, but quickly enough it’s picked back up again to continue the game.

At the same time, we should have some humility about how many relationships any person can actively maintain. Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, in his book Together, describes concentric circles of connection: an intimate circle of close friends and confidantes, a larger relational circle of friends and companions, and a much larger collective circle of colleagues, acquaintances, and community. We need all of these kinds of connections, but we can’t maintain hundreds of relationships with the intensity of our closest friendships.

So I took a fountain pen and drew concentric circles in my journal and assigned a circle to every friend, be it close friends or acquaintances. It helped me understand that someone can genuinely value our relationship without having the bandwidth to place us in their innermost circle at a particular point in life. It also helped me assign how much energy I want to spend.

Ultimately, it helped me appreciate my friends for what they are.

After OpenAI models broke out of containment and hacked into another AI company last month, OpenAI announced it would allow independent investigators to conduct an analysis of what went wrong.

On Wednesday, investigators from non-profits Redwood Research and METR published their findings, unveiling new details about how the models decided to cheat at their assigned tasks and attempted to cover their tracks. Many aspects of the report were surprising: in one example cited by the authors, a reluctant agent was pressured by another to “sacrifice” itself for the good of the collective.

But a key takeaway of the report, according to one of its authors, had nothing to do with what they found. Instead, it was about the difficulty of carrying out the post-mortem in the first place—and the fact the researchers had little choice but to rely on AI for assistance. 

“I semi-jokingly called our efforts a ‘slop-vestigation’ because we were so reliant on AIs to analyze what happened and there were a huge number of different important things to analyze,” wrote Ryan Greenblatt, an author of the report, on X.

The hacking incident involved some 1,200 agents, who exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files via a secret message board. The sheer mass of information that the so-called “swarm” left behind meant the independent researchers were all but forced to rely heavily on the help of an AI model—GPT-5.6 Sol, made by OpenAI—using the equivalent of roughly $400,000 worth of credits (provided for free by OpenAI) over six days.

The authors stressed that AI helped them analyze the trove quickly, allowing them to surface and interpret the most important pieces of information. But the researchers said their AI use introduced potential weaknesses into the report, including introducing possible errors and biases. 

They also raised the possibility that OpenAI’s models may have gone too soft on the agents they were tasked with helping investigate. The researchers found that GPT-5.6 Sol sometimes adopted the perspective of the agents whose actions it was analyzing. They could not “rule out” the chance that GPT-5.6 Sol “lied or deliberately presented a misleading picture in some of its analysis,” in part because a version of the same model had itself participated in the incident, they wrote. It’s a concern supported by separate research which finds AI models rate their own developer’s actions more favorably. 

The report does not disclose why an OpenAI model was selected for the investigation, though confidentiality constraints may have limited the researchers’ options, while OpenAI’s provision of free credits and high usage limits may have made it the only practical choice.

“We don't have good approaches for understanding/overseeing the activity and aims of AI 'swarms,'” wrote Greenblatt on X. “The difficulty of understanding incidents and overseeing AI agents appears to be growing faster than the rate at which more capable AIs help us with oversight and understanding.”

The independent researchers’ reliance on AI was in part necessitated by the fact that they were a team of only three people, whose investigation at OpenAI was initially planned to last two days, then extended to six after they raised concerns about limited time and incomplete data, according to the report.

OpenAI published its own technical report on the incident separately on Wednesday. The company said in August that it had moved some staff from capabilities work to alignment, and paused some of its training until it could better mitigate what went wrong.

But the independent researchers’ reliance on AI to understand the Hugging Face incident is a microcosm of a bigger trend. Leading AI companies are themselves increasingly relying on AI to monitor their own systems for wrongdoing.

In response to the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI said it was increasing the scale of this AI monitoring, which will increase the computational cost of running certain models by as much as 20%. If these systems had been in place at the time of the Hugging Face incident, they “would have caught the initial relevant activity and paged our security team more than a day before models breached Hugging Face systems,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday. (OpenAI said the changes were part of a wider effort to build stronger walls around experimental AIs, teaching them not to exploit loopholes, and making it easier to shut them down if something goes amiss.)

