The Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm is leading a probe into a federal agent’s shooting of an immigrant from Venezuela in Austin, Texas, on Sunday afternoon.

Protesters immediately gathered at the scene to denounce the latest instance of violence involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, with videos on social media showing them paralyzing traffic. Texas law enforcement was deployed to the scene to respond and attempt to disperse the gathering, CBS Austin reported, detaining multiple protesters and firing pepper balls into the crowds.

“I’m very angry about this,” Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a Democrat, said in a press conference about the shooting, adding that local police were not involved in the incident, which happened during a traffic stop.

Watson said he was not surprised by ICE’s involvement, given “the nature of ICE and the way ICE is doing its business these days.”

Watson and other Texas Democrats have also called for independent investigations into the incident. James Talarico, who’s campaigning for a U.S. Senate seat, said he was “closely following” the reports and urged a probe that released available footage of the shooting. “Previous incidents have shown that this agency cannot be trusted to report all the facts,” Talarico said in a statement released to the media.

The District Attorney’s Office in Travis County, which includes Austin, requested to partner with city police in the investigation and for the federal government to cooperate in providing access to evidence. It added: “As has occurred in other jurisdictions, it is possible that this incident included violations of state law.”

Rep. Greg Casar (D, Texas) wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE director David Venturella seeking a congressional briefing on Sept. 28, and asked the agencies to publicly release all body and dash camera footage from federal officers present at the scene and recorded communications between agents before and after the shooting.

Casar and Watson claimed that ICE activity in Austin has increased in recent weeks amid President Donald Trump’s implementation of his strict anti-immigrant agenda. “It’s a disturbing pattern,” Casar said, “and it has got to stop.”

Here’s what we know so far.

What happened?

The shooting occurred near the intersection of Anderson Square and Research Boulevard in Austin. The Texas Tribune reported that Texas state troopers received a call at around 12:50 p.m. from ICE officials, citing Sheridan Nolen, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Public Safety. The officials reportedly asked for help to pursue a blue Toyota Corolla. 

But Nolen said that before the state troopers arrived, an ICE agent had shot a man, and upon the troopers’ arrival, they treated the driver of the Toyota Corolla. 

Austin-Travis County EMS received notification from city police of a shooting around 12:56 p.m. CT, according to its chief Rob Luckritz. They identified a man who sustained a gunshot wound to the torso, with Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis adding that preliminary information pointed to a “small foot pursuit” happening before the shooting.

Authorities then added that the man was transferred to the Dell Seton Medical Center in stable condition.

What do we know about the people involved?

Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an Austin immigration lawyer who said she had been hired to represent the man who was shot and his wife, identified the man who was shot as a 28-year-old Venezuelan named Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. 

The Tribune reported, citing Lincoln-Goldfinch, that Perez had a work permit and had entered the U.S. legally. According to Lincoln-Goldfinch, Perez was delivering for DoorDash when the shooting occurred.

A DHS spokesperson said, without naming Perez, that the Venezuelan immigrant who was shot “illegally entered our country under the Biden Administration and had a final order of removal.” The man is stable and “in federal custody pending removal,” the spokesperson added.

In videos posted to her social media, Lincoln-Goldfinch said Perez’s wife had not been informed of her husband’s condition since and that she was turned away at the hospital’s premises before being informed several hours later that her husband was already in ICE custody.

“If ICE deports him, the key witness to their shooting disappears,” Rep. Casar posted on social media. “He must not be removed from this country, and he must receive proper medical care.”

As for the ICE agent, who has not been publicly identified, when authorities were asked about his whereabouts, Mayor Watson said: “We do not know that. But my hope would be that an agent that’s involved in an officer-involved shooting would not leave the city; certainly not leave the state.”

Is this part of a pattern?

Sunday’s shooting involving federal immigration agents follows another widely reported shooting in July. In Houston, an ICE agent shot and killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national, while conducting a traffic stop. ICE said Salgado Araujo was not the intended target of the operation, though the DHS has claimed, without proof, that Salgado Araujo was in the country illegally and attempted to ram ICE vehicles.

Read More: These Two Brothers Are Fighting to Protect Immigrant Families After a Tragedy

Since Trump’s return to the White House, his Administration has deployed federal agents to Democrat-run cities around the country to carry out the President’s strict immigration agenda, and these agents have been involved in multiple high-profile violent incidents. 

Among the first people killed in such operations was 23-year-old U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez. A federal agent fatally shot Martinez in South Padre Island, Texas, on March 15, 2025.

Shootings involving federal agents, such as those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, have sparked debate over how immigration policy is enforced nationwide. Demands for accountability over the shootings, mainly from Democrats, have triggered funding battles and partial shutdowns of the DHS.

Children born in Europe now will live through almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their grandparents (an 84% increase), according to a new study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.  

A child born in Europe in 2025 will live through more than three additional years of extreme fire weather compared with someone born in 1950, the researchers found. 

The largest increases are projected in the Mediterranean—a region already hard hit by wildfires. There, people born in 2025 are projected to face up to 2.5 times the exposure to extreme fire weather than those born in 1950—the equivalent of over five additional years of extreme fire weather over their lifetime. That’s for a scenario where global warming increases by 2.6°C above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100, as is currently predicted under current global climate and energy policies.

To map out potential outcomes, researchers used climate model projections for fire weather known as the Fire Weather Index. Fire weather refers to the hot, dry, and windy conditions that make fires more likely to ignite, spread faster, and become harder to suppress—conditions that are becoming more common due to climate change. They define extreme fire weather as days when the fire weather index exceeds the top 5% of days for that country over 1985-2014. 

