It’s been a summer of climate extremes—from record-breaking heat waves to deadly flash floods to a fire season that has seen a number of acres burned well above the 10-year average. Even Sesame Street, where sunny days once swept the clouds away, can’t seem to keep the storms at bay. 

A new special, Storm on Sesame Street, which aired on Aug. 3, follows Elmo and friends as they work together to get ready for a big storm, and help rebuild in its aftermath. The episode was created to help kids better understand extreme weather as it becomes increasingly more frequent. 

“Extreme weather is now a reality for many families, and young children need support they can understand and trust,” Joseph Giraldi, chief operating officer of Sesame Workshop, said in a press release. “With our Extreme Weather response initiative, we’re using the power of Sesame Street to help children prepare for what’s ahead, cope with big emotions during moments of disruption, and begin to recover afterward. From our new storm special to year‑round resources and community outreach, this initiative reflects our commitment to showing up for children and families when they need it most.” 

The episode provides an opening for adults to help prepare kids about what to expect during an extreme weather event—before it actually happens. Elmo and his father help hand out food and water to their neighbors, talk through the big emotions the storm brings up, and find ways to help their friends when the storm leaves Sesame Street unrecognizable. 

“It's really important, and I think it can fall off a lot of our radars to have emergency plans or to know what should be in an emergency kit,” says Samantha Harrington, director of audience experience for Yale Climate Connections. “People don't always make great decisions when they're in an emergency situation, or when they're stressed. So as much as you can make that decision-making earlier before the emergency happens, then you're going to be a lot better prepared to react and respond in a way that is going to be the safest and calmest for you and your child.”

Sesame Street first tackled extreme weather in the episode, Sesame Street Gets Through a Storm, which premiered in 2001 and featured Big Bird rebuilding his nest after it was destroyed in a hurricane. The episode re-aired in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy. 

In the years since, extreme weather events, fueled in no small part by climate change, have become hard for most Americans to ignore. There has been a “staggering rise” in climate-related disasters in the 21st century, according to the United Nations. Nearly one in five Americans have had to evacuate their homes due to extreme weather conditions, according to an October 2024 poll conducted by YouGov. Children born in 2020 are projected to experience up to seven times more extreme weather events than those born in 1960. 

Sesame Street plans to provide resources to help families, including a printed and digital storybook, to help children heal when the things they love are lost, articles and activities that support children and families as they deal with environmental stressors like heat or air quality,  and plans to distribute “go bags” with essentials to support families during evacuations and periods of displacement. 

It’s an important first step in getting children and families more equipped for dealing with extreme weather events—which most Americans are woefully underprepared for. In one 2025 survey of 2,000 adults by Talker Research, 90% said it's critical to be prepared for extreme weather, but only 46% had an emergency plan in place. 

The episode opens the channel of communication in an age appropriate way, experts say. “It's covering all of the bases,” says Adam Rainear, associate professor of communication and media at West Chester University, whose work focuses on climate communications. “It's giving the messaging so that kids are aware and alert, but also not making them afraid of everything around them.” While Elmo and his friend Abby acknowledge their fear, they focus on having courage—and when Elmo’s courage falters as the power goes out, his dad steps in to help with words of encouragement and an exercise to help calm him down. 

Tina Grotzer, principal research scientist at Harvard University, who works at the intersection of climate change and education, hopes that any future episodes on the topic can be more explicit in drawing the connection between extreme weather and climate change, which is not mentioned in the episode.

“This is a generation of kids for whom extreme weather is becoming more and more common, and they have to somehow walk this balance of normalizing kids' experiences, but also helping kids to know that this is only the new normal in terms of recent times,” she says. “It may seem subtle, but if we talk about people all around the world engaging in actions, a lot of people together can make a difference. We can't change the weather we're getting today, but over time we can do things to care for Earth.”  

The Los Angeles County Fire Department on Tuesday found the utility company Southern California Edison (SoCal Edison) responsible for the Eaton Fire, which ravaged more than 14,000 acres, destroyed over 9,000 homes and businesses, and killed 19 people in the cities of Altadena and Pasadena, California, in January 2025.

“After 18 months of thorough review of all evidence, alongside retained electrical and metallurgical experts, the investigation concluded that the cause of the wildfire conflagration was due to the electrical arcing events that took place on the out-of-service Southern California Edison (SCE) tower,” the new report said.

It went on to explain that faulty transmission equipment shed sparks, which in turn ignited dry brush surrounding the tower on Jan. 7. The ensuing blaze, which quickly spread amid powerful Santa Ana winds and extremely dry conditions, led to a monthlong battle for local firefighters while stretching emergency resources as crews simultaneously fought the Palisades Fire.

The Palisades Fire, which also ignited on Jan. 7, stretched over 23,000 acres and killed 12 people, while destroying nearly 7,000 structures. Federal prosecutors allege the fire was intentionally set, and a suspect was identified in October 2025. In the subsequent year, he was arrested and his case resulted in a mistrial in June. A retrial is scheduled to take place this October, but the question remains whether it will provide any additional answers for the tens of thousands affected by the blaze.

With both cases at a turning point, California residents may be hoping to finally get answers about the events leading to one of the most catastrophic chapters in the state’s wildfire history. But will they also get the justice they are seeking?

What comes next in the Eaton Fire investigation?

SoCal Edison quickly acknowledged that its equipment most likely caused the Eaton Fire. In reports to the California Public Utility Commission in January 2025, SoCal Edison said it had detected a “fault” on one of its transmission lines.

Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokesperson for SoCal Edison, told TIME that the utility company is reviewing the report, and the findings are “generally consistent with what [the company has] been saying regarding the ignition of the Eaton Fire.”

“As we have said, Edison believes that it's likely that its own equipment was associated with the start of the Eaton Fire,” she says. However, it is “definitely” not just the equipment to blame for how intense the fire became.

“A fire of the size and magnitude of Eaton is rarely the result of just one thing,” she explains.

With nearly 1,000 lawsuits against SoCal Edison from the families of the deceased, as well as those who lost their homes in the fire, the company filed its own countersuit in January 2026, accusing Los Angeles County, local water agencies, and the Southern California Gas Company of failing to warn residents about or prevent the spread of the fire.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told the Associated Press that it is planning on reviewing the latest investigative report, and will work with local, state, and federal authorities to determine if criminal charges are warranted.

What comes next for the arson suspect in the Palisades Fire?

In June, the case against accused arsonist Jonathan Rinderknecht, who federal prosecutors say is responsible for the Palisades fire, ended in a mistrial, with 10 of 12 jurors leaning toward a verdict of not guilty. The retrial is scheduled for Oct. 19, according to U.S. District Judge Anne Hwang, who presided over the first.

Though the suspect is due back in court in October, it’s unclear if anything will change in prosecutors’ handling of his case.

At the time, they did not provide direct evidence that Rinderknecht started the Palisades Fire. Instead, prosecutors argued that he was in the area when the fire ignited and was motivated by resentment toward its wealthy residents.

His defense, meanwhile, suggested that fireworks were a more likely culprit than Rinderknecht.

One juror, identified only as Syrena, spoke with the Associated Press in June, claiming that there was “just not enough proof.” 

For victims of the Palisades Fire and their families, the October retrial could offer the next opportunity for answers—and, potentially, accountability.

While Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally rescinded the controversial “Anti-Weaponization Fund” the Justice Department planned to create under a settlement agreement with President Donald Trump, another element of that agreement remains intact—and could shield Trump from paying as much as $100 million in back taxes and penalties.

The President tapped Blanche, his former personal attorney and the former deputy attorney general, to lead the Justice Department after Pam Bondi was removed from the position in April. But Blanche’s confirmation was upended last week when two Republican senators threatened to pull their support. The holdouts, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said that they wanted assurance from the Justice Department that the proposed $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which was intended to compensate people the Trump Administration believed to have been unfairly targeted by the government, has been abandoned.

On Monday, the senators announced that they would back Blanche’s nomination after the Justice Department confirmed, in writing, that it was rescinding the proposed fund.

Read More: Who Is Todd Blanche, Trump’s Former Lawyer and Nominee for Attorney General?

But a tax audit immunity deal that was included in the same settlement agreement and has raised its own concerns from lawmakers and experts will remain in place. 

Here’s what to know about that deal, and what it could mean for the President.

What are the terms of the tax audit immunity deal?

The Justice Department outlined the immunity deal in a document dated May 19, saying that it shielded Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization from audits related to tax returns filed before that date. 

The agreement that the deal was a part of settled a $10 billion lawsuit Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization filed against the IRS and the Treasury Department in January over the leak of his tax returns to news outlets by a former contractor years earlier.

Cornyn and Tillis said this week that in addition to confirming that the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was being rescinded, Blanche and the Justice Department addressed concerns they had with the audit deal, including clarifying that the scope of the protection was limited to the parties in the initial lawsuit.

Blanche shared a document on X Sunday night in which he confirmed that the audit deal only applies to the parties named in the lawsuit. He also reiterated that the immunity plan “applies by its terms only retroactively.” That means that under the deal, while Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization could avoid audits of previously filed returns, they could still face audits of tax returns they file in the future.

The NYU Tax Law Center said in a statement on Monday that the new document shared by Blanche this week “does nothing to change” the original deal.

“These assurances are not worth the paper they’re written on,” NYU Tax Law Center Policy Director Brandon DeBot said in a statement. “They don’t pull back on the ongoing attempts to give the President, his family, and his affiliates unauthorized immunity from tax audits.”

What does the agreement mean for Trump?

“It basically means that if [Trump] underpaid taxes or made misleading statements in his returns prior to the day of the deal, he gets a free pass,” David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, tells TIME.

The amount in back taxes and penalties that the President may be able to avoid paying under the immunity deal is not clear, since audits conducted by the IRS are typically confidential information. But a 2024 report from the New York Times and ProPublica revealed that Trump could owe more than $100 million if a lengthy dispute related to an IRS audit over tax breaks that Trump claimed on his skyscraper in Chicago resulted in an adverse ruling. In May, the Times reported that it wasn’t known if that audit is still ongoing.

Super says that the tax audit immunity deal is unprecedented and “completely self-dealing.” In the past, the IRS has regularly audited the sitting President “so that there would never be any question that they got preferential treatment,” he says.

He contends that “it is not … [a] deal that anyone has considered and decided was in the best interests of the United States government; it’s simply in his and his family’s best interest, and he has the power to force the Justice Department to accept that.”

“In that respect,” Super says, “it is unlike anything we’ve seen before.”

Last month, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s lawsuit was an exercise in self-dealing. While she didn’t explicitly overturn the tax audit deal conferred on Trump, the judge said that the deal can’t be claimed to be a product of a legitimate legal process. The President has filed an appeal.

The NYU Tax Law Center also questioned in its Monday statement whether Blanche has the legal authority to end tax audits of Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization in this litigation.

Blanche “only has authority to resolve tax matters that have been referred to DOJ—here, a taxpayer privacy lawsuit, not issues with tax returns,” the Tax Law Center contended. “Likewise, to the extent that the new documents purport to maintain the May 19, 2026 order’s audit immunity for the Trump plaintiffs, that is also unauthorized."

In a statement to TIME, the Justice Department said that Blanche "restated and incorporated testimony he gave under oath that the May 19th Order has effect only on plaintiffs and defendants, and that the release is retroactive only."

The White House, IRS, and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment

Abdul El-Sayed's victory in Michigan is the latest in a string of progressive primary wins that are challenging the Democratic Party’s thinking about electability—and it could reshape the party's strategy heading into November.

Michigan offered the clearest example yet on Tuesday. El-Sayed won the Senate primary, while progressives also notched victories in key House races. William Lawrence, the founder of the Sunrise Movement, captured the nomination in the battleground 7th Congressional District, and Donavan McKinney unseated Rep. Shri Thanedar in the safely Democratic 13th District.

Read More: Abdul El-Sayed Wins Michigan Senate Primary, Delivering Progressives a Major Battleground Victory

Progressives had already accumulated a series of high-profile wins this summer: Janeese Lewis George claimed victory in the mayoral primary race for Washington, D.C., in June; Chris Rabb beat out two moderates for a House seat in Pennsylvania; and Graham Platner won Maine’s Senate primary, although he later dropped out.

But Democratic strategists have already acknowledged that progressive candidates can do well in safely blue districts; Michigan signaled that they can stand out in competitive states. 

What makes El-Sayed’s win even more notable is that he’s the first progressive to carry a senatorial primary in a state that President Donald Trump won in 2024. The outcome suggests that progressives may be able to secure wins when and where Democrats need them most. 

It’s a theory that more centrist party members have long doubted—but if proven, it could also shift the party’s strategy not only this fall, but also looking ahead to elections in 2028. 

What does this mean for the future of the Democratic Party?

El-Sayed’s victory is representative of a shift in the Democratic Party, according to Evan Roth Smith, a pollster and political consultant. He tells TIME that it could settle a 10-year debate among left-wing politicians who have tried to find the best strategy to respond to Trump-era Republicans.

The questions on either side of the debate, he says, are: “Is the party’s future about passion and organizing and envelope-pushing?” He explains that progressives believe this approach can appeal to “ideologically eclectic voters in the middle.” 

Or, he asks, do the centrists present a stronger strategy for the party, which is to lean into candidates who are “optimized around the median voter” in the hopes of swinging them to the left.

Read More: What Is a Democratic Socialist?

Smith believes that progressive candidates’ wins show that the base is fed up with the more conventional approach put forth by establishment Democrats. Instead of emphasizing electability, the party could find success by putting its support behind those who are “optimized around the truest and innermost desires of the primary electorate.”

“That calculus collapsed because of the events of 2024,” Smith says, referring to the period in which President Donald Trump won his second term and Democrats lost the Senate.

Importantly, El-Sayed’s win was not as much of a landslide as polls had projected, something Trump noted in his reaction on Truth Social.

“As usual, the polls were way off on this one,” he wrote.

These polling inaccuracies may reveal a potential blind spot toward progressives, Smith says, explaining that Democrats are likely to take note as Wisconsin heads into its primary next week. Polls show progressive gubernatorial candidate Rep. Francesca Hong winning in the state.

“Hong is in many ways the presumptive nominee for governor of Wisconsin at this point,” he says. “But what we saw last night is a major polling miss that heavily overestimated the progressive candidate, which will make people in Wisconsin raise their eyebrows and say, ‘Well, we all think Hong the frontrunner, but maybe this polling's no good.’”

Smith says there is reason to believe Wisconsin has more accurate polling practices than Michigan. Either way, Democrats will watch Hong’s primary closely. Establishment Democrats claim that she is unlikely to beat the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany, and that her loss could even hurt Democratic candidates in downballot state races.

Red-state progressives faced some losses on Tuesday. Notably, Missouri Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate, crushed a comeback attempt by his progressive predecessor, Cori Bush.

The real proving ground comes in November, Smith says. Midterm elections are the first real chance for progressives to topple longstanding narratives from within their own party that their ideology is not electable.

Midterm wins might show that there is “a better path to victory than the caricature of establishment Democrats as lab-grown moderates,” he says. It would give progressives the chance to show that their policies “get people who are disengaged or tuned out, excited.”

But the biggest takeaway from El-Sayed’s race is that the Democratic Party can no longer be made up of factions, Smith says.

“What the Democratic Party has to look at itself and say is: ‘How do we make the party a home for both of these camps?’” he explains. “Because otherwise, it’s not tenable.”

Most people know the rule: Never comment on another person's body. People experiencing weight loss often find themselves fielding comments regardless. And if they have an eating disorder, both the comments and the silence can fuel it in different ways.

Dr. Jennifer L. Gaudiani, an internist in Denver who specializes in eating disorders, says patients tell her some version of the same thing all the time: “Nobody said a word while I disappeared, and it messed with my head.”