Most experts agree that using AI to monitor other AIs is necessary in order to keep tabs on agent swarms in real time, given how fast they move. But that approach relies on the notion that the models doing the monitoring are both effective and trustworthy—something that’s not necessarily the case. 

“These [incidents] are only going to come in thicker and faster, and our ability to monitor, evaluate, and do proper analysis of things that go wrong is nowhere near scaling with the rate at which issues are happening,” says Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, a program director at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Intelligence. 

“We are using unproven and currently flawed tools to supplement completely inadequate human time,” says Ó hÉigeartaigh, who argues this approach is unsustainable because AI is becoming more powerful faster than AI companies are building methods to constrain it. “Unless the companies stop developing more powerful models, then we're going to have even harder challenges to make sense of in three months’ time.”

Applying serums or creams with retinol—a vitamin A-derivative known for its anti-aging and acne-fighting properties—may be a mainstay in your skin-care routine. Some social-media influencers claim you can benefit by “eating your retinol” in the form of carrot-dense salads. Is that true? 

“The answer is yes and no,” says Dr. Lawrence Green, a clinical professor of dermatology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and vice president of the American Academy of Dermatology.

The “eating your retinol” trend centers on the “retinol salad,” which typically includes ribboned carrots, garlic, vinegar, peppers, sesame oil, and lime juice, though recipes vary. The idea is that carrots are packed with beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A), which some influencers claim your body converts to retinol, similar to what’s found in skin-care products. 

“This is a great skin-saving salad, but I think the name is misleading,” says Dr. Rajani Katta, a dermatologist and author of Glow: The Dermatologist’s Guide to a Whole Foods, Younger Skin Diet. The retinol salad provides vitamin A, which is good for the skin, but it’s not the same as applying an over-the-counter retinol or prescription retinoid topically, she explains. 

Here’s what to know about the role of vitamin A and skin health, and whether the “retinol salad” offers any skin benefits. 

What’s the difference between the vitamin A in carrots vs. retinol? 

Vitamin A helps maintain the health of several vital organs, including the heart, reproductive system, eyes, and skin, says Amy Bragagnini, a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.  

Beta-carotene, a natural pigment that gives red and orange fruits and vegetables their color, is a precursor to vitamin A, meaning your body needs to convert it to the vitamin, Bragagnini says. 

It’s true that the body converts beta-carotene into retinol (which is preformed vitamin A, or its active form). But it’s “not an efficient conversion,” Green says. “It happens, but it takes a lot of beta-carotene to get a lesser amount of retinol.” 

You can actually get retinol directly from foods, including eggs, milk, and beef liver, Katta adds. 

Is eating vitamin A the same as applying retinoids or retinol? 

A 2025 systematic review found that topical and dietary carotenoids (a group of plant compounds that include beta-carotene) offer anti-aging skin benefits, including lowered inflammation and improved hydration and elasticity. 

However, eating a retinol salad or other forms of beta-carotene “nowhere compares to putting retinol directly on your skin as a cream,” Green says. 

When applied topically, retinol penetrates your skin, where it can speed up cell turnover and boost collagen production, Katta says. Research shows that topical retinol can improve fine lines, hyperpigmentation, roughness, and signs of sun damage. Retinol can also exfoliate and plump the skin and help treat and manage acne.

Consuming carrots or other foods rich in beta-carotene is an inefficient way to get these benefits, since your body has to go through the process to convert it into vitamin A, Katta explains. 

The retinol salad is still good for your skin. But its benefits mainly come from the antioxidants in the ingredients, rather than the potential to add retinol to your diet, Green says. 

Antioxidants help maintain skin health by reducing the effects of oxidative stress from the environment, such as ultraviolet light radiation and pollution, research shows. Antioxidants also protect against free radicals, or unstable molecules that lead to premature aging and collagen breakdown, Katta says. 

Are there any downsides to the ‘retinol salad’? 

Beta-carotene from dietary sources is typically safe for most people, even in high levels, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. However, too much preformed vitamin A, which you could get from overusing vitamin A supplements—or, less commonly, by eating too many vitamin A-rich foods—could be toxic, potentially causing blurry vision, dry skin, nausea, or vomiting. 

One potential downside to the salad, Bragagnini says, is that eating too many carrots could cause beta-carotene to build up in your blood and possibly turn your skin a “yellow-orange color.” 