“It doesn't mean that there [will be] a wildfire on all of those days, but it does mean that the risk is much higher,” says Rosa Pietroiusti, lead author of the study and PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. 

Portugal, the European country that has seen the highest proportion of its area burned in recent decades, can expect to see extreme fire weather days more than double under current climate policies, from 14 days per year from 1950 to 1970, to 32 days per year by 2100. 

Each additional degree of global warming by the end of the century adds around 272 days of extreme fire weather to the life of a Portuguese child born in 2025. A child born in Greece can expect to see 473 additional days of exposure to extreme fire weather during their lifetime, while children in Spain and Italy will see 448 days. 

Exposure to wildfire smoke comes with a number of immediate health impacts, including stinging eyes, wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. Over time, long-term exposure can cause and exacerbate diseases in the lungs, and heart, and has been shown to lead to cognitive impairment and memory loss. Long-term exposure to wildfire smoke is also associated with higher risk of death.

The study notes that rapid measures to reduce emissions could reduce exposure in all regions. If we limit warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century, “a lot of exposure could be avoided,” says Pietroiusti. “While younger people will be more exposed than older generations under all pathways, every fraction of a degree of warming counts, and every fraction of a degree of avoided warming can reduce the hazard that we're exposing young people to during their lives.”

The world, however, has strayed far from that goal. A U.N. report published at the beginning of September found that the planet is set to pass the 1.5°C threshold for global warming set out in the Paris Agreement within the next few years. Optimistic scenarios estimate temperature rise peaking at 1.8°C, while other estimates predict even higher peaks. 

Europe is the world’s fastest warming continent. Temperatures have risen by approximately 0.56°C per decade since the mid-1990s—more than double the global average.

This summer alone brought several severe heat waves to the continent, with the European Forest Fire Information System reporting that wildfires burned over 668,000 hectares (over 1.6 million acres) across the E.U., including Belgium’s worst wildfire in a century and the largest recorded wildfires in France and Spain since data collection began. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently proposed a new European Heatwave Plan as well as a future European firefighting fleet of airplanes to address the realities of climate change, calling this summer “the summer of truth.”

“We're really seeing that these conditions are not just climate model projections and simulations and results,” says Pietroiusti, “but they're really real world conditions and risks.”

President Donald Trump announced Sunday that his proposed “triumphal arch”—which is planned for Memorial Circle near the Virginia end of Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C.—will serve as a military complex with drones, ammunition storage, and sniper facilities.

“There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World,” he wrote on Truth Social, adding that the arch would “house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones” and that there would be snipers “on both the roof and plaza areas.”

The announcement comes almost a year after he debuted a model of the 250-foot arch in the Oval Office on Oct. 15, 2025. In his initial proposal, Trump said that the arch was meant to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

Read More: How Trump’s Proposed Triumphal Arch Stacks Up Against Others Around the World

Trump has also argued the arch is significant because it brings the United States on par with other world capitals featuring similar monuments. He emphasized that point again on Sunday, writing: “Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all.”

Trump did not identify the 59 cities he was referring to or explain the basis for the comparison. He appeared to mean that Washington was the only one among a group of leading world cities and capitals that lacked a triumphal arch.

His post said that the changes to the plan for the arch came “at the strong request of the United States Military” and had been made “for National Security purposes.” 

The President’s post did not elaborate on the security role that a militarized arch would play in Washington, and Trump has not made public any revised proposal, model, or mockup of what changes that might entail.

TIME has reached out to the White House and the Pentagon for comment. 

Trump’s new description of the arch echoes the Administration’s defense of another signature construction project: the White House ballroom.

How Trump’s White House ballroom project became a ‘military complex’

The White House ballroom was initially presented as a privately funded venue for state dinners and other large events. In subsequent litigation, however, the Administration argued that the ballroom and the underground military facility beneath it constituted a single, integrated project.

That argument emerged amid legal challenges to construction already underway at the site of the former East Wing. On March 31, a judge ordered the ballroom project halted unless authorized by Congress, while leaving open an exception for work necessary to ensure the safety and security of the White House. The Administration subsequently argued that the security exception allowed the entire project to continue—claiming that it is one “massive” military complex that is “vital” to national security. 

Prior to litigation, Trump had called the $400 million ballroom a social and diplomatic space to “host major functions honoring world leaders.” But in court documents filed last month, Solicitor General John Sauer raised the stakes, writing: “Every day the President does not have access to the vital security features of the military complex presents unacceptable risk.”

On Aug. 31, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction, allowing construction to continue while the government seeks further review. The Court did not rule on the project’s legality.

Much like the ballroom project, the triumphal arch has been the subject of legal and political scrutiny since it was announced in 2025. 

The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts—whose members were all appointed by Trump—approved the project’s design in May. House Democrats called it a “vanity” project and introduced a bill to Congress to block its construction, along with the construction of any triumphal arch exceeding 50 feet on any National Park Service (NPS) lands in Washington “except by express authorization of Congress.” Democrats also argued that the arch was an unnecessary expenditure amid the affordability crisis affecting Americans.

“As President Trump strips away the necessary safety nets from Americans who are struggling to afford their basic needs like groceries and healthcare, he builds his unauthorized, grandiose Triumphal Arch,” Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada, one of the representatives who introduced the bill, said in a statement in May. 

A group of Vietnam War veterans and a historian have jointly sued to block construction, arguing in Lemmon v. Trump that the monument would disrupt historic sightlines between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. The group has also argued that the plan requires congressional authorization.