“The actual comment or the absence of the comment are both instantly absorbed and processed in ways that can be really undermining and painful,” she says. “If somebody says something positive, the eating disorder goes, ‘Well, I'm clearly not sick enough to warrant anyone's concern, and my therapist must be wrong, because people keep telling me I look good,’” Gaudiani says. “And if it's the other direction, then the eating disorder is like, ‘Oh my gosh, kick it into gear. You gotta really go harder.’”

That leaves anyone who’s genuinely concerned in a difficult position: Say the wrong thing, and you could make things worse; say nothing, and your silence might say something you never intended. The good news is that there’s a way to have this conversation that feels like care rather than surveillance or judgment—and clinicians who navigate this territory for a living have a clear sense of what to say. 

When to say something about someone's weight loss

There isn’t a magic number that tells you when it’s time to speak up. No amount of weight loss automatically calls for a conversation, says Dr. Evelyn Attia, a psychiatrist and director of the Center for Eating Disorders at New York-Presbyterian Hospital—but you also don’t need to wait until someone looks alarmingly thin. “Clinically significant eating disorders can occur in individuals across all shapes and sizes,” she says. Often, the people closest to someone can tell when something simply feels off, and that instinct is worth listening to.

You don’t have to know exactly what’s going on before you say something. People often get stuck waiting for certainty, says Francesca Emma, a therapist in Long Island who specializes in eating disorders and body image. You’re not trying to diagnose the person; you’re letting them know you’ve noticed a change and are there to support them. If you hold out until you feel completely sure—or completely comfortable—you may never bring it up.

The most useful clues are often physical and behavioral, not visual, Attia says. Maybe your friend has become dizzy, pale, or short of breath more often, or has fainted without a clear medical explanation. Or perhaps the change shows up around food: They used to love going out to dinner, and now they turn down every invitation that involves eating. Foods they once enjoyed are suddenly off-limits. Those shifts—not the size of their body—deserve your attention. 

None of this means every drop in weight calls for a heart-to-heart. People lose weight for all sorts of reasons—a new medication, an illness, grief, stress, or changes they’re making with a doctor. “That's not what we're talking about here,” Attia says. “We're talking about medically significant nutritional change.” The distinction is whether weight loss is simply something you’ve noticed, or one piece of a larger pattern that makes you worry about your friend’s health.

What to say to someone you're worried about

Once you’ve decided to speak up, your first instinct might be to name the most obvious thing: the weight loss. Try not to. Vanessa Scaringi, a psychologist and eating disorder specialist in Cincinnati, says clinicians often steer families toward talking about behaviors instead: the skipped book club, the lunch that keeps coming home uneaten, the friend who’s stopped showing up anywhere food might be served. “Behaviors are safer,” she says.

That’s partly because a comment about someone’s body rarely lands as intended. “It could shut someone down,” Scaringi says. Worse, it might register as praise. “Sometimes it actually feeds the eating disorder, where it's like, ‘Oh, mission accomplished.’”

But avoiding comments about weight doesn’t mean being so vague that the person has no idea what you’re talking about. Point to something specific and observable, Scaringi suggests: “You haven’t come to anything involving food in two months” or “You seem much more rigid about eating than you used to be.” Emma recommends leading with curiosity rather than a conclusion: “I’ve noticed some changes, and I’m wondering how you’re doing,” as opposed to “I think you have an eating disorder.” The first opens a conversation, while the second can feel like an accusation or diagnosis.

Before you begin, examine your own motives. Eating disorders can carry what Scaringi calls a whiff of the salacious, and feeling riveted by someone’s changing body isn’t the same as caring about their well-being. Ask yourself: “Am I bringing this up because I’m genuinely worried about this person, or because I’m curious about what’s happening?” If the answer is merely curiosity, keep it to yourself.

How to start the conversation

Don’t spring this conversation on someone over dinner—or anywhere other people might overhear. Find a private moment when neither of you is rushing out the door or already upset. Then ask permission before going any further. Gaudiani’s go-to opener sounds something like this: “I want to say something to you that comes from a place of deep care and some concern, and it might be a little hard to hear. I wonder if you're in a space where we could have a brief, meaningful conversation.”

The question isn’t a formality. “Consent is important at every step,” Gaudiani says. It gives the person a moment to decide whether they’re ready to hear you—and signals that they’re not about to be ambushed.

If they say yes, say what you came to say—and then stop. Gaudiani is more comfortable than some clinicians with family and friends naming the weight loss directly, as long as they do so neutrally. She offers a sample script: “I want to speak directly but kindly. I’ve noticed that your weight has decreased. And I'm a little worried about you.” That’s different from telling someone they look way too thin or unhealthy; it’s an observation paired with concern, not a judgment about their appearance. Once you’ve said it, give them room to respond. “Just wait, and give some space,” Gaudiani says. The urge to keep explaining yourself will be strong, but it’s important to resist it. 

You don’t need to show up with a solution, a meal plan, or advice about what your loved one should eat. You’re not there to solve the problem. A much better question is: “Where can I be helpful to you?” A primary-care doctor is often the best place to start, Attia says, so you might ask: “Would you be willing to make an appointment with your doctor?” Offer to schedule it or go along for support. From there, you can help your loved one find an eating-disorder therapist, dietitian, or other specialist if they need one. 

What to do if they get defensive

The person you’re worried about might immediately brush you off: “I don’t know why you’re bringing this up. I’m fine.” That reaction can make you wonder whether you overstepped. Defensiveness doesn’t prove that someone has an eating disorder—but it doesn’t necessarily mean your concern was misplaced, either. An unusually sharp response is information worth noticing, Gaudiani says.

She explains it with an analogy. Imagine telling a friend you’ve spotted a suspicious-looking mole on their shoulder. They might thank you or tell you they already have a dermatologist appointment. What they probably wouldn’t do is snap: “I don’t have a mole. You have a mole. Why are you even talking about my mole? Everyone has moles.” “When we hear that defensive reaction,” Gaudiani says, “we can be like, OK, there’s something going on.” The point isn’t that defensiveness confirms a diagnosis. It’s that you don’t have to take back your concern simply because the person pushes against it.

So what do you do with that reaction? Don’t turn the conversation into a debate, and don’t apologize for caring. Scaringi describes the right stance as staying “sort of solid”: Don’t argue, but don’t retreat from what you said. You can also acknowledge the person’s anger. Attia sometimes suggests to parents, in particular, that they put it this way: “I understand you're angry with me for bringing this up, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I said nothing.”

If they still don’t want to talk, end with the part you hope they’ll remember later. Gaudiani’s closing goes roughly like this: “I'm reading that you're not interested in talking about this with me, and I'll respect that. But I care deeply about you, and it feels to me like something that isn't great for your health might be going on. If you'd like my support finding someone who could help, text me anytime.” She sometimes adds that she can’t promise it will be the last time she raises the subject. That last part may feel awkward, but it makes something important clear: Her concern didn’t evaporate the moment the person deflected it. 

The conversation doesn’t have to work immediately to matter. Your loved one might replay it later, Emma says. For now, it may be enough that they leave knowing you noticed, you care, and you’ll still be there when they’re ready. 

It’s OK to bring up the subject again, though it works better as an open-door reminder than a follow-up audit. Don’t start checking whether they’ve gained weight, eaten more, or made an appointment. Scaringi suggests keeping the focus off their body and reminding them that you’re available if they want to talk.

If you’re still worried, you don’t have to be the only one saying so. Attia says hearing the same gentle concern from a partner, close friend, or family member can land differently than hearing it from you a second time. Just don’t turn it into a surprise group intervention; these conversations should happen separately. Your loved one may still find out and accuse you of talking behind their back. If that happens, Scaringi says, be honest: You did—because you’re worried.

Keep checking in on the person, not policing their plate. Remind them that you’re available, and make it easy for them to come back. “A compassionate conversation is always more effective than silence,” Emma says.

As AI becomes more prevalent in our personal and professional lives, the more we’ll need a way to stand out. In fact, skills like empathy, influence, and the ability to read the room—things AI cannot yet do with accuracy and facility—are already becoming more valuable. 

We are facing an insidious threat to our interpersonal skills, driven not just by AI's growing capabilities, but by our own diminishing opportunities to actually practice communicating. The expansion of our digital lives has already caused a roughly 28% drop in the words we speak daily between 2005 and 2019, and leaning on AI shrinks those vital practice moments even further. Ultimately, when we offload too much to AI, we aren't just taking a convenient shortcut; we are actively causing our fundamental capabilities to atrophy and increasing our communication anxiety because we know that if we are challenged, we might not have the depth of knowledge to respond.

With algorithms drafting our emails and smoothing out our speech, the baseline for communication has never been more flawless—or flat and disconnected. Because so many people are hiding behind this generated perfection, we gain a massive competitive edge when we do the exact opposite.

Communicating authentically, revealing our humanness, increases our value by serving as a real-time signal of trust and genuine effort. Because anyone can now generate flawlessly polished text, unscripted moments containing natural flaws and foibles demonstrate that we’re actually investing our own labor and personal touch into the exchange. 

Striving for a hyper-polished veneer is no longer the winning strategy. Instead, the speakers who resonate most today are those who loosen up and embrace a more idiosyncratic, less perfect expressiveness. This means giving yourself grace when using “filler words” such as “uhm” and “like.” And it means emphasizing your unique perspective. To be sure, putting our unvarnished, authentic selves on display can feel intimidating, but audiences respond well to it, and this approach can allow for meaningful connection and influence. 

I experienced this firsthand not long ago when I logged on to speak to 800 people at a live virtual event on best practices for classroom teaching of MBA students. I expected a standard Q&A, but upon arriving, I learned the organizers actually needed me to present solo for 30 minutes. Drawing on my knowledge of the material, I spoke completely impromptu. Did I occasionally veer into a non-sequitur or mangle a sentence? Yes. But the aftermath was a flood of emails from attendees praising the session. They were refreshed to have a speaker who wasn’t reciting a script or hiding behind slides. They appreciated my being me while communicating.

I wasn’t simply winging it, however. I was deliberately letting the audience see more of who I really was.

As humans evolve for the AI era, I created the TRUST framework to help my students at Stanford communicate effectively while embracing their authentic imperfections. Here is how you can use it to project your humanity and establish genuine connection.

Truthful foundation

AI struggles to convey authentic emotion and context, but you do it naturally. Ground your messages in your actual lived experiences, offering specific feelings and the emotions that accompany them. Speak your truth. If you are giving a toast at a wedding, don't reach for generic platitudes; recount a hyper-specific memory chock-full of genuine emotion that only you would have noticed. 

For instance, during a recent virtual presentation, I didn't just share teaching theory; I admitted how I had struggled mightily to manage learners of different ability levels, sharing my own insecurity about boring expert students and how it led me to over-monitor their reactions.

Real-time processing 

An AI engine delivers its final, polished output as a completed message. In order to communicate more authentically, you can verbalize what you are thinking in the moment, revealing your internal thought process, and proving to your audience that you are originating content on the spot. Using phrases like “My first inclination is…,” or “When I had a similar question prior,” brings listeners into the all-too-human workings of your mind. 

When responding to a complex chat question regarding non-native speakers during my event, I simply paused and said, “Give me a moment to reflect on this important point.”

Utilize tailored, local evidence

While AI offers generic backing for its conclusions, you can offer the delightfully quirky. Use stories, data, or testimonials that speak exclusively to your unique background to support your logic. If you are pitching a new product, explain how the street signs in your rural Nebraska hometown inspired its visual design. 

To illustrate the challenges of speaking a non-native language, I shared an embarrassing personal story about my own struggles teaching in Beijing.

Show your unique speaking style

For decades, communication coaches counseled clients to ruthlessly eliminate verbal tics and awkward pauses. In the age of AI, those exact imperfections add something vital: a sense of your humanness. You shouldn't go overboard with "uhs" and "ums," but you also shouldn't strive to expunge them completely. My own tendency is to repeat phrases I have recently heard. 

During my impromptu keynote, I found myself repeating "the reality is..." multiple times. Instead of freezing or over-correcting, I gave myself grace and let my unfiltered self come through.

Tip off the audience to your perspective

Information without a point of view is just data. When sharing an update, provide commentary through your unique thoughts and historical perspective. If you describe a new process you developed at work, cap it off with a genuine reflection like, “This was one of the most challenging, but fun solutions I’ve seen our team come up with.” 

During my presentation, I shared that I love puzzles, and that I find the task of crafting unique activities for my students to be among the most fun puzzles to solve.

Throughout our education and experience, we have been conditioned to hide behind a veneer of perfection, but now that perfection is only a prompt away, people are incredibly ready to reward us when we let our authentic selves shine. In a landscape crowded with pixel-perfect output, projecting your humanity is the ultimate way to build trust, to connect, and ultimately to enhance your influence and impact.

Ukraine hit at least two warehouses belonging to Russia’s e-commerce giant Wildberries in overnight strikes on Monday, adding to a series of drone attacks that have targeted the online retailer.

Ukrainian forces have repeatedly struck warehouses belonging to Russia’s largest online retailer as part of a broader campaign against logistics sites that Kyiv says support Moscow’s military.

Often described as Russia’s “Amazon,” Wildberries operates dozens of warehouses across the country and plays a core role in the Russian consumer economy.

Since July 18, Ukraine has targeted close to 20 of the retailer’s sites, referring to them as military-linked “logistic centers.”

Moscow and Wildberries have denied that the facilities supply the armed forces.

The strikes have drawn attention not only because of their reach inside Russia, but also because of Wildberries’ economic importance, its ties to the country’s financial sector, and the potential impact on ordinary Russian consumers.

”Ukraine's Defense Forces struck the Wildberries logistics center in Krasny Bor near St. Petersburg. Burning again,” read an update from the Defense of Ukraine on Tuesday. “Russian logistics, dismantled one hub at a time.”

The social media statement was accompanied by a video showcasing a large, white-painted building engulfed in flames.

“Wildberries was used to distribute military and dual-use goods,” read the caption across the footage. “We will continue dismantling the enemy’s logistics.”

https://x.com/DefenceU/status/2084653333068055029

With the Russia-Ukraine war now in its fifth year, Kyiv has shifted its military strategy as it continues to come under heavy bombardment from Moscow. Ukraine has increasingly used long-range drone strikes to target infrastructure and supply networks deep inside Russia. Amid a broader government reshuffle near the end of July, Kyiv gained a new military chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, who Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has tasked with leading the country's precise defensive efforts.

With Kyiv vowing to maintain its focus on the retailer’s hubs, here’s what to know about Wildberries, its high-profile founder, and why it’s being targeted.

What is Wildberries—and who founded it?

The online retailer, which hosts third-party sellers, facilitates everything from household goods to air travel, and even has a financial arm, WB Bank.

In May, Wildberries announced a strategic partnership with VTB Bank, a Russian majority state-owned institution.

VTB Bank shares fell around 2.5% on July 28 amid ongoing strikes, according to Reuters.

Days after Ukraine’s July 18 strikes against the Wildberries sites, the European Commission included the WB Bank when E.U. member states adopted its 21st package of sanctions against Russia.

“Wildberries Bank LLC is involved in an economic sector providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine,” declared the council of the European Union.

Wildberries was founded by Tatyana Kim, formerly Tatyana Bakalchuk, in 2004.

A former English teacher, Kim was 28-years-old and on maternity leave when she launched the initiative, and was later joined by her now ex-husband, Vladislav Bakalchuk.

As Wildberries grew, Kim’s fortune did too. Forbes estimates her net worth at $8.1 billion, making her Russia’s richest woman.

She was the only Russian entry on Forbes’ 2025 list of “The 50 Richest Self-Made Women On Earth.”

“Wildberries has grown from small origins to be one of two major internet marketplaces in Russia [alongside Ozon],” Charles Hecker, an associate fellow in international security at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, tells TIME. “It’s an enormously prominent company and Kim is an incredibly prominent business person in Russia.”

Why is Ukraine targeting Russia’s ‘Amazon’?

Kyiv insists Wildberries is being used as a key supply chain for the Russian military.

“Ukraine's official reason behind attacking Wildberries is that Ukraine believes the website is used as a channel for military components,” says Hecker.

