A video of Catholic bishops praying around President Donald Trump during a meeting at the White House last week has sparked debate, with some bishops claiming their attendance was “exploited” for political purposes less than two weeks before the midterm elections.

The 12 clergymen joined Trump on Thursday in the Oval Office, for what Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee has said was intended to be a private meeting to discuss matters such as immigration enforcement, religious worker visas, and human dignity. But in a “public apology” issued Sunday, Grob expressed deep regret over the meeting that he suggested was used as a "political photo opportunity” after White House officials shared images and footage of a moment of prayer. The video, which Grob claims was posted without the bishops’ consent, has been viewed over 1.8 million times on X alone.

Grob said he had received “many questions” over the encounter and wanted to emphasize that the meeting “was in no way an endorsement of the President, his policies, or his party.” He said his invite to the meeting had been extended by Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, and that he had been informed ahead of time there may be an opportunity to pray privately with the President. “Several photos were taken and we were ushered out [after the prayer]. Unbeknownst to the group of bishops, a video was also taken. But permission for the public distribution or posting of either the video or photos was not given by the bishops,” he claimed, insisting the bishops “should never have been put in that position by the White House.”

The White House did not directly respond to questions over whether permission was obtained from the bishops prior to the video and photos being shared. Spokesperson Taylor Rogers told TIME “there has never been a greater President for Catholic Americans than President Trump, and his strong record proves it,” citing the pardoning of “pro-life activists” as one such example.

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Bishop William Joensen of Des Moines also issued a statement suggesting that the meeting had been ”exploited.” Acknowledging that “there are many things tied to this present [Trump] Administration that are blatantly at odds with our Catholic faith,” Joensen said he attended the gathering as the advance communication he had received “indicated that we were to have a conversation and that key officials would be interested in hearing our perspective.”

“None of us bishops were unaware that our meeting was on the cusp of a national election,” he said. “Yet in no way did any of us intend by our involvement to endorse any political party or any individual candidate.”

He added: “I wish I had been more shrewd and less simple, like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political purposes. I pray I am more prudent and wise going forward, even as I remain resolute in my openness to engaging and praying for political leaders at all levels.”

Archbishop James Golka of Denver, who led the prayer in the Oval Office, has also addressed the matter after people raised questions over the timing of the video.

“I understand that many people saw the video, posted by the Administration twelve days before an election, as an endorsement. That was never my intention,” Golka told Denver Catholic magazine. “The bishops of the United States teach that the Church cannot champion any candidate or party. I hold to that.” 

He continued: “I’ve had a lot of people, really good friends, ask me, ‘What were you doing?’ ‘Why did you do that?’ I just answer: ‘I was being a Catholic priest. We pray for people.'”

Other clergymen in attendance included the former Archbishop of Kansas City Joseph Naumann. In a statement to TIME, his successor, Archbishop Shawn McKnight, said Naumann’s presence at the White House “was in his own individual capacity” and that “his actions and presence at that event were not on behalf of, or representative of, myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.”

A separate statement from Archbishop Emeritus Naumann’s office said of the event: “The bishops were assured that no photographs would be made public. They came to have a discussion on important policy matters. As Catholic bishops, they pray with everyone, but do not endorse candidates or political parties.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), meanwhile, has distanced itself from the gathering. A spokesperson for the group told TIME that “the meeting was not organized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops” and emphasized it was “not affiliated” in any way. 

Trump described the meeting as “really good” when speaking with reporters Friday, calling the bishops a “nice group of people” who “mostly prayed” in the Oval Office. Amid the online discourse, White House Faith Office director Jenny Korn defended the gathering, describing it as “not politics,” but “policy in action ending with meaningful prayer with, and for, the President. 

The controversy comes as the Trump Administration seeks to maintain support among Catholic voters ahead of the midterms. According to data circulated by the Pew Research Center in 2025, 20% of U.S. adults describe themselves as Catholic. Trump's approval rating among Catholics has fallen to 30% as of October 2026, compared to the 47% he held when he returned to the White House in January 2025, per the D.C.-based think tank.

When asked about the drop in support from Catholic voters in an Oct. 22 interview, Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, said that while he believes Catholics, and Americans in general, are not “displeased with the direction” of the country, he acknowledges that “a lot more work needs to happen.” 

“The Catholic vote is absolutely critical in electoral politics in the United States, and particularly in the midterms,” says David Gibson, director of the Center of Religion and Culture at Fordham University. He adds that while certain religious groups may stick more with a particular political party, the “Catholic vote can shift between Republicans and Democrats much more easily than any other religious bloc.”

Trump won a majority of Catholic voters in the 2024 Presidential election, taking 55% of the Catholic vote to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 43%, according to the Pew Research Center. With Republicans attempting to retain control of both chambers of Congress amid tight races, Catholic voters could prove an important voting bloc.

Yet the Administration has also faced growing tensions with Pope Leo XIV in recent months. Trump and the first American-born Pope have repeatedly clashed over policy disagreements, particularly Leo's opposition to the Administration's immigration crackdown and the Iran war.

“The dynamics are shifting. For the past few years, the white Catholic vote was very solidly with the Republicans and with Trump, but Catholics are growing disaffected with him,” says Gibson. “Now you have an American Pope, from Chicago, the Midwest, and he is widely popular. American Catholics identify with him, and Trump has not ceased picking fights with the Pope, and American Catholics [could be] getting kind of fed up with it.”

American Catholic leaders have raised concerns over Trump's policies

In January, three Catholic Cardinals issued a “rare joint statement on the morality of U.S. foreign policy.”

Archbishop of Chicago Blase Cupich, Archbishop of Washington Robert McElroy, and Archbishop of Newark Joseph Tobin said the “events in Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace.” They argued that the “building of just and sustainable peace” is being “reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.” The statement bolstered remarks Pope Leo had made earlier that month, in which he warned against a “diplomacy based on force.”

Trump’s war with Iran has prompted further warnings from American Catholic leaders.

Archbishop of Oklahoma City Paul Coakley, who serves as president of the USCCB, earlier this year joined Pope Leo in urging Trump to pursue a negotiated settlement to the war.

The Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement practices have also prompted debate. Upon returning to the White House, Trump rescinded previous government guidance that restricted immigration arrests in sensitive locations, including schools, churches, and hospitals. Immigration enforcement efforts subsequently intensified, with arrests reported outside churches, drawing backlash from religious leaders.

In November 2025, the USCCB approved a special message opposing indiscriminate mass deportations by an overwhelming vote of 216 in favor and five against. The bishops also raised concerns about detention conditions, family separation, the loss of legal status, and “the lack of access to pastoral care.”

The message was later echoed by other Catholic leaders across the country. In December 2025, the Catholic bishops of Wisconsin issued a statement that expressed “strong concern” over what they referred to as “the indiscriminate nature of the current federal immigration enforcement.” 

Gibson says that although the USCCB used to have a somewhat friendly relationship with the Republican party, particularly on the pursuit to overturn Roe v. Wade, relations have grown increasingly frayed during Trump’s return to the White House. He points to the USCCB’s argument that the Administration has denied visas for priests and bishops, and the announced cuts to the resettlement of refugees for Catholic charities.

However, Catholic bishops have diverse views on politics and the Trump Administration.

Last year, Bishop Robert Barron was among those selected to serve on Trump's Religious Liberty Commission.

The 2025 National Study of Catholic Priests found that from a sample of 1,164 priests, 30% identified as somewhat to very liberal, 36% as moderate, and 34% as somewhat to very conservative.

The first tanker carrying Russian diesel to the United States since 2022 is expected to arrive in New York within the next few weeks, but its 40,000-ton cargo amounts to less than two hours of American consumption. The shipment will barely register at the pump—and it answers the wrong question, since what drove American diesel past $6 a gallon was never a shortage of Russian supply, but historic bottlenecks from the war in the Middle East.

Recall what happened between May and July of this year, when Ukraine launched one of the most destructive phases of its energy war against Moscow, sending waves of drones attacking massive Russian refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Omsk one after another. If Russian refining capacity governed American fuel costs, prices at U.S. truck stops should have exploded. Instead, American diesel fell by $1.06 a gallon.

With the midterms days away and September’s consumer price index showing fuel oil up a staggering 74% on the year, President Donald Trump has cast Kyiv as the architect of American inflation. “What’s happened in Russia with Ukraine has been really the biggest problem for diesel,” he said in the Oval Office on September 30 before naming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the culprit, telling reporters that Zelenskyy “wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel.”

The charge is politically convenient but economically backward. Until this month’s waiver, Russian fuel had been barred from American ports since 2022, meaning Ukrainian strikes have reached U.S. pumps only through the gradual tightening of global supply. The real shockwave runs through the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran can choke off a fifth of the world’s seaborne crude overnight. Diesel was $3.48 a gallon in January and still under $4 the week American and Israeli bombs fell on Iran. When Tehran closed the Strait, the price jumped 96 cents in a single week. 

From that moment, the U.S. price line has moved in lockstep with the Iran war—cresting at the April ceasefire, dipping only after the June truce, climbing after the pause in hostilities collapsed in July. By September, the tanker war had driven diesel to a record $6.53. 

Ukraine’s unceasing drone campaign has at most modestly nudged up the global floor, while the Iran war has steered every spike and plunge.

By authorizing the sale of Russian diesel, Washington provided Moscow the relief that sanctions are meant to withhold. And when Zelenskyy refused to halt strikes on Russian refineries, Americans throttled the Starlink defenses only they can supply. 

Now, Ukraine and its European backers are left with a narrowing set of options. Pulled with discipline, however, the levers they hold can still keep Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on a tightening clock.

A cure that feeds the disease

After an Oct. 9 phone call with Putin, President Trump directed the Treasury to reopen American ports to Russian diesel through April 2027. On paper, the deal promises 4.8 million tons of fuel. In reality, the promise amounts to roughly 10 days of U.S. demand, and analysts doubt that Moscow can ship even that much after months of Ukrainian strikes on the refineries that would fill the tankers.

Carnegie’s Sergey Vakulenko calls the arrangement “largely for show,” yet for a Kremlin watching its September oil and gas tax revenues plunge 22% year-over-year, the spectacle is the prize. What former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul condemned as “absolutely deplorable,” and Zelenskyy called “a gift to Putin,” was followed a week later by a concession of far greater strategic weight. Two days before the Russia provisions of the Graham sanctions act were scheduled to bite, an executive order waived them. In a single stroke, the White House neutralized both the 100 and 500% tariffs and stripped out the clause locking existing sanctions in place.

While Moscow collected waivers, Kyiv got the vise. Washington announced an “energy ceasefire” the Kremlin never bothered to acknowledge. After Zelenskyy held his fire for three days, Russia pounded Ukrainian energy infrastructure 76 times in the week that followed. By the Ukrainian president’s account—one Secretary of State Marco Rubio denies—the American satellite alerts that warn Ukraine when a Russian missile is in the air went dark for a period of time. Procurement contracts required for the transfer of an allied-funded batch of Patriot interceptors reportedly sat unsigned on the desk of U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.

Meanwhile, the speed of Starshield datalinks, the military-grade Starlink network that Ukraine’s drone units rely on, was throttled. Starshield datalinks need to operate at speeds up to 550 km/h (342 mph) to effectively intercept Russian jet-powered Shahed and Geran drones. 

The 160 km/h (100 mph) cap was apparently instituted—simply insufficient to protect Ukrainian civilians from Russian ballistic missiles. 

Trump and Elon Musk finger-pointed at each other for the restriction. Trump has reportedly since called Musk to lift the cap. U.S. officials say service is running more normally. Kyiv says the limit remained in place into this weekend, with President Zelenskyy tweeting on October 24 that service has now been restored.

The Trump Administration should also allow Ukraine to use the system in Russia, targeting ballistic missile launchers. Take out the archer, not the arrows.

What Ukraine can still do

Washington’s squeeze rests on the premise that Kyiv is losing and must be forced to settle, but the front-line situation does not support that notion. Russian forces have made virtually no net territorial gains in 2026 despite suffering more than 40,000 casualties a month since July. At this year’s rate of advance, we estimate that Moscow would need 60 years to capture the rest of Donetsk Oblast.

In fact, the momentum has tilted the other way, with Ukrainian counteroffensives, such as the exceptionally innovative Operation Vivaldi. For months, Kyiv’s forces have killed or seriously wounded more Russian soldiers than the Kremlin can recruit. Closing that gap would require a mass mobilization Putin has been afraid to order, wary of unrest in a country reeling from the fuel shortages created by Ukraine’s refinery strikes. The myth of an inevitable Russian victory amounts to a Kremlin sales pitch aimed at Washington, and the very energy campaign the White House wants to shut down is what keeps Putin boxed in.

Nor can the White House physically switch that campaign off. For all the damage the administration’s freeze inflicted on Ukraine’s air shield, enough Ukrainian drones and missiles were able to reach their targets. Washington’s leverage is entirely defensive, whereas Ukraine’s offensive reach is built at home and in Europe. The 1,000-strong armada that struck St. Petersburg in mid-October was built around FP-1 drones, 90% of which are Ukrainian-made, flying into Russian airspace where Starlink does not function, and Starshield caps do not apply. The E.U.’s Kaja Kallas has rightly defended Ukraine’s actions as legitimate self-defense. 

By Putin’s estimate, the wider Ukrainian campaign has cost Russia about 1% of GDP, more than a year of Russian growth, as the central bank’s fight against punishing inflation pushed interest rates to their highest level since the early 2000s. The true toll is almost certainly worse. As we have previously argued, even after Moscow blacked out mandatory economic data, the IMF continues to recycle unverified Kremlin figures to dub Russia the world’s fourth-largest economy at peak output, despite ranking just 51st in GDP per capita. 

In 2022, hundreds of billions of dollars abandoned the Russian economy after our team helped spur the withdrawal of more than 1,000 major corporations following the invasion. Firms that curtailed operations outperformed those that did not, in terms of market performance. 

Even where Kyiv chooses to look beyond oil, its domestic weapons require no American permission and offend no American farmer. Homegrown Long Neptune missiles have already crippled four of the Black Sea Fleet’s Kalibr missile carriers and recently destroyed four Russian Su-34 bombers, proving that Ukraine can systematically hunt the launchers, airfields, and factories that fire on its cities. The same freedom of action applies to striking Russian data centers, an asymmetric campaign that an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute judges lopsidedly in Kyiv’s favor because Ukraine’s critical data is already safely hosted abroad.

Holding an offensive campaign that Washington wants to stop but cannot physically block changes the terms of diplomacy. Toward the White House, Kyiv should act as a customer rather than a supplicant. Any pause in energy strikes should be treated strictly as an opportunity to make a deal—offered only in exchange for verified Russian reciprocity and binding, written guarantees from Washington on Patriot interceptors, satellite-based missile launch warnings, and uncapped Starshield access, a bargain of the kind legislators like Senator Roger Wicker and organizations like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have urged.

What Europe must now do

Kyiv’s balancing act rests on a hard truth in Brussels. Europe can replace most of America’s financial support and much of its weaponry within two years, but it cannot replace Patriot-class interceptors, space-based ballistic-missile warning, or Starlink-scale connectivity this winter. The vulnerability is partly of Europe’s own making after three decades of over-reliance on American dominance, and it now collides with an American arsenal running dry.

The on-again, off-again war with Iran that drove U.S. diesel to $6.53 is also the conflict that emptied the Pentagon’s magazines. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Gulf conflict consumed roughly two-thirds of America’s Patriot inventory and more than a third of its THAAD interceptors, leaving a rebuild measured in years at the exact moment Ukraine’s Patriot stockpiles are reportedly exhausted. Europe’s scramble to build sovereign air defenses—four SAMP/T NG batteries currently on order, a 10-nation FREYJA program aiming for a first intercept in mid-2027, and the diplomatic courtship of Japan, the sole non-American producer of PAC-3 interceptors—is real and necessary, but slow. Every euro spent on European interceptors is one less dollar earned in Washington, and one fewer armament President Trump can delay.

A similar bottleneck applies to space. While Europe’s radar and optical satellites could potentially replace American targeting imagery within weeks, OneWeb and the E.U.’s GovSatcom offer only a partial hedge against a Starlink slowdown. And a European satellite constellation capable of warning of a ballistic launch probably will not exist before the 2030s.

Because Europe cannot buy its way out of those technical bottlenecks overnight, it must lean aggressively into the financial and maritime levers it controls today. The E.U.’s €90 billion loan covers 2026 and much of 2027, and when the remaining €70 billion gap comes to a head at the December European Council, moving the €202 billion in frozen Russian assets out of Belgium offers the clearest route around Belgium’s objections. Better still, a full ban on shipping services for Russian crude, along with expanding the shadow-fleet boardings that European navies have already begun, could squeeze Moscow’s war chest at almost no cost to European taxpayers.

Ukraine’s most decisive advantage, though, is found on the factory floor. Domestic drone production has surged 370% this year, and the Ukrainian-made Flamingo cruise missile costs just under $600,000, less than a fifth of an American Tomahawk’s $3.5 million price tag. By guaranteeing a loan to the Flamingo’s manufacturer, Denmark has laid out a blueprint for surviving an erratic Washington: European capital behind Ukrainian weapons.

The lesson of the lever

A bitter paradox governs the current battlefield. The offensive campaign squeezing Moscow is the one Washington objects to, while the defenses faltering over Ukrainian cities are the ones only the U.S. can supply. By blaming Kyiv for an energy shock originating in the Persian Gulf, the White House has struck a bargain that lowers no prices at home, replenishes the aggressor’s coffers abroad, and teaches the Kremlin that American sanctions expire if Putin simply waits them out. Such a posture delivers neither peace nor strength. 

Ukraine is akin to the Biblical hero David, who, through cunning, triumphed over the lumbering giant Goliath. Moscow's “card hand” is neither the colossus Trump believes it to be nor the colossus its propaganda advertises. Russia is not remotely an economic superpower. Beneath its vast map lies a concentrated population—over 80% of the population lives in the 20% not plagued by extreme cold, permafrost, and poor soil—and a brittle economy dependent on raw materials the world can increasingly buy elsewhere, backed by a military with a long history of failing to subdue smaller, more determined foes, from Japan in 1905 and Poland in 1920 to Finland in 1940 and the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. Sheer land mass has never guaranteed victory when the smaller side is fighting for its existence.

The silver lining is that Washington’s attempted coercion is forging the European autonomy it assumed would never materialize. If European leaders withstand Russian pressure over the next 18 months and resist the political disarray stoked by Kremlin disinformation, the continent will emerge a far more formidable power—proving the quip circulating in allied capitals that Europe has found no better unifier since Charlemagne than Donald Trump. Europe, Ukraine, and the world now know what an American guarantee is worth when the guarantor changes its mind, and Washington is about to learn that leverage, like interceptors, is a stock that depletes with every use.

As Mark Twain advised, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

A woman who had accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1993 described it to congressional staff as rape and said the interaction left her bleeding and bruised, according to a report released Monday by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee examining Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Beatrice Keul, a model and former Miss Switzerland, alleged to Judiciary Committee staff that she was raped by Trump in a Plaza Hotel suite in Manhattan when she was 24. Keul said that while attending the American Dream Pageant, which had a partnership with Trump, she met with Trump at a press luncheon at the event.

Trump, according to Keul, promised to arrange her visa in the U.S. and ensure her acceptance into New York University through his friend Paolo Zampolli, a close Trump ally who was, until earlier this month, part of his Administration. At the same event, she also spent at least 10 minutes talking to Epstein who she said claimed to have organized “many parties with Don.”

Later that day, Keul alleges, Trump invited her to a hotel suite where Trump “grabbed Keul from behind and forcibly raped her,” causing “bleeding and bruising on multiple parts of her body,” the report says. Following the incident, Keul alleges Trump made her promise she would keep quiet and repeated his promise for visa and college admission.

Because Keul’s passport had been taken from her on her arrival, she was not able to leave the contest following the incident, she alleges, according to the report. After she returned to Switzerland, she declined to participate in an additional Trump-sponsored pageant in Hawaii several weeks later.

TIME has been unable to independently verify details of Keul’s account.

In a statement, the White House denies the allegations and says that President Trump has been “fully exonerated of anything related to Epstein.” “This ‘report’ is nothing more than a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans from the surging Republican momentum driven by President Trump’s historic achievements,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis says. 

Keul has previously spoken in public about her sexual assault allegations against Trump, but the report provided new details of the alleged rape—as well as reviewing similar accounts of other Trump accusers. 

Read more: Trump Said He Banned Epstein From Mar-a-Lago. A Lawmaker Who Reviewed Unredacted Files Says They Tell a Different Story

In addition to Keul’s account, the report also compiled allegations from four other women who have directly accused Trump of rape or sexual assault in connection with the Epstein investigation. The allegations, spanning from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, had all been previously made public either through media interviews or FBI testimony released as part of the Epstein files. 

The report’s release, just over a week before Election Day, comes as Democrats are working to signal to voters how they will make use of their power if they gain control of one or both chambers of Congress.