“The President’s new justification for this wildly unpopular construction does nothing to cure its fundamental illegality,” Nicolas Sansone, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, said in a statement Sunday. “Congress has not authorized the arch, and unless and until Congress does so, building the arch on Memorial Circle is unlawful.”  

How national security matters can expand presidential power

The difference between a construction project that is a matter of national security and one that is not can inform the role of Congress, according to Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Framing a project as a national security matter could give the executive branch a basis for arguing that Congress has less authority to constrain it.

Wehle tells TIME that Administrations have, for decades, used this understanding to expand presidential powers. There has been a “lot of deference” given to Presidents in the past when they invoke such reasoning, she says, pointing to the example of the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping and torture efforts after 9/11. At the time, the Justice Department argued that Congress cannot limit a President’s core military and national security decisions during a time of war. 

Although the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that President George W. Bush’s military commissions had to comply with restrictions imposed by Congress, the decision did not foreclose broader claims of presidential power over national security. Successive administrations continued to invoke those claims—or expansive congressional authorizations—to defend actions including surveillance, targeted killings, and military operations undertaken without a formal declaration of war.

Wehle says that decades-long accumulation of authority has brought the Executive Branch close to treating the President as “above the law.”

“Trump’s authority is at its apex when it can be tied to the Commander-in-Chief power,” Wehle says.

Republicans control both the House and Senate, she says, and Trump could have attempted to get Congressional approval for both the ballroom and arch projects by rallying his own party’s support—but he didn’t.

Instead, the Administration has opted to add military justification to its efforts, she says, which “makes it more convenient for the court to reinterpret the Constitution around unaccountable, unlimited, concentrated power in one person.”

Can Trump’s triumphal arch also function as a military site?

Trump has not given much information regarding what military use the arch would have, but George Washington University law professor Sara Bronin, who is also an architect, tells TIME that she is not aware of any other structures that double as commemorative monuments and military infrastructure.

“It seems crazy to include national security infrastructure in a site that is intended to be used by the general public and is intended to be a tourist attraction,” Bronin says, calling the two intentions “fundamentally incompatible.”

“Take the Pentagon, for example. Obviously, that is a site of national security importance, but that is not a site where members of the public are generally welcome,” she adds. 

Bronin also points out that the National Park Service prepared a 22-page memorandum of agreement last week, acknowledging that the arch will unavoidably harm historic sites in the capital. The document sets out measures intended to mitigate those effects.

“NPS recognizes that Memorial Circle is located within a highly sensitive historic and commemorative landscape and that the undertaking’s location contributes to adverse effects to historic properties whose significance is associated with setting, design, feeling, association, spatial organization, circulation, and contributing views and vistas,” the agreement said.

It concluded, however, that the project cannot be located anywhere else since erecting it at Memorial Circle is “central to the undertaking.” To mitigate any adverse impacts, NPS said officials would create interpretive signs, webpages, and other materials documenting the site, its history, and the views affected by the project.

That document did not take into account any proposed military infrastructure.

“If this type of use and these physical improvements will be incorporated into the memorial arch, the memorandum of agreement will have to be completely redrafted,” Bronin says.

Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Lemmon v. Trump, has not ruled on the central question of whether the arch can be built without Congressional authorization. On Sept. 4, she ordered the Trump Administration to provide 48 hours’ notice before undertaking arch-related activity other than specified archaeological work. She also reminded the government of an earlier consent order requiring final NPS authorization and 14 days’ notice before construction or demolition. Last week, she denied the Justice Department’s request to dissolve the 48-hour requirement.

The Administration has not yet presented the arch’s new military rationale to the court or released plans showing how the proposed military infrastructure would be incorporated into the monument. That leaves the legal significance of Trump’s remarks unresolved.

But the claim places the arch on a path already taken by the ballroom. Both were introduced to the public principally as civic or ceremonial projects; both are now being described in military terms amid disputes over whether Trump can build them without Congress. Together, the projects may test how much additional authority a President gains by recasting a building project as military infrastructure.

Circle is known to many as the issuer of the $74 billion digital currency USD Coin, or USDC. But co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire believes the company’s latest launch may be the “most consequential major platform launch” in its history.

“Arc is built from the ground up for what the financial system needs: fees paid in dollars, settlement that is final in under a second, confidentiality with compliance built in, and operators that boards and regulators can trust,” Allaire wrote in a recent email.

Allaire likens the Arc blockchain and full-stack platform, launched on Sept. 16, to an Android operating system for the global economy, facilitating payments, lending, trading, and even, one day, commerce between AI agents. “Humans tolerated money that sleeps on weekends; machines will not,” he says.

The platform has more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders including global banks, asset management firms, payment networks, exchanges, and AI platforms. Its founding validators include BlackRock, Standard Chartered, Mastercard, Visa and Intercontinental Exchange. 

Allaire, who co-founded Circle 13 years ago, is a serial entrepreneur. Before his work on stablecoins, he founded cloud-based online video platform Brightcove, and before that, software company Allaire Corporation with his brother, which was acquired by Macromedia in the early aughts. He spoke with TIME in June, ahead of the launch of Arc.

How are you thinking about the different regulatory environments in all the markets that you're operating in?

Blockchain networks are just technology services. They're soft, open software protocols that run on the internet. They're general purpose computers, and so general purpose computers and network protocols are themselves not regulated activities. It's what people do on top of it. It's a little bit like the internet itself. The internet is unregulated, but the activities on the internet become regulated, whether it's privacy, data, or financial activity. 