After Wildberries sites were struck on July 18, Zelensky announced that “two major logistics facilities were hit—in the Moscow and Tambov regions” and said “the aggressor [Russia] used them to supply sanctioned components for drone production and navigation equipment.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has refuted accusations that Wildberries warehouses are used for Russian army supplies.

Kim has also rejected the allegations. In a July 31 video statement uploaded to Telegram, she argued Kyiv’s drone attacks on sites linked to Wildberries amount to “acts of terrorism” against civilians.

In response to accusations that ⁠Wildberries sells dual-use goods, items that can have both civilian and military uses, Kim said ​the company doesn’t offer anything that is ​not ⁠also available on major global e-commerce platforms such as Amazon or Alibaba.

After previous drone strikes on its facilities, the e-commerce giant issued statements pledging financial support for sellers whose goods were damaged.

The retailer's ties to the country’s financial sector and the far-reaching economic impact of the strikes is a key factor to consider, experts say.

“Putin said at the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that the war would not impact the way Russians lead their lives,” Hecker tells TIME. “But attacking Wildberries impacts the Russian consumer, and this comes on top of inflation, on top of periodic mobile internet outages across Russia.”

While inflation in Russia has climbed down from highs of 9.4% last year, it rose once again to 6% in June—its highest level since January. 

Consumers in Russia are also tackling a summer fuel crisis after Ukraine stepped up its drone attacks on oil refineries.

“It's difficult now for President Putin to say that the war on Ukraine is not impacting the way ordinary Russians live,” Hecker says, reflecting on the economic blows. “Ukraine has discovered how successfully it can penetrate airspace deep into Russian territory, and I think what it's doing right now is exploiting that capability.”

A Florida resident has died from an infection of Vibrio vulnificus, a type of “flesh-eating” bacteria that thrives in warm coastal waters. It is the first reported death linked to the bacteria this year in the U.S. Florida has the highest rate of Vibrio vulnificus infections in the country. 

Twelve Vibrio vulnificus infections have been reported in Florida this year, and the one death occurred in Palm Beach County, according to data from the state’s health department. The person was in their 80s, NBC 6 reported. Florida’s health department told TIME that it is investigating the case, but wouldn’t provide additional details, including how the person became ill. 

Vibrio vulnificus is part of the Vibrio genus of bacteria, a group of water-loving pathogens that includes the bug that causes cholera. Vibrio vulnificus infections are much rarer than cases of cholera globally, but they’re much more likely to be fatal. About 1 in 5 people who are infected with Vibrio vulnificus die, sometimes within a day or two of becoming sick, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

How do you get a Vibrio vulnificus infection?

Vibrio vulnificus can sicken people in different ways. Most commonly, the pathogen is consumed through raw or undercooked shellfish, particularly oysters, says Valerie Harwood, a professor of biology at the University of South Florida who studies the bacteria. “Oysters prefer the same salinity of water as Vibrio vulnificus,” she says, “and since oysters are filter feeders, they pull water and microorganisms into their [digestive] tract, and the bacteria get concentrated in their tissue.” 

Vibrio vulnificus can also infect open wounds; for example, if someone with an open cut waded into waters infested with the bacteria, they could contract the disease. Once in the body, the “flesh-eating” pathogen can travel under the skin along fascia, the connective tissue that surrounds every part of the body, and cause tissues to degrade and die, or necrotize. This type of infection is known as necrotizing fasciitis, and in severe cases, can result in amputation or death.

The infected person will often get an “extremely hot and painful wound, but you might not be able to see it initially because it’s under the skin,” Harwood says.

Ingesting Vibrio vulnificus can cause diarrhea, vomiting, stomach cramps, and other symptoms of food poisoning. In people with weakened immune systems, the infection could spread to the bloodstream and be life-threatening. 

Wound infections tend to be more lethal, Harwood says. People who are elderly or have certain underlying medical conditions, including liver disease, diabetes, or cancer, are at greater risk of severe disease, the CDC says.

“If you go in the water and 8 or 24 hours later, your leg hurts and feels hot, go to the doctor right away,” Harwood says. 

How to prevent a Vibrio vulnificus infection

To avoid dangerous exposure to Vibrio vulnificus, Harwood recommends that people with open wounds on their body, including fresh tattoos and new piercings, stay away from warm salt and brackish coastal waters, such as the Gulf of Mexico, until the skin is healed. Harwood says she personally would even avoid wading in such waters a day or two after shaving her legs in case of micro-tears on the skin. “I’m not even a germophobe or anything,” she says. “I just don’t want to risk any exposure.” 

Harwood also offers advice that shellfish-lovers may have a hard time swallowing: “Don’t eat raw oysters in the summer,” she says.

Vibrio vulnificus flourishes when waters are warm. (The bacteria also love the warmth of the human body.) They can also live in colder waters, but their populations shrink under those conditions, Harwood says. Eating raw oysters during cooler months or oysters that have been harvested in colder waters, such as on the western coast of the U.S., could be safer, Harwood says. She also recommends that people wear gloves when shucking oysters to avoid getting cut and risk being exposed to the bacteria. 

“Washing oysters won’t help,” she adds, though cooking shellfish kills the pathogen. The Florida health department recommends that people boil shucked oysters for at least three minutes, or fry them in oil for at least 10 minutes at 375°F.

Vibrio vulnificus infections are rare globally. In the U.S., about 150 to 200 cases of the disease are reported every year, according to CDC data—most of them in Florida and other Gulf Coast states. Climate change, however, is expected to increase the prevalence of Vibrio vulnificus in the U.S. and around the world.

In 50 years or so, Vibrio vulnificus infections are projected to be present in every Eastern U.S. state because of global warming, according to a 2023 study in Nature. Similarly, a paper published in March 2026 found that cases of Vibrio vulnificus infection are rising in Northern Europe “alongside warming coastal waters.”

Vibrio vulnificus “used to be seen as a very rare infection, but it is becoming a huge problem now, especially with the heatwaves in the summertime, and the growing popularity of year-round sea bathing,” Yaovi M. Gildas Hounmanou, an infectious-disease expert and co-author of the 2026 study, told Gavi, the global vaccine organization, in a May interview. 

There is currently no Vibrio vulnificus vaccine for people, though researchers are exploring potential options. People who suffer serious infections are treated with antibiotics. However, says Harwood, “if Vibrio vulnificus gets into your bloodstream and causes sepsis, sometimes there is nothing doctors can do.”

A fruitful collaboration between Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis sounds, at once, inevitable and impossible. Murphy is a maximalist in every sense—a superproducer pumping out show after operatic show, writing characters who say the quiet part of every story out loud—and one of TV’s most influential promoters of inclusive, identity-politics-driven programming. Ellis, for his part, is known for the minimalistic prose of his generation-defining debut novel, Less Than Zero, and a more recent culture-warrior phase in which he has inveighed against the same “fake-woke corporate culture” within the entertainment industry that some might say Murphy epitomizes. On the other hand, both men are inveterate provocateurs, unafraid to alienate audiences and fascinated by the psychology of psycho killers (see: Ellis’ American Psycho and a huge chunk of Murphy’s output) and the interplay between pop culture and real life. Born on the boomer-Generation X cusp, they also remember what it was like to grow up gay in the ’80s.

In The Shards, which the two adapted from Ellis’ 2023 novel, the synergy among their experiences outweighs but doesn’t erase the irreconcilability of their perspectives. The story at its surface, an autofictional but otherwise familiar account of a serial killer stalking students at Ellis’ high school in 1981, gleams with the stylish production design, savvy genre pastiche, and elaborate set pieces for which Murphy is known. Yet it’s clear the show, premiering with two episodes on FX and Hulu on Aug. 5, has greater ambitions. In the connections it makes to cultural touchstones of its period and voiceover narration from a present-day Bret, The Shards attempts to say something profound about the transition from youth to adulthood. Blame a mismatched creative team or the visual medium’s inherent privileging of images over ideas; the shallow stuff wins out.

Like Less Than Zero—and in some ways a prequel to that novel, which took place during a college break, though Bret (played by an unnervingly self-possessed Igby Rigney) is also writing the book while this story unfolds—The Shards follows a clique of rich, debauched teens in L.A. Bret is noncommittally dating Debbie (rising pop star Hayes Warner), a ruthless go-getter, while secretly hooking up with guys. Their best friends are the class golden couple, gorgeous student body president Susan (Kaia Gerber), who wins every popularity contest even though she’d prefer not to, and Thom (Graham Campbell), an all-American dreamboat whose sadness no one perceives beneath an expression of what Bret calls “intriguing blankness.” Whether it’s the love Bret harbors for Susan or a fundamental lack of attraction to women in general that keeps him distant for Debbie is a question that lingers in the background as his identity crisis deepens. 

Senior year is starting and the group’s parents have long since checked out. (Bret’s are apparently vacationing overseas.) Which suits the performatively jaded teens, who chain-smoke at restaurants with white tablecloths and traverse the city without curfew or constraint. Only Debbie’s monstrous family enters the frame. Her father, Terry (Wes Bentley), is a stock predatory movie producer with an eye for underage boys. His wife, Liz (Evan Rachel Wood), is a sneak preview of Debbie’s future, self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, and wrathful outbursts. The fourth member of the household is Terry’s lurking aide, an androgynous aesthete named Steven (theater producer Jordan Roth, playing up the character’s feline strangeness). When the situation calls for a responsible adult, these are not the people you want on hand.

They’re who the kids are stuck with, though, when a girl’s mangled body is found fastened to a tennis net and their classmates start disappearing. Bret is certain that the handsome new boy in school, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), is the culprit. But his logic—that Robert must be a killer because he denies having been at the screening of The Shining where Bret first spotted him—is pretty flimsy. For some reason, Bret can’t get his friends to care about the murders. They’re too busy planning homecoming festivities and angling to get on dance-contest TV shows. Maybe their denial can be shrugged off as typical teen self-involvement, but it doesn’t explain why he seems more invested in the case than police and even some parents of the missing.         

The Shards is dense with references. To make sense of the show beyond the plot’s generic teenage politicking and serial-killer thrills, you must know that The Shining is a horror story about a writer becoming violently unhinged; that its other Jack Nicholson footnote, Chinatown, is synonymous with systemic evil too entrenched to fight; that the financial disaster that was Michael Cimino’s 1980 feature Heaven’s Gate symbolizes the end of New Hollywood’s auteur-driven ’70s renaissance, leaving the industry to chase youthful faces and shiny trends. (Bret gives a Patrick-Bateman-esque monologue about how music videos are the future of art.) The casting piles new signifiers atop the source material. Gerber is the spookily identical daughter of Cindy Crawford, the ultimate Gen X beauty. Gere shares a square jaw with his father, Richard, whose breakthrough movie, American Gigolo—another tale of sex and murder in L.A., whose writer-director, Paul Schrader, worked with Ellis on The Canyons—was released just in time to be referenced by The Shards’ characters. Richard Gere was married to Crawford in the early ’90s. Gerber and Homer Gere don’t share any parents, but the connection adds a pseudo-incestuous twinge to their characters’ mutual attraction. Dig deeper, and you’ll find that Homer Gere’s mother, the actor Carrie Lowell, was once married to Griffin Dunne, the nephew of Joan Didion, whose work both Ellis and his Shards alter ego idolize.

Because so much of the meaning here resides in allusions that will elude most viewers under 40, Murphy and Ellis have essentially made two shows in one—an arch teen murder soap in the vein of Riverdale-Pretty Little Liars, and something more layered and harder to pin down for the older crowd. While the former benefits from the sensory intensity of Murphy’s storytelling (The Shards’ swimming pools achieve the incandescent blueness of Donald Trump’s Reflecting Pool dreams), and Ellis’ influence seems to have reined in some of his co-creator’s usual excesses, only the latter feels like something new. Yet the more thoughtful elements remain at the margins. It’s intriguing when the narrator says, for instance, “Matt had never felt about me the way I felt about him, which would be a recurring theme for the rest of my life.” The older Bret’s wistfulness, his frustration with a precocious teen Bret who traded his childhood innocence for an adult author’s life before he’d developed the self-knowledge that comes with genuine maturity, peeks through the surface without quite penetrating it.

The Shards unravels in its final few episodes. One plays on the name of the crew’s hangout, Hamburger Hamlet, drawing Murphy-ish parallels between the characters and Shakespeare’s tragic personages that are so overwrought, they can’t be salvaged by self-awareness. The bigger disappointment is a bombshell ending, albeit a narratively ambiguous one, that fizzles rather than explodes. The psychological escalation that’s supposed to lead us there never fully happens. This show about the consequences of limited introspection suffers them as well.

Abdul El-Sayed, a rabble-rousing populist and former public health official, just barely eked out a primary victory Tuesday in Michigan over a centrist rival who was the pick of Washington Democrats to keep a must-hold Senate seat. It was a bad night for the Democratic Establishment, who see the outcome as a major setback to their party's dreams of clawing back control of the Upper Chamber for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s presidency. 

But El-Sayed’s squeaker win was not what he or his allies were forecasting as recently as Tuesday morning. For weeks, most polling indicated Michiganders were strongly trending toward El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim Senator if he prevails in November over former Rep. Mike Rogers. Even still, this outcome was not something many foresaw as recently as last year. El-Sayed managed to captured the broad, bipartisan frustration that established leaders are not hearing voters’ concerns. 

Strategists are still looking at the data but some top-line folks clearly came out winners—and others losers.

WINNER: El-Sayed

Even if he fell short of expectations, the podcasting populist still had the primary outcome he was counting on. El-Sayed has been planning this moment for a while. He ran for Governor in 2018, another wave year for Democrats, but lost his primary to the current Governor, Gretchen Whitmer. 

As TIME’s Nik Popli reported from Michigan earlier this summer, El-Sayed is using his do-over to run against both parties at the same time. He blasted the wealthy, lashed the corporations, and decried the whole system as rigged. In many ways, he was channeling a lefty version of Trump.

El-Sayed, whose surprising rise prompted state senator Mallory McMorrow to suspend her campaign before voting began, is on the cusp of being the latest avatar for the brand of progressive and populist politics promoted by supporters like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Sen. Bernie Sanders. That instant credibility may boost El-Sayed nationally, but risks turning off voters in Michigan, which is precisely what Rep. Haley Stevens warned of during her unsuccessful primary against El-Sayed.

LOSER: Stevens

She had almost every on-paper advantage: a seat in the House, proximity to donors and advocacy groups, a policy wonk’s eye, and an affable every-woman folksiness. But CVs don’t always translate to votes.

Stevens, a former campaign aide to Hillary Clinton and Obama, couldn’t translate her natural political instinct as an operative to convincing a statewide electorate that she deserved their votes. Sometimes, her comments seemed to wander. Her mind moved faster than her lips. And her critics—in not-so-subtly-gendered language—mocked her accent.

Her defeat Tuesday cuts short her time in public office. At least for now.

WINNERS: Populists

The frustrations with the status quo helped El-Sayed, for sure. But it also reflects the true sentiment of how Americans are feeling right now. According to Gallup polling, just 23% of Americans are satisfied with how things are going. With that level of angst, it’s little wonder that Michiganders opted to go with someone calling for remaking the whole system over an incrementalist and pragmatist who pitched herself as someone who can fix the system from the inside.

But, again, this result in Michigan may be a complicating factor as Democrats try to figure out their next leaders. The 2028 presidential primary is already shaping up as yet another soul-searching moment for Democrats, pitting the disparate ideological camps and competing personalities against each other. But winning primaries, even in swing states, doesn’t necessarily mean much when it comes to assembling a broader coalition. As one Democratic strategist told me before polls closed on Tuesday, the night “gives 2028-ers the wrong idea about everything.”

LOSER: AIPAC

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee became an unlikely flashpoint in Michigan. The pro-Israel group has been spending big for several cycles to support allies of Israel and counter increasingly anti-Israel sentiments in the Democratic Party. El-Sayed’s views there left little doubt which side AIPAC would be supporting.