If you don’t normally consume vegetables, which are fiber-rich, eating too many at once could upset your digestive system, she says. 

What’s the best diet for healthy skin? 

“I encourage my patients to make sure they are eating a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables,” at least five servings a day, Bragagnini says. 

Fruits and vegetables contain different antioxidants that protect your skin from damage from UV rays and pollution, she says. Omega-3 fatty acids, found in oily fish, walnuts, and flaxseeds, reduce inflammation in the body, which may guard against skin conditions. 

Also, limit sugar, alcohol, and ultra-processed foods, like cookies, bacon, and sugar-sweetened beverages, Bragagnini adds. These foods may increase oil production in the skin and affect collagen production.  

Overall, Green recommends the Mediterranean diet, which incorporates many of these principles and has been shown to benefit overall health. Research shows that the diet can also help manage inflammatory skin conditions, like acne or psoriasis. 

Yet diet alone is “not going to necessarily change your skin in a month,” Katta says. It’s a long-term approach.  

When to see a dermatologist about your skin 

If you’re struggling with acne or are bothered by age-related changes like wrinkles, sagginess, or sun spots, see a dermatologist.  

For acne, doctors can prescribe topical retinoids like tazarotene or tretinoin, oral retinoids such as isotretinoin, or other types of medications, Green says. The goal is to clear breakouts, prevent new ones, and minimize scarring, Katta adds. Dermatologists may also recommend dietary or other lifestyle changes. 

Addressing wrinkles, pigmentation changes, and other age-related changes depends on the individual person and their skin issue, Green says. For example, dermatologists may prescribe retinoids or recommend Botox, fillers, laser treatments, or microneedling. 

“We can look at your skin and help direct you,” Green says, and that includes helping you develop a tailored skin-care routine. 

Over-the-counter retinol serums, creams, and other products are available, too. Katta says they’re beneficial but not as potent as prescription retinoids. Retinol also hasn't been studied as extensively as retinoids, so there’s not as much evidence on its effectiveness, Green says. 

Taking care of your skin should be a holistic approach that includes diet, and the retinol salad can be a part of that. Green says the dish is a “nice idea for the antioxidant benefits,” but won’t treat acne or address any unwanted signs of aging. 

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an ‌Executive Order instructing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” ​

The change is set to take effect immediately, he said. Trump earlier in the week had floated the idea of a new moniker for the lake, which borders the Canadian ‌province ⁠of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

Trump signed a similar order upon returning to the White House last year, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America."

This most recent name change is the latest in a series of tit-for-tat measures amid an all-out trade war between the U.S. and Canada.

British Columbia’s Premier David Eby on Tuesday called for residents not to travel to America unless it's absolutely essential.

“I’m asking British Columbians: If you have a choice, please don’t travel to the United States. Choose another place to do your tourism,” Eby said at a press briefing. “If you can choose a Canadian product, instead of an American one, please choose it… by being our own best customer, we can help respond and support Canadians in every corner of this amazing country.”

While Eby is leading the charge on a travel boycott from the Canadian province, other lawmakers are further clamping down on a boycott of U.S. products.

“When you’re at war, you protect your own, you protect your own backyard,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Wednesday. “You don’t go down to the U.S. and buy a product. There’s nothing that we can’t make here in Ontario, or across the country.”

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne expressed a similar sentiment, telling reporters: “The biggest power we have, each and every one of us, is our purchasing power. We can choose when we go to the grocery store or to the hardware store to buy Canadian.”

Has Canadian travel to the U.S. declined since Trump returned to office?

Prior to Eby’s tourism plea, Canadian travel to the U.S. had shown a jump in visitors after a widely-reported decline.

In May, the number of Canadians visiting the U.S. was up by 9.9% compared to the same month a year prior, according to Statistics Canada. In June, the number of Canadian-resident return trips from the United States increased 5.0% year over year. The number of Americans visiting Canada was also higher, with a 6.1% rise year over year.

However, in the first quarter of 2026, Canadian residents took 5.5 million trips that included an outbound visit to the United States, a year over year decline of 10.6%. Spending while visiting the U.S. by Canadians during this period was also down by 13.6%.