But one of the biggest challenges of actually [having] what we think of as the core of the financial system run on public internet infrastructure like this, has been that the major regulators have had concerns about [whether] this infrastructure [is] too decentralized, where it's a bunch of unknown actors and therefore, even though it's meant to be trustless, it's sort of not trustworthy, or you could have the commingling of bad actors and good actors. The other is slightly more technical, but important, which is: central banks, for example, care about that. When a transaction happens, it's a final transaction, and the way a lot of these networks have worked in the past is there's what’s called probabilistic finality. And so if you're building a system where I bought or sold a stock or I made a transfer of value from one point to another point, you need to know that it actually happened. That has to be final. So regulators have a framework for that that is applied to the infrastructure that runs the existing financial system, and what we've done with Arc is we've designed Arc specifically to meet those standards, so that from a central bank perspective, or from the [perspectives of the] regulators that oversee, for example, the guts of the stock market, essentially think of it as the service guarantees that are required in the traditional financial system. 

So, in that sense, we do think about the regulatory environment. Does this technology stand up to the demands of that? Even though it's a general purpose technology that can be used for thousands of different use cases, it needs to stand up to that scrutiny, and so, in that way, it's not so much we're worried about people regulating Arc; it's more [for] Arc and the people who want to use Arc, can it meet the regulatory expectations?

What does this mean for the future of trading desks, and how will that look in the future? Presumably, fewer people, more agents?

There's several things all happening. One is getting this general purpose economic infrastructure out there, where machine software can deploy and run and intermediate value all programmatically. The second is taking existing financial contracts, and digitizing those onto these networks—tokenization. An equity is a contract. It conveys governance. It conveys a waterfall of economic participation. Taking the financial contract itself and the instrument itself, and digitizing those fully, that whole process of tokenization is going to take years, but it's already begun. Once that happens, then all of these become themselves programmable. Just like we have with things like USDC, we now have programmable money, and that's really powerful. The second piece is basically the development of agentic infrastructure. There's the development of the agentic infrastructure from an AI platform perspective, and then there's this convergence of agentic infrastructure and economic infrastructure. I call it the agentic economy, and this convergence of those will, I believe, completely reconstitute the way every firm in the world operates. 

Yes, the job of trading, essentially will be increasingly driven by AI agents, and whether they're operating on behalf of a treasurer in a company, they're operating on behalf of a household, or they're operating on behalf of a financial institution or a financial intermediary, a trading firm, etc. All of these will increasingly be executed agentically, and that's happening quite fast. Things are happening on exponentials, and it's very hard for humans to think in exponentials. 

You have said that you consider Circle to be in the very early stages of what it could be, even though you are already a very big business. Where do you see the future of Circle going?

When I founded the company, I was thinking about it over a multi-decade timeframe, and we're broadly a decade into this, and the first thing that we wanted to achieve was this idea of programmable money, open protocols for dollar digital currency on the internet, and getting that into a place where it could scale. It took around 10 years or so to get there. We're now there, but the adoption of that is still at the very start. So there's $360 billion of stablecoin money in circulation. There's a lot of transaction volume, but if you look at the total supply of electronic money in the world, roughly $120 trillion of electronic money in the world, there's an enormous amount of growth to happen, and I believe that this kind of money is a superior form of money and will eat into the electronic money base over time. It's at the front end of penetrating all these different areas of markets and commerce and the financial system. 

At the same time, I have a bigger thesis, which is these economic operating systems that are emerging, whether it would be like the mobile operating systems or the cloud platforms, they're emergent environments that will take 10 or 15 years to really mature. But what they portend is a world where more and more of what a corporation is will become transformed into being pure software—and that's not like we have SaaS applications or software that we interact with. The nature of the firm itself will become software, the economic activity of the firm—so that's the money, the contracts, the governance that is there, the coordination mechanisms that are part of the firm—will become run by software machines, and then the actual work of the firm, which for many companies is basically cognitive work, will be decomposed into agentic work, and will get reconstituted as agentic infrastructure with a mix of AI and humans, all of this being run on these new operating systems. That's a transformation of the very basis of the economic system, it's a transformation in the nature of the firm. It's a transformation in the way economic coordination and governance and contracts and other things work, and I think we're at the very beginning of that. I view Circle's opportunity as being a company that provides the platforms to help make that happen, that provides the infrastructure to the agentic economy that builds and issues money for that system, and that builds applications that support that change. So, we're going from, “we did the digital dollar” to “let's build the comprehensive platforms to think about this complete upgrade to the economic system that's going to take place over 10 or 15 years.”

How are your efforts around building quantum resilience going? Has AI overtaken those concerns? 

There's the countdown to quantum, sort of like Y2K. It's very clear quantum is coming, and for us there's two things that we have to be thinking about. One is we have an existing financial infrastructure which runs on 35 different blockchain networks, which is USDC, and there's money issued on all of these, and those networks themselves are going to be vulnerable to quantum. So we have to track all the existing infrastructure and the progress that they're making, and if they're not making progress, we have to think about how do we help those people safely get somewhere else. The other is, we're building de novo—from scratch—new infrastructure, and we have the benefit of building that new infrastructure at a moment in time where post-quantum cryptography is beginning to be available, and so I think we're going to be the very first public blockchain network with Arc that has post-quantum features from day one when we launch, and so that's a piece of the puzzle. And then there's a whole roadmap for every layer of what we do in this infrastructure to be post-quantum prepared. My view is this is coming. AI may accelerate the timeline to quantum coming, because AI is just assisting with advancements in technology design in general. So it may continue to solve essentially scientific problems that are needed to solve quantum. So in some ways, AI accelerates the need to figure this out, but we do have the benefit of building now in a moment where there has been enough progress and an understanding of what that first wave of quantum might look like. That kind of quantum cryptography is something that we can apply in our own infrastructure.