The group spent a record $30 million to help Stevens, an outlay that fed El-Sayed’s characterization of his opponent as little more than a mouthpiece for her deep-pocketed supporters. 

While the group is nominally focused on promoting the relationship between the United States and Israel, its advertising focus seldom mentions Israel. In fact, a New York Times analysis of AIPAC’s ads since April of 2022 found 109 ads. Just six mention Israel. 

WINNER: CAIR

Michigan is home to one of the nation’s largest and most politically engaged Muslim communities. And one of its most important civic engagement groups, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, pulled a last-minute flex in the final hours of the race.

On the eve of Tuesday’s primary, CAIR began a robocall effort that reached more than 13,000 Muslim Michigan households, where roughly 29,000 mail-in ballot recipients are registered. Another 19,000 low-propensity Muslim voters got calls.

Given El-Sayed’s narrow win, that push looks even more impactful, allowing the country’s largest Muslim civil rights groups to more firmly showcase its power in Michigan, as it finds itself targeted on multiple fronts in some red states. 

LOSERS: Establishment Democrats

Stevens was the undisputed choice of the Democratic Establishment. She was a swing state Democrat who previously won on the same ballot as Trump. She had been through the vetting, could raise money, and seemed a practical choice to hold the seat of retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. 

But Washington insiders’ efforts to help Stevens actually worked against her in a year when Democratic voters were more aligned with El-Sayed’s contempt for the Establishment. That anger found a vessel in El-Sayed and a target in Stevens. Even though Democratic leaders didn't get their way, that doesn't mean they're giving up on Michigan. Quickly after El-Sayed's primary victory became clear, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair, released a statement of support. “We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November," they said.

ACTING LIKE WINNERS: Republicans

Senate Republicans have been rightly nervous about holding their narrow majority. El-Sayed’s nomination takes away some of that stress. While Michigan is expected to be a close race, Republicans were a lot more eager to run against El-Sayed than Stevens. Republicans are ready with plenty of fodder from El-Sayed’s past comments; his unrelenting criticism of Israel will be wielded to sway Michigan’s Jewish voters to either back Rogers or sit the race out. 

LOSER: Whitmer

For the longest time, the state’s popular Governor insisted she was not getting involved in the primary. She had defeated El-Sayed to win the nomination in 2018 and has led a diverse state party through some tough family fights, especially when it came to the 2024 presidential race. Whitmer, who is term-limited and will leave office after November’s elections, is often mentioned as a 2028 contender. She has, with varying levels of intensity, said she is not chasing the nomination, but clearly isn’t ready to end her political career. 

So it left a lot of watchers surprised when, on July 24, Whitmer endorsed Stevens. It was a move that another Michigan Democrat and oft-mentioned 2028 contender, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, did not make. Whitmer quickly became one of Stevens’ better surrogates, making the argument in a clearer way than the candidate herself did.

As the folks in Whitmer’s lane look around, they may be questioning if there is a lane for their likes heading into 2028, or if a principled stand for pragmatism is truly a non-starter.

Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, delivering the party’s insurgent progressive wing a major victory in a contest that became a fierce referendum on whether Democrats need to move further left to fully harness plummeting support for President Donald Trump.

The Associated Press called the race early Wednesday for El-Sayed, ending one of the midterm’s most expensive and bitter primary races. With 99% of the votes counted, El-Sayed was leading by about 15,000 votes, out of nearly 1.5 million votes cast. Michigan is widely viewed as critical to Democrats’ effort to regain control of the chamber, and some party leaders and strategists view El-Sayed as less competitive against Mike Rogers, the former congressman who ran unopposed in the Republican primary.

The race between El-Sayed, 41, and Stevens, 43, had become a proxy fight over the Democratic Party’s future. El-Sayed, a non-practicing doctor who previously ran for governor, built his campaign around a sweeping progressive agenda, calling for Medicare for All, a 7% annual tax on the wealth of billionaires, and a broader effort to challenge what he described as an economic system tilted toward the wealthy and powerful. “Democrats really should be afraid of what I mean for their system of politics,” El-Sayed told TIME in a wide-ranging interview in late May. “When I say I’m coming for it, I’m coming for all of it.”

For progressives, El-Sayed’s victory amounts to a rejection of an establishment seen as overly cautious, too closely aligned with corporate interests and unwilling to challenge traditional power centers. Stevens represented a different path: a candidate with deep party ties, more traditional experience in government, and a message focused on growing American manufacturing.

The primary unfolded amid uncertainty and rising tensions, defined in large part by deep ideological differences over Israel, an issue in which younger and more progressive voters are increasingly more sympathetic with the Palestinian cause. El-Sayed sharply criticized Stevens over her support for continued military assistance to Israel and her refusal to call Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. He also hammered her on her relationship with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose aligned super PAC spent tens of millions supporting Stevens.

Read more: The Winners and Losers From Michigan's High-Stakes Senate Primary

Stevens, a moderate from the Detroit suburbs elected to Congress in 2018, framed herself as the Democrat best positioned to keep the seat in Democratic hands, arguing that El-Sayed’s positions on Israel and other issues were out of step with the state’s electorate. On the campaign trail, she emphasized her record in Congress, her ties to Michigan’s manufacturing communities, and her experience working for former President Barack Obama during the auto industry bailout. “I’m the only candidate who can keep Michigan blue,” Stevens argued in the final days of the campaign.

Stevens called El-Sayed to concede Wednesday morning and vowed to back his candidacy. “This was a thorough and rigorous campaign that brought out the full span of views within the Democratic Party—and that is why we have primaries,” she said in a statement. 

Senate control at stake

The stakes for Democrats were unusually high as they nominated a candidate to retain the seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters. The party faces a difficult Senate map and must defend vulnerable seats while attempting to gain ground elsewhere if they hope to win control of the chamber. Losing Michigan, strategists in both parties have argued, could make the path to a Democratic majority far more difficult.

That math puts Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a complicated position after he backed Stevens over El-Sayed, who had told TIME that he wanted to replace Schumer with progressive Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen. Soon after the race was called, Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand issued a statement of support for El-Sayed: “Democrats are united by a common purpose: putting a check on Donald Trump by defeating his Republican enablers and taking back the Senate. We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November."

Republicans had quietly hoped that El-Sayed would emerge as the Democratic nominee, believing some of his progressive views could provide them an opening in a state that has repeatedly shifted between the parties. Conservative groups have spent months portraying him as too radical for Michigan, focusing on his policy positions, his criticism of Israel, and his association with the political commentator Hasan Piker. Piker has faced criticism for past comments, including remarks that America deserved the Sept. 11 attacks that he later said he regretted. On the eve of the primary, El-Sayed once again campaigned with Piker, which Republicans pointed to as evidence of a broader ideological extremism.

Trump celebrates

Trump, who has endorsed Rogers, celebrated El-Sayed’s win as “great news” for the Republican Party. “El-Sayed, a communist loser who hates Jews and Israel, is the projected winner in his race with the socialist,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. 

El-Sayed previously told TIME that he does not consider himself a socialist even though his backers include prominent members of the Democratic Socialists of America. “I have no fealty to a dead German guy in his writing,” he said. “I actually think that at the small and local scale, capitalism is a great way to allocate resources, as long as everybody has access to it.”

With the general election race now set, Michigan’s Muslim and Jewish communities are likely to draw intense interest in the coming weeks. El-Sayed would be the first Muslim Senator in American history. His past comments on Israel, which he argues is guilty of genocide, have drawn fierce backlash from some Jewish leaders in Michigan, particularly after he linked a March attack on a Detroit-area synagogue to broader debates over Israel’s actions in Gaza, while still condemning the violence itself.

El-Sayed entered the race with a national following but a complicated political history. A Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Columbia Medical School who pursued a career in public health rather than practicing medicine, he served as Wayne County’s health director and gained national attention during a 2018 campaign for governor of Michigan in which he lost in the Democratic primary. In the years since, he has written books, hosted a podcast, and become a prominent voice in progressive circles.

His win comes just weeks after several Democratic socialist and progressive candidates scored major primary upsets against long-term establishment incumbents in safe-blue districts. On Wednesday, Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar became the latest example, losing his primary to democratic socialist Donovan McKinney.

The Senate race in Michigan shifted in early July when Democrat Mallory McMorrow, a state senator, dropped out of the primary, reconfiguring the contest as a direct confrontation between two sharply different visions of the party.

Stevens consolidated support from many establishment Democrats, including Schumer and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, while El-Sayed strengthened his alliance with progressives, campaigning alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In the final weeks, the race grew increasingly personal. El-Sayed accused Stevens of representing a failing political establishment and mocked the outside spending supporting her campaign. Stevens responded by accusing him of focusing more on national attention than on Michigan voters and warning that his approach would make it harder for Democrats to win in November.

For progressives, the Michigan result will be viewed as proof that the party is gravitating toward candidates who openly challenge Democratic leaders and embrace a more confrontational politics. For establishment Democrats, it will raise urgent questions about whether the party’s primary electorate is moving further away from the voters needed to win statewide contests in November.

Sydney Mishkin’s father had Stage IV sarcoma for seven years. In the weeks before he died, she kept trying to figure out what she still hadn’t told him. She searched through their old texts and listened to his voicemails. At night, she lay awake reviewing their entire relationship, desperate to identify the words she might one day regret leaving unsaid.

Eventually, she realized there weren’t any. A week before her father passed away, Mishkin told him: “There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted to say and didn’t.” He was very weak, but he managed to answer: “I could not ask for a better daughter.” Within days, he was no longer able to speak.

The exchange was deeply meaningful—but also bittersweet. Mishkin worried she had said too much or made her father feel obligated to summon the energy for a profound response. “How do you sum up a lifetime of loving somebody into a sentence or two?” she says.

The answer, according to people who spend their careers alongside the dying, is that you don’t have to. There are words that can bring comfort, invite honesty, and help both of you find peace. But there’s no perfect script—and your presence likely matters more than anything you manage to say.

Don't wait for the right moment

When people ask Dr. Ira Byock whether they should make the trip to see a seriously ill friend or relative, he answers with a question: “Would you go to the funeral?”

Almost always, they say yes—of course they would. "Well, go now,” says Byock, a palliative care physician in Montana and author of The Four Things That Matter Most. You'll say generous things at the memorial about what a remarkable person your friend was. Better to say them while she can hear you. "It's much more fun to say those nice things when somebody is alive," Byock says. If you can only make one trip, make it this one.

Hadley Vlahos, a hospice nurse and author of The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments, regularly hears from families who want her to alert them when the end is near. Her answer never changes. "You need to come right now," she says. "Everyone looks for this perfect time, and they always think that there's gonna be more time." In hospice, the opposite is true: Beginning care earlier leaves more time for meaningful conversations. "You don't want to wait until they're in a coma," she says.

The window for a real back-and-forth closes before most families expect it to. Start when the diagnosis arrives, says Dr. Kate Brazzale, chief medical officer of Empath Health, which operates Florida’s largest nonprofit hospice network. "Don't wait, because the person that's dying needs to be able to respond and speak," she says. "You need to get all those things out of the way. Towards the end, the person that's dying may not be able to speak, and it's not very fair to unload on them at that point."

Sometimes there's no window at all. Christine Davies, director of spiritual care at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, has been a hospital chaplain for more than 25 years. She’s present for expected deaths after long illnesses, as well as sudden ones. "We may not even have the opportunity to say these last words, and so we have to say them all of the time," she says. "Knowing no day is promised makes it all the more sacred."

Lead with the obvious—and then let them talk

Once you're in the room, you don't need to read from a prepared statement. But on the drive or flight over, Byock suggests, think about what's most obvious to you, and open with that: “It's really good to see you. I've been thinking about you so much. It's just so good to be with you.”

From there, say the thing you assume they already know. "I so value our relationship. You've been so important to me," Byock offers as an example. Then get specific, the way you might at a celebration of life—without going overboard. “You've always been there for me.” “You're one of the funniest people I've ever known.” “What a remarkable parent you've been.”

"Notice I'm just saying the most obvious things," he says. "If the person means enough for you to travel and see them, they are important to you. This is a time to say it out loud."

Then shift the focus to how they’re feeling. Byock's go-to: “How are you doing physically—but also, how are you doing within yourself?” "That phrase is one that we don't hear very often, but people tend to know what I'm asking," he says.

If their answer surprises you—or you don’t quite understand it—don’t rush to reassure them or claim to know how they feel. Brazzale suggests three words instead: “Help me understand.” Unlike “I know how you feel,” which few people can truthfully say to someone who is dying, the phrase invites them to share more. “It opens the door,” she says.

She also asks patients directly whether they're afraid—one of her most effective questions, though she notes it lands differently coming from a physician than from a daughter. What surfaces is rarely just fear of physical pain. It's fear of the unknown, of losing control, and of what their loved ones will have to endure.

The conversation can also turn toward the past. Davies uses an approach called life review, inviting people to reflect on the experiences that shaped a person’s life—the highs and lows, regrets and celebrations, important relationships, and the legacy they’ll leave. Looking back can include plenty of laughter: Families might retell favorite stories or swap inside jokes. “I have no idea what they’re referencing,” she says, “but it’s almost like they’re recounting the stories.”

Say the four things that matter most

Decades ago, Byock started teaching patients, students, and families that there are four things worth saying to someone before you're forced to say goodbye. Put them in your own words if you like, but here’s how he phrases it: “Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you.”

The first two are there because no relationship is perfect. "Within the history of almost all relationships, there are times of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, anger—sometimes real transgressions," Byock says. You can be specific about what you’re asking forgiveness for, or you can keep it general. “Dad, please forgive me, because I know I haven’t been the perfect son,” Byock offers as an example. “And I forgive you for the times that I felt misunderstood and harshly judged by you.”

In conversations between parents and children, Byock suggests adding an expression of pride. A parent might say, “I’m so proud to be your dad.” “Who else on the planet can tell your child how proud you are to be their mom or their dad?” he says. “That is a gift that keeps on giving.” A son or daughter can reverse it: “I’m so proud to be your daughter.” When the person dying is young, Byock focuses especially on this kind of affirmation.

It’s a good conversation to have even if no one is sick. Byock had it with his own mother in October 2003, prompted by the galleys of his book. They sat together, and he said nearly all of it, including thanking her for being his most steadfast supporter. There were tears, and they talked for an hour. A month later, his mother died suddenly of an undiagnosed heart condition. "I miss her," he says. "But there was nothing critically important left unsaid between my mom and me."

Reassure them about what they're leaving behind

Much of what frightens people at the end isn't about them. It's about everyone else.

Vlahos sees it most clearly with the matriarch of a family—the woman who called all the kids every Sunday, who hosted every holiday. She describes a patient who seemed to be holding on, and whose sons finally said the thing she needed to hear to pass peacefully: “I promise I'm still going to call Dad every Sunday. I promise we're still going to have Christmas.”

Vlahos remembers a patient who was told, “I promise to make sure your grandson knows you.” "I think that matters a lot more than people think," she says.

Then there are the reassurances almost no one thinks to offer. Brazzale says patients who are declining may worry about soiling themselves, losing their dignity, or being moved out of their home at the end. What she’d want to hear, she says, is this: “We’re going to keep you clean. We’re going to keep you safe. We’re going to keep you comfortable.” If dying at home is the plan, family can add: “We’re going to keep you home.” “There’s something about cleanliness that resonates with people,” she says. “It sounds simple, but it’s quite powerful.”

In the final phase of dying—a period Barbara Karnes, a hospice nurse and educator since the 1970s, calls labor—many people become nonresponsive. “What we watchers can do is talk as if they can hear us,” she says. Hearing is thought to be one of the last senses to fade, so continue as though your loved one may still hear you. Brazzale offers similar advice: If you run out of things to say, choose a beautiful book and read aloud. She also suggests keeping your touch light—holding a hand rather than hugging, which can be jarring. 