On Monday, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat of the House Judiciary Committee, called on the Department of Justice to appoint an independent special counsel to oversee the investigation of allegations mentioned in the report. So far, Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein confidant, is the only person to have been convicted of sex trafficking of minors in connection with the Epstein case. 

“An independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice,” Raskin said in a statement.

Allegations made against Paolo Zampolli

The report also alleges that Zampolli, a former Trump administration official and a close Trump ally, was “an active participant” in the Epstein sex trafficking allegations. 

According to the report, which cites multiple FBI reports included in the Epstein files, Zampolli arranged U.S. visas for young female models before they met Epstein. One FBI report mentioned that Zampolli arranged an 18-year-old model’s visa before she was recruited to give a massage at Epstein’s house, where Epstein allegedly raped her.

Zampolli himself has also been accused of rape and sexual assault in a separate case brought by model Victoria Drake, who alleges in an ongoing civil lawsuit that Zampolli drugged and raped her in 2023. 

TIME has reached out to Zampolli for comment. 

Previously, Zampolli has claimed that he had introduced First Lady Melania Trump to the President in 1998, but the report disputes that claim, citing two accounts—one from an unnamed Epstein associate and the other from Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model—saying that Epstein had introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump. 

The New York Times reported in March that Zampolli had asked a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement  last year to detain and deport Ungaro, whom Zampolli had previously dated, amid a custody battle over their son. Zampolli denied making such requests. 

Until earlier this month, Zampolli held a diplomatic role under the State Department as Special Representative for Global Partnerships. He was fired two weeks ago over a months-long dispute with the department’s deputy secretary, according to Politico.

On Oct. 25, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won an unprecedented fourth term, defeating the far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro with 51.79 % of the vote, a margin of nearly 4.4 million votes. For the 80-year-old Lula, who had trailed his opponent by 2.2 million votes in the first round of elections just three weeks earlier, the victory was a remarkable comeback.

Brazil is the largest country and economy in Latin America, and the contest had become a test of whether the region’s rightward shift could be stopped. Lula’s victory interrupted that drift and dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s ambition to build a hemisphere of governments aligned with his politics. Yet interpreting the result as a triumph for the left would be a mistake.

Consider the first round of the elections in Brazil: more than 33 million Brazilians did not vote in the first round, an abstention rate of 21.08 %, the highest for a presidential election first round since 1998. Millions more cast blank or invalid ballots. Voting is optional for Brazilians aged 16 and 17 and for those 70 or older, but the scale of abstention points to a broader problem of political alienation. The high rejection rates for both candidates suggest that, for many voters, the election was not about electing a president but to ensure his opponent is not elected.

Flávio, whose father and former president Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years in prison for crimes against democracy, won the first round, with 2 million more votes than Lula, and his Liberal Party’s formidable showing in Congress in early October shocked the liberal world. He ran as his father’s proxy. He promised to pardon his father and his accomplices and to carry forward his political legacy.

The new expectations of Lula’s children

It seemed puzzling that Lula needed such a dramatic comeback to win re-election when unemployment in Brazil stood at 5.3 %, near a historic low. The International Monetary Fund projected that Brazil would become the world’s eighth-largest economy in 2027. Poverty in the country had fallen substantially during Lula’s third term, while real wages rose and food insecurity declined. Violent deaths had fallen to their lowest level in over a decade. Deforestation of the Amazon had fallen to its lowest level since records began in 1988. Incumbents have been re-elected in Brazil with far less to show for their time in office.

The children of Lula’s social policies came of age in a rapidly changing world, and in a country where formal employment, labor unions, and traditional social protections have struggled to serve an increasingly informal workforce. Some turned toward market-oriented politics. Others found a sense of belonging in conservatism, part of a broader rightward turn among young men around the world.

Brazil’s left governed for much of their formative years. Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached in 2016 amid a bitter political crisis and corruption scandals that implicated political figures across party lines. For many Brazilians, the political establishment became synonymous with impunity and self-preservation. They saw Lula’s Workers’ Party as the establishment. And while Lula’s earlier corruption convictions had been annulled, the allegations continued to shadow him.

Meanwhile, lethal violence had become a defining feature of everyday life. Brazil had urbanized rapidly without addressing deep inequality or reforming a public-security system inherited from the military dictatorship. Overcrowded prisons became recruiting grounds for criminal factions.

In Rio de Janeiro, militias made up largely of serving and former police officers and other security personnel initially claimed to protect residents from drug traffickers. They evolved into criminal enterprises that extorted communities, struck deals with drug factions, and infiltrated local governments. Yet responsibility for confronting them remained fragmented. State governments control most policing, leaving the federal government with limited direct authority over local law enforcement.

Flávio understood how to exploit voters’ distrust and frustration. His promises of tougher security resonated with Brazilians desperate for protection. His campaign drew comparisons to the hardline model of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Yet Bolsonaro Jr. also faced questions about his own associations with criminal figures in Rio, undermining his claim to offer a solution to the country’s security crisis. During the campaign, new revelations about his ties to Daniel Vorcaro, the disgraced banker and owner of Banco Master at the center of a vast financial scandal, added to those doubts, even as he denies wrongdoing.

Flávio's brother, Eduardo, had lobbied the Trump Administration to punish Brazil over the prosecution of their father. Washington imposed tariffs on Brazilian exports, explicitly linking the measures to the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. The tariffs threatened Brazilian businesses and proved deeply unpopular, leaving Flávio defending a political alliance whose costs would be borne by Brazil.

How Lula fought back

Lula’s campaign had expected these vulnerabilities to suffice. When Flávio entered the presidential race in Dec. 2025, early polls placed Lula comfortably ahead. His first-round defeat jolted the progressive camp out of its complacency. Lula’s campaign returned to the streets of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and intensified its presence on social media, seeking to mobilize the voters who had stayed home in the first round. Lula’s people reorganized their digital outreach to speak more directly to younger Brazilians and informal workers.

Lula, who had initially seemed detached from younger voters’ digital habits, embraced viral content and selfies. His coalition expanded beyond the traditional left, drawing in moderates and voters who feared another Bolsonaro presidency. His campaign also challenged what it described as algorithmic bias on platforms such as Instagram, securing an electoral court ruling requiring equal treatment of candidates’ content.

The most potent opening for the Lula campaign came from Washington. Trump praised Flávio’s first-round performance as a “very, very big victory,” helping Lula recast the runoff as a contest over national sovereignty. The tariffs had already alienated Brazilian exporters and moderate voters.

In televised debates and rallies, Lula accused the Bolsonaro family of serving American interests and warned that Flávio would surrender control of Brazil’s natural resources to foreign interests. He also attacked his rival’s support for sweeping cuts inspired by President Javier Milei of Argentina. For voters outside the left, defending national sovereignty offered a reason to support Lula despite their reservations about his government.

On São Paulo’s Paulista Avenue, Brazil’s main stage for political protests, a protester wore a Trump mask and carried a Flávio puppet. The image captured the choice Lula wanted the voters to see. This was no longer simply a referendum on his record. It was also a choice about whether Brazil would let an American president shape its politics.

Lula’s campaign turned a contest he had been losing into a choice between an imperfect incumbent and a candidate whose victory threatened democratic institutions and national autonomy. Abstention fell from 21.08 % in the first round to 19.22 % in the runoff. On election day, severe weather and heavy rainfall in southern Brazil kept some voters from reaching the polling booths. Transportation disruptions also hampered voting in cities including Salvador and São Paulo. A last-minute Supreme Court ruling extended voting hours by two hours, allowing more voters in working-class strongholds to cast their ballots.

Lula’s victory is both a reprieve and a warning. It shows that a broad democratic coalition, mobilizing in the streets and online, can defeat a far-right candidate even amid a regional shift to the right and pressure from Washington. But the victory has not resolved Brazil’s divisions. Lula must govern a country where about half of those who cast valid ballots chose his opponent. He has won four years. He has not won back the country.

Flávio has challenged the result and demanded that the runoff be annulled. His party holds a powerful position in Congress, where conservative and center-right forces can obstruct Lula’s agenda. The election has given Brazilian democracy breathing room, but the battle for Brazil’s democracy has only begun. What Lula does with his mandate will determine whether he can make it count.

In 2027, TIME will publish its third annual ranking of the World's Top GreenTech Companies in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. This list will recognize the most innovative, impactful, and successful companies working to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment.

Because many companies in this space are young, TIME and Statista are accepting applications as part of the research phase. An application guarantees consideration for the list, but does not guarantee a spot on either list. Companies that do not apply may also be included in the ranking.

To apply, click here.

More information visit: www.statista.com/page/top-greentech-companies. The winners will be announced on TIME.com in June 2027.

Japanese lawmakers are reforming the country’s more-than-a-millennia-old continuous hereditary monarchy in an effort to keep it alive amid a shrinking imperial family.

Amendments to Japan’s Imperial House Law that passed in July took effect on Saturday. One allows Japanese princesses to keep their royal status even if they marry non-royals, though their future children are not considered royals. The other amendment is an apparent roundabout way to preserve patrilineal succession: members of the royal family may adopt a male from former imperial branch families, and those adoptees’ future male offspring can be considered legitimate successors to the throne.

The revisions aim to expand the future pool of eligible heirs to the throne while reinforcing the shutting out of women from leading the Japanese monarchy, which staunch conservatives including the country’s first female Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, have repeatedly advocated against upending.

Before the revisions took effect, Emperor Naruhito only had a few viable successors: his younger brother Akishino, followed by his 20-year-old nephew Prince Hisahito, then his 90-year-old uncle Prince Hitachi. 

The small pool had raised concerns about the future of the Japanese imperial family. The Japanese public has shown support for female monarchs, signaling a preference to keep the renowned family on the throne. Fans of Princess Aiko, the emperor’s sole daughter, have marched in Japan’s streets in recent weeks in support of her eligibility to become empress.

But extreme right-wing factions in Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party have insisted that maintaining only males from the male imperial line as eligible to become emperor preserves the authority of the Chrysanthemum Throne. The revisions were ultimately borne out of the coalition agreement signed in October last year by the LDP and its junior partner, the Japan Innovation Party.

While the Imperial Household Agency has said it will study how to implement the measures, critics are already studying how to turn the policy over, arguing that it violates the country’s anti-discrimination law. Manga artist Yoshinori Kobayashi filed a lawsuit against the government that called the amendment “unconstitutional.”

Experts say the amendments could affect how the Japanese public views the imperial family. 

“It could dilute the feeling of closeness or the feeling of holiness that some people might feel towards the royal family,” Jeffrey J. Hall, a lecturer at Kanda University of International Studies, tells TIME, “because they're more used to the royals that they already know.”

Welcoming back the former imperial family branches

The amendments allow members of the imperial family to adopt a male who is 15 years of age or older and is also a legitimate descendant of a male member of the imperial family before it was trimmed down after World War II. That adoptee should not be married or have children.

Several branches of the Japanese imperial family renounced their royal status in 1947 to cut down on costs the monarchy incurred after the war. Government officials previously said that these 11 families split from a common male-line ancestor some 600 years ago, and are now at least 36 degrees of kinship from Naruhito.

However, the adopted males would not be eligible for the throne—only their eligible male offspring would be. The law would be reviewed every 30 years.

Jeff Kingston, a professor of Asian history at Temple University’s Japan campus in Tokyo, tells TIME the government’s offered solution to the dwindling pool raises questions about the legitimacy of the potential heirs. “Would these people be taken as legitimate by the public?” he says remains an open question, especially as reports surface about who those potential additional successors to the throne might be. “The problem of a monarchy is it’s sort of based on—I don't know—a collectively held myth, belief, faith; and a sausage maker probably isn't going to have that magic.”

Hall, from the Kanda University of International Studies, echoes that the Japanese government will find it difficult to convince the public, especially since the move would introduce unfamiliar faces. “It will be a very difficult problem for the Japanese government to try to basically build up an ideology or a PR program that convinces people that the new royal adoptees are just as royal as the other ones that we all know.”

Snubbing the nation’s popular princess

Kingston says that conservatives proposed the amendments to ensure that a female-led monarchy wouldn’t happen in Japan, even when many Japanese people appear fine with it and some even seem to prefer it. Past media surveys have shown that more than 80% of Japanese respondents favored a female emperor.

Protesters took to central Tokyo’s streets on Oct. 10 to call for further debates on the Imperial House Law, claiming that Princess Aiko, who is 24, should be eligible for the throne.

The other amendment that took effect allows Aiko and the four other single princesses to retain royal status if they get married to people outside the imperial family. Before, princesses who did so lost their royal status, meaning their children are ineligible for the line of succession; the most recent being Mako, one of Naruhito’s nieces. Mako married her college boyfriend in 2021 and has since moved to the U.S.

Hall describes the recent amendments as “very strange” and suspects “many Japanese people won't really fully grasp” them. An August poll from the Social Survey Research Center came to a similar conclusion that the revisions to the Imperial House Law “have not gained the understanding of the Japanese public.”

While Naruhito and the royal family have largely ceremonial duties and do not weigh in on the country’s politics, they have even hinted at what they think should be done. In June, the emperor said he hopes any decision to expand the imperial family should have public support: “I hope it will be something that gains the understanding of the people.”

Each new release of a frontier AI model, such as Anthropic’s Mythos or OpenAI’s Astra, brings a new wave of speculation over how much closer this takes us to artificial general intelligence (AGI) and how much further that lofty goal remains. 

But what if we’re overlooking something more important than an individual model’s supposed IQ?

OpenAI recently announced that an internal model, claimed to be “significantly more capable than GPT‑6 Astra,” solved Navier-Stokes, one of a handful of legendary math problems each carrying a million-dollar bounty. While mathematicians unpack what this means for the profession, and investors unpack what it means for OpenAI’s upcoming IPO, to me the biggest takeaway is that capability emerges from the collective. Just as it does in nature.

OpenAI didn’t crack Navier-Stokes by pointing its internal model at the problem. It pointed a swarm of 10,000 AI bots at it. These agents were encouraged to explore different directions and communicate promising leads with each other. 

Think of what a lone honeybee or termite can accomplish compared to a colony of them. What a single person can accomplish compared to a nation of them.  

In biology, a bacterial colony is a group of identical cells derived from the same mother cell. This, I would argue, is the most suitable analogy for the collective of agents that solved Navier-Stokes. It is many from one. Or, to paraphrase Walt Whitman: an AI that contains multitudes. 

While OpenAI deployed its AI colony to solve a math problem that no human or individual AI agent could, Google DeepMind recently set an AI colony loose on math problems for a different purpose. It wanted to see what behaviors would arise within the colony. What it found was remarkable. 

One agent discovered a way to cheat, convincing the examination software that it had solved math problems when it hadn’t. Rather than resting content with this small victory, it messaged other agents, telling them how to cheat. Some agents joined the unscrupulous agent and formed a sub-colony of cheaters. Others resisted and even formed a sub-colony of whistleblowers trying to out the cheaters. 

As a math professor, I thought it was hard enough to keep students from using AI to cheat on exams. Now we have to worry about the AIs themselves cheating on math exams!

Which brings us to perhaps the most striking example of AI hive intelligence: the Hugging Face hack. OpenAI’s agents broke out of a sandbox environment and hacked into another company. Arguably, it was a felony offense—or rather, it would have been if a human were in charge. OpenAI’s agents coordinated their behavior in ingenious ways, including writing secret messages in a file system so that even when one AI colony was erased, a future colony could pick up the hack where the previous one left off.

Researchers have long known that complex behavior can emerge from simple computer systems. For instance, in 1970 the mathematician John Conway introduced the Game of Life, where an elementary set of rules governing the movement of pixels on a screen leads to remarkably rich ecosystems.

With today’s AI agents, we are going far beyond this by letting extremely sophisticated entities interact in sophisticated ways—using language, often hidden and coded. 

This is why we must adopt a new mindset regarding AI capability. Testing a new AI model to see what it can do and how dangerous it might be by directly prompting it is like deciding how safe it would be to stick your head in a wasp nest by letting a single insect sting you. 

Some developers and red-team activities do focus on AI colonies. The Hugging Face attack resulted from OpenAI trying to evaluate the cybersecurity capabilities of an AI colony. But the AI arms race between the U.S. and China, and between the competing companies within each country, has dangerously pushed our attention to what each individual model can do. 

One model might top the leaderboards, but a thousand weaker models could wreak far more havoc. As calls to pace the frontier abound, let us not lose sight of the fact that the AI frontier isn’t what each model can do in isolation—it is what a colony of them can accomplish together. 

The Israeli settlement of Neve Daniel sits south of Jerusalem, atop one of the highest ridges in the West Bank, nearly 1,000 meters above sea level. The view to the east stretches to the mountains of Jordan, and to the west across the Mediterranean coastal plain—where most Israelis live. But the tranquility of the landscape belies the political fervor animating the Oct. 27 election, a contest with stakes as great as any in the 78-year history of the world’s only Jewish state. When I ask three residents what will ultimately determine their votes, one responds with particular ferocity.

“Seven hundred trucks were delivered to Hamas today by Israel,” says Barak Moore, who has lived in Neve Daniel for 14 years. He’s referring to commercial goods and international aid entering the Gaza Strip. “We’re paying a terrorist organization that committed the greatest atrocity against the Jewish people since Auschwitz.”

While much of the world has come to define Israel by its military actions in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, Moore’s views reflect the passions coursing through a society still traumatized by that day. Israelis tend to be less preoccupied by the nearly 75,000 Palestinian fatalities in Gaza since the war began, than by the 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 hostages taken by Hamas—the women subjected to sexual violence, the children shot at point-blank range, the families burned alive in their homes. In a country so small and intimately connected, scarcely anyone was untouched by events that shattered the assumptions of a people whose nation was founded to give Jews a safe haven in their ancestral homeland. 

Both the Hamas massacre and the wars that followed loom over a vote shaping up not only as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, but also the nature of the country that, as Israel’s longest serving prime minister, he has done so much to shape. 

Arrayed against Netanyahu is a fractured field of challengers. There is Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief whose reputation for honesty, sobriety, and competence contrasts with Netanyahu’s polarizing leadership; Naftali Bennett, the right-wing former prime minister seeking a comeback; Yair Lapid, the centrist former premier who has spent years trying to dislodge Netanyahu; and Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish secular nationalist who has become one of Netanyahu’s fiercest adversaries.

Also on the ballot: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, far-right extremists whose parties made possible Netanyahu’s current coalition, and whose ambitions to annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza constrain his room to maneuver while damaging Israel’s standing abroad. The next government will either push Israel further down the path of religious nationalism, permanent conflict, and international isolation—or toward a new generation of leadership.

According to the polls, Netanyahu’s strongest challenger is Eisenkot, a soft-spoken, heavyset career soldier running as a centrist. His son, Gal, was killed fighting Hamas in Gaza, and one of his nephews also died in the war. Eisenkot is campaigning on a promise to restore public trust in government, rebuild Israel’s security, and heal the divisions that have fractured the country. “This election is about the identity of Israel,” Eisenkot told TIME in an interview on Oct. 20. “What will be Israel two weeks from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? This is the main question.”

Three years after Netanyahu’s political obituary was being written, pre-election polls show him running in a dead heat. On the eve of the vote, the nation is suffused with a sense of uncertainty; political analysts say almost anything can happen. Netanyahu and Eisenkot could form a unity government. Netanyahu could cobble together another right-wing coalition, dragging Israel further right. Eisenkot could join forces with Bennett, Lapid, and the Arab parties (20% of Israeli citizens are Palestinian) to oust Netanyahu, producing the closest thing Israel could muster to a center-left government. Or perhaps no bloc will manage to pull together the 61 Knesset seats needed for a majority, plunging Israel into another round of elections and a reprise of the paralysis that produced five contests between 2019 and 2022.

“The most probable scenarios currently are either there will be some sort of unity government, which again is very complicated politically because all of the opposition parties swear they don’t want it under Netanyahu, and I don’t see how Netanyahu is going to sit under them,” says Nimrod Nor, an expert on Israeli politics at Hebrew University. “The other is we’re going to have another election after this one.”

According to two sources familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking, he would prefer to form a unity government with Eisenkot. One reason is legacy. He believes such an alliance offers his best chance to transcend the worst security failure in the nation’s history, and to be remembered not only as the leader who emerged from the slaughter of Oct. 7 to decimate Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and persuade an American president to wage war against Iran, but also as the statesman who helped to reconcile a divided nation.

The other reason, the sources say, is personal. Netanyahu has little desire to form another right-wing coalition that would leave him beholden to the radical and uncompromising parties led by Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, both of which he brought into government four years ago to reclaim power. “He thought that he could control Ben-Gvir,” one Netanyahu aide says. “Now he knows that he can’t.”

That is precisely what the Israeli right fears he’s thinking, and what brought me to Neve Daniel. The settlement of capacious red-tiled homes is just across the Green Line that defined Israel’s borders before the Six-Day War of 1967. It was built on land that was a Jewish farm even before Israel was founded in the crucible of the 1948 war. Settler violence against Palestinians has risen sharply during Netanyahu’s tenure, but the militant settlers who make headlines by terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors tend to live on hilltops deeper into the West Bank than this.