You're a serial entrepreneur. What skills do you think are required to be a successful founder?

There are many pathways to being successful as a founder and an entrepreneur, but I'll describe what I've experienced at least in my in my realm. There are some founders who are, let's just say, really difficult, and who drive people extremely hard and have huge success, and then there are founders that are demanding, but also operate with more human compassion. So I'm more of the latter. What I'd say is, it’s critical that founders have to really have deep conviction about what it is that they're trying to accomplish, a belief of some significant change that you can bring to the world—and it doesn't have to all be rosy sunshine. Without that core, it's very difficult to be successful because the reality is that the odds are so against you. One of the hardest parts of being a founder is you're envisioning something that doesn't exist, and so inherently the world is skeptical. Inherently you're going to be told over and over again why you're wrong, why it's not going to work, why the existing world already solves the problem. It's endless. And if you go back and read through media coverage of Circle from 13 years, you'll see for probably about 10 years it was all skepticism, and still. And so, whether it's hiring people, retaining people, people have to feel like they believe in the founder, the mission, and even when you're slapped in the face or you have a huge setback and a huge failure—which you're going to—you're going to have endless failures. Failures happen every day; they happen every month. There's small scale failures and there's large scale failures. You have to have that perseverance.

Are there things that you've learned about leadership over the course of your career that you come back to? 

There are a variety of things. I believe in openness and transparency. I believe it's really important for everyone to understand what the strategy is, and communicate and overcommunicate about those things. That openness and transparency is extremely critical during the early stages of a business as well, and that includes total transparency about your financial circumstances. 

I've learned a lot from a talent perspective. There are phases that you go through in terms of of scaling, and the people who are willing to be joining you when you found a company are not necessarily the people who are going to be the right people for leading during the bigger commercialization phase, and those may not be the right people for being a public company. There's a constant organizational evolution. There's lots of smaller lessons like hire slow, fire fast. It's like a motto I have. When I was a young entrepreneur in my 20s, I was very skeptical about the importance of culture and values. That has really evolved for me a lot and so I really got religious about mission, values, culture, and overcommunicating about it, interviewing for it, performance managing around it, making it central because a company is an organism, and you want a healthy organism. Results really comes from that. 

There's a lot of consternation about what AI means for young people entering the workforce. What would your advice be to someone early career in the age of AI?

I'll give you a real-world example. I have two sons who both graduated college in the last two years, and they're entering the workforce. One of my sons studied finance and marketing, and he wanted to get into business development. He went to a startup, and he got a job but [became] frustrated. But he got AI-pilled in January of this year, and he does not have a background in technology in any explicit way, but he just poured himself into learning these agentic systems, and he came to me and he said, "I'm going to quit my job and I want to master these skills. I want to build things. I want to create things.” I'm like, “OK, go do that.” And it is essentially my advice for anyone who is at any stage in their career, but I'll say for young people who are coming in, the opportunity right now is incredible. If you're a generally good thinker, you can become a master of literally hundreds of different domains, and you can learn how to create and orchestrate and build things that it was impossible to do before, and so it's one of the greatest periods ever in human history for individuals and individual agency, and that's why we're seeing a huge surge in solo founders. That's why we're actually seeing record numbers of new business creation that are happening in the U.S. Agents give agency. So, my recommendation is that people should dive in whatever their domain interest is and master these tools, because it effectively is going to give you superpowers. And that’s the exact message I've given every single employee at Circle. I’ve said everyone's jobs are going to be transformed. We are going to reconstitute this company. We're going to reorganize this company around the capabilities of agentic [AI], and it's the greatest career opportunity you're ever going to have. Take as much time as you want to master this, because you're going to be more valuable in Circle, or if you choose to go do something else as well. 

Concussions in children are alarmingly frequent, affecting over a million children in the U.S. each year. An estimated 50% of all concussions are undetected, unreported, and untreated. 

As the founder and director of a concussion clinic in New York, I see my fair share of concerned parents who want to do everything they can to help their kids heal from concussion. It’s a good instinct: Early and active intervention with targeted therapies is critical. From years of caring for children and adolescents with concussion, my team and I wondered if the parents most involved in their children’s recovery—some might call them “helicopter parents”—could be a key part of navigating a serious medical problem which, left untreated, may have devastating consequences. 

Our society has turned against helicopter parents, viewing them as unnecessarily controlling. But they are uniquely valuable as a temporary framework for healing. The treatment regimen for concussion involves drastic lifestyle changes surrounding their daily screen-time exposure, shifting circadian rhythms, intellectual stimulation, and the cognitive demands of school or work. Everything has to be turned down or dialed back, sometimes for weeks at a time. The brain heals gradually, and each lifestyle change removes a source of strain it would otherwise have to contend with while heeding a vigilant dietary and sleep schedule.

I see often in my clinic that the children with very involved parents are the ones most likely to recover swiftly and without complications. After their child gets a concussion, these are the parents who diligently and methodically plan waking hours, sleeping hours, meal times, recreation, and exercise, and gradually adjust screen time. These strict parental accommodations are fundamental to recovery. 