Karnes recommends making room for both private goodbyes and a shared gathering. First, have each person go into the room alone, sit down, hold their loved one’s hand, and talk about the relationship. “You can speak from your heart and say everything you want and need to say,” she says, even if the person is nonresponsive. Then come back together: Gather around the bed, put on dad’s favorite music, let the kids in, put the dog on the bed. After the death, before you call the funeral home, let everyone go in alone one last time if they want, Karnes suggests.

Skip the platitudes—and don't try to fix it

Some phrases are worth retiring entirely. At the top of the list: “I know how you feel.”

"How could we possibly know how they feel? We haven't died," Brazzale says.

Davies advises against what she calls spiritual platitudes, like “everything happens for a reason” and “God needed another angel.” "That can be really harmful to the people that are hearing it," she says. Such phrases try to impose meaning onto someone’s suffering or force an unbearable moment to feel better, she says, rather than leaving room for the person’s actual emotions.

And avoid any framing that treats dying as quitting, Brazzale recommends. She has watched families push patients through a 10th round of chemotherapy so no one can say they gave up. "There's going to be a point at which they die, and you should never frame it that they gave up," she says. "What a terrible thing, that 100% of the human race is just going to quit."

Platitudes often spring from the urge to talk someone out of what they’re feeling. But if a dying person says, “This sucks,” you don’t need to insist otherwise. “You can be like, ‘Yeah, you know what, it does,’” Vlahos says. Making room for that honesty also helps relieve the dying person of another burden: managing everyone else’s emotions. Loved ones rarely mean to put them in that position, Vlahos says, but she sees it happen often.

That means silence is a legitimate option. Vlahos believes many of these important final encounters don’t happen because people feel pressure to find the right words. “Sometimes the right thing to say is nothing—to just let someone talk,” she says. 

Davies gives her chaplaincy students a five-word rule: “Show up and shut up.” Her interns sometimes come to her surprised that a grieving family hugged them, because they felt they hadn’t done anything. “No—you bore witness to what they were going through,” she tells them. “‘You were there in the hardest moment, and you didn’t fill it with words. You allowed for the silence to take place.’ We try not to cheer people up, because there’s no cheering up.”

You don’t have to hold yourself together, either. Vlahos would far rather someone show up and cry with her than stay away. Brazzale once made the same point, half-jokingly, to her own children. She initially told them she didn’t want anyone crying at her bedside when she died—then reconsidered. “Actually, you’d better shed a few tears,” she told them. “Because that shows I mattered.”

The person who is dying is grieving, too, Brazzale says. Trying to protect each other by hiding that sadness can create distance at a moment when time together is especially precious. “Don’t be tiptoeing around one another for fear of hurting each other’s feelings,” she says, “because the scars left behind will be that much deeper.”

The European Central Bank (ECB) is redesigning its euro banknotes and the public is playing a key role in deciding how the new bills will look.

Two core redesign proposals are being considered—with each offering a different interpretation of its theme across the €5, €10, €20, €50, €100, and €200 bills.

One redesign package focuses on European culture, with banknotes set to feature faces of prominent talents, including American-born singer Maria Callas. The other is centered on nature, featuring imagery of rivers and birds.

Europeans have been invited to give their views on the final selection through an online survey which closes Sept. 21. The results will be considered by the Governing Council of the ECB, along with independent jury conclusions and a technical review, before the final design is selected toward the end of 2026.

The new banknotes would then undergo testing before entering circulation, while remaining interchangeable with the current series of euro notes.

According to the ECB, the redesign aims to better reflect Europe's identity and values, introduce enhanced security features, improve environmental sustainability, and make the banknotes more accessible and easier to use.

As it’s the first major redesign of the euro banknotes since the currency notes were introduced in 2002, the stakes are high.

“Talk to friends, colleagues, family members, and ask them to participate, because we want as many Europeans as possible to express their views about our future banknotes,” said ECB president Christine Lagarde.

As for the choices at hand, the rivers and birds series highlights wildlife found across Europe. The designs spotlight species including the wallcreeper, kingfisher, bee-eater, white stork, avocet, and northern gannet against a range of serene landscapes.

Meanwhile, there are some very recognizable faces of people credited with shaping the continent’s cultural identity in the European culture redesign package.

German symphonist Ludwig van Beethoven, considered one of the greatest composers of the 18th and 19th centuries; Polish-French scientist Marie Curie, known for discovering radium and polonium; Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote; Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, famed for painting the Mona Lisa; and Austrian novelist and peace activist Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

American-Greek soprano Callas is set to appear on the new €5 banknote, should the cultural package be selected.

What to know about Maria Callas

While the other figures featured in the proposed designs were born in Europe, Callas was born in New York in December 1923 to Greek parents.

Often hailed as one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century, she moved to Athens with her mother as a teenager.

Callas was a pupil of the celebrated Spanish soprano Elvira de Hidalgo at the Athens Conservatory. Her own career went on to span decades across many of the world's leading opera houses.

In 1951 she made her official debut at La Scala in Milan, performing Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani. From there, she appeared on some of the world's most prestigious stages, including the Royal Opera House in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Paris Opera.

The English National Opera describes her as being “able to deliver a wide range of vocal colours depending on the mood or type of music she was singing.”

According to her biography at the Maria Callas Museum in Athens, Callas “is widely recognized as the foremost Opera icon of the 20th century, renowned for her unmatched interpretations and techniques.”

When TIME put Callas on the cover of the Oct. 29, 1956, issue, the magazine dubbed her “the undisputed queen of the world’s opera.”

Callas made her final major recital appearance in Sapporo, Japan in 1974, and withdrew from public life to live in Paris, where she died of a heart attack in 1977, at the age of 53.

Across the world, Callas' legacy continues to be recognized.

Greece's Ministry of Culture successfully organized for the centenary of her birth to be included in UNESCO's 2023 anniversary commemorations.

In 2024, Angelina Jolie portrayed the opera singer in the Netflix biopic Maria.

A man who was arrested Sunday afternoon at the Trump National Golf Club in Southern California faces federal and state charges after authorities found ammunition on him and a gun in his vehicle. The Secret Service is reportedly investigating whether the man posed a threat to President Donald Trump, who was due to visit the golf course on Tuesday.

On Friday, plainclothes federal agents noticed a “suspicious individual” on the golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes while they were conducting a security assessment ahead of Trump’s scheduled visit, according to a press release on Tuesday from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for California’s Central District. 

The press release stated that the individual, later identified as Jeanine John Taele, 38, was seen wandering around the golf course while wearing an earpiece and taking photographs and videos of federal agents’ security-planning activities.

Taele returned to the golf course Sunday afternoon, prompting staff to alert federal agents, according to the press release, which alleged that Taele approached the federal agents and claimed the State Department hired him as part of a security detail. 

Agents then contacted the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release. When they arrived at the club, the Sheriff’s Department deputies learned that Taele was wanted in connection with a 2025 robbery case out of El Segundo, Calif., before they detained him.

Deputies found a magazine with ammunition from Taele’s pants pocket, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said, adding that a subsequent search of his pick-up truck in the golf club’s parking lot yielded a loaded pistol, an additional loaded magazine, a pair of binoculars, and a badge that read, “security protection agent.” 

The Sheriff’s Department said detectives assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force later searched Taele’s home in Downey, Calif., on Monday, where they found an “illegally modified” AR-platform rifle, a pistol, ammunition, body armor and magazines, and two radio signal devices. The Sheriff’s Department added they also found multiple notebooks containing what they described as “concerning statements,” though they did not elaborate on what those were.

An unnamed federal law enforcement source told CNN that the Secret Service is looking into whether the person posed a threat to Trump.

“While we are still investigating the motives of this individual, we are thankful he was apprehended before the President’s visit,” First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli said in the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release. “Federal and local law enforcement stepped in early and prevented what could have been a dangerous situation from occurring. This investigation remains ongoing.”

At the state level, according to a felony complaint filed Tuesday in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, Taele faces several firearms-related charges: carrying a concealed firearm in a vehicle; possessing a short-barreled rifle or shotgun; and manufacturing, importing, keeping for sale, or giving or receiving a large-capacity magazine. He also faces the second-degree robbery charge for the incident in November 2025.

Venusse Dunn, spokesperson for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, told TIME that Taele pleaded not guilty at arraignment Tuesday. He was ordered not to possess weapons, to stay away from Trump’s golf course, and not to leave the state.

Taele remained in custody as of early Wednesday, the Sheriff’s Department told TIME, and he is set to appear in state court on Aug. 26. His bail is set at $250,000. 

Taele is expected to appear for the first time in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Wednesday, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He faces a federal charge of possession of an unregistered short-barreled rifle, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

Authorities say that the man’s motives are still under investigation and have not publicly alleged that Taele planned an assassination attempt on Trump. But the incident at the Trump golf course recalls previous assassination attempts on the President. 

Before his reelection, Trump’s right ear was wounded during an assassination attempt at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., in July 2024. Weeks later, another man attempted to assassinate Trump at a golf course Trump owns in Florida; the would-be assassin in that attempt was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year. And a California man was charged with an attempt to assassinate the U.S. President—after he tried to force entry into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April and opened fire. The defendant, who was apprehended on the scene, has pleaded not guilty and the case is ongoing.

Despite the recent potential security concern, Trump appeared unfazed, suggesting to Fox News on Tuesday that such incidents only target Presidents with relevance: “The only thing I get a little solace from is they say only consequential Presidents, and I am definitely consequential.”

Periods of disruption have often forced societies to rethink old assumptions, create new institutions, and find novel ways to solve problems. I have been thinking about that idea over the past year after seeing a record number of measles cases in the U.S.; disease outbreaks not seen in our country in decades, such as New World screwworm returning to our states; dismantling of federal health agency programs such as smoking cessation and global health; the chipping away at the childhood vaccine schedule and declining vaccination rates for children; and all of this coupled with less trust in federal agencies and political leaders.

I spent a decade at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and believe deeply that our country needs strong, independent federal health institutions. States cannot replace national disease surveillance, reference laboratories, research, or the ability to coordinate a response across 50 states.

But since leaving government almost a year ago, I have had a different vantage point. I have worked with state health leaders, universities, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and organizations across the country. And amid the significant disruption, I see something else happening. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, new ways of working in public health are emerging.

States are finding new ways to work together. The West Coast Health Alliance and the Northeast Public Health Collaborative have aligned states in their regions on evidence-based vaccine recommendations after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. And this isn’t simply a red-state or blue-state phenomenon. When Texas needed greater capacity for measles testing, its public health laboratory developed a high-throughput approach that other states could validate and use for measles outbreaks. Further, states are collaborating and sharing information with one another through national organizations in the face of multistate threats such as Cyclospora. Recently, California launched its PHNIX initiative to connect public health with technology to develop scalable solutions in the state that improve health, lower costs, and strengthen emergency response. Rather than simply rebuilding what existed before, PHNIX asks what should be built next.

Medicine is responding, too. The American Academy of Pediatrics has continued issuing evidence-based vaccine recommendations and has challenged federal actions that threaten the integrity of the vaccine advisory process, resulting in courts temporarily pausing these federal policies that might limit access to childhood vaccines. The Vaccine Integrity Project, working with the American Medical Association and other organizations, has created an independent, science-driven process to review evidence on influenza, COVID, and RSV vaccines to counter the political interference impacting CDC’s recent vaccine guidance.

Universities are also rethinking what public health can be. Yale’s new Future of Health Innovation Hub fosters a different model where public health ideas engage commercial partners and move from research into products and solutions. Yale’s PopHIVE combines traditional government data sources with information from electronic health records and other sources to provide a timely picture of population health that is less impacted by government shutdowns or political priorities. With concerns about gaps in federal infectious disease monitoring during the World Cup, Georgetown University created a Health Security Operations Center that brought together universities, health systems, public health, and technology partners to use real-time data to help identify emerging threats.

And innovators are applying technology to problems that public health and health care have struggled to solve at scale. While it is too early to call them success stories, they are steps in the right direction. This month, the Coalition for Health AI launched PULSE, bringing public health agencies at state, tribal, local, and territorial levels together with technology companies to test responsible use cases of generative AI ranging from biosurveillance to multilingual communication. OpenAI and Anthropic are providing access to their technology, and lessons from participating health departments will be shared so others can build on what works. Akido is using AI to help street medicine teams care for hard-to-reach populations, using technology to increase the number of patients each clinician can see while maintaining strong retention in care and addressing public health concerns such as substance use. Jimini Health is using technology-enabled AI models made for mental health to extend care between visits, engaging patients between sessions while giving clinicians visibility into progress and allowing clinicians to prioritize what the models work on with patients.

None of this means the challenges facing public health can be solved or even patched up without federal leadership. The U.S. still needs a CDC capable of detecting threats, coordinating across states, conducting rigorous science, and providing trusted guidance. But resilience comes from having multiple sources of strength. Maybe that is a better ambition for American public health now: not simply to restore what has been lost, but to try to rebuild what worked, learn from what didn’t, and establish something stronger in its place.

After a year with plenty of reasons for concern, I find myself increasingly focused on what is being created. For centuries, the phoenix has symbolized renewal and the idea that something new can emerge from destruction. We should not have to lose important institutions and capabilities to spur innovation. But when disruption comes, we can choose what we build from it. Across American public health, I see people making that choice now. And that is what gives me hope.

AI is disrupting the world of work. But can it disrupt gender inequality at home?

The rise of “Care AI” offers up a tantalizing vision, one in which the never-ending work of managing family life—the anticipating, planning, caretaking, troubleshooting, worrying, and remembering—is outsourced to and supported by AI. 

Can’t keep up with emails and updates from your child’s school? An AI personal assistant can summarize communications, prioritize action items, and send reminders about back-to-school night. Worried something is off with your elderly father? An AI agent can track his medications, monitor for warning signs, and draft emails to his doctors. 

Techno-optimism hails AI’s transformative potential to solve major social problems and address unmet needs. These arguments highlight how Care AI can augment our social capacity to care, alleviating the care crisis, while reducing the caregiving burden on women. 

On the face of it, such technological developments are welcome news. Despite recent upticks in the amount of time men spend on unpaid household work, women still do significantly more. And that’s especially true when it comes to the mental load. In most households, it is women’s enduring vigilance, problem-solving work, and emotional management that keep the wheels from falling off. 

Studies show that the gendered division of cognitive labor is even more unequal than housework or childcare. And women pay an enormous price for holding everything together. Mothers who do a disproportionate share of the mental load have higher rates of depression, stress, and burnout. They are also more likely to report lower quality romantic relationships and to arrive at work already exhausted. An AARP survey found that four in 10 caregivers of adults say they rarely or never feel relaxed. 

This unpaid labor women do may leave them depleted, but its economic value has long gone unrecognized. Tasks like cooking or coordinating family logistics are typically excluded from measures of GDP. 

A new analysis turns this thinking on its head. A new report by consulting firm PwC provides an estimate of the socioeconomic value unlocked by AI assistive supports for unpaid household work. From AI-enabled wearable monitors that alert caregivers to problems to AI assistants that research options, streamline family routines, and prevent missteps, the value of technologies that bring efficiencies to “care and life management” and that “reduce friction in everyday life” is $330 billion, and that’s just assuming a 40% adoption rate. These gains are generated not only from time savings but from the decreased stress and higher well-being that results from AI reducing the cognitive load caregivers carry.   

Are techno-optimists right? Can Care AI offer women a better organized, fairer, and more carefree existence? History suggests otherwise.

Technofeminism has long criticized the idea that technology is the solution to the problem that has no name. In her influential 1985 book, More Work for Mother, historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan documented how the rise of “labor saving” domestic technologies like washing machines and vacuums actually increased women’s load by raising cleanliness standards and expanding housewives' responsibilities. Because technology is laid over existing cultural beliefs and social relations, it rarely fixes social problems. 

Innovation has not brought about women’s liberation. In fact, it’s added to women’s plates. Research has found that the uneven gendered division of labor extends to the digital realm, where women often take the lead on their family's online communications and oversee and negotiate their children’s media use. Moreover, technologies that keep us continually connected have given rise to a relentless and transcendent type of caretaking. Far from feeling like they have less to do, women now feel like they are never off the clock. 