But few, if any, of the 700,000 Israelis who live in settlements are leftist. Many regard Netanyahu as a cynical opportunist—a political chameleon who parrots their convictions but will do whatever it takes to survive. Among his many heresies, they say, is a long history of accommodating American presidents: signing the Wye River Memorandum under Bill Clinton to advance the Oslo peace process that aimed to create a Palestinian state; voting for the disengagement from Gaza under Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush; endorsing, at least rhetorically, a two-state solution and imposing a moratorium on settlement construction under Barack Obama; and, under Donald Trump, accepting a ceasefire and hostage-exchange agreement to end the war in Gaza.

Three people in Neve Daniel offer a revealing glimpse of the forces pulling Netanyahu rightward. Each plans to vote for a different party, but they all share an overriding objective: a right-wing government with Netanyahu at its center, constrained by allies who will keep him from drifting toward the middle. 

Barak Moore is supporting Zehut, a libertarian nationalist party founded in 2015, whose eclectic platform combines tax cuts, the dismantling of monopolies, and cannabis legalization with an uncompromising vision of Israeli sovereignty and the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. It is something of a right-wing hipster party, blending free-market economics with religious nationalism.  

Avi Abelow, 52, an activist who runs the website Pulse of Israel, is voting for Netanyahu’s Likud Party. His complaint is not that the prime minister has gone too far in Gaza, but rather that he has not gone far enough, hamstrung by a security establishment and governing coalition insufficiently committed to the nationalist cause. “We should have conquered all of Gaza and made sure it’s Jewish again,” he says.

The youngest of the three, Hershey Kellner, is a 19-year-old Orthodox Jew who moved to Israel from New Jersey just months before Oct. 7. He is supporting Otzma Yehudit, the far-right party led by Ben-Gvir, whose confrontational politics and open contempt for established norms have made him a hero to some of Israel’s most fervent ideologues. Helner admires Ben-Gvir’s push to expand civilian gun ownership, permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount, and introduce the death penalty for terrorists. 

To explain his thinking, Kellner invokes one of the most consequential decisions in recent Israeli history: the 2011 deal that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Among them was Yahya Sinwar, who would go on to mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre. Helner believes that sparing Sinwar’s life was a catastrophic mistake. “If you hanged him or put a bullet in the back of his head, not sure how the world would be now,” he says, “but it would definitely be better.”

For three years, Israel has been a nation at war, not only with its enemies but with itself. The extraordinary solidarity that followed Oct. 7 has given way to recriminations and ideological divisions, intensified by the trauma of war, the anguish of the hostage crisis, the pain of deepening antisemitism worldwide, and the unresolved question of who bears responsibility for such a stunning security lapse. Though Israel rejects the charge, critics accuse the country of committing a genocide in Gaza, where the dead include both uncounted Hamas fighters and 20,000 children—and of countenancing a thuggish brand of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. On Oct. 16, masked settlers were filmed attacking Palestinians and European diplomats in the West Bank, and injuring a Washington Post photojournalist.

The fault lines run through nearly every aspect of Israeli life. Secular and religious. Liberals and nationalists. Those obliged to serve in the military and the ultra-Orthodox who are not. Those who believe Israel must reach an accommodation with the Palestinians and those who want permanent Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. And, not least, those who regard Netanyahu as the indispensable guarantor of Jewish security and those who see him as the principal threat to the country’s democratic character and reputation abroad.

The fear increasingly voiced across Israel’s political and cultural establishment is that another Netanyahu victory could push those divisions toward a societal rupture. After Netanyahu’s coalition moved in early 2023 to restrict the power of the Supreme Court, the prospect of another government dependent on religious and ultra-nationalist parties has raised the specter of an exodus of young Israelis, who see the country’s liberal and democratic traditions slipping away. In a recent survey by the Agam Institute, an Israeli research firm, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 59% of Israelis said they believe internal threats are greater than external ones, while 64% said they were considering leaving Israel, citing insecurity, living costs, and political instability. In a nation of roughly 10 million, even the departure of tens of thousands of highly educated citizens could have consequences far beyond their numbers, draining the country of the talent and investment on which its economic and military strength depends.

There is a deeper irony. Israel was founded as a refuge, a place where a people long subjected to persecution and exile could finally determine their own destiny. Some Israelis now contemplate leaving, not because they have lost faith in the necessity of a Jewish state, but because they fear the political direction of the state created to provide one.

For those contemplating a future abroad, there is an unsettling question: Where, exactly, would they go? Antisemitism has surged across much of the world, with 2025 marking the deadliest year for Jews in the diaspora in more than three decades, according to Tel Aviv University.  Israel has become increasingly isolated, condemned in international forums, denounced in the streets of European capitals, and regarded by many critics as a pariah state. The result is a profound paradox: Israelis who fear for their country’s future wonder whether they would be any safer, or more welcome, anywhere else. 

It is this siege mentality, the sense of a small nation standing alone against a hostile world, that Netanyahu is counting on to sustain his political survival. He has spent much of his career presenting himself as a leader hardened by history, experienced in diplomacy, and ruthless in the exercise of power. His message: Whatever Israelis think of him personally, whatever blame they assign him for Oct. 7, the world is too dangerous to entrust their security to anyone else.

The chasm between how Israelis see themselves and how much of the outside world sees them has rarely seemed wider. In the new documentary NAZA, Israeli filmmakers draw on the anonymous testimony of 24 soldiers and intelligence officers to expose what they describe as the military’s systematic use of artificial intelligence to identify Hamas targets in Gaza, even when commanders knew that bombing them would kill women and children. Inside Israel, meanwhile, the fifth season of Fauda, the country’s enormously popular television thriller, recreates the atrocities of Oct. 7 in harrowing detail, immersing viewers once again in the terror, grief, and vulnerability of that day.

One production focuses on the suffering Israel inflicted, the other on the suffering Israelis endured. Together, they illuminate the competing narratives of a war that has left Israel increasingly estranged from the world, and many Israelis feeling more besieged than ever. Indications from polls and analysts are that even after voters have their say, no one bloc will have mustered a legislative majority. At that point the leading vote-getter will have weeks to try to gather a coalition, a test of the kind of political leadership at which Netanyahu has long excelled.

For nearly three decades, Netanyahu has been the dominant figure in Israeli public life, his political fortunes rising and falling with the country’s anxieties and ambitions. He has survived scandals, indictments, electoral defeats, and repeated attempts to engineer his ouster. The question is whether a political system he has spent so long mastering can produce a future that no longer revolves around him.

In a country not yet 80 years old, many are ready to chart a new era. “I think that Eisenkot is the one,” says Livna Savir, 72, at a rally for the challenger on a basketball court in Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, outside of Tel Aviv. “It’s a change of direction.” With her children living in the U.S., she laments the impacts of the last three years on a once unified group: “What happened now in our country—it’s not good for the family.”

Susan Collins had just laid out her receipts.

The five-term Republican senator was standing on a debate stage in Portland earlier this month, explaining how she deserved credit for ensuring concrete and road salt were exempted from President Trump’s Canadian import levies. The move saved one small town in northern Maine $10,000, Collins said. It helped a concrete business owner avoid a $150,000 hike.

It was an updated version of the same argument Collins has been making for decades to win re-election in a state that hasn’t backed a Republican President since George H. W. Bush.

When it was her opponent’s turn to respond, Troy Jackson shrugged. What about everything else going up in price, he asked her, before adding, “We can’t eat road salt.”

For Jackson, the comeback was a hit. It sparked “let them eat road salt” memes of Collins depicted as Marie Antoinette and assuaged some fears among Democrats about how the last-minute replacement candidate would fare in the spotlight. The viral moment also brought into focus the race’s defining issue: Collins herself. Amid a handful of Senate races that will decide which party controls the upper chamber for the last two years of the Trump era, the race in Maine has emerged as the one most decisively about voters’ view of the incumbent.

“He’s got a unique challenge because this race really isn’t about him,” says Emily Cain, a former Maine legislator and Democratic political strategist in the state. “This race is about Susan Collins and asking the people of Maine whether or not it's time for change. He just happens to be the alternative.”

Given the candidate they ended up with, some Democrats are thrilled with this dynamic. Jackson became the nominee after a tumultuous summer in which the state’s Democratic primary winner, Graham Platner, withdrew from the race int he wake of being accused of sexual assault, which Platner has denied. While Platner and Jackson have nearly identical progressive, populist policy platforms, there’s a clear contrast between them in style. Platner is a charismatic, at times gripping, campaigner. Jackson is not. His speeches tend to be more subdued and matter of fact, and he often wears an expression of utter boredom despite being at the center of one of the highest-stakes contests in the country. His affect matches his typical attire on the trail—a Red Sox cap, a fleece vest, his cell phone on a belt clip.

“Troy’s a salt of the earth guy. His biggest strength is his authenticity,” says Toby McGrath, who ran President Barack Obama’s campaign in Maine in 2008 and 2012.

With polls showing Jackson ahead but within the margin of error, both sides have sharpened their attacks. Jackson has repeatedly highlighted a recent report that the FBI and Justice Department had previously sought to open a pay-to-play bribery probe into Collins, allegations, which she denied. And a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans released an ad calling Jackson a “freak” and a “creep” over his relationship with his second cousin, with whom he has two sons. Last week, Collins distanced herself from the ad and called for it to be taken down.

Yet it’s unclear if any of that is breaking through with voters in a race that could ultimately come down to how Collins ensures Maine isn’t forgotten by Washington. On the stump, she warns voters all that could all disappear if Jackson replaces her.

"He'll be 100 in seniority,” she told Fox News digital earlier this month, “And all of that essential federal funding targeted for the state of Maine, virtually all of it will go away."

Collins’ hold on Maine

For years, Collins has been the immovable stateswoman. She is both Maine’s longest-serving member of Congress and the longest-serving Republican woman in Senate history. Astoundingly, she’s never missed a roll-call vote since taking office in 1997. 

A self-described centrist, she has cultivated a deep connection with Maine’s independent-minded electorate. In 2020, she was reelected by 9 points as Joe Biden carried the state by the same margin.

Collins, 73, has increasingly found herself on the defensive over years of controversial votes, including those confirming Trump cabinet members like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She also cast votes elevating Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Her 2018 vote on Kavanaugh, in which she said she trusted he wouldn’t endanger the right to abortion access, became a flashpoint after the court overturned Roe v. Wade in in 2022. (Collins is also the only Republican senator to vote for all three Democratic-appointed justices currently on the court.)

Most towns in Maine have felt the benefit of Collins’ role as chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, with which she has steered funding for community centers, railroad improvement projects and shipyards. Her campaign puts the total at $1.5 billion in congressionally directed spending and targeted investments since 2021. 

“Even Democrats acknowledge her work to bring funding and support back to the state is just off the charts,” says Lance Dutson, a Republican strategist in Maine. “So people are going to have to make a decision, ‘Do I hate Trump more than I appreciate and need the support Susan Collins has brought to the state over the years?’”

That argument faces more pushback this year given wider dissatisfaction with Republicans and the state of the economy. Jackson has capitalized on those economic anxieties. One of his final ads references high heating oil costs. It’s hitting airwaves just as residents fill their tanks for winter in the nation’s fourth-coldest state. He repeatedly points to Collins' votes related to the conflict in Iran for driving up fuel costs and her vote to advance the Big, Beautiful Bill, a major Republican budget and tax package, for slashing Medicaid in the state.

Last month introduced another chink in Collins’ armor, as a ProPublica investigation revealed that FBI and Justice Department agents sought to open a pay-to-play bribery probe into Collins related to allegations she’d rewarded a campaign donor with millions of dollars in federal naval defense contracts. Collins has denied the allegations, and no charges were ever filed against her or her campaign.

Several Republican and Democratic strategists told TIME they question how effective the corruption argument is landing in tight-knit Maine. “Susan goes to the grocery store, does her own shopping, doesn't live in a lavish house,” Dutson, the GOP strategist said. “People may disagree with her, but I think it’s a big stretch for almost everybody up here to get their head around her being corrupt.”

But the investigation cuts at the core of Collins’ Maine-first brand, McGrath argued, so even a small erosion of support could be the difference in a close race.

‘Troy is not a smooth talker’

As Jackson’s campaign keeps the spotlight on Collins, it’s kept its own candidate somewhat hidden away. Up until recently, Jackson had done very few on-camera interviews, and it was rare for him to take many unscreened questions at campaign events. Local and national campaign staff have feuded over how to showcase Jackson from the early days of the campaign, infighting detailed in an August New York magazine story.

“He has a nationalized campaign team, and these are folks who are generally only comfortable with smooth talkers, and Troy is not a smooth talker,” says a Maine Democrat who worked with Jackson in the state legislature. The Democrat, who supports Jackson, thinks there’s wisdom in trying to avoid gaffes that distract from Collins. Jackson has struggled at times to talk about foreign affairs or federal policy issues, like detailing how to pay for Medicare for All in a conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash in mid-October. 

But other allies of Jackson say an overcautious campaign is impeding the Bernie Sanders progressive and stalwart labor champion from connecting with voters. “A lot of folks don’t know anything about him except that he’s a logger. He has a charming and funny side, and you don't get to see it,” says Betsy Sweet, an activist and political organizer who ran for U.S. Senate in 2020. “The D.C. folks are sure they know everything, and I feel like in so many of our national races they don’t listen to us and they screw it up.”

Jackson has a compelling working-class backstory. His mom was 16 when she had him in Aroostook County, on the rural northern tip of Maine. He grew up poor in Allagash, a frontier town near the Canadian border where he started logging at age 19, taking after his dad, his grandfather and his great-grandfather.

When Canadian loggers started crossing into Maine and taking work away from locals, he helped lead a blockade, driving his truck to the border to halt temporary workers from coming into the state. The protest made headlines but did little to change the situation, and a frustrated Jackson turned his attention to the state legislature. He first ran unsuccessfully as a Republican and eventually got elected in 2002 as an independent. He became a Democrat two years later and rose through the ranks to become Senate president. 

Over decades in state politics, Jackson’s opinions on abortion and LGBTQ rights have evolved. Sweet, who lobbied for women’s groups, recalled pushing him to back abortion-rights legislation in the state. “I think it finally clicked for him after us telling him abortion is health care. It’s not whether women are gonna have one, it’s whether low-income women have the same access as rich women.”

His reputation for having a gruff demeanor, Sweet says, is accurate, but attack ads that portray him as antagonistic toward women go too far. “He will go toe to toe with you. He’s not genteel. You know where you stand with him, but you work it out.”

A shade of that temper came out in the final debate before the election. Jackson told Collins to “shut up” after she accused a protester of being one of his supporters. “It was a stupid thing for him to say,” the Democrat who worked with Jackson in the state legislature says of the debate moment. “Collins is known for her decorum, her civility. He’s courting 55- to 65-year-old women who are all about not being talked down to.”

Maine’s population is the oldest in America and the race will likely come down to older, moderate voters who have split their ticket in past elections. Collins' campaign has argued Jackson has run to the left of the electorate, drawing liberal figures like Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to rally with him.

“That they are all campaigning in Maine for Troy Jackson tells voters exactly how he would govern,” Collins campaign spokesperson Blake Kernen said.

For all the debate about whether Jackson’s makeshift campaign has positioned him for victory, it will largely be Collins’ race to win or lose. A September CNN poll of voters backing Jackson found 29% said theirs was a vote for Jackson, while 71% said it was a vote against Collins. Her future in the Senate may not come down to Jackson at all but whether she gives voters enough confidence in what the next six years would look like.

“She’s got an amazing record in the past, but people need to hear from her what she’s gonna do in the future and what the game plan is,” Dutson, the GOP adviser, says. “They need to know, if we send Susan Collins back to Washington, how is that gonna help alleviate the anxiety this administration has been causing me right now?”

“I am here. With you.”

Venezuela’s popular opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado posted the message on social media platform X Sunday morning local time, announcing her return to the country after more than 10 months in exile.

Machado, who was briefly detained in January 2025 following a protest against autocratic then-President Nicolás Maduro’s swearing-in despite a dubious election victory, went into hiding in Venezuela and emerged in December that year in Norway. Since then, she has been fighting for a return to democracy in her own country, demanding that, following the extraordinary American military operation that captured Maduro, Venezuelans get to have free and fair elections.

The social media accounts of her political movement, Vente Venezuela, as well as her campaign, posted images and videos of Venezuelans crowding the streets of Caracas to welcome her return. The New York Times reported that Machado entered Venezuela from Colombia, citing two anonymized government officials.

https://x.com/ConVzlaComando/status/2114539789047517605

Edmundo González Urrutia, another key opposition figure, also posted on social media Sunday that Machado is “on Venezuelan soil” and that he would soon be with her “so that our country truly advances toward freedom.”

Machado’s return adds some urgency to the country’s democratic transition—which the interim Venezuelan government under acting President Delcy Rodríguez, as well as its apparent overseer, the U.S., have both promised. Rodríguez, who was formerly Maduro’s deputy, and U.S. President Donald Trump have both said that elections will be held in the country, but a date has yet to be finalized.

The 59-year-old Machado, meanwhile, has called for elections by July 2027, telling the Financial Times that there was “more than enough time” to prepare for one. She has also said she will contest the presidency. A majority of Venezuelans want her to be President, according to a poll from AtlasIntel and Bloomberg.

Following Maduro’s ouster, Venezuela’s highest court said Rodríguez’s interim presidential appointment could last for up to 90 days, with the National Assembly potentially extending her term for another 90. But the assembly, controlled by the ruling party, did not vote on extending her term, which officially expired in April.

It remains unclear how Machado could hasten elections, given the Venezuelan government is in talks with a different U.S.-backed faction of the opposition. A third round of talks ended this month without reaching a firm election schedule. Venezuelans have since grown impatient and have taken to the streets to protest the delays.

What the U.S. has said about Machado’s return

Asked about Machado’s return to Venezuela, Trump said Sunday he was unaware of it. “I think she's a very nice woman,” Trump told reporters. “She gave me her Nobel Prize, so how can I say anything else? And I hope she’s safe.”

Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal earlier this year in what appeared to be a push to hasten Venezuela's democratic transition. But since Maduro’s arrest and the U.S. elevation of a new Venezuelan government under Rodríguez, tensions between Trump’s Administration and Machado have increased.

The opposition leader has tried to return to the country multiple times, but she has claimed Venezuelan authorities have repeatedly blocked her. Machado has denied suggestions that the U.S. was blocking her return. But her insistence on returning reportedly roiled some in the White House who worry it could spark a political crisis.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the conditions that allowed Machado’s return to Venezuela were “the direct result of the U.S. supported reconciliation talks which has already seen hundreds of political prisoners freed and hundreds of political opposition figures return from exile.”

But Rubio also hinted that the U.S. expects no further interference in the ongoing discussions: “The United States expects the freedoms of all sectors of Venezuelan politics to continue to be respected. Likewise, we expect all political actors to support these talks which represent the best chance Venezuela has had in thirty years to peacefully achieve not just a free and fair election but an enduring democracy.”

Machado said earlier that, despite not being a part of the discussions between the Venezuelan government, legislative opposition, and the U.S., her movement will not hinder initiatives that “produce real progress.” 

The U.S. has argued that Venezuela must ensure political and economic stability before it can hold elections. But critics and other observers have pointed out that the Trump Administration’s approach has instead prioritized doing business with Venezuela over facilitating democratic transition—with Washington announcing a major oil deal with Caracas amid the talks.

“She’s a very nice woman,” Trump said of Machado Sunday. “But we’re doing really well in Venezuela.”

The next time someone does you a favor, take a minute to note how they respond to “thank you.” You’ll likely find that the traditional “you’re welcome” is fast fading and being replaced by “no problem” or “no worries.”

We often treat politeness as a set of rules that people either follow or ignore. But the rules themselves are changing.

In the time of Old English (5^th to 11^th centuries), acting according to one’s rank and station was simply expected. Linguistic analysis shows very direct request forms, for example, “Thou shalt do X,” rather than the more modern, “Would you mind doing X?” And routine thanking, or saying “you’re welcome,” would have seemed odd in a time when people simply did what was required.

When Norman French started to enter English around 1066, the idea of courteous behavior also entered the language. An example would be the move toward switching between “you” and “thou” to appropriately show respect or intimacy, modeled on the French tu/vous distinction.

This concept of courtesy was central to how one expressed gratitude and, by the time we arrived in the early modern era (the time of Shakespeare), thanking was firmly established. However, routinely responding to those thanks was not common. If uttered at all, we’d more often hear something like a deferential, “I am but your humble servant.”

In the 18^th century, elaborate complimenting routines became popular, and by the late 19th and early 20th century, English-speaking society had a greater focus on treating all people as equals. As a result, being aware of how one’s actions might impose upon others became increasingly important.

Requests that were once directly stated as imperatives were now couched with indirectness as merely suggestions or questions: “Shut the window,” became “Could you please shut the window?” And, in addition to saying “thanks,” responding with an acknowledgment of that thanks, such as “you’re welcome,” became routine.