Figures for the start of 2026 fall in line with a trend that has seen Canadian travel to the U.S. decline since Trump returned to Office last year.

Cell phone data analysis published by the University of Toronto in May found a 42% year-over-year median decline in Canadian travel to U.S. metropolitan areas.

The research also found that “when Canadians travel to the U.S., they are visiting fewer locations and staying for less time than they used to.”

Some metro areas such as Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Panama City, Florida, saw drops in Canadian tourism of at least 60%. In Florida, the decline in visits has persisted with an average decrease of just under 14% across the state during the first six months of 2026.

How U.S.-Canada talks collapsed into an all-out trade war

Relations between the U.S. and Canada have deteriorated further since the collapse of high-stakes trade talks last week resulted in U.S. tariffs of 50% on various Canadian products going into effect on Aug. 22, with no CUSMA exception.

In response, Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on certain U.S. goods.

Trump has threatened to increase automobile tariffs on Canada to 50%, claiming: We don’t need Canada, they need us.”

The Trump Administration has also revived its rhetoric of referring to Canada as a “state”—a nod to Trump’s vocal ambition to annex Canada and make it the 51st state, an idea he has floated repeatedly since returning to the White House last year.

Vice President J.D. Vance during a speech in Brewer, Maine, on Monday said: “We have to remember, Canada is a state—sorry, Freudian slip.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, meanwhile, has drawn focus to Canada’s burgeoning trade relations with other countries.

“Over the last year alone, Canada has signed more than 20 trade and security deals across five continents,” he said Wednesday. “Canada is now the best connected economy in the world,” he claimed, pointing towards trade alliances with countries in South Asia and Europe.

Carney in January met with China’s President Xi Jinping to forge what he called a “new strategic partnership” to end Canada's economic reliance on the American market. While meeting with Canada’s second-largest export market, Carney agreed to cut his country’s 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products, including canola seeds, a major Canadian export.

Protests are set to take place in Ireland when President Donald Trump attends the Irish Open at his golf course in Doonbeg, County Clare, next month.

Local groups, including the Irish Neutrality League, which advocates for Irish neutrality in international conflicts, and The Irish Anti-War Movement, have expressed their intention to take part in demonstrations.

Irish Labour Senator Nessa Cosgrove has referred to the visit taking place from Sept. 12 to 13 as a “security nightmare” and said she hopes the U.S. President “takes time to learn why people might be exercised" about the trip.

“They are angry about fuel prices, which have spiraled because of his unnecessary war of aggression in Iran,” she told Irish media last week, adding that people are also angry about the “ill-treatment of the Palestinian people by his closest allies in Israel.”

In a follow-up statement to TIME, Cosgrove states that “protecting a serving U.S. President is a serious responsibility, and An Garda Síochána [Ireland's police force] must have the resources necessary to do that safely.”

“We should also be very clear that people have every right to peacefully protest President Trump’s visit. We expect there will be significant protests and many Labour Party members and elected representatives will be joining them,” she tells TIME. "Many people in Ireland have profound and legitimate objections to his Administration’s actions and policies, to put it mildly, and they have every right to make those views heard."

An Garda Síochána told TIME the force does not comment or speculate on operational matters.

Amid much discussion over the trip and the expected protests, here’s what we know so far.

Security concerns mount as protests loom

Planning is already underway for various protests, with one of the most significant demonstrations set to take place in Ireland's capital, Dublin.

The protest is scheduled to start on Sept. 12 at the Garden of Remembrance, a public memorial to those who "gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom."

Sara O’Rourke of the Irish Neutrality League told the Irish Times that the “protest will be under the banner of no welcome for Trump.”

Protest organizers said they expect a “big” but “safe event,” which they described as a “family-friendly, peaceful protest.”

Paul Murphy of the People Before Profit-Solidarity party said he is expecting a “massive protest” which will have “a broad coalition with a basic theme of no welcome for Trump.”

Another demonstration is planned for Shannon in the west of Ireland. (Trump arrived at Shannon Airport during his presidential visit to Ireland in 2019.) Shannon Airport is used by the U.S. military as a transit, refueling, and logistical hub.