Indeed, Care AI arrives on the scene as parenting standards have become supercharged. The cultural ascendance of intensive mothering, in which mothers are deemed entirely responsible for their children’s well-being and success, has upped the ante. Mothers feel this pressure to be the perfect parent acutely. Compared to fathers, mothers tend to hold higher standards for “good parenting,” but nonetheless judge themselves more negatively and worry more about falling short. The all-consuming and unforgiving nature of motherhood today results in a sad irony. Women often do more than their own mothers, but feel like they are not measuring up.

To be sure, there are enormous upsides to Care AI. These technologies will enable more convenience, improved coordination, enhanced monitoring, and in many cases better care. Women stand to benefit from these developments. 

An analysis of Japan and the U.K. estimated that automation could reduce time spent on unpaid work by 50 to 60%, decreasing women’s domestic workload by about three hours per day, and enabling 9.3% of working-age women in Japan and 5.8% of women in the U.K. to take up a job. Against the backdrop of a care crisis and high burnout, Care AI provides a lifeline that families desperately need. 

And there’s high demand. A new survey from LogicMark, a provider of personal safety and connected care technology, found that almost eight in 10 caregivers would embrace or try AI that predicts health issues before an emergency happens.   

But for these gains to materialize, we must guard against Care AI creating even more intensive care standards. If “frictionless” family life becomes the norm, whatever downtime or peace of mind AI might give women will instead be consumed by datafication, mommymaxxing, and an endless quest for optimization.

In the end, what is most likely to ignite the gender revolution at home are not large language models but a cultural reckoning over why we continue to expect women to do it all and hold them to such impossible standards. 

What’s really needed is for men to do more at home and for women to be given the green light to do less. In her recent book, anthropologist Carrie M. Lane shows how professional organizers do this kind of “feminist work.” Not only do organizers give their mostly women clients the permission to part with belongings, but also the permission to let go of exacting societal expectations like having a perfectly organized and spotless house. As one organizer explained, “Moms who are doing so much and have all this stuff and think they’re supposed to be able to handle everything… ‘You cannot do it all. You can’t. So, it’s okay.’” 

Until we upend these stubborn cultural beliefs, and until we have functional care systems, we’ll just have to watch as the tech bros get rich by monetizing ever more innovative ways for women to continue doing the mental load for free. 

Ted Lasso is back. Like a band that makes a big deal out of doing a farewell tour, then reunites before anyone had a chance to miss it, the megahit Apple TV sorta-comedy about a folksy American football coach hired to lead an underdog English soccer club has returned just three years after an implicit finale that sent its hero home to his son in Kansas. Premiering Aug. 5, Season 4 takes co-creator Jason Sudeikis’ Ted, who became a nurturing father figure to the surrogate family that was AFC Richmond, back across the Atlantic to shepherd the club’s new women’s team. It doesn’t quite work.

The season opens with the jarring image of Coach Lasso manning a supermarket register. Still in the Midwest a few years after the events of Season 3, he loves being with his son, Henry (Grant Feely), but is so bored at work, he steals snackfood for kicks. So it’s a relief when his old boss, Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), and colleagues Keeley (Juno Temple) and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) fly in to persuade him to coach the Lady Greyhounds. Never mind that he still doesn’t know much about soccer, or that there are many qualified female candidates back in the UK—he’s the only name on their list. When his ex, Michelle (Andrea Anders), frictionlessly agrees to move with him and Henry to London, everything’s coming up Ted.

With the conspicuous exceptions of Nick Mohammed’s prodigal junior coach, Nate, and team star Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster, who joined Lasso executive producer Bill Lawrence’s new HBO comedy Rooster), the original cast remains intact. Brett Goldstein’s seething has-been, Roy Kent, has replaced Ted as the men’s coach; Beard (co-creator Brendan Hunt) stuck around to assist Roy but has gone feral in the absence of his professional soulmate. Rebecca and Keeley are battling sexism—their own internalized prejudices as well as those of the sports and business communities—to get the Lady Greyhounds the financial support they need. Which leaves Ted to win over the icy assistant coach, Alice (played by the wonderful Tanya Reynolds from Sex Education and The Other Bennet Sister), who was passed over for his job, and establish the same magical rapport with his new team that he had with the old one, despite how careful he needs to be about entering the women’s locker room. Strangely, in the four episodes provided for review (out of 10 total), his interactions with the players are minimal.

The original Ted Lasso was a show about masculinity. Neither particularly funny nor especially exciting in its depiction of Premier League play, it appealed to a broad audience with a vision that was comforting to viewers of all genders—of macho, mostly straight men becoming better people through bonding and introspection. The catalyst for this was kind, empathetic Ted, who played Gallant to a gaggle of Goofuses: angry Roy, preening Jamie, insecure Nate. To its credit, the show put an anxious, avoidant Coach Lasso on the analyst’s couch, too. His ultimate choice to go home to Henry concluded an arc that had him learn to stop running from problems like his divorce and ended the cycle of dad trauma in which several characters’ struggles were rooted.

Ted is a more awkward fit as a father figure to the Lady Greyhounds because, well, the new gender dynamic could read as less paternal than paternalistic. Make him a voice of reason, and he might be perceived as mansplaining; have him defer too much to his players, and he becomes the cringey, try-hard male feminist he sometimes resembled in previous seasons. The show’s solution is to keep him largely on the sidelines, leaving female characters like Alice and, in one clumsily inserted storyline, erstwhile AFC Richmond therapist Sharon (Sarah Niles) to dispense wisdom on such female-coded issues as intra-team cliques. This puts the players at arm’s length as well. There’s a mom, a couple, a goalie who refuses to wear gloves, but no Roy or Jamie emerges.    

Female characters were never the mostly male Ted Lasso creative team’s strength. Despite charming performances from Waddingham and Temple, Rebecca and Keeley’s business plot never lives up to its potential because these colleagues continue to interact like giggly teenagers at a slumber party. Although there are plenty of women writing and directing in Season 4, Alice—the highlight of the series’ second act so far—is the only substantial character who doesn’t feel filtered through the male gaze. 

No longer a tutorial in how to be a good man, Ted Lasso returns as, in parts, a gentle rejoinder to sexism in sports and a gift to those still shipping Roy and Keeley, but mostly a workplace comfort show about nothing in particular. TV could certainly use more scripted stories about women athletes—a Friday Night Lights for softball, a Winning Time for the WNBA, a sapphic hockey romance in the mold of Heated Rivalry and Off Campus. But a different coach is going to have to inspire those locker rooms, because Ted Lasso just doesn’t belong.

The Trump Administration is likely to extend a waiver of a century-old shipping law in an effort to keep energy prices down, officials said.

After Iran militarized the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for the U.S. and Israel launching the war on Feb. 28, disrupting global energy supplies and sending oil prices skyrocketing, the Trump Administration temporarily suspended the Jones Act. The law requires that cargo moving between U.S. ports be carried on ships built in the U.S., owned by American companies, and predominantly crewed by Americans. By allowing foreign ships to transport cargo in the U.S., the waiver made domestic shipping more flexible, although estimates suggest the waiver would reduce oil prices by only a few cents per gallon.

The waiver has been extended once before and could be extended again as recent flare-ups between the U.S. and Iran dim hopes of a quick return to normal shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and lower energy prices.

“I think another extension, temporary extension, of the Jones Act waivers is quite likely to happen,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said at a media briefing in Texas on Tuesday. “These temporary suspensions of the Jones Act have been quite helpful for moving energy around our country.”

The current suspension will expire on Aug. 16, and the oil industry had reportedly expected a decision on an extension by the end of July. But the waiver has faced criticism from American maritime companies that argue it weakens the domestic shipping industry and does little to meaningfully lower fuel prices. Trump officials are reportedly still deciding whether to extend the waiver.

Still, Trump is facing increasing pressure to bring down U.S. petrol prices—currently averaging more than $4 a gallon—while the war’s economic and human costs have become a political liability for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections in November.

By Aug. 16, the waiver will reach 150 days, making this the longest suspension of Jones Act shipping restrictions in the program’s history. The waiver was first issued for a 60-day period on March 17, then extended for a 90-day period beginning May 18.

President Donald Trump and his officials have also explored other avenues to lower fuel costs as the war against Iran has threatened to spillover into new shipping routes and prolong economic pain for Americans and the rest of the world. On Monday, Trump called on ExxonMobil and Chevron—the two biggest U.S. oil companies—to return their surging profits to customers at the pump.

“President Trump believes in markets and he believes in capitalism. But he’ll use every tool he has, including the bully pulpit, to try to encourage and put pressure to lower energy prices for Americans,” Wright said.

To waiver or not to waiver

The Jones Act, part of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, was initially enacted to strengthen the U.S. shipping industry after World War I. The policy was rooted in an 1817 law that restricted domestic maritime trade to U.S.-owned vessels and a 1789 law that encouraged U.S.-built and -owned ships through preferential tax treatment.

Since the Jones Act rules were first waived till the end of July, there have been 196 voyages conducted under the waiver, according to government data. The waiver covers hundreds of commodities, including crude oil, refined petroleum products, natural gas, coal, ammonia, and fertilizers. It has increased the availability of tankers to move critical fuel supplies around the country, Wright said, noting that it has kept energy prices in California and on the East Coast “lower than they would otherwise be.” He said fuel prices should come down in the coming weeks.

The Administration appears likely to extend the waiver, although an extension is not confirmed and may have restrictions. Trump officials have reportedly met with industry representatives and lawmakers about potentially narrowing the scope of the waiver to be more targeted and friendlier to the domestic shipping industry.

The Maritime Trades Department, which represents U.S. and Canadian maritime workers, argued that the waiver threatens American vessel operators, mariners and shipyards by upending a law that is “the backbone to the American industrial workforce.” Without the law’s protections for American-owned and -operated vessels, the influx of foreign vessels could potentially lead to losses for U.S. shipyards, ultimately hurting the broader economy, the union said.

Maritime firms have also said that the waiver produces minimal savings for consumers and urged the U.S. government to pursue more effective cost-saving measures. In an article published by the Center for Maritime Strategy, non-resident senior fellow John McCown argued that the Jones Act’s benefits far outweigh its costs. 

“The waiver was justified as an emergency measure to lower fuel prices. It should be judged on whether it achieved that objective. And despite more than 130 foreign voyages under the waiver, consumers have seen little measurable relief at the pump,” William Doyle, a former Federal Maritime Commission member, wrote in a letter to the Washington Post in July.

And both maritime firms and some lawmakers have raised concerns about the waiver’s potential impact on national security.

In a June 30 letter to Trump, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority leader Steve Scalise, as well as 50 other House Republicans, called the waiver “a loophole exploited by adversarial countries to erode America’s maritime dominance.” The group of lawmakers urged the Administration to let the waiver expire on Aug. 16.

Two Democratic lawmakers separately penned a letter opposing the waiver and calling for greater scrutiny of its use.

Maritime companies and unions argue the waiver has opened protected U.S. domestic trade up to vessels linked to China, a major maritime rival of the U.S., while diverting business away from U.S. carriers. In June, American maritime groups raised concern about one such vessel, Jin Zhou Wan, whose operator is a subsidiary of state-owned China COSCO Shipping Corporation, which appears on the Pentagon’s list of Chinese military-linked companies. Voyages by Jin Zhou Wan carried asphalt—which is covered by the waiver—rather than fuel, which critics cited as evidence that the waiver is overly broad.

Extended waivers could weaken demand for U.S.-built and -crewed vessels, groups say, potentially discouraging investment in domestic maritime capacity and undermining the Trump Administration’s goal of rebuilding the American shipbuilding industry.

Pressure to lower gas prices

The Trump Administration has already taken other measures aimed at lowering energy prices. In March, the Administration authorized the release of 172 million barrels of crude oil from the country’s national stockpile. Also in March, it temporarily eased sanctions on some oil supplies from Russia and Iran.

Trump has also called out the biggest U.S. oil companies for “making too much money” amid the energy crisis. ExxonMobil recorded a $14.5 billion profit in the second quarter of 2026—105% more than the same period last year—and Chevron recorded a $12.1 billion profit—385% higher year over year.

“When you look at one company where they made 12 times what they made the year before, they ought to give some of that back to the public,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “And they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”

Oil prices initially fell after the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding in mid-June, but climbed again after the agreement broke down and fighting resumed. Prices have fallen again this week on hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough as mediators reported progress towards an agreement, but it could still take some time for global energy prices to stabilize. Wright previously said it could take “many months to get back to normal flows of energy” after the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz ends. Analysts previously told TIME it could take months for shipping through the Strait to return to prewar levels, and further fighting between the U.S. and Iran or a breakdown of negotiations could prolong that recovery.

Ever since Saved by the Bell bestowed upon Zack Morris a cellphone the size of a dumbbell, TV has been scrambling to keep up with young people’s tech habits. Clarissa Explains It All had DIY video games. Gossip Girl was the name of a blog as well as its author’s alias. Emily in Paris chronicles the birth of an influencer, regularly splashing Emily’s Instagram posts and growing follower count across the screen. When teens and 20-somethings became the earliest adopters of Snapchat and then TikTok, titles aimed at those demographics had to embrace them or risk being written off as irrelevant by a generation that is more inclined to watch YouTube anyway. 

But what if young people immersed—so early in their lives, they can’t meaningfully consent—in a digital realm that stunts their growth outside it were no longer clamoring to see the constant barrage of text messages, push notifications, and social video they know so well represented on TV? What if, for a cohort whose approval of AI keeps declining and that made dumbphones cool again, the ultimate in escapist entertainment would be a show where tech was relegated to the margins, supplanted by face-to-face human connection in the natural world? In that case, the refreshingly old-school Prime Video teen drama Sterling Point might really hit the spot for Gen Z and their nostalgic elders.

Premiering with all eight episodes on Aug. 5, the series has a tremendously appealing protagonist in Ella Rubin, who played Anne Hathaway’s daughter in The Idea of You and looks like she could be the result of splicing Hathaway’s and Julia Roberts’ genes to engineer the ideal rom-com star. Rubin’s Annie is an independent, hyperconnected, Type A New York City teen, all big ambitions and nervous energy, though her kindness prevents her from being a stereotype. Her first words when the automated curtains on her bay window part in the morning are: “Sound machine off!” She eats breakfast in front of a laptop flanked by her phone and tablet. But her neo-yuppie fantasy is punctured when she’s rejected from a business-school summer program. Now, the months leading up to her senior year of high school stretch out empty before Annie. Her maddeningly unserious twin brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo), is jaunting off to Europe with his girlfriend du jour. Her single dad, Steven (Jay Duplass), seems kind of checked out. And she’s well aware that her longtime boyfriend (Luke Avoledo) is closeted, which is probably why he doesn’t seem so excited at the prospect of her tagging along on his summer trip to Thailand. She’s just considerate enough to let him come out to her in his own time.

Annie gets a jolt in a new direction following the death of a grandparent she never met—Gordon, the father of her mom, who passed away when the twins were toddlers. Despite his estrangement from their family (according to Steven, he was a jerk), Gordon has left his grandchildren the island he owned in Canada’s beautiful Muskoka region, Sterling Point. A note enclosed with the will suggests that there are things Steven has been hiding from his children. So, self-sufficient Annie flies up to Ontario without telling her dad where she’s really going. A cascade of mysteries, revelations, and firsts, experienced under evergreen canopies and out on the rippling open water, her summer at Sterling Point changes her life.