This brings us to modern times. Today, “you’re welcome” is becoming less common. Instead, when someone says “thank you,” we reply with “not at all,” “no problem,” or “no worries.” This assures the person who expresses gratitude that no imposition was involved. In this way, we attempt to offset any social imbalance.  

As a result, Americans who say “no problem” and those who always respond with “you’re welcome” can tend to believe the other camp sounds rude. 

Those who prefer “no problem” often feel that “you’re welcome” has a condescending tone, while “you’re welcome” traditionalists feel like “no problem” suggests the favor could have been a problem. For instance, the sense that “you’re welcome” can have a bit of a smug, haughty tone has been played up by comedians like Will Ferrell in his 2009 Broadway show, You’re Welcome America, satirizing George W. Bush’s presidency.

Research confirms this shift toward expressions like “no problem” or “no worries” over “you’re welcome” is a generational one. In the norms of how we respond to thank you across generations, linguist Aaron Dinkin found that young Americans increasingly preferred “no problem” as the go-to polite response to “thank you.” Older speakers still felt “you’re welcome” was more appropriate, particularly when a favor required more than perfunctory gratitude.

So, the way someone responds to “thank you” is much more than a simple return on someone’s gratitude. These small words help us understand how politeness—and our expectations of one another—have changed over time.

Women are speaking more openly about periods, pregnancy, perimenopause, and menopause, bringing once-taboo topics into public conversation. Clinicians and health systems need to now connect these experiences with what the science is telling us about how they influence a woman’s cardiovascular health throughout her life.

A woman may see a gynecologist for her irregular periods, a therapist for her depression, and a primary care doctor or cardiologist for her high blood pressure. Each clinician may focus on an important concern. But what is often missing is a shared understanding of how those concerns fit together and what that means for her lifelong cardiovascular health. 

A narrow lens has too often been applied to women’s health, defining it as care of reproductive organs and pregnancy. Reproductive health is essential to a woman’s well-being, but women’s health is much broader. We now know that menstrual patterns, pregnancy, and menopause can provide important information about cardiovascular health. Our approach to care should reflect this.

These missed connections matter because cardiovascular disease is the greatest threat to women’s health today. Approximately 1 in 3 deaths in women are due to cardiovascular disease every year. Yet fewer than half of women knew that heart disease was the leading cause of death for women, according to a 2019 survey performed by the American Heart Association. 

As a preventive cardiologist and epidemiologist, I study how women’s life events shape cardiovascular disease risk. We now know that unique signals of cardiovascular risk in women can be identified years and decades before heart disease develops. The challenge is making sure that this information changes the care women receive.

This is what led the American Heart Association to bring together the American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. Our three-part series, published today in Circulation, establishes a new framework for cardiovascular health in girls and women. The papers and accompanying videos introduce the new Female Life Stage tool, provide clinical guidance, and outline how health systems can deliver coordinated care throughout life.   

This framework gives clinicians a shared approach to cardiovascular disease prevention across specialties, interconnected areas of health, and life stages.

What one clinician learns should inform the care a woman receives in different settings and from different clinicians. For example, pregnancy can act as a natural stress test, revealing cardiovascular risks that may otherwise go unrecognized. A history of preeclampsia should inform cardiovascular preventive care long after delivery. The 2026 Cardiovascular Kidney Metabolic Syndrome Guideline now explicitly recognizes pregnancy complications, as well as premature menopause, as one of the factors that can inform personalized prevention.

Menstrual cycle patterns can also provide information relevant to cardiovascular care. A first period before age 10, irregular menstrual cycles, or menopause at a younger age can each serve as signals of higher cardiovascular risk. In a study of more than 10,000 women that my colleagues and I recently published, menopause occurring naturally before age 40 was associated with an approximately 40% higher lifetime risk of coronary heart disease. 

Mental health is also linked to hormonal and cardiovascular health. Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) can frequently disrupt sleep, physical activity, and eating patterns, which are relevant to cardiovascular health. These symptoms are common, but being common does not make them inconsequential. Mood symptoms during the menopause transition likewise deserve assessment and treatment as part of comprehensive care. 

A woman and her care team need to anticipate that her health needs will change from adolescence through older adulthood. The framework defines four Female Life Stages: the transition around the first period, the years of ovarian cycling (including pregnancy), perimenopause, and postmenopause. It gives clinicians and patients a shared language for recognizing changing health needs so everyone can know what to expect, identifying cardiovascular risk earlier, and guiding prevention across a lifetime. 

Recognizing perimenopause as a distinct life stage acknowledges that its symptoms can disrupt daily life, persist for years, and deserve treatment. Hormone and nonhormonal treatments can help, with decisions guided by symptoms, age, cardiovascular and cancer history, and a woman’s preferences. The same visit offers an opportunity to assess cardiovascular disease risk and address changes in cholesterol and cardiometabolic health. 

Women may spend nearly 40% of their life in the postmenopause stage. Yet conversations of hormonal health and their enduring impact often end with the last period. Hormonal health history should continue to inform cardiovascular care. 

But documenting information in the medical record will not be enough. We also need to change how care is delivered.

An instructive historical example can be drawn from Vienna. In 1991, an art exhibition documented the daily lives of eight girls and women, including an eight-year-old, a student, a nurse, and a retiree. This resulted in the city incorporating women’s everyday needs into urban planning, including street lighting on walking routes for women’s safety.

Health care should apply this principle; women’s experiences should shape how care is organized and delivered. But this redesign must be paired with structural change that addresses the barriers, bias, and discrimination that contribute to symptoms being dismissed, delays in care, and unequal access to health care and treatment for women. 

A shared framework—like the one we developed—can support implementation of existing evidence, but we also need better evidence for women. In 1993, the NIH Revitalization Act made women’s inclusion in NIH-funded clinical research a requirement. Yet underrepresentation in research persists. A 2025 systematic review of cardiovascular trials registered from 2017 through 2023 found that women comprised 41% of participants but only 22% in trials studying acute coronary syndromes, including heart attacks. 

Women’s health research also remains underfunded, though there may be some recent signs of progress. In October, President Trump signed an executive order to create a new division for women’s health in the National Institutes of Health, but no funding has been allocated at this time.  

These efforts are part of a larger movement that builds on decades of public advocacy for women’s health. Since its launch in 2004, the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign has helped bring women’s cardiovascular health into public view. Melinda French Gates’ investments through Pivotal are directing resources toward understudied areas in women’s health. Katie Couric and Dawn Porter’s forthcoming documentary “HORMONAL!” will add to this momentum by sharing women’s experiences. 

Girls and women represent half the population, and every clinician, every specialty, and every health system has a role to play in their health. Women can do much to protect their health, but they should not have to connect the dots in their care alone. 

Wendy Tan White leads robotics software and AI company Intrinsic, which is focused on making industrial robots easier to use and train. Intrinsic initially sat outside of Google at Alphabet, as part of its “Other Bets” group, which includes businesses such as Waymo. But in February this year, Intrinsic was brought into Google as a separate entity, working closely with DeepMind and using Google’s Gemini models and cloud services. 

In September, Intrinsic announced that it would be making its basic software—needed to build and operate industrial robots—freely available, or open source. The aim is to give smaller manufacturers the ability to use robots without having to spend vast sums on custom technology. In the longer term, Google and Intrinsic hope to become the providers of the platform that powers what gets built on top of that software. Tan White sees this as the “Android for robotics and AI.”

Tan White has experience as an entrepreneur, investor and operator. She co-founded U.K. website-building platform Moonfruit, later becoming a partner at the British Growth Fund’s £2.5 billion growth capital fund, and general partner at Entrepreneur First, a global tech talent investor in AI, robotics and biotech. Tan White was then recruited as a vice president at Alphabet’s X, the moonshot factory, and in 2021 launched Intrinsic, which spun out of X. 

She spoke with TIME about how she sees robotics helping small manufacturers, Intrinsic’s relationship with Google, and what skills young people need in the AI age.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me about the history of Intrinsic.

The manufacturing process hasn't really changed much for many years [since the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the Henry Ford model]. And the problem with it is, you’ve got to make it cost effective. It has to be high volume, and it has to be very similar in product. And so, from a customer's point of view, you can't always have something very specific customized to you at a price point you can afford. And also, from a production point of view, the lines are very brittle and very standardized. One of the things we were looking at is if you brought in robotics, could one let's say robot cell do more than one task? Could you get a robot cell that's more intelligent to make a phone and a server and it's not it's not as sophisticated as this yet, but maybe a whole other type of product in one line. Could you customize it, and could you only actually build a few items? The reason that's important is you don't waste inventory; you actually build what you really need. And a factory can actually effectively be much more flexible. The other advantage to something like that might be there are certain tasks that humans do in these line production, things that actually they shouldn't do. There are dangerous tasks. Through COVID, a lot of skilled labor workers in manufacturing retired because they don't want to do those jobs. In food production, there are some people who have to sit there deboning chicken. It's not a job humans should be doing, and there are just lots of dangerous and dirty and very repetitive jobs like that. 

So, I think with robotics and AI, what that brings is the ability to have much more flexible making and production more intelligently, so actually that's really what most of my team cared about. How can you democratize access to that type of technology and tooling so that both small and big businesses can have access to it? How do you make sure humans don't have to do those sorts of jobs? But also how could you bring some of this manufacturing back more locally as well, because otherwise, what we also do is we ship a load of raw materials to China, build it there because it's cheaper, and bring it back again. That seems like a real waste from both an economic and climate point of view, but also, it's a crazy supply chain to be relying on. So at that insight, actually, we proved that we could do cell and robotics with AI that could be more flexible and also could be a smaller unit or even in a small town or a small warehouse, but also could be used in a modular way in larger factories too. So that was the insight. We did a prototype, and then Alphabet got behind and said, "Actually, we think you're ready.” I think the way Google saw it was, it was like the Android for robotics and AI. They've been very good with innovating Android as a platform to democratize building applications for mobile phones. So I wanted to do the same. 

Intrinsic was brought into Google in February. What impact has that had?

The reason we were brought back in is that robotics and AI come very front and center. So far, it's been about generative AI and agentic tools, but it's still very much in the digital world only. So it's for video, for images, for language. The next bastion is what we would call physical AI, which is: Can you bring the same ability to create intelligence around vision and touch and mobility, which we take for granted as humans. And that's what robotics really is. What we can do with AI now is add vision, touch, and mobility to robotics, and democratizing that, making it open in a software sense, is something we had proven we could do, and in a way, given Gemini and given where Google is going, it was a very natural way for them to go. There's going to now be a platform for AI into the physical, and they thought we would become a very core part of that. We had a lot of other partners, so we ended up doing a joint venture with Foxconn, the biggest electronics manufacturer in the world, with collaboration with Nvidia, and a lot of people started wanting to invest in us, and I think Alphabet felt this should be a core part of our next generation of software for physical AI, so they brought us back in. It's been helpful because we work very closely with DeepMind as well. It's given us more certainty to really focus on the democratization of the tooling rather than worrying about somebody wanting to invest in us. So far so good, but it's obviously psychologically a change, I think.

How does that change how you approach things like day-to-day decision making?

They've actually unusually kept us separate, so in a way, we've been brought in a bit more like DeepMind was when it was first acquired, and they've kept me CEO. They've kept our brand as Intrinsic. We've got two buildings of our own that are not in the core campus. So we have our own identity, and the reason they've done that is they know that we're still scaling and incubating. And if you just try and squeeze us in, it's a back to innovator’s dilemma. You put us back into a standard product area within Google. It may not get the airtime it needs to breathe and to keep innovating. Now we're innovating the business itself, not just the technology. So I think that's been really helpful.

But the advantage we do have is we have much more line of sight to the senior level itself, and so they understand what we're trying to do, and we get decisions made faster, and that's been really helpful for us. The flip side is we also have to consider now that if we're representing part of the Google family as such, we can't just run. We can't just think “oh, we're just a startup, we should just take the risk and break something over here.” We actually have to consider the impacts that might have as well. 

What will be the initial tasks that we will see your technology being used for?

There's a lot of hype at the moment around [whether it’s] going to be humanoids being at home with you. The thing about robots and AIs is the development of their senses so that they can be adaptive and safe within the home—there's still innovation to go there. So we made a choice to do this within manufacturing because it's a semi-constrained environment, and they've already got some understanding around safety and how to organize that. So we started there. Smaller machine workshops [that] do things like make a part of a phone, they'll use a CNC [computer numeral control] machine to do that. Typically, they haven't been able to afford things like robotics and AI, and we've already started working with a couple of different companies in the U.S., machine shops who effectively need their machines tending because it's a quite a boring job for humans to do, but also some of them have so much demand now for things like computers, the servers that produce the processing for the AI chips, and then they get put into data centers. So increasingly, that some of the machine shops in the U.S. are being asked to build component parts of these machines. They don’t have the skilled labor anymore to do it. They don't necessarily have the space to do it. [We provide] small cells for them, so that they can actually run an extra production run overnight themselves, without that labor. So suddenly they can meet that demand. 

But what's interesting is the same cell can do more than one type of task. It can tend a machine, but it can also inspect [a part] and do other tasks. So getting something that's cost effective and able to be flexible for a small machine shop like that is a game changer for them. It's a platform, so the same cell can be configured through software to do a different task, and so you don't have the cost of actually building another cell. We've also found we can plug them together and orchestrate them, and if you build up a whole set of flexible cells like this, you have a whole factory, and that's what we're doing with Foxconn. So the same cells that are going into small machine shops are now also able to go into whole factories as well, with the same platform and the same sort of structure, and that's really where we're starting to democratize it. So, the sort of task we're talking about is machine tending, polishing. We can look at inspecting. Some of the more innovative stuff we're looking at is things like assembly. So the thing that robots and AI haven't traditionally been able to do so far today is dexterous tasks. It's what we're good at, humans, like plugging things together, inserting things, screwing things. All those sorts of tasks are now more possible with AI, and so we're adding that in too

Can you tell me more about the Nvidia partnership?

With Nvidia, they do a lot of work in their site called Omniverse, which is simulation. So we're working with them and looking at how we do more of the orchestration of the cells I was talking about in factory. They also have some what we would call specific things like how do you grasp something? The Gemini team also have some of those. We are an agnostic platform. So we're a bit like Lego. We can wrap everything into a skill. So we can take a grasping skill from Nvidia or a grasping skill from Gemini, or we have some ourselves. So we have a world-class vision model at the moment that you can basically see with it very quickly, can look at a new part, see where it is, and pick it up. That sort of thing wasn't possible in the past. We can wrap those in skills and add them to a platform, so that people effectively can assemble skills. Like, can you pick this up? Can you move it here? Can you plug it together? All those become like Lego bricks within our platform, and we can use it on different types of hardware. So, we're working with several partners now. Nvidia, but also our own team, Gemini, and many other startups now doing these different models. We can also wrap different pieces of hardware like that too. So we've got a big partnership with the biggest robot manufacturer in the U.S., called FANUC [headquartered] in Japan. We've been able to add software and AI capability to their robots, which is the vision,  touch ability to start to do things like insertion assembly that they've never been able to do before. So, in a way, we're a massive enabler. We wanted to make this open to many different types of people to access, and we also have a user interface layer that makes it easier for people who are more like operators to be able to use our tooling. This was again the democratization point. If you can get a standard operator within a factory or a machine shop to really use our tooling, it's a bit like using apps on phones. They can do things they've never been able to do before either. You give them access to that technology, so we're trying to provide that too at the moment.

Do you have any specific rules or guardrails around what your products can't or shouldn’t be used for, like defense?

We've always taken quite a strong view on where we can make the biggest difference and I think when I'm in the way, I'm mostly interested in helping the land of smaller suppliers. How can they actually have access to this?

Whether it's U.S., Germany, Japan, we work in different countries in that way. If you take Germany’s economy, most of it is driven by the Mittelstand, which is that whole supply chain machine shop group in the middle suppliers, but we're also trying to understand what is needed at the bigger factory end as well. That's why we've got a partnership with Foxconn. But we just work in the factories right now in the U.S. with that to learn how to do that. I think we've stayed there because there's enough of a need around production. I think people forget just how hard it is to meet demand. In the U.S. 53% of skilled labor jobs are not fillable anymore, and the young are not coming into it, and the old have retired. A lot of what we do is more in that educational space. What's interesting is the next gen will come back in if they believe the tooling is more sophisticated, more like an application or it's got AI, and you get that a lot with the mom and pop shops because often they're family-owned businesses and they're finding they can't get their kids back in it [if] it looks really old-fashioned. Whereas, as soon as you bring a bit more technology in again, they'll come back in, so we're focusing more at that end of it, to be honest.

There's been a lot of conversation around how AI is going to impact the labor market, particularly at the entry level, and what skills people should be learning. How would you advise a young person?

My son's actually 21. He's an industrial designer, which, if I'm honest, is a great place to go, because he can code, he's a good engineer too, and he chose industrial design because he wanted to make, physically. And  the design thinking process is really about your unique take on a problem solve or a product design. And actually, I think in a world where [AI can do] the coding for you, the design thinking process and the editing and the curation is going to become more important as the direction, to some extent. I think that matters for all the next gen. If that tooling is available to you, your unique taste and ability to direct it is going to become more important. And do you know that process of how to make that consideration in your own mind? I think that's going to happen to every industry. I think taste-making is going to become the thing to really hone. In my daughter's case, she's gone for neuroscience. So, same thing. She could have gone blank coding, and my husband and I encouraged her to go more down a creative route, again, because she's gone down a more science creative route, which is, how do you do the breakthrough thinking? So I would say for all the next gen, it's more about what do you love and are you great at, is what's going to become super valuable because that's all there's going to be, in some ways. It's what makes us human, and I think we're building things for other humans. That's the other thing people forget. What other humans that are interested in buying—things [or] having experiences—that resonate for them, that somebody else has designed. So that's what makes the connection.

There's been discussion about women lagging behind in terms of AI adoption. What do you make of that conversation?

I've been in tech my whole career. When I did computer science, [it was] with seven women on our course at Imperial College London, out of 120—it's got better. It is important, though, that I actually think this new world should suit women. I don't want to overgeneralize but we are very multi-hybrid in our skills, and often what happens is that we put and integrate things better together. Coding, for example, or pure technology is often quite focused, and sometimes the women on my team find that either too low level or they tend to like to do broader [work], so they make great product managers. I think we've got a media marketing problem in really putting it out there. I genuinely think women are going to be very good at using the tooling. 

The way I tend to use it now is, it's almost like a collaborator. So it's somebody. I tend to solve problems by talking to people, interacting. So what I'll do now is use an agent or something to actually just talk to it. And I test it too, like another person—I know another person has a perspective, I think you're an interesting person, I know you've got this information, I don't necessarily think you know everything, and that you're right. So what I want is a sort of debate. So, I think we can have better tools where it's more collaborative interaction. I think we'll all get more out of it, and I think then there'd be better adoption. I think the user experience side of it is going to become critical. The adoption won't be there otherwise, but I think it's coming.

Is there anything that you definitely wouldn't use AI for?

I'd never use it as a definitive answer. I know there's a lot of debate about critical thinking at the moment, but, even when I talk to one of my mentors, a human being, I will take the information and still try and think about it within my own context, and is it actually relevant or valid? Same thing here. Don't think it's a definitive answer. I think you need to use your own wisdom and brain and intuition if this is OK or not. I. I think it's the same as normal life. It's just a tool, right? So don't do anything with it that you don't feel fits with your moral compass. Just don't do it. I think these things are always going to be challenging. So, what's possible with it? I would just make sure you use it as an enabler, stay creative with it so that you don't sort of atrophy your own brain.

You've worn many hats over the course of your career. What are some of the most important lessons that you've learned about leadership?

I probably matured in that, because I was a CEO at 28 the first time round, I think I was hungrier then, and it kept me moving. But now I'm more patient, and I'm better at trying to get a full picture of information before I make a decision, but within constraint. So, one of the things about having done startups is you learn that some decisions are like 48:52 probability. You make a decision, that's your job as a leader, but I've got much better at fast trying to really get as wide a purview as I can in the time constraint I have before I make that choice. And then when I make that choice, I make it knowing that I may not have all the information. And so I'm also prepared that if something turns out not to be right later, to adapt to that, iterate on it, and be OK if I'm wrong [and] to admit it. I think a lot of people struggle in leadership or don't know how to own it and then to iterate, and that can cause more damage over time, or it can actually slow down, ultimately. What that's about is, you need to learn to drop your inner ego, for the outcome.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been re-elected to a historic fourth term as Brazil’s President after a tight race with far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President and Donald Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.

Lula won with 51.8% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 48.2%, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court announced. Sunday’s vote was a rematch after neither reached an outright majority in the first round on Oct. 4. Lula had trailed then, becoming now the first presidential candidate since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 to finish second in the initial vote and win the run-off.

The election also marks a remarkable win for the global left, as it bucks a trend of right-wing electoral victories across Latin America. Lula will serve for another four-year term beginning on Jan. 5, 2027.