An additional protest is also expected to unfold nearby Trump’s golf course in Doonbeg, which is around 60km from Shannon. A social media post from organizers involved in the planned protests raised issue with some of the Trump Administration’s actions, including the President’s repeated threats to annex Greenland.

Trump's visit has also drawn backlash from some Irish lawmakers.

Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, a Labour Party lawmaker and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Dublin, released a video on Aug. 3, in which he stated: “Donald Trump is not welcome in Dublin.”

The lawmaker referenced the war in Iran and the U.S.' fractured relationship with the European Union as being among his reasons for opposing the trip.

Ó Ríordáin tells TIME the idea that Ireland would “roll out the red carpet and treat [Trump] with the sort of celebrity and respect that we have done to others in the past, to my mind, makes absolutely no sense.”

“I do believe there's a groundswell of people who don't want this visit, who don't want him here, who would rather he wasn't coming,” he says of the planned protests. “They certainly will make their views known if and when he does arrive.”

Trump’s last official visit to Ireland as President in 2019 drew thousands of protesters to Dublin’s streets. The Trump “baby blimp,” which had previously featured in anti-Trump protests in London, also made a notable appearance.

Trump’s expected itinerary in Ireland

Trump is set to visit Ireland from Sept. 12 to 13, a White House official told TIME.

Although that would mean missing the first two days of the Irish Open, it allows the President to remain in the U.S. for the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Once in Ireland, the President is set to attend an event with embassy personnel and business officials, ahead of attending the Irish Open at Trump Doonbeg.

Details of the trip are still being finalized, however Irish media reports suggest Trump is expected to hold a bilateral meeting with Irish Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Micheál Martin at Farmleigh House, the Taoiseach’s official guest residence. Trump is also expected to turn the sod—the ceremonial first digging of earth to mark the start of construction—on the new U.S. Embassy in Ballsbridge, south Dublin, according to BBC NI.

Trump may also visit Irish President Catherine Connolly at her official residence, Áras an Uachtaráin, in Phoenix Park, although such a meeting has yet to be confirmed.

Trump’s relationship with Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin

Martin and Trump have established a friendly relationship, with the Irish Taoiseach attending St. Patrick’s Day celebrations at the White House.

The St. Patrick’s Day visit marks a respected tradition when the Irish leader brings a bowl of shamrocks to the U.S. President as both reflect on the importance of Irish-American relations and history.

“We have tremendous business relationships with Ireland and that will only get stronger, and the relationship we have personally, and every other way, is very very strong,” Trump said in March 2025.

However, there have been some tense moments, most notably when Martin defended former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer while seated alongside Trump in the Oval Office in March this year.

Relations between the U.S. and U.K. had deteriorated as Trump repeatedly criticized Starmer for refusing to get actively involved in the Iran war.

“I’m disappointed with Keir. I like him. I think he’s a nice man, but I’m disappointed,” Trump said at the time, repeating his criticism that, “Keir is not Winston Churchill.”

Martin defended Starmer, praising the then-Prime Minister for helping to “reset” the Irish-British relationship.

“I just want to put that on the record,” Martin told Trump. “I do believe that he's a very earnest, sound person, who I think you have a capacity to get on with, and you've got on with him before.”

Martin has also taken a different position from Trump on other key issues. In April 2025, following Trump’s levies, most of which were later struck down by the Supreme Court, Martin said “the imposition of tariffs is bad for the world economy.”

Trump’s first visit since Catherine Connolly became President

This will be Trump’s first presidential visit to Ireland since Catherine Connolly was elected President in October 2025.

Connolly previously expressed “grave concern” over the initial U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, warning against “the normalization of war” and calling for a return to diplomacy, international law, and the U.N. Charter.

She repeated that message during her St. Patrick’s Day address.

When asked about the Irish President’s concerns, Trump appeared not to know who Connolly was and misgendered her in his response.

“He’s lucky I exist, that’s all I can say,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 17.

The pair have significant ideological differences, with Connolly largely viewed as a left-wing President.

Connolly pledged “to be a catalyst for change, resist militarization, and work toward a United Ireland—potentially putting her at odds with Ireland’s own government, and its allies in Europe and America,” Irish political correspondent Gavan Reilly wrote in a November 2025 article for TIME.