Plenty of classic teen-drama tropes come into play. Not only does Annie get caught in a love triangle, but her two suitors each represent opposing factions of the community: townies and summer people. Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie) is a hard-working, year-round resident, and Rory (Daniel Quinn Toye) a rich New York acquaintance whose family has a luxurious vacation home nearby. As also tends to be the case in stories aimed at teens, the young characters are remarkably autonomous. But creator and co-showrunner Megan Park, whose films The Fallout and My Old Ass displayed deep insight into the inner lives of young women, isn’t mindlessly mimicking the mini-adults of Euphoria and Gossip Girl. (Sterling Point shares co-showrunners with the latter series, in Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, which goes to show how conscious a choice its divergence from its millennial predecessors must be.) Like Annie, most of these characters have been forced by their parents to fend for themselves, emotionally if not quite literally. One of the most charming performances in a show that has many of them comes from Bo Bragason as Oona, a bubbly lesbian flirt whose mom has jetted off to India, leaving her in charge of her little sister (Mabel Strachan) and their houseboat.

Park takes her time bringing the parents’ generation into the frame, gradually revealing how many shocking secrets they’ve kept from their children. Some storylines can be soapy. The dialogue is occasionally stilted. Yet richly developed characters keep clichés from lingering. As in My Old Ass, the regrets of adults who erred mightily in their youth are poignantly contrasted with the brashness of teens who don’t know what they don’t know. There’s patience and, for all its jarring disclosures, gentleness in the way this story unfolds that are rare to see these days, not just in teen TV, but in any twist-happy streaming drama. 

Sterling Point isn’t anachronistic or retrograde. Smartphones exist in its world, though they don’t often get service on the island. Queerness is no big deal. Rather, the show is a throwback in the sense that the characters spend most of their time just hanging out together, on a boat or at an outdoor movie screening, the way teenagers used to before their summers filled up with precollege programs, internships, schemes to become TikTok famous, etc. Romance happens through eye contact and heart-to-heart conversations; friends cry in each other’s arms. There are hints of Gilmore Girls in the show’s quaint setting and generational role reversal, traces of Dawson’s Creek in its adolescent earnestness. As Ellis tells Annie when she frets about having to break the habit of checking her phone in bed: “Once you get used to it, it’s kinda the best.”

You’ve probably heard that getting some morning light can help you feel more awake during the day and sleep better at night—from your doctor, your sleep app, and roughly 900 podcasts. But you might not realize just how much it matters. “Morning light is arguably more important than your coffee,” says Mariana Figueiro, director of the Light and Health Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. 

Morning light shifts the body clock earlier, which can make it easier to feel sleepy at night and alert when it’s time to wake up. In a study of more than 400,000 adults, people who spent more time in outdoor light during the day reported fewer insomnia symptoms, less tiredness, and an easier time getting up in the morning.

What you may not have heard is exactly how to get it: where to position yourself, how early in the morning to start basking, and how long to take in the rays. Without that knowledge, the advice to “get more morning light” is surprisingly hard to put into practice.

Here’s what researchers say about how to get the right dose of morning light. 

How morning light helps you wake up—and sleep at night

The amount of light reaching your eyes is measured in lux, and by that measure, most morning routines happen in near-darkness. A dimly lit bedroom might clock in at 30 to 40 lux. A brightly lit kitchen might reach 500. Step outside on an overcast morning, and you're standing in 5,000 to 10,000. "You're looking at orders of magnitude more light when you're outside," says Jamie Zeitzer, a circadian physiologist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University.

Sitting directly beside a window and looking out might expose you to around 1,000 lux. That's a fraction of what's available outdoors, but, as Zeitzer puts it, "even by a window, it's much brighter than what you're going to get from most interior lighting sources."

Light can have an immediate effect, too. It’s “an alerting stimulus to the brain,” Figueiro says, which can help you feel more awake in the moment.

Its longer term effect comes down to a small structure in the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which serves as the body’s central circadian clock. When light reaches the retina, it sends a signal directly to that clock—and early in the morning, the signal helps nudge it forward. It needs that nudge: The average human clock runs about 24 hours and 11 minutes, which means it would naturally drift a little later each day without light and other signals keeping it synchronized with the outside world.

A well-synced clock does more than govern sleep. Its real job, Zeitzer says, "is allowing your body to anticipate things as opposed to responding to them"—preparing you to wake up, eat, exercise, and wind down instead of scrambling to adjust after the fact. Without that anticipation, your body still functions, of course; just a little less efficiently. "It's not like if you didn't have a clock, you drop dead," he says. "But it's all less well optimized."

Many people aren’t giving their clocks much natural light to work with. We tend to overestimate how much time we spend outside, Zeitzer says; for many of us, outdoor exposure amounts to little more than walking to and from the car.

How to get enough morning light

Try to get light within an hour of waking. “You want to have it as soon as you get up,” Figueiro says. What matters is how soon you get it after waking, not the particular time on the clock.

Going outside is best. But if you’re sitting near a window, position yourself close to the window and face it, rather than having it be beside or behind you. “You want to get it at the back of the eye, not at the back of the head,” Figueiro says. Light levels drop quickly as you move away from the glass: You might get around 1,000 lux right beside a window, compared with only a few hundred lux from several yards away. If you work from home, simply turning your desk toward the window can make a meaningful difference.

How long should you stay there? There’s no magic number, but both researchers agree that longer is better. Figueiro recommends at least 30 minutes and ideally an hour. Zeitzer considers 15 minutes a practical minimum. “Technically, with 5 minutes you can get a good effect, but that’s in a lab, and it’s probably not in the field,” he says. 

If you want one simple target, aim for 30 minutes of morning light, Figueiro says. Sitting beside a window counts, but going for a half-hour walk after daybreak is even better. “That’s ideal,” she says. “You get your exercise, you get your light, you’re all set for the day.” And wear sunscreen as usual: It won’t blunt the circadian effect, which is driven by light reaching cells in the retina rather than the skin.

Try to get that light at roughly the same time every morning. “Your clock likes that regularity,” Figueiro says. She also leaves her sunglasses off during her morning commute when the light is comfortable, allowing her to take advantage of that exposure.

Give the habit some time to work. Your body clock will begin adjusting within a few days, Zeitzer says, but it might take a few weeks before you notice a difference in your sleep.

How to get morning light when the sun isn’t up

What if you wake up at 5 a.m., work in a windowless office, or look out at what Zeitzer describes as “a brick wall 15 feet across an alley”? You’ll need to create more light indoors.

The easiest place to start is with a brighter bulb. Bulb packages list brightness in lumens, a measure of how much light the bulb produces. A standard one typically produces about 800 to 1,000 lumens; Figueiro recommends looking for one that produces at least 3,000. Place the lamp no more than an arm’s length away, and make sure its shade is translucent, not opaque, so the light can reach your eyes. The bulb doesn’t need to give off cool or bluish light. If you prefer warm light, that’s fine, Figueiro says—the brightness is what matters most.

If a brighter lamp isn’t enough, or you don’t have access to a window, consider a light-therapy box. Zeitzer prefers natural light—“it’s much nicer looking out your window,” he says—but considers a light therapy box a reasonable alternative. Turn it on while you drink your coffee or eat breakfast so it becomes part of your usual routine. 

And don’t assume an overcast morning is too dark to be useful. Most of us underestimate how much brighter it is outside: In one study, researchers found that even under cloudy or partly cloudy skies, outdoor light was dozens of times brighter than indoor light. If you can’t go out, sit close to the window and face it; turning on the room’s other lights can help, too.

Getting enough light in the morning is only part of the equation for better sleep. Figueiro also recommends dimming the lights about two hours before bedtime. Your body clock responds to the contrast between day and night, she says, so too much evening light can “in a way cancel out the benefits of the morning light.”

Think of the formula as brighter mornings and darker evenings. Tomorrow, you can start by turning your coffee—and yourself—toward the window.

For generations, homeownership has been one of the clearest pathways to economic opportunity in America, particularly for Black and Brown communities. A home has never been just four walls and a roof. It has helped parents send children to college, start businesses, and create opportunities that last for generations.

But that pathway is under strain. Families are facing inflation, stagnant wages, limited housing supply and historically high home prices. At a time when buying a home has never been more difficult, we should be expanding access—not creating new barriers. 

I would argue that online home listings have created a more equitable system by allowing agents and brokers to serve their clients with the full inventory of available homes. For buyers, that transparency determines where they live, whether their home builds wealth, and the opportunities they can create for future generations. But this equitable listing model is under increasing threat.

Private listing networks (PLNs) and pocket listings allow homes to be marketed privately to a select group of agents, brokers, and potential buyers instead of through a multiple listing service (MLS), the shared database real estate professionals used to find and compare homes. Supporters say these practices give sellers more choice, control, and privacy. But in today’s housing market, you shouldn’t have to know someone to know what’s possible.

The growing acceptance of private listing networks by powerful real estate interests signals a shift in how the market operates, with selective access becoming a central feature rather than an exception. 

The risks are not theoretical. These exclusive listings can reduce opportunities for first-time homebuyers: 46% of housing counselors say first-time buyers struggle with pocket listings, according to Consumer Federation of America (CFA) and the National Urban League. Previous research found such listings can perpetuate racial exclusion and discriminatory steering. MLS-listed homes sell for 17.5% more than off-MLS homes, according to Bright MLS and Drexel University.  Sellers in majority-minority zip codes lose $9,850 a sale compared with $3,700 in white neighborhoods, according to research from Zillow.

Transparency is not a luxury. When buyers can compare homes, prices, and time on market, they can make informed decisions. Sellers reach more potential buyers, and the market works more fairly for everyone.

When homes move into closed or semi-closed channels, that basic fairness can break down. Buyers who are not connected with the “right” agent, broker, or social network may never have the chance to find their dream home. Sellers may lose out on a better deal because fewer buyers know their home is available. Smaller brokerages and agents lose access to critical information that is no longer shared equally.

That should concern anyone who cares about fair housing.

In April, the MLS serving greater Chicagoland worked with the nation’s largest brokerage to expand its private listing network while restricting public visibility of many home listings. A federal court recently issued a temporary restraining order to ensure the Chicago MLS continues to provide fair access. 

Chicago should be a warning sign to the rest of the country. If this model spreads, public access to home listings could become a fallback rather than the default. We risk breeding the kind of widespread inequity that harkens back to redlining.

Redlining denied generations of Black families’ equal access to mortgages, investment, and the opportunity to build wealth. During the 1930s, federal programs used maps to gauge and rate neighborhoods for lending risk. Minority neighborhoods were often unjustly marked in red ink as “hazardous,” denying them mortgages and investments. Although outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, its legacy remains visible today in racial wealth gaps, segregation, and unequal opportunity. Now, a modern form of digital redlining threatens to emerge. This is more than an industry dispute. This is a civil rights issue.

States are beginning to recognize the danger. Washington and Connecticut have enacted laws to protect public access to home listings, while lawmakers in Illinois, New York and other states are considering similar protections. Illinois’ HB4964 would require most residential listings to be publicly marketed online within one calendar day unless a seller signs a formal disclosure and opt-out form. Every state should consider that kind of common-sense guardrail.

How much longer will America refuse to listen? To stop this, proponents of consumers and of the American dream must support legislation to safeguard against this practice. As the head of an organization that has fought for civil rights and social justice since 1909, let me be clear: We have seen the roots of this pattern before, and we must act with fervor to avoid repeating a history of injustice.

People in AI safety circles often talk about "warning shots:” events that indicate more severe threats are on the horizon. Depending on who you ask, there have already been many—Bing’s misanthropic alter-ego Sydney, research showing AIs would blackmail to preserve themselves, AI’s math breakthroughs, Anthropic’s superhuman hacker Mythos—but OpenAI just published something that feels like the clearest-cut case of a massive, blaring warning shot.

Last month, the ChatGPT developer reported that, during an evaluation of cyber capabilities, two of its models escaped from their isolated, supposedly secure, test environments and accessed the web to autonomously hack into Hugging Face, a leading platform for hosting AI models and datasets. OpenAI said the models discovered multiple novel vulnerabilities in software from both companies, then chained together working exploits, successfully gaining them access to the answer key to the test they were given. Hugging Face reported the AIs took more than 17,000 actions over the course of the attack. 

There's a lot more for us to learn about how this happened. For instance, how exactly were the models prompted? The answer to this question could help establish whether they took their instructions to demonstrate their hacking capabilities further than intended or if it's a more general case of the models cheating in a novelly risky way. 

That said, the specifics won’t change the upshot—these rogue AIs are the most potent illustration yet of the core beliefs behind AI safety: AI models are unpredictable and their risks scale with their capabilities. 

We didn’t actually need a warning shot to know what we should already be doing: organizing to stop the race to replace us. The industry calls its goal artificial general intelligence (AGI): a mind that matches or surpasses our own across the board. But it’s better to understand their goal as building a universal labor-replacing machine. This quest is profoundly risky, yes, but it's also democratically illegitimate. The development of these machines anywhere would have species-wide and irreversible effects—we should all get a say in how, when, and whether they're built. 

Universal labor-replacing machines should not even be pursued further, let alone built, without strong public buy-in and a scientific consensus on safety. 

On Tuesday, over 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies essentially asked the U.S. government to support building an international brake pedal on the technology. While this commonsense demand, with formal support from both OpenAI and Anthropic, is a welcome step, it does not go far enough. 

The U.S. should ban training runs larger than the ones that produced OpenAI’s rogue models, as it works toward a bilateral deal with China to ban further research toward universal labor-replacing machines, enforced using verification techniques that don’t require trust. 

But couldn’t China overtake the U.S. in the meantime? Compared to their American counterparts, Chinese AI companies are at a massive disadvantage in computing power, a gap that has grown substantially since ChatGPT’s release. But the gap between the two countries’ AI frontier actually shrank substantially since then. What gives? Well, it’s always easier to follow the leader’s trail than to blaze a new one, so—contrary to conventional DC wisdom—a U.S. ban could actually slow Chinese AI progress too. Moreover, neither superpower should be pleased to live in a world where the best hackers aren’t human and will not reliably do as they’re told. 

For close watchers of the technology, this particular incident is shocking, but not surprising. For the wider public, it shows just how large the distance has grown between the passive chatbots of merely one year ago and the beyond-bleeding-edge AI agents that are now working around the clock inside AI companies. For instance, one of the two hacking models at the center of this recent controversy is an unreleased one, more capable than anything else OpenAI has on the market. As AI models get better at automating further AI research and as the Trump Administration creates more uncertainty about which models are even permitted, it is now common for companies to hold their best stuff back for longer, creating a gulf between what the public knows and the technology’s bleeding edge. Congress should mandate safety incident reporting and regular disclosure of data related to internally deployed models, such as the fraction of code in production that was both written and reviewed by AIs.

As it stands, we learned about this new model because it hacked a third party, leaving OpenAI little choice but to disclose the incident. The company reported this happened during an internal evaluation that "prompts models to pursue advanced exploitation using complex attack paths, in an effort to quantify their cyber capabilities."

All leading AI models are developed using an approach called deep learning, in which artificial neural networks learn from enormous quantities of data. OpenAI itself has written, “the process is more similar to training a dog than to ordinary programming.” In recent years, AI companies increasingly train models to repeatedly solve problems with verifiable answers: fixing bugs, solving math problems, and finding software vulnerabilities. This makes the models more useful, but also teaches them to win at all costs, resulting in what AI safety researcher Jeffrey Ladish memorably told me are “increasingly smart sociopaths.”

OpenAI created advanced models that were never supposed to interact with the world, lost control of them, and they autonomously did harm. This time, the damage was limited. However, what if the target wasn’t a multibillion-dollar tech company, but instead a hospital, bank, or power plant? 

Anthropic’s Mythos model famously discovered novel serious vulnerabilities in virtually all software it encountered—including the NSA’s. One of the two models that carried out the hack, GPT-5.6 Sol, was even better than Mythos at a cyberattack test conducted by the U.K. AI Security Institute. Citing this finding the day before his company even realized what was happening, OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman boasted “GPT-5.6 Sol is the state of the art in cyber.” And the unreleased model, OpenAI tells us, was more capable still. Given how reliably AI models have improved at cyber tasks, it’s not clear which, if any, target could have withstood the rogue AIs’ hacking effort. We’re lucky the thing they apparently wanted was an answer key. 