Although the degree of supervision may be controversial to developmentally favored ideas of nurturing independence in adolescence, a brief “helicopter” approach in the context of youth brain injury can be remarkably effective. Parents of young children or young adults who are recovering from concussion must be involved from the start and commit to executing all aspects of the recovery plan while modeling positive coping styles. 

These interventions can also be effective for young adults in their 20s who had already adjusted to and embraced an independent life. One typical reaction of a parent to their twenty-something offspring could reasonably be that their child has to navigate their treatment and recovery on their own. 

Yet irrespective of their age or how long they had or had not lived at home, my team and I found, time and again, that it’s extremely beneficial to have a parent swoop in, micromanage a patient’s schedule, and deliberately revert to the past concern and meticulous care that they took on when their child was very young. The person they are caring for who has to adhere to the concussion regimen cannot easily follow the regimen without them. 

A young woman was hit in the back of her head in a boating accident, and suffered an “out of body” experience. Her father reluctantly traveled from far to come to her side, believing she was a young adult who could surely manage this invisible injury by herself. He found her to be different: she had confusion when calculating tips, struggled with maps, and complained of headaches in her entire head accompanied by eye pain. After a few days together, she reluctantly pulled out of the marathon she had signed up for and allowed her father to regulate her protein intake and remind her when it was her bedtime. 

Another young man was skiing and fell forward down a hill, landing 30 feet downhill.  Every time he looked at a screen, “it was the shape of a lightbulb, surrounded by tiny little pinwheels” and said “my mental compass was off and I could hear my internal monologue.” Here began the necessary dialogue with his family and his mother was soon at his side, ensuring that he took the correct vitamins at the correct time, cutting tablets into half when doses needed to be titrated, and counting his eye and neck exercises. 

No matter how motivated a concussed individual is to achieve recovery, they rarely have the capacity to follow the treatment regimen, which involves drastic lifestyle changes affecting their daily screen exposure, shifting circadian rhythms, intellectual stimulation, and the cognitive demands of school or work. The intriguing and undeniable result was a patient who recovered more swiftly and with fewer complications or setbacks when compared with their independent counterparts. The helicopter parent  actively reinforces the details, effectively guiding an incremental and purposeful exposure to stimuli. The parent also validates the recovery process as an active coach, facilitating and motivating the path ahead.

Concussion recovery is best accomplished using a systematic and methodical approach. Each advancement toward complete recovery is closely calibrated whether it be bedtime, the number of minutes of breaks between screen exposure, or even the heart rate at which the first cardiovascular exercise is attempted. A helicopter parent can be taught and also encouraged by their child’s doctor to maintain strict sleep and waking schedules, specific protein-based meals, drastically reduce screen time, supervising exercise, and with a constant willingness to adjust specific circumstances of exposure to monitor recovery. 

The goal of medicine is to heal, and we found that healing is best accomplished by a clear adoption of the helicopter approach, albeit for a transient period. 

We often triumphantly declare the last visit to a concussion clinic as graduation. It marks a return to normal activities: sports, homework, time spent with friends. Their commencement to self-governance has begun.

On Sept. 15 and 16, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh presided over his third Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the body responsible for setting the interest rates that shape the American economy. 

With August jobs numbers coming in stronger than analysts expected, the Fed unanimously decided to raise interest rates by a quarter percentage point for the first time since 2023. Its new benchmark interest rate sits at a target range of 3.75% to 4%, and markets are expecting at least one additional interest rate hike by the end of the year. That decision unfolded against a striking backdrop: inflation has run above the Fed's 2% target for more than five and a half years. 

“The plain fact is that inflation is too high and has been for too long,” stated Warsh. Few economists disagreed with Warsh’s determination and the Fed’s decision—but President Donald Trump did. 

Trump quickly critiqued the committee’s undivided vote to raise rates via social media. “LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!” he cried. 

And upon landing in North Carolina for a campaign rally, the president told reporters he blamed Warsh’s Board of Governors for the decision. “I told Kevin, I said, ‘You might as well vote with the board because it’s just not going to matter.’ The board is very hostile,” he said. “They’re very political. They’re doing the wrong thing. They’re a bunch of politicians.”

Warsh took the helm of the more than century-old institution earlier this year and has moved quickly to put his stamp on it, launching five task forces within his first month, each charged with developing recommendations across a different area of the Fed's mandate. How far he can take that reform agenda will depend on his ability to build coalitions among fellow board and FOMC members and to hold the confidence of financial markets.

At the press conference following his first FOMC meeting in June, Warsh announced several initiatives covering the Fed's communications strategy, balance sheet, data sources, productivity and jobs, and inflation framework. Each is led by three outside experts drawn from academia and industry. The groups are expected to deliver preliminary findings this fall, with most wrapping up by year's end. 

The pace and ambition of the efforts signal that Warsh is serious. Whether it proves truly transformative remains an open question.

Watch the data, not the Fed

Of his five reform areas, communication has drawn the most attention, and Warsh moved on it before the task force even convened. He stopped offering long-term projections on Fed policy actions and simplified its press releases, signaling a clear break from recent practice. At the heart of this shift is Warsh's belief that markets have grown too dependent on Fed communication, paying more attention to what officials say than to the underlying economic data. He argues this creates a feedback problem: if markets are reacting to the Fed rather than to the data, the Fed gets a distorted read on where markets actually stand.

Central to this critique is his skepticism of forward guidance, the practice by which Fed officials provide long-term outlooks to signal predictability and transparency. Forward guidance in various forms has been used since the 1990’s but became central as a policy tool when the policy rate reached “the zero lower bound” during the 2008 financial crisis. It was never fully retired. Warsh wants to end it, arguing that it ties the Fed's hands and leaves officials with less room to respond to new information as it arrives.