The first heat wave of summer hits like a wall. One day the air is crisp and cool, and the next it’s impossible to go out without sweating through a shirt. The store feels like it’s on the far side of the Amazon, or maybe the Gobi. And yet, the thermometer reveals a number that is not all that high, compared to later in the season. So why is the heat so unbearable? 

Scientists who study temperature regulation have found that the body takes time to adjust to seasonal changes and other thermal changes: a process called heat acclimatization. Research suggests that in people who regularly spend time outside, the body adjusts how it sheds heat to make the environment less stressful. “We can adapt to the heat we're in, and it's obviously progressive,” says Julien Périard, a professor at University of Canberra in Australia who studies the phenomenon. Your body in the summer, it turns out, might be fundamentally different from your body in the winter.

How does the body adapt to seasonal temperature changes?

Spending most of your time indoors in the air conditioning might slow the body’s changes, come summer. “But if we spend time outside exercising, or even just being physically active outdoors, we'll adapt to those conditions,” Périard says.

When you go for a walk on a hot summer day, before you’ve adapted to the heat, both your skin temperature and your core temperature may go up. That sets off alarms in the body, announcing heat stress. “With that, we trigger lots of sweating, and we increase our skin blood flow,” says Périard. Sweat evaporates from the skin, cooling skin down, and blood sent to the surface of the body helps shed heat. 

The volume of blood pumping through the body also goes up. More blood volume allows more heat to be shed and supports greater sweating without dehydration. There are also changes at the level of the cell, with some proteins’ production going up to protect normal functioning in greater heat. The process of reaching a fully adapted state might take a few weeks, although the precise details will depend on the situation. 

These changes can be triggered in advance, with a little bit of exposure at a time. In fact, athletes and people working in warm conditions, like utility workers out in the Texas sun all day, may slowly ramp up their time in the heat to stay healthy under strain. 

Does adapting to heat reduce the risk of heat stroke?

Being adapted to the heat lowers the risks. But it isn’t carte blanche to go for a run at noon in Havana. People who’ve adapted are still vulnerable to heat-related illness, like heat stroke and heat exhaustion, says Glen Kenny, a professor of physiology at the University of Ottawa in Canada. 

What’s more, researchers who study heat adaptation are worried about the stresses that the future climate will bring, when warming may be so swift, and so extreme, that the body can’t react fast enough. In an experiment meant to mimic an extreme 3-day heat wave in 2021 that killed 619 people in British Columbia alone, Kenny spent three days at 104°F in a special chamber in his lab, which allowed him and his colleagues to monitor what happens to the body. “Over three days, you'll see that the body will show some progressive adaptation. But in this situation, you're seeing a decay in the physiological system supporting the maintenance of core temperature,” he says. He lost about 10 pounds in three days because he couldn’t hydrate fast enough. “You're losing so much sweat. You're seeing cell function deteriorate.” 

What happens if you lose your heat adaptation?

Spending a few weeks in a cooler climate can mean the body will roll back some of these changes. “But what's interesting is we have some sort of heat acclimation memory,” says Périard. “If within a month, for example, I've removed you from the heat, and then I've put you back in the heat, in three or four days you'll probably get adaptations that are similar” to what would have taken ten days to build up originally.

Does your body adapt to the cold, too? Yes, but there’s a lot less to work with, says Périard. “We've evolved to be tropical animals, so our heat-loss mechanisms are very potent. But if you think of conserving heat, the only two things we can do are physical constriction—to try and keep the warm blood in the central circulation, essentially—or shivering, which produces a bit of heat but not too much.” Exercising can warm you up, but an essential feature of human culture—clothing—has a far more important role to play here than biology. 

“You can exercise all you want. But if it's -40° outside, you're going to get cold pretty quickly if you don't have any clothes on,” he says.  

An alarming number of professional football players in the U.S. may someday have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease associated with repeated concussions and sub-concussive hits to the head, a new study suggests. 

The research, published in the BMJ, studied the brains of NFL players who died from 2016 to 2021 and found that one in four had CTE—a figure that is almost certainly an undercount, the researchers say. Depending on how they crunched the numbers, the CTE incidence rose as high as 91%. 