And these models, as impressive as they may be now, will be quaint compared to their successors. 

As many AI executives such as Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg will freely admit, a primary goal of the tech industry is to build AI that can fully automate its own research and development—known as recursive self-improvement—which, if possible, would be the most crucial step toward rendering all of us obsolete.

For my reporting, I’ve spent the last three years talking to dozens of AI safety staffers at the leading companies. Typically, I have found that these genuinely well-intentioned researchers believe that AI will become superhuman across the board, but we might be able to create superhuman automated safety researchers to watch over them. 

How will they be able to understand and control systems that truly outsmart us? Or catch subtle drift between what we want and how the models behave that compounds over generations? Who knows. 

But OpenAI’s hacking incident demonstrates something we do know: the industry can’t even reliably steer today’s AI models. But we have the power to avert our obsolescence. We just have to get organized. 

When cisplatin came on the market in 1978, it revolutionized cancer care. Carboplatin, a related chemotherapy drug with fewer side effects, soon followed in 1986. Together, these two drugs have saved countless lives and are prescribed for up to 20% of cancer patients to treat ovarian, bladder, breast, lung, and other types of cancer. “They're the backbone for treatments for a lot of different types of cancer,” says Dr. Jacob Reibel, a medical oncologist at Dartmouth Cancer Center.

And yet, in recent years, when some hospital pharmacists have gone to source these chemo drugs for patients, they’ve had difficulty. They’ve had to call around, looking for some other facility that might have extra doses. Doctors, for their part, have had to have tough conversations with patients. If there’s no carboplatin or cisplatin to be had, patients might be given another, less-optimal chemotherapy. Or doctors might try spacing the doses out more than they usually would, trying to stretch the supply. Some fear that these shortages, which have been ongoing since 2023, might make cancer more deadly. In June, the U.S. Pharmacopeia, a nonprofit scientific group, released their latest report on drug shortages, which revealed that the average duration of shortages for drugs of all kinds has more than doubled since 2019.  

Why is this happening? The reasons, it turns out, are essentially economic, and have to do with hospitals paying as little as possible for these lifesaving drugs—so little, in the end, that few companies can afford to make them.

Why is there a chemotherapy drug shortage?

This problem has been building for a while, says Matthew Christian, director of supply chain insights at U.S. Pharmacopeia. “Back in 2019, the average drug shortage only lasted about two years. But now when we look at the drugs that remain on the list, the average duration’s over five years,” he says. “In fact, 95% of drug shortages at the end of 2025 were holdovers from 2024. So current shortages—they're not new. It's old shortages that have not been resolved and show systemic issues in the supply chain.”

In the case of carboplatin and cisplatin—and several other chemo drugs experiencing shortages—these medicines take a certain investment and expertise to make. They need a specialized sterile facility. But they are now off-patent, or generic, which means that any drug manufacturer is allowed to make them and charge whatever price the market demands. 

The market price is the problem. Hospitals in the U.S., or group-purchasing organizations working on their behalf, hunt for the least expensive sources of drugs. A manufacturer that offers the lowest price can win a contract to make a chemo drug. But the purchaser is under no obligation to guarantee that they will buy a given volume, which would ensure that the manufacturer will have enough money to continue making the drug, says Stefan Scholtes, a professor of health management at University of Cambridge in the U.K. 

There are plenty of drugs that can be made in the same facilities as chemo drugs. When companies’ capital runs low, “they can repurpose the line for another drug that has a higher margin,” Scholtes says. “Why would they carry on delivering [the chemo]?”

What’s more, the hunt for a minimal cost leads to factories overseas, to relatively few companies willing to take on the task, and to sourcing key ingredients and finished products from just a few places. This leads “to a very fragile supply chain, and when a little thing happens, the whole thing falls over,” says Scholtes. Some global shortages of chemotherapy drugs have been caused by a single plant going offline or failing a quality control check. Currently, the war in Iran has upended supply chains such that some of the few manufacturers of cisplatin and carboplatin are having trouble getting ingredients.

A lot of ingredients for all kinds of drugs come from China and India, says Christian, who has spearheaded the development of a supply-chain monitoring tool for the U.S. Pharmacopeia. He has found that 41% of drugs’ key starting materials are made solely in China, meaning that the health of people around the world relies on Chinese companies continuing to make and provide those ingredients. 

What’s the way forward?

At the moment, hospitals “are heavily incentivized to find any drug that is the cheapest upfront cost,” says Christian. “But there's no real mechanism for hospitals to pay more to ensure greater resilience.” As the shortages prove, these drugs aren’t products where market dynamics lead to a consistent, reliable manufacturing system. “They should be cheap and high-quality,” says Scholtes. “They are essential.” 

Generic drugs in general should be like water coming from the tap, he says. It’s a model that inspired a group of U.S. health systems to start a non-profit, U.S.-based drug manufacturer in 2018, which Scholtes, who co-authored a paper about it, calls a “health care utility.” The company, called Civica, is based in Petersburg, Va. and capable of manufacturing a small handful of generic drugs in a U.S. facility and ensuring consistent supply at a sustainable cost. But currently, Civica only produces certain medications—not including chemotherapy drugs. Few companies have similar models and missions, but one, called Phlow Pharmaceuticals, was founded in 2020 to produce active ingredients for drugs in the U.S. in order to mitigate reliance on overseas sources.

Experts say that much more movement in this direction—–from contracts that hold buyers to purchasing a given volume, to factories closer to where drugs are needed, to more diversity and redundancy in supply chains—is needed before patients and doctors can feel secure that cancer care won’t be complicated by shortages. Reibel co-authored a paper looking at whether the 2023 shortage had changed cancer mortality rates, and while they found that doctors seem to have achieved similar short-term survival using alternative treatment plans, he points out that they need to look at the long term to get the full picture of the effects of these shortages.

“In oncology, any shortage in a single medication, a delay in treatment, or substitution could impact cure rates or even survival. So it’s immensely important that we have access to all the therapies at our disposal,” Reibel says. “Unless changes are made in the way that we create and procure these drugs, we will keep having shortages over and over again.”

A coalition of 25 U.S. states is suing the Trump Administration, arguing the President’s latest round of sweeping tariffs on over 80 countries exceed his legal authority.

Filed Monday in the U.S. Court of International Trade, the lawsuit denounces the tariff action imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 as “arbitrary, capricious, and contrary to law.”

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) announced the new levies on July 23, targeting 60 trading partners, including the European Union. The Trump Administration cited these economies' alleged failure to impose and “effectively” enforce a ban on the import of goods “produced with forced labor.”

But the Democratic-led states strongly refute this reasoning, insisting in the lawsuit that “the Administration cannot use forced labor as a pretext to continue its illegal tariff scheme. The tariffs the USTR imposed are so broad that they defy the USTR’s own stated aims and make a mockery of the statute used to justify them.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who co-led the coalition, claimed Trump is “so intent on raising the cost of living for Americans that he is willing to break law after law after law to do so.”

“Tariffs are taxes, and the American people cannot and should not shoulder the extra costs that come from the President’s failed and illegal economic policy—no matter how much the President wants them to,” he added, in a statement announcing he is suing the Trump Administration over its tariffs for a third time.

Joining California in the lawsuit are Arizona, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey,  North Carolina, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia Washington, and Wisconsin.

All of the states have Democratic attorneys general or governors.

Per the lawsuit, the 25 states are arguing that the USTR mishandled its investigations into alleged forced labor malpractices.

“Over the past four months, USTR sought public comments and testimony regarding its Section 301 investigation. However, the comments and testimony the USTR compiled do not support implementing tariffs as a method to combat forced labor; rather, the comments and testimony show that the USTR acted arbitrarily and capriciously,” the lawsuit alleges.

In a statement shared with TIME, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said “the United States is using its lawful authority to obtain the elimination of unreasonable acts, policies, and practices that burden U.S. commerce.” Section 301 tariffs have “proven to be a legally durable tool since the President’s first term, and they remain so now,” he added.

Trump's legal battles over tariffs

This lawsuit is just the latest roadblock Trump has been met with in his efforts to install global tariffs.

When the Supreme Court ruled in February that the President lacked the authority to impose his "Liberation Day” tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 statute intended for national emergencies, Trump labeled the decision “deeply disappointing” and said he was “ashamed of certain members of the court.”

The Administration responded by imposing a 10% temporary import duty under a different legal authority, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

A coalition of states sued the Trump Administration in March, arguing that the President's use of Section 122 exceeded the limited authority granted under the statute.

In May, the U.S. trade court ruled that the specific Section 122 tariffs challenged in that case were unlawful, but the levies stayed in place while the Administration appealed.

Those temporary levies were due to expire at midnight on July 24. The Administration announced this new round of tariffs the day before.

When asked at the time if he was confident his latest levies would withstand legal scrutiny, Trump insisted the “very standard tariffs” had previously been approved in “thousands of cases.” 

More expansive than the island of Manhattan, Thacker Pass in northern Nevada is the biggest U.S. lithium-mining project developed in decades. And it’s been one of the country’s most visible flash points in the race to build new critical-mineral mines. While at first spurred by the clean-energy transition, the demand for critical minerals is now driven by their role as essential ingredients for AI data centers.

But local communities aren’t so sure. In northern Nevada, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe has protested Thacker Pass, saying it would destroy sacred Indigenous sites, while climate advocates have tried to thread the needle between its potential to produce lithium, a key component of some rechargeable-battery technology needed to manufacture electric vehicles, and mining’s risks to the local environment. Today, Thacker Pass is grinding ahead alongside dozens of other projects in the U.S. facing similar concerns. 

Much of the world’s critical-mineral supply chain currently runs through China, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to geopolitical wrangling. The success of the ongoing American mining renaissance will shape whether the U.S. and other allies can insulate themselves from such challenges—not to mention power the transition to renewable energy. “It is the most important emerging energy-security question,” says Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency.

Across political parties and ideological camps, policymakers agree the U.S. must bring some mining and processing capacity home. But many environmentalists and local communities remain concerned about how it’s happening, with 40 mining projects listed as part of a federal fast-track program and projects moving quickly. Today’s rapid development, captured in these up-close images of the new mining boom, will set new precedents for what companies must do—or could get away with—when they want to build megamines. There are no easy answers.

Carmen Lucas is a 90-year-old from the Kwaaymii tribe in California and has been fighting mining developments for over two decades. Her list of grievances is long. Development creates local pollution that harms children’s health and can damage the cultural heritage of Indigenous sites. More than anything, she criticizes developers for treating the land as if it’s empty. “Washington is looking at the Imperial Valley and saying that’s just a desert, that’s just wasteland,” she says. Today, she is championing opposition to a project to tap into a lithium reserve beneath the southern end of California’s Salton Sea, where reserves are worth more than $500 billion. “It has been mandated by the United States government and the state of California to annihilate the California Indians since the Gold Rush,” she says. “And I’m still watching it today.”

Lucas and the Kwaaymii tribe are far from alone. Globally, more than half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are on or near the land of Indigenous or other land-connected peoples, according to research published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Historically, these communities have been displaced, or suffered from polluted air and water as a result—even long after the mines close. At the former site of the Tar Creek mine in Oklahoma, which stopped operating in the 1970s, for example, generations have suffered from the mining remnants that have seeped into the soil and ground-water, leading to neurological damage and stunting development in local children. 

In the U.S., community buy-in is often the biggest factor determining whether a project will receive the necessary permits. “You have to embrace social license to operate and say it’s not just a real thing, it’s as important, if not more, than the permit,” says Pat Risner, the president of mining company South32’s zinc and manganese Hermosa Project in Arizona. (Getting and maintaining social license to operate remains difficult for any mining company, given the array of community concerns.)

The context at the federal level has also changed. While the Biden Administration touted the need to boost domestic critical-mineral production, action came relatively slowly. But when Beijing countered President Trump’s massive tariffs by threatening U.S. supplies of critical minerals, his Administration found incentive to accelerate permitting and put up federal dollars to buy into companies. Given the stakes, critical-minerals advocates want to avoid the issue becoming partisan, politics being yet another needle for minders to thread. To many of the people on the front lines, though, none of this matters too much. They just want to ensure that this mining revival doesn’t harm their communities.

Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Project

Humboldt County, Northern Nevada

An 18,000-acre project site with billions of dollars of lithium underground, Thacker Pass is the flagship U.S. lithium project. With bipartisan federal support, it broke ground in 2023 after clearing a range of permitting hurdles. And yet a bitter taste remains for some community members who say that Thacker Pass will damage historic sites sacred to the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe tribes. Others have spoken out in support thanks to the promise of economic development beyond the 1,000 people who work on the site. The project, a priority for the Trump Administration, has also received attention for its unique financing structure. The Department of Energy took a 5% equity stake in both the project and the company developing it.

Black Hills Mines

Southwestern South Dakota

Demand for gold has skyrocketed thanks to geopolitical tensions and supply-chain disruptions. The mines in the Black Hills area of South Dakota, which date back to the 19th century, are now seeing a modern-day gold rush. Even as gold production has dwindled, revenues have soared thanks to higher prices driven by gold’s role as a safe-haven asset as well as its role in advanced electronics and aerospace. Mining companies want to produce more. 

But the mining revival extends beyond gold. The Dewey Burdock Uranium Project, also in Black Hills, is being fast-tracked by the federal government to serve the growing demand for nuclear power. Tribes are fighting back mine by mine, citing everything from threats to sacred land to water contamination. Indeed, the nearby history carries warnings. Past uranium mining contaminated local water systems.

Hell's Kitchen Lithium Project

Imperial Valley, California

The Hell’s Kitchen megaproject on the shore of California’s Salton Sea is a $1.8 billion bet on a massive, first-of-its-kind geothermal power and lithium-extraction facility. Developers aim to start up the facility’s new geothermal power production first, with lithium mining to follow. While the county and Controlled Thermal Resources, the mine’s owner, last year defeated a lawsuit that attempted to halt operations there, community opposition remains strong and opponents are appealing. The project sits in a low-income, heavily Latino, environmentally over-burdened valley with some of the worst air quality in the country. Tensions are also rife over the mine’s water consumption and the terms of its community-benefit agreement. Meanwhile, as demand for lithium for EV batteries has softened, the company has emphasized that both its geothermal energy and minerals can serve the AI-driven data-center boom. 

South32 Hermosa

Patagonia, Arizona

South32 Hermosa is emerging as the next big case study for the future of U.S. mining. The $2 billion zinc and manganese project was the first mining project to receive expedited federal permitting under a streamlined process earlier this year. Unlike most mining mega-projects, which require huge open pits, the Hermosa project is underground, minimizing the visible footprint. “We will mine for up to 70 years at this site, and only disturb 750 acres in total,” says Pat Risner, the project’s president. 

Still, many community tensions remain unresolved. The project sits in a biodiversity hot spot, home to jaguars and Mexican spotted owls, and locals are concerned that mining operations may pollute the groundwater they rely on for household use. Negotiations over a community-benefits agreement remain ongoing.

Stibnite Mine

Valley County, Idaho

In central Idaho, developers are bringing an abandoned World War II–era mining district back to life to produce gold and antimony, a mineral used to harden other metals and as a fire retardant. U.S. government officials say the mine is the only one in the U.S. capable of producing enough antimony to meet growing defense needs, for everything from ammunition to infrared sensors. Critics point to company documents showing the site contains only enough to supply the U.S. for two years. Indeed, the vast majority of the project’s revenue will come from gold. After a nine-year process, it received its final permit in May 2025 and broke ground in October. But lawsuits remain ongoing. The Nez Perce Tribe opposes the project in its entirety, saying the permitting decision violates treaty rights and environmental law. And new mining threatens to upend millions spent by the tribe on restoring the local salmon population harmed by mining decades ago. Conservation groups are suing too, because of potential harm to local wildlife. Developers contend that their work will actually remediate the area, since the site was left abandoned in poor condition.

— With reporting by Kaya Lee Berne

The writing in this story is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. TIME is solely responsible for the content.