"The role of forward guidance should be limited and circumscribed. Otherwise, it risks creating ambiguity in the name of clarity. Oversharing policy deliberations and overcommitting to future decisions can lead markets, businesses, and households astray,” argued Warsh. “And I believe when policymakers make quasi-commitments on interest rates through the cycle, we inhibit our own freedom to make the right calls when it's time to decide."

Yet even a more restrained communication style does not insulate a Fed chair from market scrutiny. After his second FOMC meeting in July, Warsh learned that lesson firsthand. Many observers felt he underperformed at the press conference, and markets responded with alarm, raising questions about his credibility at a moment when inflation remains stubbornly high and the chair, while acknowledging the problem, has appeared reluctant to deploy his most powerful tool: raising interest rates. 

To be sure, Warsh is not the first Fed chair to rattle markets during a first-year press conference. Both Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen had similar stumbles early in their tenures. What matters is the recovery, and Warsh moved quickly to make one. At the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Wyoming at the end of August, he delivered a forceful address on the state of the economy and the urgency of bringing inflation to heel, reassuring markets and resetting the tone ahead of September's meeting.

Warsh's push to streamline Fed communication extends to the meeting calendar itself. He has proposed reducing the number of annual FOMC meetings from eight to six, which would mark the first such structural change since the 1980s. Fewer meetings, he argues, would give the committee more time between sessions to absorb incoming data and deliberate before acting. Critics counter that the tradeoff is agility. With only six scheduled meetings a year, the Fed would have fewer opportunities to respond to fast-moving economic conditions without resorting to emergency sessions and inter-meeting moves. Importantly, Warsh has not convinced critics that the current schedule leads to worse policy outcomes.

Every corner of the Fed under review

Among Warsh’s remaining reform areas, the balance sheet and inflation framework task forces carry the greatest consequence. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed began purchasing long-term government bonds and other securities to inject liquidity into the economy, a practice known as quantitative easing. Its balance sheet swelled from roughly $1 trillion before the crisis to nearly $9 trillion in the wake of the Covid pandemic. It currently stands at $6.7 trillion, a level Warsh views as excessive. Bringing this total down is one of his stated goals, but doing so is acutely market sensitive. Any reductions will need to be phased in gradually and communicated with care, as an abrupt shift risks triggering the kind of market disruption the Fed is expressly trying to avoid.

The inflation framework task force operates under similarly intense scrutiny from policymakers and markets alike. The 2% inflation target itself is not on the table. The task force will instead examine the drivers of inflation, how it is measured, and what tools are available for delivering price stability in a changing economy.

The fourth task force examines the economic impact of technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, on the Fed's dual mandate of keeping prices stable and employment high. The fifth focuses on data sources, evaluating new information streams and methodological changes to improve how the Fed collects data and measures inflation. The goal is to give policymakers more current information on the state of the economy.  

What Warsh needs

To enact any of these changes, whether on the balance sheet, the inflation framework, or the number of FOMC meetings, Warsh will need to bring his fellow policymakers along. The chair has the authority to convene the task forces and shape their composition, but any resulting changes require approval from the seven-member board of governors, or in the case of FOMC meetings, the full 19-member committee. All proposed reforms will face intense internal debate. The recent frequency of dissents during FOMC meetings suggests that not all members will greet the reform agenda with equal enthusiasm. How transformative Warsh's tenure proves to be will therefore depend not only on the ambition of the proposed reforms but on his ability to bring a majority of colleagues on board. And as his July press conference demonstrated, financial markets will be watching and rendering their own verdict throughout.

Warsh has taken over the Fed at a turbulent moment. Inflation has been running above the 2% target for half a decade. Supply shocks from the conflict in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, combined with repeated tariff threats from the White House, have injected fresh uncertainty into the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, the effects of artificial intelligence, beyond an immediate boost to economic activity, and the potential productivity gains as well as the potential job losses, remain difficult to measure and even harder to predict. And with midterm elections approaching, political pressure is only likely to intensify. Trump has repeatedly called for lower interest rates, and he seems unlikely to quiet his calls.

Faced with these pressures, Warsh has set out on an ambitious reform path. Whether he succeeds will come down to two things: the pace at which he can advance his agenda, and his ability to bring enough of his fellow Fed members with him. Most importantly, Warsh and his colleagues will need to convince the public, the financial markets, and Congress that the changes adopted will lead to better policy making. 

This is his ultimate challenge.

On Sept. 2, 2026, the United Nations Environment Program report, Limiting Overshoot, declared that the world has fallen short of keeping global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and that urgent action is needed to course-correct. That same week, NPR reported that extreme heat killed nearly five times as many people in the United States as official records indicated. 

These findings followed two consecutively brutal summers. Death counts from heatwaves across Europe dominated news cycles this year as the continent’s aging infrastructure struggled to cool down. “Heat domes” trapped heat across the United States.

But merely counting deaths from heat risks missing its impact on human life. Each heat dome in the U.S. affected over 100 million people. Among them were construction workers, outdoor workers, delivery workers in unairconditioned cabs, farm workers, the unhoused, the poor who could not afford air conditioning, those on medications on whom the impact of heat was amplified, those with mental health disorders, and those with little or no access to healthcare.

According to the International Labor Organization, billions of workers around the world are exposed to extreme heat every year. While the vast majority of them do not die, many suffer deeply from the arduous ignominy of a life exposed to heat, day and night, year after year. 