“I want to thank the generosity of the Brazilian youth who took to the streets, who went to the streets to defend democracy,” Lula said in his victory speech on Sunday night. “I want to thank the elderly. I saw scenes today of people being carried by their grandchildren to vote, people unable to move around, people with cancer and other illnesses. And people went to vote because we managed to convince them that voting was very important to ensure democracy in the country.”

“This election was a defeat for denialism, a defeat for lies,” he continued.

Bolsonaro, however, said late on Sunday that he would not concede defeat to Lula and would seek an annulment of the result. The senator for Rio de Janeiro said a ruling by the Supreme Court to extend voting for two hours, citing public transport issues, was “unacceptable.”

Nevertheless, several liberal leaders around the world have already lauded the result.

“Long live democracy, the people of Brazil won,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney posted, “The relationship between Canada and Brazil has flourished under our partnership. Let’s seize this opportunity to make it even stronger, together — to create major new trade opportunities, protect ​the environment, and build greater prosperity for both our peoples.”

Several U.S. lawmakers have also congratulated Lula on the result, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Ro Khanna (D, Calif.), California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

A former metalworker and union leader, Lula co-founded the Workers’ Party in 1980 and continues to serve as its honorary president. He served as Brazil’s President between 2003 to 2011, before he was jailed from 2018 to 2019 on corruption convictions that were later annulled. He went on to defeat incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, winning his third presidential term.

Lula’s campaign focused on labor reform, welfare benefits, and affordability. At a time when public debt as a share of GDP has risen to its highest level since the pandemic, Lula cited his achievements in lowering poverty rates, as well as reducing unemployment, illiteracy, and deforestation to record lows. He pledged to make public transit free on the weekends, a program that would need congressional approval. He also increased benefits under his signature Bolsa Família program and championed a landmark constitutional amendment shortening the working week, which Congress approved.

Bolsonaro, meanwhile, campaigned on harsher criminal penalties, tougher policing, lower taxes, and cuts to government spending. His campaign highlighted a corruption investigation involving Lula’s son and a pension fraud scandal that spanned both Lula’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s administrations.

Bolsonaro also called for amnesty for his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest after being found guilty of plotting a coup to overturn his defeat in the 2022 election.

In his election night speech, Lula pledged to strengthen federal involvement in public security, expand education and healthcare, and develop Brazil’s technological and artificial intelligence industries.

“This country will not be built by me,” he said. “But by you.”

A blow to the right

Lula’s win pumps the brakes on the broader political shift towards the right in Latin America. Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, and Chile elected right-wing presidents in recent election cycles, reversing an earlier “pink tide” of left-wing governments.

Lula’s victory also denies Trump another political ally in Latin America, which include Argentinian President Javier Milei and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

Bolsonaro had portrayed himself as an ally of Trump, courting closer ties with Washington and backing U.S. terrorist designations for Brazil’s major criminal gangs. Reuters reported on Saturday, citing current and former U.S. officials, that two U.S. State Department officials had pushed sanctions and other measures intended to weaken Lula and help return the Bolsonaros to power. The State Department did not comment specifically on the reported efforts but told Reuters that “all actions taken by the United ⁠States against narco-traffickers and to protect free speech are to defend the rights and lives of the American people. The Brazilian people have the right to choose their leaders through free and fair elections.”

Trump previously expressed support for Jair Bolsonaro and labelled Lula a “radical left lunatic” during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election. He also criticized the criminal prosecution of Bolsonaro, calling it a “witch hunt” and demanding it end.

Trump has not reacted to the election results as of early Monday. After Bolsonaro led in the first round on Oct. 4, Trump called the result “close, but a very, very big victory.” His son, Donald Trump Jr., posted earlier criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision to extend voting hours and what he described as the lack of American mainstream media coverage of it.

Lula had warned that Bolsonaro would surrender Brazil’s sovereignty to Trump.

Lula has publicly sparred with Trump on multiple occasions. He accused the Trump Administration of interfering in Brazil’s election and imposing punitive tariffs on Brazil under alleged pressure from the Bolsonaros. The Bolsonaro family and the U.S. State Department denied the allegations.

At the same time, Lula has pursued closer ties with China, Brazil’s largest trading partner and the U.S.’s geopolitical rival, although he rejected subordination and said Brazil was not choosing between the two countries.

“This country will not accept being anyone’s backyard,” Lula said on Sunday night.

Analysts, however, warned that Lula’s political influence could wane despite his re-election. Earlier this month, Brazil elected its most conservative National Congress since the 1980s. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) and allied parties could control majorities in both chambers, with more than 280 of 513 seats in the lower house and up to 50 of 81 seats in the Senate.

That could make it difficult for Lula to pass his legislative agenda, analysts said.

But Lula shrugged off those concerns and promised to work with the more conservative Congress to govern for all Brazilians.

“The day after tomorrow, the 27th, I turn 81 years old, and I want to make a commitment in front of the press and in front of you,” Lula said. “I will have the best term a President has ever had in the history of this country”

William Diaz has a mantra: His only political party is his Venezuelan community.

He doesn’t abide by strict partisan rules, and doesn't believe in only voting for Democrats or Republicans. He supported Republicans Sen. Rick Scott and Secretary of State Marco Rubio when they were running for office in Florida, where Diaz has lived for 37 years.

For these midterm elections, however, the Orlando resident hopes to make a clear statement: He does not support President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and is unhappy with how Republican-backed initiatives have affected his community.

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“I voted already, and what I did when I was voting and when I was with my ballot, I was really thinking and praying for all those that has no voice, those that can not vote, those immigrants that are right now victim of actions on the streets,” Diaz tells TIME, referring to Trump’s mass deportation agenda and the expansive influence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “My people have been suffering that much.”

Diaz is one of more than 2.6 million people who have already cast ballots in Florida, either by mail or through in-person early voting, according to state figures released Sunday. In-person early voting began in some counties Oct. 19 and expanded statewide Oct. 24.

Diaz’s community is one part of a Florida Latino electorate with varied national origins and political loyalties. Taken together, however, Latino voters are a swing vote in several closely watched races statewide. They were key to Trump’s Florida victory in 2024, with 56% supporting him over Kamala Harris, according to the 2024 American Electorate Voter Poll.

But new polls ahead of Election Day suggest that Latino support for the GOP may be on shaky ground—a shift that could put Republicans to the test in Florida and shape the political landscape beyond November.

Why Florida’s Latino voters are frustrated with Trump

Dissatisfaction among Florida’s Latino voters reflects a broader national mood, according to Stephanie Valencia, a co-founder of Equis Research, an organization that studies Latino voting behavior.

Concerns about the economy and immigration enforcement tactics are fueling dissatisfaction among Latino voters, who “make up a huge part of the electorate in Florida,” she says, pointing out that both of these issues are “disproportionately impacting” them.

A Univision/YouGov poll, conducted Oct. 2–15, showed that 41% of registered Latino voters in Florida were “very or somewhat worried” that they, a family member, or someone close could be detained or otherwise directly affected by immigration enforcement, compared with 27% of Florida voters overall. 

The same poll showed that 4 in 10 Latino voters in the state felt that their finances had worsened over the past year, with 70% disapproving of Trump’s handling of the cost of living in the U.S. That stands in comparison to a 63% disapproval rate from Florida voters overall.

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For Johanna Chavez, a Dominican immigrant living in Kissimmee, Florida, the economy is top of mind.

“Many people are concerned about the economy and the price of gasoline … and then there’s the cost of rent, it’s become incredibly, overwhelmingly high,” Chavez, who speaks Spanish, tells TIME through a translator. “All the things they promised would be done—nothing has happened.”

In the past few years, Chavez says it has felt like the United States has started “regressing,” and the opportunities she was looking for when she arrived here have not materialized in the way she had hoped.

“It’s starting to feel just like the situation back in my home country, the Dominican Republic,” she says. “We all came here hoping for change, seeking a better life, but it’s ending up being the same thing all over again. Things just aren’t what they’re supposed to be.”

Jared Nordlund, the Florida State Advocacy Director at UnidosUS, the largest nonprofit Latino rights organization in the U.S., says this is a common refrain among Floridian Latinos; people are upset over how the economy has been affected by tariffs and the war in Iran. Florida was hit particularly hard by rising gas prices after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz squeezed the global energy supply, he says.

“Florida is not a state friendly for public transportation, so people are highly reliant on the cars, and so what they would be paying for food now is having to kind of get broke between … paying to get the gas and then going to get food,” Nordlund says.

The question now is whether that dissatisfaction will translate into votes against Republicans—and whether it will be enough to tip the state’s close races.

Trump’s declining Latino support puts Florida Republicans on notice

Trump’s approval rating has plummeted with Latino voters in Florida, dropping from 58% approval at the start of his term to 36% ahead of midterm elections, according to Equis Research.

According to an AP-NORC poll from October, about 6 in 10 Latino voters disapprove of how Trump is handling the presidency, and more than 7 in 10 disapprove of how he is handling the economy. 

A Pew Research Center poll found that Trump’s job approval rating among Latino voters dropped from 38% in February 2025 to 24% in September and October. Of those who backed him in the last election, approval dropped to 57%—down from 93% in early 2025.

The shift may be resonating with Republicans like Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, who is seeking re-election in Florida’s 27th District in Miami-Dade—a majority Latino district that Trump carried by some 15 points in 2024. She publicly broke with Trump in her campaign and criticized his immigration policies.

In one ad in September, Salazar said that Trump has “gone too far" with his deportation agenda.

“In July, 50% of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record,” she notes in the ad.

“Be careful what your advisers are telling you about immigration policy,” Salazar continues, addressing Trump. “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

Why Latino frustration may not translate into Democratic votes

Guillermo Grenier, a Cuban American professor of sociology at Florida International University (FIU), agrees that many Latino voters are “ticked off” at Trump.

“The population, if you look at the whole Latino conglomerate, is turned off pretty strongly with Trump,” he says.

But South Florida’s Latino electorate is unique; Grenier points out that the state is home to 1.9 million Cuban Americans—the largest concentration in the United States. 

As a voting bloc, the community has significant sway. In 2024, FIU’s Cuba poll found that 68% of likely Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade County supported Trump, compared to 23% for Harris—representing his highest-recorded support level in the poll's history.

A shift away from Republicans among Cuban American voters could therefore have significant consequences in South Florida. But disillusionment doesn’t always turn into action, according to Grenier. 

“I think a lot of Cubans are pissed off at Trump, but they're still Republicans,” he says.

The Democratic Party’s response to this potential opening may unfold over several election cycles.

“Democrats are going to be in a probationary period with Latinos and with all voters, quite frankly, on whether they can deliver or not,” Valencia says. “One election is not durable support among a particular group.”

The electorate’s age also matters to its long-term political influence, says Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida. “Latinos are much younger than the rest of the population in the United States.”

He points out that voter turnout “is highly correlated with age” and expects Latino participation to increase as younger voters grow older. In his assessment, that could reshape the electoral map beyond Florida.

“Hispanics are getting old enough so that their turnout rates are going to start increasing, and that's going to have like profound consequences on American politics,” he says. “A state like Texas is now going to be purple, and some other states with large Hispanic populations are going to start trending even further away from the Republicans.”

Both Valencia and Grenier suggest that it will come down to Democrats proving that they are willing to reinvest in Florida.

What are the key races to watch in Florida?

There are several key races at stake in Florida. Although the state has leaned reliably red for the past three election cycles, Democrats are investing late in the race through campaigning and financing. 

Florida Democrats posted a larger monthly net gain in active registered voters than Republicans, according to figures the party highlighted Oct. 1. The Florida Democratic Party touted the gains as a sign of its growing base in the state.

“We’ve spent years rebuilding this party from the ground up. Our organizers are in communities year-round, our volunteers are knocking doors across this state, and Democrats are having real conversations with Floridians about what’s at stake,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in an October statement. “The momentum is real.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis is term-limited and cannot run for re-election, leaving the role open for Byron Donalds, the Republican candidate who has been endorsed by Trump, and David Jolly, who is running as a Democrat after leaving the GOP in 2018. 

A poll released Oct. 21 by the Public Opinion Research Lab (PORL) at the University of North Florida (UNF) found that Donalds leads 49% to 47%—within the poll's almost 3-percentage-point margin of error.

Latino voters could be important to Jolly’s chances. The Univision/YouGov poll found that they favored him over Donalds, 48% to 43%, even as Donalds led 50% to 42% among Florida voters overall.

Democrats are taking note. Weeks after Jolly beseeched the Democratic Party to send money to his campaign, the Democratic Governors Association announced Oct. 20 that it will invest $1 million to help close the narrowing gap in the weeks before Election Day.

That trend follows in certain congressional races downballot. 

A September poll found Salazar leading Democratic challenger Eliott Rodriguez, a former local news anchor, by just 1 point.

Angie Nixon, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is an underdog for Senate, taking on Republican incumbent Sen. Ashley Moody. A recent UNF poll has Moody leading by 49% to 45%, halving the advantage she had in July.

National Democratic leaders and allies have made the trip to Florida to bolster these close races. 

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic ally, rallied in Tampa for Nixon on Oct. 17. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries campaigned with Rodriguez on Oct. 16; they held a campaign event at a Cuban coffee shop and bakery.

The decision received some blowback, with one conservative Cuban influencer taking to Instagram to slam the business for hosting Jeffries. He argued that associating with the Democrats equated to supporting socialism.

For Grenier, the incident shows that Democrats have some serious work to do to gain trust in Florida—and while it might be “too late” to invest in candidates in this election, the party can lay the groundwork for 2028 and beyond.

He said that if Democrats want to build on the momentum after the midterms, they can’t get “gun shy.”

“This new beachhead that [Democrats] are trying to establish is the way to go for the next elections,” Grenier says. 

“You know, it was 10 years of investing before Republicans flipped the state in 1996,” he continues. “So, they need to just keep it up, and have national leaders support local leaders.”

McDonald observes a "shifting democracy" and believes the GOP will continue to face new challenges when it comes to remaining competitive with Latino voters. He says: “The Republican Party is going to have to adjust.”

Gadi Eisenkot’s office is small and sparsely furnished. There are no medals on display, no photographs with foreign dignitaries or political luminaries, none of the trappings of a decorated general who rose to become chief of staff of Israel’s military. The space, tucked inside a commercial building in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon, is conspicuously devoid of ostentation.

Beside his desk sit three photographs. One is of his son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in Dec. 2023, two months after the war began. Another is a family portrait taken during a visit to Washington, D.C., years earlier, a picture of a family still whole, before the war shattered it. The third shows Gal next to one of his closest friends from their military unit, who was also killed in combat. “He was a settler,” Eisenkot says of his son’s friend. The image conveys a snapshot of contemporary Israel: the son of a centrist military commander and a young man from a West Bank settlement, products of different worlds, serving and dying alongside one another. 

As we speak, Eisenkot, dressed in his trademark black polo and black pants, pauses to pick up the photographs. He recalls the days after his son’s death. After three nights of sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, he left his grieving family to attend a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. “I decided to go forward,” he says.

Now Eisenkot hopes to move not only himself forward but his country. The former general has emerged as a leading challenger to Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Polls suggest a close contest, with Eisenkot seeking to assemble a coalition capable of ending Netanyahu’s rule three years after he presided over the worst security failure in Israel’s history, launched the war in Gaza, and led the country into deepening international isolation.

Eisenkot has cultivated a reputation for integrity, competence, and personal rectitude, forging relationships across Israel’s fractured political spectrum. But perhaps his most powerful political asset is his devastating personal loss. In a country scarred by the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed, Eisenkot’s grief is familiar to countless Israelis. His effort to persevere mirrors a nation’s struggle.

The Oct. 27 election will be more than a referendum on Netanyahu. It will test whether Israelis are prepared to chart a different course after three years of bloodshed, recriminations, and cultural fracture. The country is deeply polarized, increasingly castigated by the rest of the world, and confronting a resurgence of antisemitism. Voters will determine not only who governs Israel but what kind of nation Israel will become—and whether its next leader can begin to heal the divisions that have left the world’s only Jewish state facing one of the gravest crises in its history.

Netanyahu, of course, can never be counted out. The consummate political survivor, he has weathered scandals, electoral defeats, and corruption charges. His credibility has suffered, but many Israelis still regard him as the only leader who can protect them in a dangerous region. Eisenkot could assemble a coalition with other opposition figures, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan. Netanyahu would depend on the far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose ultra-nationalist politics have found a receptive audience among younger right-wing Israelis.

Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system offers no guarantee of a decisive outcome. Negotiations could drag on for weeks, or fail altogether, sending Israelis back to the polls. Eisenkot tells me he will not serve in a unity government with Netanyahu under any circumstances. He has framed his ambitions around nothing less than the sustenance of the Zionist enterprise: the ability of Jews to live safely in a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. In his telling, that means confronting the threat from Iran; restoring Israel’s standing in the world; preserving the country’s character as a Jewish democracy; and finding an accommodation with the Palestinians, who lay claim to the same land and have their own aspirations to self-determination. 

“What holds the country together is the Jewish and democratic ethos of the majority of Israelis,” says Yossi Klein Halevi, a bestselling Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “That's what we're going to have to try to repair. That is really what Eisenkot is offering the country.”

For Eisenkot, the challenge is not merely to replace Netanyahu but to lead Israel beyond the trauma that has consumed it since Oct. 7. He sees a country caught between the imperative to protect itself and the need to recover the democratic values, national solidarity, and international legitimacy that are essential to its survival. “I feel like it’s a historic mission—to save the state of Israel,” he says, invoking his son and the many others who died defending the nation.  “We owe it to them to be worthy of the sacrifice they made.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, Eisenkot awoke shortly after 6 a.m., stirred by nothing more than his circadian rhythm. When he turned on the television, he saw the first images of a catastrophe unfolding a short drive south of his home. Thousands of Hamas-led militants were pouring into southern Israel by land, air, and sea. They rampaged through kibbutzim and the streets of Sderot, descended on the Nova music festival, where they murdered civilians, raped women, desecrated the bodies of the dead,  and dragged hundreds of hostages back into Gaza. Many filmed themselves carrying out the atrocities, celebrating the carnage as it unfolded. Desperate Israelis called the authorities, pleading for help that would not arrive for hours. By the time security forces regained control, entire communities had been devastated by the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

Eisenkot’s son Gal, 25, was staying at the family home in Herzliya, outside of Tel Aviv, rather than his apartment near Tel Aviv University, where he was studying bioinformatics. He had come home for the holiday of Simchat Torah. Eisenkot woke him. “Gal, come to see the TV,” he said. “There are trucks of Hamas inside Sderot. This means war. Where is your military equipment?”

Gal had completed his compulsory service and was now a reservist, trained as a combat medic. Eisenkot drove him to his unit’s base, where lines of cars were already forming as reservists converged. “I knew right away that Israel, that the world, would never be the same,” Eisenkot says. 

Four days later, with a ground invasion of Gaza looming, Netanyahu asked Eisenkot to join a small war cabinet. Eisenkot had served under Netanyahu as chief of the general staff from Feb. 2015 to Jan. 2019, but the two men were now political adversaries. Netanyahu had hoped to project unity to a divided public, much of which had come to distrust or despise him. After months of mass demonstrations against his efforts to curtail the power of the judiciary, he sought to rally the country behind the coming war.

One of Eisenkot’s first priorities in the war cabinet was to prevent the opening of a second front against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group in Lebanon. Some of Netanyahu’s senior ministers, particularly Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, favored launching a preemptive offensive against Hezbollah, despite objections from the Biden Administration. Eisenkot argued that Israel needed to concentrate its military resources on defeating Hamas in the south before embarking on another major conflict. On that question, he prevailed.

On another matter, one he considered even more urgent, Netanyahu was less receptive. Hamas had abducted 251 people on Oct. 7, and Eisenkot believed securing their release should take precedence over a full-scale military campaign. It was, in his view, a fundamental obligation of the state, part of the covenant between a country and its citizens. Once Israel plunged into a prolonged ground war, he feared, the prospects of recovering the hostages alive would diminish. “My idea was to do the hostage deal, and after that, defeat Hamas,” Eisenkot tells me.

Netanyahu chose a different course. Israel launched a ground invasion following an extensive aerial bombardment of Hamas’s military infrastructure, including its vast network of subterranean tunnels. Hamas had embedded military facilities and weapons in densely populated areas, deliberately exposing civilians to grave danger. The military campaign that ensued has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. 

Two months into the war, Eisenkot suffered a catastrophe of his own. He was at a military headquarters, studying a satellite map showing the positions of Israeli battalions near some of the fiercest fighting in Gaza. Fifteen minutes later, a major general who had once served under his command approached him.

“Gadi, come to me,” the officer said. “Gal is critically injured. Go home”

Eisenkot had spent more than four decades in the Israeli military. He knew what those words meant. If his son were still alive, he would have been told to go to the hospital, not home. “I understood he was dead,” he tells me. 

Gal died in combat alongside his friend Eyal Berkowitz, a young man from a West Bank settlement. It was Berkowitz whose photograph Eisenkot had shown me in his office, standing beside Gal. 