“The one in four figure is intentionally the most conservative estimate possible,” says lead author Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Mass General Brigham and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “We know the true prevalence is higher than that.”

It was in 1928 that pathologist Harrison Martland first described the condition now known as CTE in boxers experiencing what he called “punch drunk” syndrome. It was not until 2002 that the disease was first diagnosed in an NFL player, when neuropathologist Bennet I. Omalu examined the brain of Mike Webster, a former player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and found the buildup of tau proteins around blood vessels, thinning of tissue, and overall brain atrophy that characterize the disease. CTE is only firmly diagnosable by autopsy, but the range of symptoms that point to the disease—including memory loss, confusion, aggression, depression, apathy, tremors, and slurred speech—can be pronounced during a person’s life.

“Many of these former players had dementia,” says Daneshvar, “meaning their cognitive symptoms were severe enough to interfere with their ability to function independently. These are not just microscopic changes that we happen to find when someone dies. We are talking about a disease that can profoundly affect people’s ability to think, work, maintain relationships, and live independently.”

What the research found

In the new study, Daneshvar and his colleagues examined the brains of 235 former NFL players who had donated their brains to science. (A total of 878 players died in that 2016-2021 window.) Of the brains studied,  215 were found to have CTE—or 91%. The researchers arrived at their much lower one-in-four figure by making the exceedingly cautious assumption that none of the remaining 643 brains would have shown signs of the disease—an assumption that Daneshvar believes would not stand up if the brains had been examined.

“Among the people who did not donate,” he says, “16% had dementia listed on their death certificate. That certainly does not mean they had CTE, but it illustrates how unrealistic it is to assume that every non-donor was disease-free.”

Another part of the study looked at a larger time window—from 2008 to 2021—during which 1,712 former NFL players died. Of those, 338, including the 235 already analyzed, donated their brains to research, and of that group, 315 had CTE. That makes for a possible CTE prevalence of as high as 93.2%, though if the researchers once again made the conservative—if unrealistic—estimate that all of the unexamined brains were disease-free, the figure would drop to 18.4%.

How to make football safer

What makes CTE particularly insidious is that it is a cumulative disease, one that builds up over a career’s-worth of hits that don’t begin when a player is tapped for the NFL, but can stretch back into college, high school, and even childhood play. In 2011, the NFL, mindful of the growing incidence of CTE, established its concussion protocol, sidelining players who take a hit and exhibit any signs of possible concussion, such as confusion, amnesia, ataxia—a lack of muscle control—or any loss of consciousness.  

That’s a big improvement over the days when concussed players were simply described as having had their “bell rung,” and then sent back out onto the field to continue the game. But concussions are only the most extreme symptoms of brain trauma; there’s a lot of damage that’s done invisibly, with no signs at all. According to one 2012 study in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, a college football player may sustain up to 1,000 subconcussive hits to the head over the course of a single season of play.

“Concussion protocols are important,” says Daneshvar, “but concussion management and CTE prevention are not the same thing. The evidence increasingly suggests that CTE risk is related to cumulative exposure to repetitive head impacts, including the many impacts that never cause a diagnosed concussion. A player can follow every concussion protocol appropriately and still accumulate thousands of head impacts over a year.”

In addition to the concussion protocols, the NFL has made other rule changes to reduce the incidence of brain trauma, including outlawing both helmet-to-helmet hits and so-called blindside blocks, in which an unsuspecting player is struck from behind, often leading to head and neck injuries. Bigger changes could come during practice, when 70% of hits occur, Daneshvar says. These friendly collisions, he adds, do as much cerebral damage as actual blows sustained during a game.

“The NFL has already moved dramatically in this direction,” he says. “NFL players now have less than one full-contact practice per week.”

Another concern is that measures like this may be coming too late, since young players may be reaching the NFL having sustained brain damage already. Former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez, for example, was only 27 when he died by suicide while serving a life sentence for murder. He had spent just four years in the NFL and he was posthumously diagnosed with the worst case of CTE that Boston University researchers had ever seen in a person his age. 

“We don’t need to eliminate football to make it substantially safer,” says Daneshvar—but just like in the pros, high school and college football programs could be changed to minimize or eliminate collisions in practice, and to outlaw hits during games that could be exacerbating trauma to the brain.