Thousands attended Gal’s funeral, which was broadcast on national television. Across the country, Israelis watched one of their most decorated commanders mourn the loss of his own son. Eisenkot delivered a eulogy, his voice trembling. “I promise you that we will continue to be a united and happy family, so that your sacrifice and that of the other fallen will not be in vain and that we will be worthy of it,” he said. “I salute you, beloved son.” 

Three days later, Eisenkot returned to Netanyahu’s war cabinet. He watched as Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war turned Israel into a pariah state. Images circulated daily on social media of children killed as collateral damage in strikes on Hamas targets. Netanyahu resisted allowing aid into the Strip. The world accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war and committing war crimes against a trapped population of 2 million.

He recalls his final meeting with Netanyahu, in late June 2024, when the prime minister appeared before a special intelligence committee in the Knesset. Eisenkot pressed him on how he intended to end the war. “What is your exit plan?” he asked. Netanyahu offered none, Eisenkot says, insisting instead that Israel would continue fighting until it achieved “total victory.”

Eisenkot reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book: Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, Martin Indyk’s 2021 study of Kissinger’s statecraft. Indyk, who served in senior diplomatic roles under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, was a friend of Eisenkot’s and a longtime critic of Netanyahu. “Have you read this?” Eisenkot asked. Netanyahu said he had not. Eisenkot urged him to do so, arguing that military force without a diplomatic strategy could not deliver a lasting victory.

“Gadi,” Eisenkot recalls Netanyahu replying, “I have a different view about the meaning of the word strategy.” 

Eisenkot was enraged by Netanyahu’s refusal to prioritize the hostages. The suspicion among Netanyahu’s critics was that he feared a deal would fracture his coalition, potentially forcing elections that could remove him from power and trigger an inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7—much like the Agranat Commission, established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that led to the downfall of Golda Meir. In Eisenkot’s telling, Netanyahu put the preservation of his own power above the lives he was entrusted to protect. “He neglected them,” Eisenkot says. 

A spokesperson for the prime minister did not respond to multiple requests for comment.  

On June 9, 2024, Eisenkot resigned from the emergency government, ending his eight-month effort to influence the war from within. His departure, alongside that of Benny Gantz, effectively ended the national unity arrangement and precipitated the dissolution of the war cabinet. But the war was not finished exacting its toll on Eisenkot’s family. One nephew had already died fighting in Gaza on the same day of his son’s funeral. Another was killed 11 months later. 

Over the next two years, Netanyahu presided over a succession of extraordinary military operations. Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre, and Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s longtime political chief. It assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and dealt devastating blows to the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, including through an audacious operation that turned thousands of its members’ pagers into explosive devices. After Donald Trump returned to the White House, Netanyahu persuaded the president to join Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, with U.S. forces striking three of Iran’s principal nuclear facilities.

But the military triumphs told only part of the story. For two years, the war in Gaza devastated the Palestinian enclave, killed tens of thousands of people, and left Israeli hostages languishing in captivity. In October 2025, under intense pressure, Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire and hostage-exchange deal that halted the fighting and secured the release of the remaining living hostages. “Netanyahu dragged it” out, Eisenkot says. “President Trump pushed him to do it.”

Months later, the confrontation with Iran entered a more perilous phase. Netanyahu helped persuade Trump to join a broader war against the Islamic Republic, a conflict that grew difficult to end and intensified criticism of Israel in the United States, including among elements of the American right. Around 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a 2026 Pew survey. 

Now, for the first time since Oct. 7, Netanyahu must face the electorate. Eisenkot thinks Netanyahu has done little to help Israel recover, instead perpetuating the trauma, cultivating a siege mentality and an atmosphere of never-ending conflict that allows him to cast himself as the indispensable wartime leader. “I don’t know how Netanyahu wants to close the story,” Eisenkot says.

He decided he would try to write the ending himself.

Eisenkot’s strategy has been to assemble a broad coalition. To his right, he envisions Bennett and the secular nationalist Liberman; to his left, Golan, leader of the Democrats, the successor to the historic Labor Party, and Lapid, the former television host who briefly served as prime minister. “I told them, let’s build a big party,” Eisenkot says.

He held a series of talks with Bennett about the prospect of running together, but ultimately declined, calculating that separate campaigns would give the opposition bloc a better chance of expanding their support. Instead, Eisenkot chose to lead his own party, Yashar. Bennett subsequently joined forces with Lapid. “I thought I had the ability to unite Israel, unite this divided country,” Eisenkot says, citing his military experience and relationships across the political spectrum. “It’s not from arrogance but from deep commitment to bring change and defeat Netanyahu.”

Eisenkot’s background also carries significance. Born in Tiberias to Moroccan Jewish immigrants and raised in the southern port city of Eilat, he belongs to Israel’s Mizrahi community, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have long faced discrimination from the country’s predominantly Ashkenazi establishment. If elected, he would become Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister.

Eisenkot has campaigned on restoring public trust in government, strengthening Israel’s security, and preserving its foundation as a Jewish democracy. He has pledged to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank and crack down on extremist Jewish settlers who terrorize Palestinians, expand military or civilian national service across Israeli society, confront the threat from Iran, pursue a political resolution to the Palestinian conflict, repair Israel’s frayed relationships abroad, and restore national unity.

Travel through the country and the psychological scars of Oct. 7 are difficult to miss. They surface in the impatience of drivers, the intensity of political arguments, the restless energy of a society still living in the shadow of a nightmare. The country seems suspended in its aftermath, unable to separate the horrors of the past from the anxieties of the present. In some ways, it is still Oct. 8, 2023.

During our interview, Eisenkot and I discuss Bessel van der Kolk, the Harvard psychiatrist whose bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, explores how overwhelming experiences can leave people psychologically trapped in the past. Trauma, van der Kolk argues, can persist long after the danger has passed, disrupting the ability to integrate painful memories and move forward.

Eisenkot believes Netanyahu has purposefully made that process harder. Nearly three years on, Israel has yet to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures that allowed the attack to happen. Without an authoritative accounting, Eisenkot argues, the country cannot fully reckon with the catastrophe. He pledges to establish such a commission within his first 14 days in office, with a mandate to investigate not only Oct. 7 but the decade of decisions that preceded it, including his own tenure leading the military. 

He points to widespread suspicions that the attack involved some form of betrayal from within, a belief he attributes partly to Netanyahu’s efforts to shift responsibility onto military and intelligence officials. Netanyahu and members of his family have promoted disputed allegations that security officials deliberately withheld warnings before the Oct. 7 attack, including the claim that they failed to wake the prime minister as Hamas launched its assault—part of a broader effort by Netanyahu and his allies to shift responsibility for the security failures onto the military and intelligence establishment.

Recent polls show a close contest, with Yashar running ahead of Likud. But neither Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance nor the parties seeking to replace him appear assured of the 61 seats required for a majority in the 120-member Knesset. 

“I think the chances for a unity government are high because we will be more than happy to have Eisenkot joining our coalition,” says Ohad Tal, a Knesset Member running with Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. “If the other side will have a majority with the Arabs, God save us.”

Forming an alternative majority could require support from Arab parties, a fraught prospect in Israeli politics. Eisenkot will not commit to bringing them into his government. Instead, he has set four conditions for any coalition partner: recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; adherence to the principles of its Declaration of Independence; acceptance of a national-service obligation for all citizens, with civilian alternatives to military service; and agreement that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be dismantled. None of the Arab parties has yet to accept the latter tenet.

“I understand that in the Israeli system we must have a big bloc,” Eisenkot says. “It’s a huge challenge. I’m doing my best from morning till night. I’m convinced we’ll defeat Netanyahu.”

If Eisenkot succeeds, he says, he will break with Netanyahu’s defining political method: cultivating a siege mentality that pits Israel against the world. “The main challenge is to break Netanyahu’s method with them and us,” Eisenkot tells me. “This is poison to our society.”

Nowhere is that more consequential than in the United States, where support for Israel has deteriorated, particularly among younger Americans. “Netanyahu knows the United States better than all of us, but today he can’t improve Israel’s relationship with the U.S.,” Eisenkot says. “He may have a good relationship with the administration today, but the situation in universities, with American Jewry, with the bipartisan relations, are at their lowest.”

One of Eisenkot’s proposals is to gradually wean Israel off American military assistance. He believes the dependence has become a source of friction in Washington, and runs counter to the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state capable of guaranteeing its own security. “Maybe it will take five to 10 years,” he says, “and it is our interest to do it.”

Eisenkot opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, a goal long championed by much of the international community. But he also recognizes the profound danger of a one-state future: Israel would face a choice between granting millions of Palestinians citizenship and voting rights, which would end its Jewish majority, or denying them those rights, which would undermine its claim to be a democracy. He wants to prevent the vision of permanent Israeli control advanced by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. “Smotrich’s vision for one state will be the end of our country,” Eisenkot says.

To avert that outcome, Eisenkot tells me he favors some form of separation in the West Bank, with a reformed Palestinian Authority assuming greater responsibility for Palestinian self-government while Israel retains military control over the territory. His approach to Gaza is different. He endorses the framework of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which calls for a technocratic Palestinian administration to govern the enclave and envisions a conditional pathway to Palestinian statehood.

“We have two options: the 20 points of President Trump, or to use force,” Eisenkot says. “I prefer the diplomatic option—and I believe I can do it. But if not, I know how to dismantle Hamas with force.”

For all his confidence in working with Trump, Eisenkot and his advisers were surprised when the president endorsed Netanyahu. Trump had previously passed up opportunities to do so, including in an interview with TIME. Some of his closest Middle East advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, had grown frustrated with the Israeli leader. According to people familiar with the discussions, Fox News host Mark Levin and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee urged Trump to back Netanyahu in the closing days of the campaign. “Israeli society is independent and will make its own decision,” Eisenkot says. “I have no doubt Trump will accept every democratic choice in Israel.”

Netanyahu’s political operation has circulated a stream of AI-generated videos attacking Eisenkot, including one depicting him in a field approaching a young Israeli soldier who bears a striking resemblance to his dead son. Instead of embracing the soldier, the figure resembling Eisenkot pushes him aside and embraces Mansour Abbas. “I felt contempt,” Eisenkot says when we discuss the video. “That is the lowest he could go.” The invective has only continued. Yinon Magal, a Channel 14 host and pro-Likud commentator, called Eisenkot a “monkey” on air. Netanyahu waited days before describing it as “highly inappropriate.”

Eisenkot sees the election as a test of whether Israel can preserve the democratic and national ideals of the Zionist movement or drift further from them. “My goal is that the Israeli people will be united and proud of their country,” he says. “That global Jewry will be proud of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.” Many fear an exodus of Israelis should Netanyahu hang on. A Channel 12 poll in July found that 23% said they or any of their relatives would leave if the Israeli premier is reelected. 

Eisenkot lacks Netanyahu’s rhetorical flair, polished English, and decades on the world stage. But he argues those advantages have grown less useful as Netanyahu grows increasingly polarizing, at home and abroad. For many critics of Israel, particularly younger ones, the distinction between the country and its longtime leader has become difficult to discern. “We need to return to speaking about sharing the same values,” Eisenkot says. “Nobody speaks about values right now. Everything is about interest, power, more power, and more power.”

As our interview draws to a close, Eisenkot returns once more to the subject of trauma, the force that has shaped his own life and, he believes, the fate of his country. “Netanyahu is unwilling to show the courage needed to end the war from a position of strength,” he says. “It will take years to close the trauma, but we must start now.”

- With Reporting by Liam Forberg

In 2015, Chicago’s public health department identified three cases of invasive meningococcal disease, a highly dangerous pathogen that can kill within hours. To determine whether these cases signaled a larger outbreak, the department—which one of us, Dr. Julie Morita, led at the time—needed to know not just total cases, but the total population and demographics of affected areas. The team turned to a pillar of our nation’s public health system: the U.S. Census.

The data showed that men who have sex with men—including gay and bisexual men—among the city’s Black population were disproportionately affected. That finding drove the health department’s response, which included working with community partners to surge thousands of free vaccines into neighborhoods across Chicago. Instead of a larger and far deadlier outbreak, the outbreak ended with 11 cases in Chicago and one death.  

Census data informs every aspect of our nation’s public health system. As former leaders of local and federal health agencies, we have seen this firsthand. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has proposed radical changes to the census that would make our country less healthy, less safe, and less fair. 

The public comment period on this proposal closes on Nov. 2. Health leaders must move quickly to oppose these deeply misguided changes. It is clear to us that these changes would amount not only to an assault on our public health system but also on the U.S. Constitution. 

Per the Constitution, the federal government has carried out a national census every decade since 1790—through wars, depressions, and pandemics. Everyone who resides in our country matters and should be counted. But the Trump Administration is suggesting that the census should intentionally exclude people. This includes undocumented residents and nonimmigrant visa holders, such as foreign national students and temporary workers whose visas may permit them to live in the U.S. for several years. The Administration is further attempting to remove demographic questions related to race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from the census questionnaire.      

The repercussions would be vast. An inaccurate count would negatively affect congressional representation. The idea that some people do not deserve to be counted uncomfortably echoes the “3/5 compromise,” an insidious and later repealed clause in the original Constitution under which enslaved persons were counted as less than full people. Incomplete and unreliable demographic data could distort how trillions of federal dollars are distributed across hundreds of programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, and Head Start. Communities with the greatest needs, especially those with immigrant or mixed-status families, would likely be hardest hit. 

These are our neighbors, families, and friends. But let’s be clear: the impacts would extend beyond those communities, especially the public health consequences. As the Chicago meningococcal outbreak illustrates, health officials need a complete picture to protect people from disease and other threats. They must know who is getting sick, where, and at what rate. Take any of those data out of the equation, and the people who need the most help are far less likely to get it.  

During the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, when one of us, Dr. Richard Besser, served as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), census data were instrumental in tracking the outbreak. CDC relied on this data to calculate infection rates by age, which showed that children and young adults were getting sick at far higher rates than older adults—a striking departure from typical patterns observed with seasonal flu. When a vaccine became available, these data directly informed recommendations that prioritized children and young adults. 

A decade later, the COVID pandemic demonstrated the importance of these data on a massive scale. As case counts surged in the initial months of the outbreak, population and demographic data revealed who was shouldering the greatest burdens. CDC found that hospitalization rates were highest for American Indian, Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic populations. CDC later used census population estimates to calculate vaccination rates by race and ethnicity, allowing health officials to identify disparities in vaccine uptake. States like North Carolina relied successfully on census-tract data to increase vaccination rates among target populations.   

These examples span different locations, diseases, and levels of government, but illustrate common themes: public health officials rely heavily on census data to save lives and protect communities, and protecting communities at greatest risk helps keep us all safer and healthier. 

Health officials use population counts to study cancer, heart disease, HIV/AIDS, and many other diseases. Demographic data expose disparities that raw numbers can obscure and show whether those gaps are growing or shrinking. Together, they offer a roadmap to direct resources where they can do the most good.  

The next census count is still a few years away, but what our leaders decide now matters a great deal. A census that deliberately counts fewer people while telling us less about them will leave our nation ill-prepared for future outbreaks and pandemics, while making it harder to handle daily health challenges. It is essential for the public health community to speak out now.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) last week filed a lawsuit that intends to weigh in on the results of the Senate race in Alaska. It seeks to block certification of the election results under certain conditions if Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan loses. 

Experts question whether it has the legal basis to do so—and if this intervention is a preview of how the Trump Administration might respond to unfavorable midterm results across the U.S.

The DOJ, in its Oct. 22 filing, expressed concern that there might be “voter confusion” stemming from the fact that two candidates on the ballot are named Dan Sullivan. Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan is currently seeking re-election, and one of his challengers is Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. (a Republican whose party affiliation does not appear beside his name on the general-election ballot).

The GOP first raised concerns in May, prompting a proposal to add “incumbent” beside the sitting senator’s name on the ballot. But the party continued to warn that voters could split their votes between the two Sullivans, opening the door for Democrat Mary Peltola.

Read More: The 7 Key Governor Races to Watch in the Midterm Elections

Alaska has traditionally been a state that leans Republican: Trump won the state by 13 points in 2024, and the state has not had a Democratic governor since 2002. 

But the race is closer than analysts first expected. October polls from The New York Times/Siena, Alaska Survey Research, and Data for Progress show Peltola leading Dan S. Sullivan by between 2 and 7 points.

The DOJ lawsuit claims that the “sole purpose” of Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy is to benefit Peltola. Therefore, it seeks to block certification if the incumbent loses but would have won with all of Daniel J. Sullivan’s votes. To determine that, it proposes recalculating the ranked-choice count as though those votes had gone to the incumbent instead.

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice system, voters rank candidates by preference. If no candidate initially wins a majority, the lowest-ranking candidates are eliminated in successive rounds and their ballots transfer to the next remaining choice.

In a Truth Social post on Oct. 21, Trump said he was “very concerned” about the race and described the situation as “totally confusing.”

“Even 1, 2, or 3% could make the difference,” he wrote of the potential outcomes.

The DOJ said there would need to be an “investigation” to determine which vote was meant for which Sullivan. The DOJ said an “investigation” would be needed to determine which Sullivan voters intended to support. 

Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that voters’ rankings could provide clues: “There are a number of scenarios where it could be obvious that a voter was confused by the way they wrote down candidates.” He did not elaborate on what those scenarios might look like within the parameters of a formal investigation. 

Neither the DOJ nor the candidates’ campaigns responded to TIME’s requests for comment.

On Oct. 23, Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asked to join the DOJ’s case as defendants, writing: “Alaskans, apparently, must elect Senator Dan S. Sullivan or the President will not let them elect anyone at all.”

On Sunday, Peltola’s campaign and the DSCC asked the court for permission to seek dismissal and requested an expedited ruling this week. They proposed requiring a DOJ response by Tuesday afternoon, arguing that the pending lawsuit could undermine confidence in the election.

Voting rights experts are calling it a “garbage lawsuit” and “an unprecedented intervention by the federal government.” 

Lisa Murkowski, the state’s other Republican Senator who is not up for re-election, endorsed the incumbent Sullivan in January. Last week, however, she condemned the DOJ’s efforts to intervene.

“Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates,” she wrote Oct. 23 in a post on X. “The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.”

Trump responded to her comments with a scathing post on Truth Social on Oct. 24, calling Murkowski “Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far” and “a DISGRACE to Alaska and our country.”

He also criticized the state’s ranked-choice voting system, writing: “Ranked Choice Voting Ballot is a TOTAL DEMOCRAT SCAM meant to confuse the Voter.”

Asked to comment on the DOJ filing the next day, Trump told reporters: "I'm the one that said do it." 

Blanche declined to confirm whether the Justice Department acted at the behest of the President during his appearance on CNN on Sunday. 

He denied that the Trump Administration was laying the groundwork to overturn election results, arguing that the lawsuit would allow Alaska officials and courts to address any unlawful voter confusion after the election.

“It is an obligation of the states to avoid confusion, among other things, confusion in the minds of voters in the election process,” he said. “So the question is whether Alaska, by allowing this to happen, is violating the law and the federal law and the constitution by allowing confusion in the ballot.”  

Why experts question the DOJ’s Alaska election lawsuit

Prior to the DOJ lawsuit, Republicans sought to remove Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot in June. 

When he decided to run, Republicans sent complaints to Carol Beecher, the director of Alaska’s Division of Elections. She wrote a letter to Sullivan in June saying that election officials had determined that he would be removed, claiming his candidacy was not filed “in good faith for the purpose of genuinely pursuing” leadership. 

Sullivan challenged the decision and sued the state. Judge Thomas Matthews of Alaska’s Third District Superior Court ruled in June that he could remain on the ballot beside the other candidates. He wrote in a 32-page decision that elections officials were introducing a “new, previously unstated ‘good faith’ criteria” and said that this requirement is not present in state law or the Constitution. 

That decision was upheld by the Alaska Supreme Court on June 29.

It was later determined that a “mitigating remedy” would be to present each candidate’s name with the middle initial and to add “incumbent” to the sitting senator’s name. 

The Alaska Supreme Court ruling did not end scrutiny of Daniel J. Sullivan’s candidacy. In August, Reuters reported that the DOJ had issued grand jury subpoenas while investigating whether he entered the race to confuse voters.

The DOJ then filed its new lawsuit amid October polling that showed Peltola ahead.

The department justifies the move using language in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) that says its purpose is to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” 

Experts, however, dispute whether that language authorizes the intervention.

Derek Muller, a professor of election law at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in a blog post after the filing that the proposed investigation is “essentially impossible.” But succeeding is not the point, he continues. 

“The legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” he wrote, adding that the real purpose of litigation is to signal to the press and public that the Trump Administration is “ready” if the result goes against the GOP’s interests in Alaska.

The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), a nonpartisan nonprofit working to inform voters, called the move “unprecedented” in a statement that also said the lawsuit “raises serious concerns about political interference.”

“I cannot recall an administration ever attempting to stop the certification of an election—and certainly not 11 days before polls close,” CEIR Executive Director David Becker said in the statement. 

“Furthermore, this issue has already been fully litigated by Alaska’s courts,” he continued. “Alaska election officials are following state law, as the Constitution requires, and the courts will uphold that.”

Richard Hasen, a professor of law at UCLA, called the move a “desperate and unprofessional assault” on the American elections system.

Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization represented by the ACLU, filed a motion on Oct. 23 seeking to join the case to oppose the DOJ’s effort. Its president and CEO, Virginia Kase Solomon, said in a statement Oct. 24: “Politicians don’t dictate election outcomes; the people do.”

Nate Adams, a spokesperson for Dan S. Sullivan’s campaign, expressed confidence in his candidate’s re-election but told local media outlet KFSK last week: “We’ll let the DOJ complaint run its course.”

How has the federal government used the National Voter Registration Act?

The National Voter Registration Act was enacted in 1993 to address barriers to voter registration that depressed participation and disproportionately affected racial minorities. It was predicated upon the fundamental right of every eligible citizen to vote, as well as the duty of local and federal governments to protect that participation in the democratic process.

In the past 30-plus years, it has been used to sue states that fail to maintain their voter rolls or enforce registration requirements.

The Biden Administration also reckoned with Alaska in 2022, finding that the state wasn’t consistently letting residents register to vote—or update their voter registration—as part of their routine paperwork at the Department of Motor Vehicles. An agreement reached that June required Alaska to bring those procedures into compliance with the NVRA.

In 2012, the Obama Administration sued the state of Florida over a program intended to identify and remove suspected noncitizens from its voter-registration rolls too close to the elections. The parties agreed to dismiss the case in January 2013. 

The George W. Bush Administration also sued several states under the NVRA to enforce requirements for offering voter registration and maintaining accurate voter rolls. 

The DOJ’s Alaska lawsuit goes further than those earlier cases. Experts say the NVRA does not expressly authorize blocking election certification over suspected voter confusion.

If courts accept the DOJ’s argument, the consequences could extend beyond Alaska, warns Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. It could give the federal government a new basis to challenge how states design ballots, determine which candidates qualify, and certify election results—all in the name of protecting election integrity.

“[The lawsuit] attempts to stretch a federal statute, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), beyond recognition by snipping language from the law’s preamble and treating it as if it creates vast and open-ended new duties that the federal government can enforce on states,” Olson said in a statement Oct. 23. “If accepted, it would suddenly federalize many issues of local election administration.”

In A Fine Balance, one of the finest novels about modern India set in the 1960s and 1970s, Rohinton Mistry powerfully conveys a sense of the social meaning of the vote for the Indians at the bottom of the ladder. Narayan, a Dalit tailor, insists on marking his own ballot in an upcoming election instead of allowing an upper-caste landlord’s men to vote on his behalf.

Dukhi, his father, warns him against it.  “It is still my right,” Narayan replies. “And I will exercise it in the next election, I promise you.”

Dukhi urges him not to risk his life.

“Life without dignity is worthless,” Narayan replies.

I have been rereading Mistry’s novel over the past few weeks as a series of protests has turned October into a month of fierce battles over the integrity of India’s elections, the accountability of its institutions, the right to protest, and the soul of its democracy.

A nascent Gen-Z movement, Cockroach Janta Party, which organized protests over education and unemployment in Delhi in June and July and forced the resignation of India’s higher education minister, gave the call for the October protests. Young protestors answered with an insurrectionary energy in the summer and soon found support from a broader coalition comprised of opposition parties, social movements and other pillars of Indian civil society.

These assorted protesters see the stakes of the current moment as existential: the sanctity of the vote in India, the essential ingredient, in other words, of democracy.  Throughout October thousands joined the cause in Delhi and other Indian cities, their marches spurred by anger directed against an ongoing national exercise to overhaul the country’s electoral register. 

Known as the Special Intensive Revision, the exercise has, according to the protestors, resulted in more than 130 million voters being removed from electoral lists. Although electoral rolls have been revised periodically, this is the first time such an exercise has placed the burden on citizens to establish their eligibility, raising fears that millions of legitimate voters, particularly the poor and marginalized, could be disenfranchised. 

Seeking accountability, they have been calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the country’s chief election commissioner, who oversees the Election Commission of India, the body charged with conducting and safeguarding the sanctity of elections across the nation. The protestors accuse Kumar of abandoning his constitutional obligation to act impartially. In their telling, the mandarin has set the table in a way to favor the interests of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a charge denied by those in power.

Already shaken by the summer protests over education, this time the Indian government responded with coercive force, effectively turning central Delhi, the political and administrative heart of the capital, and the place where India goes to protest, into a garrison. On Oct. 10, it deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel, restricted internet access, detained thousands of protesters, and sought to deny the protesters access to public spaces across the capital. 

The crackdown was intense. On the night of Oct. 16, there was a palpable sense of panic on social media in India as an urgent question was asked repeatedly: Where is Neha Bora? A 29-year-old doctoral student and left-wing activist, Bora has emerged as one of the most articulate and formidable leaders of these protests, which have rattled Modi’s government and—despite valiant attempts to construct a counter narrative by BJP leaders and other party apparatchiks—become a significant challenge to his popularity and legitimacy.

Bora was detained by the police on their way to join the thousands of protesters who had converged on Connaught Place, a prominent commercial district in the capital, waving the national flag and reiterating demands to protect the right to vote and the sanctity of electoral democracy in India. For several hours after sunset, there was no news of the whereabouts of Bora, who uses they/them pronouns. Their lawyers spoke about the police refusing to reveal their location. Eventually, around midnight, their lawyers located them at a police station. 

When Bora was released on Saturday morning, they tweeted, “Fighting for democracy and the Constitution cannot be criminalized.” It was a neat summation of the sentiment moving so many Indians to take to the streets, namely a sense of being robbed of something of existential proportions. “Now if they take away our right to vote,” a protester told a reporter, “what is left with us?”

The power of the vote

The emotional charge behind the protests has its roots in the birth of the modern Indian nation-state itself. India always took great pride in adopting universal franchise rights as the Constitution of India came into effect on Jan. 26, 1950. In its historic first general elections in 1952, every Indian above the age of 21, irrespective of caste, religion, gender, race or wealth, had their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. It was, as many legal and constitutional scholars have since remarked, a colossal feat, and one that became a touchstone for the modern idea of India. 

Hence the current upheaval in the country. The Modi government may be reversing decades of democratic gains by recasting the act of voting as a privilege, conferred at the discretion of bureaucrats or as a favor from the ruling party, rather than a right guaranteed by the constitutional order. Now, every prospective voter must first complete an enumeration form, and many may subsequently be required to produce onerous documentary evidence, such as birth certificates and educational records to establish their eligibility to vote. Tens of millions of Indians from marginalized communities either lack documentary records or possess documents that are riddled with mistakes such as spelling errors, making it harder for them to navigate any process of bureaucratic verification. 

The fear is that India is—to put it bluntly—being yanked back to a darker time, one from which it emerged in no small part because of the work done over decades to firmly establish the credibility and broaden the depth of its democratic franchise. In the 1950s, India was an overwhelmingly rural country, with around 83% of its population living in the villages and only about 17% in urban areas. Its nascent democratic system confronted entrenched social hierarchies of caste and power. Early accounts of grassroots democracy in India describe how higher-caste landowners controlled the votes of their lower-caste dependents, sometimes even marking ballots that the voters had to authenticate with their thumbprints.

The pioneering Indian sociologist M.N. Srinivas showed how politicians campaigning for votes treated villagers not as individual voters with agency but as members of “vote banks.” Politicians approached landlords or community leaders to deliver these blocs of votes in return for favors from the government, from “licenses for buses and rice-mills to seats in medical and technological colleges for their kinsfolk.”

And well into the 1960s, millions of Indians were still unable to exercise their constitutional right to vote. In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, landlords used club-wielding enforcers known as lathaits to keep Dalits, members of the most oppressed caste, out of polling booths. “I remember watching members of my caste being dragged out of a polling booth,” an elderly Dalit man in Bihar’s Siwan district recalled in an interview with The Print, an Indian news site.

During the state elections in 1967, Jagdish Master, a teacher turned activist, challenged the veto of the landlords over Dalit suffrage by escorting a group of Dalits to a polling booth in Ekwari, a village in Bihar’s Bhojpur district. The landlords’ henchmen brutally beat him and drove him out. He returned to the village as an armed guerrilla, recruiting Dalit laborers and other poor peasants in a Maoist-style rural insurgency that would flare across the region for decades.

The power of the vote in Indian consciousness transformed radically after the “Emergency,” the period between June 1975 and March 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended constitutional rights, assumed untrammeled powers, imprisoned opposition leaders and silenced the press. Much of India’s elite—bureaucrats, businessmen, newspaper editors and movie stars—bent the knee and welcomed Mrs. Gandhi’s promise of “order” and “discipline.” Wealth and connections offered protection from the state. India’s poor, stripped of their electoral power, suffered terrible abuses of an unaccountable bureaucracy and police from slum demolitions to forced sterilization of men.

In the general elections held in March 1977 after the end of the Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress Party was decisively defeated by the people and tossed out of power for the first time since Indian independence in 1947. The principal victims of abuses of the Emergency—Dalits, Muslims, and the poor of the populous northern Indian states—voted against the Congress party for the first time and contributed significantly to its removal from power

The power of the vote has gradually forced India’s high-handed bureaucracy to recognize the human dignity and political citizenship of ordinary people. The electorate delivered its verdict on Mrs. Gandhi’s breach of the sacred covenant between the Indian state and its people: the people confer legitimacy on the state in exchange for their rights, including its protection of the sanctity of the vote. Having asserted their power, voters proved difficult to subdue again. As the political theorist Partha Chatterjee put it, it was the 1977 defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress party that established the “capacity of the vote.” 

A silent revolution

India’s poor and marginalized took proper control of their voting choices three decades after independence. In the years after the Emergency, they leveraged the vote as a means to a secure livelihood or as a tool for ensuring justice. Politicians could no longer rely on local patrons to intimidate people into voting for them and had to compete on representing their interests. A new competitive politics emerged in the 1980s and led to an upsurge, as Chatterjee wrote, “of popular demands of a kind that had never before been allowed to disturb the order and tranquility of the proverbial corridors of power.”

By the 1990s, political leaders from socially disenfranchised castes and Dalit communities were taking power in the populous, northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot memorably described it as “the silent revolution.” This revolution, ushered in by the votes of the historically oppressed communities, did not quite transform the economic and social structures of the region. But it changed the everyday relations of power. Indrajit Roy, a scholar of development studies, recalled a refrain he heard frequently during his fieldwork among Dalits in Bihar in the late 2000s: “There has been development, change has come. Today, we can look the landlord in the eye and speak as equals.” 

Vote banks had thus turned into vehicles of collective political assertion. Marginalized communities had become adept at pooling their votes to secure political favors and advance their shared interests. They chose their own patrons, preferring their own caste leaders to represent their interests and negotiate with the state on their behalf.

Over time, the clientelist politics of vote banks became associated with an entrenched culture of corruption. This helped pave the way for Modi’s successful national campaign in 2014, in which he cast himself as a populist strongman who embodied the aspirations for “development” of all Indians while portraying the Congress and regional parties as beholden to their respective vote banks. Modi’s attacks on vote bank politics also carried a more sinister charge: that successive governments had appeased India’s Muslims minority, which accounts for around 14% of the population, for their votes at the expense of the national interest.

Bangladesh borders the Indian state of West Bengal and Modi reserved his sharpest, xenophobic barbs for Bengal’s Muslims, whom he tarred during his 2014 campaign as “Bangladeshi” and “illegal immigrants,” establishing a template for their vilification that persists to this day. In an inflammatory campaign speech, Modi issued an ominous warning: “After May 16 [the day of the results of the 2014 elections], these Bangladeshis better be prepared with their bags packed.”

A dangerous exclusion

The Modi government invoked that very specter of the “illegal, Bangladeshi Muslim” to push through revisions to electoral rolls across most Indian states. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, who had earlier likened Bangladeshi immigrants to “termites,” responded to the ongoing protests by calling them an “action plan to protect infiltrators.”

There are no reliable estimates of how many Bangladeshi immigrants live in India. In 2016, a minister of the Modi government told the parliament, without citing a source, that the country was home to some 20 million “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.” The government later acknowledged that it had no accurate data on the number of illegal immigrants in India.

Yet the Indian government has used unfounded speculation about “illegal” Bangladeshis to overturn the fundamental logic of the country’s electoral registration system, shifting the burden of ensuring registration from the Election Commission to the voter herself. The commission was responsible for ensuring that every citizen made it onto the electoral rolls. 

The exercise has already disproportionately disenfranchised the poor, migrants, religious minorities, women—and is bound to continue doing so. “The majority of voters in Bihar who were excluded from the list were in rural areas,” said retired Maj. Gen. Anil Verma, who heads the Association for Democratic Reforms, a nonprofit group that challenged the electoral rolls revisions in the Supreme Court. “Those worst affected were the poor and the marginalized—they had no documents.”

Opposition parties have also alleged that the electoral roll revisions tilted the electoral field in the BJP’s favor in the West Bengal election held earlier this year, helping the party win power in the state for the first time. An analysis by the SABAR Institute, a public policy research institute, lent some credence to that charge: a disproportionate share of the 9.08 million voters removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls came from constituencies held by the then-ruling Trinamool Congress or those with large Muslim populations. 

The Election Commission has denied the charge that the deletions were politically motivated, arguing that it applied uniform criteria to remove entries for voters who had died, were registered more than once or had permanently relocated. But that claim is difficult to reconcile with the disproportionate representation  of certain  groups among those deleted from supplementary lists issued for some constituencies after an adjudication process. For instance, although Muslims make up around 23% of the population of Nandigram, a constituency in West Bengal, the SABAR Institute study found that they accounted for 95.5% of the deletions across seven supplementary lists released by the Election Commission for the constituency.

Voting carries an almost existential significance for Indians whose equal citizenship has not been fully recognized by the institutions of the state. Indians see the vote as an affirmation of their existence. If the vote is no longer a gift freely given or withdrawn by the people but a resource controlled by the state, it reduces ordinary voters once again to supplicants dependent on the favor of political elites.

The electoral revisions and mass deletion of voters have provoked such widespread revulsion because many Indians see it as an assault on their identity as citizens and a threat to the social recognition they have won through a long, arduous struggle. Many Indians might have forgiven Modi for his numerous missteps but they are determined not to let him devalue their voting power.

We that are young

The young protesters moving through Delhi’s barricaded streets carry a palpable sense that they are living through a historical moment. References to the Quit India movement against the country’s erstwhile British colonizers and the protests around the Emergency have become commonplace. Memories of seminal events of the past offer a lens through which to consider the present. The future seems open to change through collective action. This sense of a turning point imbues individual actions with a larger purpose and drives protesters to confront a police force intent on clearing the streets by whatever means necessary.

On Oct. 9, a day before Delhi was placed under a lockdown, Bora invoked India’s struggle against British imperialism to denounce the pre-emptive detention of protest organizers. “History is repeating itself. Just like in 1942, the arrest of leaders could not stop the Quit India movement; this movement will also not stop,” Bora said. “This is nothing but a state of open emergency in the country.”

The convergence of young people’s anger over education and employment, fears of authoritarianism, and concern for the sanctity of the vote poses a serious challenge to the Modi government. It could forge a broad popular coalition of unemployed young people, urban poor, Dalits and religious minorities, united in challenging the legitimacy of the government. Unless the government retreats on electoral roll revisions, sustained protests could drain its political capital.

One of Indian democracy’s great achievements is that even its poorest citizens have proved adept at recognizing when the power of their vote is being wrested away, gauging the consequences and organizing to resist. A government in India can retain its legitimacy despite failing to provide functioning schools or decent employment. It cannot do so if it also violates the sanctity of the vote.

More than 20? Or less than 75? As I scan my feedback on a recent social media post, my brain just can’t seem to help registering the number of “likes.” I’m not alone.    

Under a recent settlement that Meta recently reached with states, Facebook and Instagram are about to look different for minors Among the new protections, one seemingly modest change caught my eye. By default, users under 18 will no longer be able to see likes and other reactions in response to their posts or those of others. The reforms are designed for children and teenagers, but touch on a psychological phenomenon just as relevant to adults. As a psychiatrist, I found myself wondering: Why does that little number beneath your post matter so much?

The answer has less to do with social media and more to do with an ancient human tendency: social comparison. Social comparison is the psychological process by which people assess themselves, including their own abilities, opinions, and achievements, in relation to those of others. Likes can both reward us and rank us. They show us that people are validating our posts and also quantify that validation. 

We know how much approval we receive relative to what we might have expected, what we got the last time we posted, and what others receive. Feedback is scored. Likes are just one example. Follower counts, views, and shares are other metrics that make social information measurable. When social approval is numerically valued, comparison becomes harder to avoid.  

From an evolutionary perspective, social comparison may have served an adaptive purpose. Humans evolved in social groups. Knowing where you stood relative to others might have helped you identify what behaviors were approved, whether you belonged, and how to navigate hierarchy. But moving beyond prehistoric time to the last century, comparison still had constraints. Your 25-year high school reunion? It happened once in your lifetime, maybe in a city far away from you, with only your fellow classmates in attendance. Now, the high school reunion lives in the device in our hands, capable of giving anyone quantitative signals from a vast reference group at any moment on our personalized scoreboards of social approval. If the subjective question is whether we belong, what can feel like an objective answer is the 100 likes our post gets from 2,500 followers. The scale, frequency, quantification, and accessibility of social comparison have all changed.

Our brains weren’t built for this much comparison. Neuroimaging studies show that our brains allocate value to how we believe we stack up next to others. Downward social comparison, in which we learn someone performs worse than us, can engage neural circuits associated with reward and valuation. Upward comparison, in which we learn someone performs better than us, can engage neural circuits associated with processing unpleasant emotions. These are ways in which our brains process social outcomes much like other kinds of gains or losses.  

But our brains don’t just register numbers; we also tend to evaluate their meaning. In one study, likes functioned as a type of currency that adult users compared themselves on, shaping how they felt in that moment. In another set of studies, adults who made more frequent and extreme upward comparisons reported an immediate decline in self-evaluation and cumulative declines in self-esteem and life satisfaction over a browsing session. Research has also found that across generational groups, greater user tendency to engage in social comparison, together with greater maladaptive ways of coping with emotions, is associated with more symptoms of anger, anxiety, and depression. 

Social comparison isn’t inherently harmful. But as repeated opportunities to compare mount, the mental health effects can add up.  

While hiding likes may not eliminate social comparison, it does remove a metric from the scoreboard. The instinct to compare or desire to belong won’t just vanish. But even if we might wonder where we stand next to who’s performing better, there’s a difference between wondering and a number answering that question for us.

Social media didn’t invent our instinct to compare ourselves to others. We’ve had that for millennia. What it did was shift the environment surrounding our instincts, encoding one form of social feedback into numbers we can monitor.  

That's why changing our relationship with social comparison will mean more than adapting digital platforms. What do we value? What gives us purpose? What makes our lives matter? 

The cultural shift that lies ahead is to ask the questions about our social worth that don’t need a scoreboard to answer.

In early August, Sagi Tzadik asked an AI agent to take a security flaw it had found in WordPress and see whether the same weakness could be made to work against Drupal, another popular content management system. Eight hours later, the agent reported that it had failed. Then it added that, in the course of trying, it found a flaw in PHP, the programming language on which both systems—and as much as 70% of the web—depend.

Tzadik, a security researcher at cybersecurity firm Wiz, assumed that the AI had made a mistake. “Models tend to hallucinate,” he tells TIME. But the exploit, which took advantage of a weakness that had gone undetected for more than a decade, worked.

Unbeknownst to Wiz’s team, researchers at another cybersecurity firm, Calif—working with OpenAI—had used AI to find a related flaw. It suggests that once AI reaches a certain capability level, it is a matter of time before some longstanding weaknesses are unearthed. AI companies have been trying to ensure that defenders including Wiz and Calif get there first by giving them early access to new AI models before the equivalent capabilities trickle down to malicious users. This time, it worked. 

The episode offers a glimpse into a new phase in cybersecurity in which AI helps defenders find vulnerabilities while giving them less time to fix them. While the bugs’ announcement has prompted alarm of a much-speculated “cyber-apolocalyse”—in which AI discovers world-melting bugs, plunging society into chaos—those who helped discover it are optimistic. “We are fixing vulnerabilities at an unprecedented rate, and this is doing security overall a very good thing,” Tzadik says.

But the details reveal just how close things came to disaster. Word of the vulnerabilities began circulating online two days before the patch’s scheduled release, prompting PHP’s maintainers to bring it forward by a day. Hours later, with the patch still unavailable, Calif mistakenly posted a video showing its exploit at work, and copycat attempts multiplied. Cloudflare counted thousands before the public announcement, tens of thousands within 45 minutes of it, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and eventually millions. Even after the patch was released, many webpages, including those of government agencies and parts of Wikipedia, were taken down as a precaution as security teams scrambled to install the update. 

“If it had leaked a month earlier,” before a patch was ready, “this would have been a very different situation,” says Tomer Schwartz, CTO of exposure management and appsec at Wiz. 

That a patch was prepared was the result of a loosely organized sprint. After Calif and Wiz sent reports to PHP, the groups joined forces. Researchers from competing companies shared their findings in common channels, with no contracts governing the arrangement. Over the following weeks, the group of roughly 15 people spoke almost daily to trace the vulnerabilities to their common source and devise a fix. The process, Schwartz says, was “just based on trust.” 

That process will have to sustain increasing pressure. OpenAI has said that the PHP bugs were among “several significant vulnerabilities we’ve already found and are working to fix,” and predicted that similar discoveries would “increase sharply in the coming months.” As those findings multiply, so will the number of dangerous secrets waiting for fixes. “We have to rethink all of our processes, all of our methods, all of our tech stack … to be able to keep up the pace against attackers,” Schwartz says. 

Though defenders are being given a head start, they face a disadvantage of another sort. Attackers only have to succeed once. “But, as defenders, we need to make sure that every single vulnerability is covered,” Schwartz says. 

AI is helping defenders find those vulnerabilities first. Previously, testing suspected bugs could take weeks, forcing researchers to prioritize which were most promising. But now AI agents allow researchers to test many ideas at once, Tzadik says. “It’s months of traditional research condensed to, like, days—couple hours to days, really.” 

But even with AI, the process is labor intensive. After the agent helped Wiz uncover the PHP vulnerability, it still couldn’t describe how the bug worked, Tzadik says. Its explanations were “just slop.” He and colleagues spent days untangling the cause of a bug and eventually reproducing it.

Cost is another constraint. Joshua Saxe, Meta’s former AI security tech lead, who left in February to co-found Abundance Security says he’s working with an organization that has spent roughly $1 million using Anthropic’s Mythos to identify bugs, adding that more bugs remain.

“As an industry, I think we’re deer in the headlights right now,” Saxe says.

"In the climate that we’re in today, you have to do cybersecurity well. It’s not an option to kind of half-a-- it,” says Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. But even a successful exploit offers further opportunities for defenders to intervene. “Exploits are going to happen, and that’s not the end of the story,” he says. “It’s the beginning of the attack.”

The title of Pawel Pawlikowski’s extraordinary, compact drama Fatherland has a double meaning. In this somewhat fictionalized story of Thomas Mann’s brief 1949 visit to Germany, the Nobel Prize-winning author, after having lived in exile in California for 16 years, is challenged with finding his mooring in a country he can no longer call home; if it’s his fatherland, it long ago turned its back on him and his ideals. But fatherland can also be a state of mind where fathers live, a state both more specific and more elusive than fatherhood. In Pawlikowski’s telling of this portion of Mann’s story, it’s during this trip that Mann learns of the death of his son, Klaus—also a writer, though not as successful as his father—by suicide. If the elder Mann feels any emotion when he hears this news, it’s frozen inside him, a bubble of feeling isolated on its own ice floe. Fatherland, so secure in its rigid borders, is a cold, cold place.

Mann’s freedom from this interior island prison happens in the film’s last five minutes, a wordless reckoning that’s as quietly moving as anything you’ll see at the movies this year. But that moment wouldn’t hold so much power if Pawlikowski—with the help of his cowriter, Hendrik Handloegten—weren’t so skilled at sketching in the feathery details leading up to it. Pawlikowski is also the director of the 2013 Ida, as well 2018’s Cold War, pictures that, like this one, deftly balance postwar Eastern Bloc realities with the truth that all humans strive for connection and belonging. These aren’t dour movies, but serious, lustrous ones, less “political” pictures than movies about people trying to sort out what living really means.

At the beginning of Fatherland, no one—not even the aged Mann, played here in a quietly extraordinary performance by Hanns Zischler—has figured that out. The movie opens with a long-distance phone call: Mann’s semi-estranged son Klaus (August Diehl), living in Cannes and clearly in emotional distress, has reached out to his sister Erika—we’ll later realize it’s Sandra Hüller’s voice we hear on the other end of the line. Erika, an actress, writer, and onetime race-car driver, has become her father’s assistant, and she now urges Klaus to join her and their father on the trip they’re about to undertake, from California to the “new” barely postwar Germany. In the year of Goethe’s 200^th birthday, Mann will be accepting two awards, one in Frankfurt, in the West, the other in the East, in Weimar: his justification is that his literary idol was born in one city and died in the other, though it’s obvious that Goethe couldn’t have imagined that chasm that would open between the two within 200 years' time.

Both cities are in transition, and in crisis, though neither wants to admit as much. In Frankfurt, a gray city crumbling at the corners and still finding its footing after the war, though somehow doing its best to pretend all is well, Mann and Erika are greeted by the mayor and hustled off to a press conference. There, the esteemed man himself answers the respectful but probing questions of journalists. Once they learn that he’ll also be traveling to the East, it’s not lost on them that doing so could make him a target at home in the States, where anti-Communist storm clouds have long been gathering. And there are other, more spiritual questions for him to consider. An American journalist, a woman who, it turns out, is an old friend of Erika’s and possibly a former lover (she’s played by Anna Madeley), asks him where he feels his true home is, now that he’s an American citizen. His answer is courtly but honest. He may live in the United States, he says, “but where my Heimat is, my home, is a much more difficult question.” He’s a man between states, both literally and figuratively.

In Weimar, the chief way to welcome a returning hero is apparently to greet him with a somber folk song sung by a choir dressed in dark clothing; at one point, he’s serenaded by a group of children singing the then-newly pened East German national anthem. Mann accepts it all gracefully, but there’s also something a bit quizzical and lost in his expression. He’s jarred by one alarming moment: a wild-eyed man appears at the hotel suite where he and Erika are staying, begging him to reveal in his speech that the nearby former concentration camp Buchenwald is now being used as a detention center for political prisoners. The man is whisked way by officials before he can finish his spiel, though it’s doubtful any of it has swayed Mann at all. In both the East and West, when it’s time to address the audiences who have eagerly gathered to hear his thoughts, he gives heartfelt speeches, anchored in the legacy of Goethe, about the power of art to transform and sustain not just individuals, but whole nations. He seems to truly believe, as he says at one point, that art doesn’t recognize borders—or at least, he truly wants to believe it.

Through all of this, Hüller’s Erika serves her father dutifully. When necessary, she translates his responses to journalists into fluid French; she attends cocktail parties in his honor, even when it means suffering the indignity of running into an oily, traitorous, Nazi-loving ex-husband she’d rather forget forever; she drives her father through the countryside, and though we can’t see her face as she does so, we wonder if this particular task gives her some joy, given her car-racing past. But through it all, because Hüller is such a subtly expressive actor, almost gossamer in the ways she shifts moods, we see the ways in which her resentments toward her father can’t help simmering to the surface. When she learns of her beloved brother’s death, her composure doesn’t crumple visibly—only somehow we know her emotional reserves are folding in and flattening like a house of cards. And when she sees how little this event seems to trouble her father, she can barely go through the motions of helping him on his mission, which, as he seems to envision it, is to save his homeland with his lofty views on art.

How these two find their way back to one another, and to a place of acknowledged and shared grief, is a kind of unspoken miracle that unfolds in last 15 minutes or so of this elegant, remarkably economical movie. Artistically and emotionally, Fatherland accomplishes more in its 82-minute runtime than any two-hour-plus movie released this year. Cinematographer Lukasz Zal, who also shot Ida and Cold War, renders Fatherland in the same satiny black and white, as well as the same serenely squarish, or Academy, aspect ratio. Every frame is spare, elegant, intimate, and the film moves along so gracefully that you’re barely prepared for how exhilarating, and how quietly devastating, its final moment is. At one point, Hüller’s Erika tells her father that Klaus had once said he felt Bach made him feel life was worth living. Her father shrugs that information off, but the final moments of Fatherland—incorporating a serendipitous conjuring, like a specter, of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—bring it back to him. Can a person have more than one Heimat? Or can that place of spiritual belonging shift over time? Perhaps Bach had the answer. Perhaps he put it in a piece of music, for us to find when we most need it, in a church or even in a movie.

A pollster admitted this week to using fabricated data in its surveys that were picked up by leading publications across the U.S., claiming the stunt was an “experimental project” intended to showcase the “vulnerabilities” of the polling industry. The announcement has shaken trust in polling infrastructure ahead of the midterms, especially as some candidates say their campaigns were directly harmed by the fake numbers.

After election analysis website FiftyPlusOne submitted an inquiry to Wedgewood Polls regarding the authenticity of its data and methodologies, the pollster put out a statement across social media on Tuesday, saying it had been conducting a test to show "how easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?" In the statement, which has since been deleted, the group claimed it had been “far too easy” to distribute false data and insisted it "highlights a systemic breakdown in media vetting and data aggregation.”

Wedgewood's polls had been used by multiple national outlets for their midterm reporting, including the New York Times, Newsweek, MS NOW, and POLITICO. The Times, which cited around 15 Wedgewood polls between June and October, has since removed the data from its stories. In an accompanying editor’s note, the publication detailed its checking process for polls and said Wedgewood had answered several of their inquiries prior to the data being published, including questions on the identities of the group’s pollsters, the methods used to draw their samples, and the source of their funding.

TIME's email to Wedgewood Polls bounced back.

In another fraudulent polling operation uncovered in August, a company called Median Strategies fabricated polls for races in Wisconsin, Nevada, and California and similarly called the ploy a “social experiment” in a statement to the Los Angeles Times.

“It's very troubling that we've had two examples of this within a very short period of time during election campaigns, creating a lot of problems for legitimate polling,” says Michael Traugott, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Michigan, who previously served as president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR).

Here’s what to know about the Wedgewood scandal, and what it says about polling ahead of the pivotal midterm elections. 

What do we know about Wedgewood Polls?

The polling group called itself a “fictional entity run by a small group of industry veterans” in its statement. Its X account, which contained many of its polls, no longer exists.

G. Elliot Morris, a pollster and journalist who works at FiftyPlusOne, tells TIME that he and his colleagues had been suspicious about a “crop of new polling firms” that have emerged and released anonymous data. An individual eventually tipped off FiftyPlusOne to Wedgewood's polling, which was “the straw that broke the camel's back for us,” he says.

FiftyPlusOne said in a public statement that Wedgewood “operated as if it were a legitimate polling firm” by collecting money from donors to carry out crowd-funded polls and share its survey data.

The poll analysis group said Wedgewood disclosed two names in connection to the company: Jack Sims and Andrew Prater. According to FiftyPlusOne, Sims had prior experience in the polling industry. SoCal Strategies, another polling firm, this week acknowledged in an email to an NPR affiliate in Michigan that Sims had worked there, but is not currently employed by the company and “has not been for a year.”

“It is not atypical for a pollster to leave an existing firm, form their own, and self-fund some surveys to build reputation; we had no reason at the time to believe this case was any different,” FiftyPlusOne said regarding Sims. 

“This event does not help what is a decades-long trend of declining confidence in the polling industry,” Morris added, when asked about Sims’ involvement with Wedgewood. TIME has been unable to reach Sims for comment.

Senate candidate in Michigan says fake polling damaged her campaign

The polling scandal has sparked a flurry of reactions within the politics and government sector, with one former Senate hopeful claiming the numbers circulated by Wedgewood contributed to the collapse of her campaign.

Democratic Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow recalled how a poll from Wedgewood had shown her “plummeting into single digits.”

Wedgewood released polling on June 29 that placed McMorrow as having the support of only 9% of registered voters, leaving her trailing behind Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed. Other polls also showed McMorrow in third place with single digits. A Susquehanna Polling survey conducted June 9 to 14 put McMorrow at 9%, although 49% of Democratic primary voters surveyed were undecided. A July 1 Quantus Insights poll put her at under 8%. McMorrow suspended her campaign on July 5, just one month before the primaries. 

In a statement posted to social media on Oct. 20, McMorrow said donations “dried up” and she was “hounded” with calls to exit the race after the circulation of the “infamous” Wedgewood poll numbers. 

Advising others not to trust the polls, McMorrow said she hoped Democrats are ready to “blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.”

Jennifer Holdsworth, a Democratic strategist who ran a SuperPAC that supported McMorrow, claimed the fake poll had been “used by several donors to pull back funding at a time we were being outspent by $80 million.”

Amid widespread discussions over fabricated data, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr said, without naming any specific instance, that there has been a “significant surge” in fake polls and blamed news outlets for “amplifying or airing” them “without regard to basic journalistic ethics.” 

Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez quipped back and shifted the onus onto fraudulent pollsters themselves. 

“Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong,” she said in response to Carr. “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”

What impact can polls have on elections?

While documented fake polls are rare, according to experts, polling in general often plays a large role in shaping the narrative of hotly contested races.

Traugott tells TIME that polls can affect voting behavior and support for campaigns “because by and large, the average citizen is interested in backing the winner, and backing means not just votes; it also means financial contributions, contributing time and effort to the campaign, and the like.”

Research has demonstrated what is known as the “bandwagon effect,” in which voters become more likely to vote for candidates or issues that are more favored in polls. A 2023 study from the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties showed that polls discouraged support for less popular ballot items, or as the paper’s authors put it: “polls demobilize the minority and mobilize the majority.” 

It also found that moderate voters, who often represent a crucial demographic of voters and can swing tight elections, were the most impressionable when it comes to being influenced by polling. “Social conformity is strongest among ideological moderates,” the study said.

This effect has been documented going back decades. 

A 1996 experiment showed that participants who were shown a fabricated poll ahead of that year’s primary had a “significantly greater tendency” to vote for the candidates favored by the poll. 

This phenomenon has similarly been demonstrated in prediction markets, which have been shown to sway voters almost as much as polls. A study released on Oct. 20 by policy think-tank the Brennan Center showed that voters were 10% more likely to say that a candidate would win in an election if that person had higher odds of winning based on a prediction market. 

Likewise, voters were less likely to believe that a candidate would win if their odds were predicted to be lower. These prediction market odds, the study said, had a similar effect on perceived electability as traditional polls.

Traugott says that generally speaking, voters who identify with a specific party are unlikely to change their vote as a result of polling, but that they might not show up to the polls at all if they see their party’s nominee is disfavored to win. 

“It's often the case in the general election that the polls have an influence in terms of turnout,” he says. 

Should you trust polls?

Michael Dimock, the president of the Pew Research Center, says that in tight races, of which there are many in the upcoming midterms, “it's very easy for polls to ‘pick the wrong winner.’”

“I do think that people should be very cautious in over-interpreting pre-election polls' ability to project an election outcome, whether it's at a national level, state level, a district level, [or] local level,” he tells TIME. 

One of the main reasons for this, Dimock contends, is that even if participants in a survey say who they would vote for, they still might not show up to cast their ballot. He refers to this immeasurable but important factor as “enthusiasm differences.”

“What polls are really bad at capturing is who's going to actually show up and cast a ballot. It's really hard,” Dimock adds. “Human beings are bad at predicting their [own] future behaviors.”

Recent weeks have brought red flag after red flag for investment in AI and the related data center boom. Bond yields soared for AI infrastructure giant CoreWeave, a sign that investors view the buildout as increasingly risky. And Meta’s reporting of negative free cash flow for the quarter to fund its infrastructure buildout while saying it might need to raise even more capital to fund its AI buildout not only hit its own stock but contributed to a price decline across the big tech companies. 

These developments raised questions across Wall Street about whether too much is being spent too quickly on data center expansion. How questions over data center investment play out has big implications for how companies and investors approach the future of energy and, by extension, climate. A pullback in the pace of new data centers could ease pressure to build fossil generation, but it would also weaken the commercial case for clean energy technologies that need big, reliable buyers who are willing to pay a premium for power.  

Most obviously, a dent in the AI buildout would translate directly into a slowdown in related electricity demand growth. In advanced economies like the U.S., data centers will account for 20% of that growth through 2030. By then, data centers are expected to account for 3% of global electricity demand, according to data from the International Energy Agency. 

Some climate advocates may initially rejoice at slowing electricity demand. Even as renewable energy expands, grids around the world still rely on fossil fuels. In the U.S. in particular, AI demand has sparked a wave of building new natural gas infrastructure. In the short term, slowing demand would mean lower emissions from the existing system than today’s baseline assumptions and less investment in new natural gas infrastructure. 

But a slowing data center build out leaves less mature technologies at risk. From advanced geothermal to new ways of producing nuclear power, big tech companies have been willing to pay more to lock in reliable power sources, thereby accelerating the market for these new efforts. Even unproven technologies like nuclear fusion have received a big financial boost from tech firms speculating that they might help solve their power challenges and give them a competitive leg up in the AI race. In a tighter financial environment with lower projected electricity demand, both the incentive and the financial capacity to make bold bets diminish. 

To be clear, data centers are not the only source of growing electricity demand. New manufacturing continues to create the need for power. The need for air conditioning has ramped up in many emerging markets, particularly in the Global South, creating new grid pressures. And electric vehicles continue to take off in many markets outside the U.S. 

Even as gas remains resilient, much of the power built to meet demand will come from clean sources, including and especially solar and battery storage. Solar is increasingly cost competitive. And this year’s spike in fuel prices—particularly natural gas—has made local power more appealing. But the companies behind growing sectors like air conditioning and EVs are less involved in local power systems and lack the capital to really shape them like the world’s wealthiest tech companies have. In short, clean energy will take a hit without the backing of big tech.  

It’s too soon to tell whether, in the long run, this week’s AI infrastructure recalibration will be a blip in time or part of a much broader realignment. But it’s something that anyone invested in clean energy and climate should be watching closely.   

Not content with renaming an international gulf and a cross-border lake, on Oct. 10, U.S. President Donald Trump recently floated the idea of renaming the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean as “Trump Ocean” or the “Ocean of the Americas” at a political rally in Clarksville, Tenn. 

“We need an ocean. So, I was thinking of either the Atlantic or the Pacific,” he said to laughter and applause. “We call it ‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas,’ something like that.”

Then, at an Oct. 21 rally in South Carolina, Trump said he asked Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, to rename the Atlantic Ocean on Google Maps. According to Trump, Pichai replied, “Please don’t ask us to do that.” 

“So, I'll probably pass,” Trump said. “I think let's keep it the Atlantic Ocean.”

While Google has not issued a formal statement on the matter, Trump’s obsession with naming places for himself or America is remarkable. In our view, it reflects a textbook case of “toponymic narcissism”—the use of place naming to remake the world in one’s own image. 

Let’s not fool ourselves: Trump knows a thing or two about branding. In fact, his business career has largely revolved around marketing the Trump brand on hotels, golf courses, and even golden sneakers. We shouldn’t be surprised to find him following the same playbook in his second presidential term. 

Yet the world map is not a private real estate development. Nor can place names be reduced to a branding exercise. Place names have a greater civic purpose as shared global symbols that should transcend the personal glorification and political interests of any individual leader.

Place names form part of our intangible cultural heritage with cultural significance that will outlive the cartographic whims of President Trump. They shape our geographical imaginations and the way people perceive and understand the world. Geographical naming also has important consequences for education, international relations, and the types of messages we wish to project to the world.

For instance, it is notable that Trump has focused much of his renaming energy on places with Indigenous names, such as Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, this could also be seen as an attempt to erase an etymology that points through Greece to North Africa. The name derives from the Greek for “Ocean of Atlas,” referring to the mythology of a giant who lives in the Atlas Mountains of northwestern Africa.

As place name scholars, we have spent decades studying the cultural, social, and political aspects of place naming. There is a long history of political leaders and cartographers using place naming to assert raw power by rewriting the world map. In one sense, Trump’s renaming shenanigans are simply the latest flashy example in this broader story of mapping and politics. 

But Trump is not merely renaming places to project American power on the world stage. He is also making a mockery of the very act of place naming itself—and, along with it, the international norms that inform the map-making process. 

The international community must reaffirm its commitment to respecting the cultural value of place naming and to articulate responsible place-naming principles, especially for geographical features that are shared across international borders. In an open letter co-authored with place name experts around the world, we propose five key principles for responsible place naming:

The first principle is recognizing that place names are culturally significant forms of intangible heritage and shared resources whose stewardship carries responsibilities extending beyond the interests of any particular government, leader, institution, or generation. 

Given the cultural significance of place names, our second principle highlights the need for meaningful public participation in place naming decisions. Place names that are changed arbitrarily and without due process should not be recognized by the international community. 

Thirdly, place names should not be used to proclaim cultural superiority, advance territorial ambitions, or assert exclusive national ownership over geographical spaces shared among different peoples. 

Places should generally not be named for living people. Instead, place naming should serve the public interest rather than promoting the personal legacies of those seeking to commemorate themselves as a form of self-aggrandizement.

Lastly, we recognize that a shared geography need not always have a single name, since multiple place names can bear witness to the layered histories, languages, and attachments through which places acquire meaning. However, this recognition should not extend to condoning the unilateral renaming of shared geographic features without international dialogue among affected countries and communities.

If Trump moves forward with attempting to rename the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, the international community should stand united in rejecting this attention-seeking act of cartographic malpractice and defend the cultural value of place naming as a cornerstone of our shared world map and geographical imagination.