While counting deaths from heat is an imperfect science, the quantification of heat’s impact on mental health, physical well-being, wages, food security, habitat, and infrastructure is even more complex. One thousand women working in India’s informal labor economy have set out to quantify this burden—to understand what impact the heat and humidity in their lived environments at home and at work have on their health, wages, and well-being.

Partnering with our team at Harvard, the Self Employed Women’s Association in India has recruited women from trades including street vendors, waste recyclers, home-based artisans, and farmers to participate in the Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies (CommHATS) study. For 13 months, each woman is equipped with a wrist wearable, microsensors measuring heat and humidity at home and workplaces, labs measuring critical biomarkers, and surveys documenting home and work layouts, wellbeing, and wages. Considered together, this data constructs one of the world’s largest such databases of the impact of heat on human health.

Building on prior work that has shown that long exposure to heat impacts multiple organ systems, including the heart and kidneys, the CommHATS project seeks to address unanswered questions in our attempts to adapt to extreme heat: How do we know if cool roofs work? What should our metric of success be? If the temperature drops a bit, but I still cannot sleep restfully, is the intervention valid? What should the threshold for a new heat insurance product be: the temperature at the airport where the weather station is, or the temperature in my home, which is actually how hot I feel? In India, where over half of women of reproductive age are anemic, how does heat further stress their hearts?  

Through community meetings and WhatsApp groups, research findings are regularly shared with all participants, who routinely ask how the data will help improve their lives. Early findings, which we will share at New York Climate Week, reveal devastating wage losses on hot days, shortened sleep spans, and high cardiac stress. This kind of relentless, unforgiving heat forces a different kind of reckoning that goes beyond OSHA regulations and market solutions. 

In places like India, where around 90% of workers are informally employed, there is no employer to hold accountable. The poor have no choice but to adapt. They change working hours at the cost of childcare. They reallocate savings to protect health and wages. They buy water jugs to carry potable water, and awnings to create shade, and ice chests to cool their produce. The woefully underfunded global financial instruments for heat adaptation have no existing structural mechanism to actually reach the most vulnerable, and so those most at risk bear the price themselves.

The CommHATS project is implemented daily by grassroots workers, a testament to its ease of use. They check on the sensors and the wearables, and most importantly, the participating workers. The participants are invested in the questions, the tools, and the analysis. The tool is thus built for scale and can help communities anywhere in the world understand what their environmental exposure is at an actionable scale that is relevant to decision-making. It helps measure exposure as well as the efficacy of interventions.

In our study, we find that the cost of our collective inaction is already being borne by those whose lives are already stressed. The human spirit is resilient, and perhaps life goes on. But in this warming world, life is compromised and diminished. Millions may still live through extreme heat and not yet enter the death counts, but they cannot thrive.

President Donald Trump’s Administration is rolling out a new rule that experts predict will make it more difficult for immigrants to get green cards if they access public assistance programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps—and could deter those hoping to obtain the status from enrolling in public benefits.

The rule, which goes into effect on Friday, updates a policy dating back to the 19th century that the U.S. has long used to prohibit immigrants who are believed to be likely to become a “public charge” from getting green cards.

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has argued that the change “is restoring the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves,” adding that it is “reaffirming the requirement of self-reliance, protecting public resources, and ending policies that encouraged dependency on hard-working American taxpayers.”

The rule marks the latest move in Trump’s efforts to sharply restrict both illegal and legal immigration. The President enacted a similar change during his first Administration, but the effort was subjected to court challenges and ultimately rescinded by his successor, Joe Biden.

The new rule has already been challenged in court by a coalition of more than a dozen states, including New York and California. It’s unclear at this point how the ongoing litigation will affect the rollout of the rule.

Here’s what to know about the new rule and how it could affect immigrants.

What is the “public charge” rule?

With its new policy, the Trump Administration is implementing a change to what’s known as the “public charge” rule, a policy first established under the Immigration Act of 1882. Since then, one factor that the U.S. government has considered when reviewing green card applications is whether the applicant is likely to become dependent on government assistance. 

Historically, officials reviewing these types of applications have only taken into account cash benefit programs—for instance, Supplemental Security Income from Social Security—as “public benefits” that could lead to an immigrant being deemed a “public charge” and having their green card application denied. They have usually not deemed non-cash public benefits, such as Medicaid and food stamps, as programs that would disqualify an immigrant from obtaining permanent resident status.

During his first term in the White House, Trump tried to expand the programs that could result in an immigrant being deemed a “public charge,” but a federal judge ruled that the policy had to be vacated, saying it had “numerous unexplained flaws” that made it “arbitrary and capricious.” 

When former President Joe Biden was in office, he officially rescinded Trump’s rule and stipulated that non-cash benefits would not result in an immigrant being considered a “public charge.”

How is the Trump Administration’s new policy different from the long-standing “public charge” rule?

In July, the Trump Administration revealed that it was revoking the Biden-era policy and was rolling out a change similar to the one that faced legal challeges during Trump’s first term. Under the new rule, officials reviewing green card applications are able to consider a broader scope of public benefit programs. The Trump Administration has noted that the new “public charge” rule does not apply to some immigrants—for instance, refugees.

The guidance, though, is vague—it doesn’t include a full list of the benefits that can be taken into consideration, saying only that immigration officers will be “using good judgment and discretion” and will be “making individualized, fact-specific public charge inadmissibility determinations, based on a totality of the alien’s circumstances.”

“Now, the officers who are reviewing and adjudicating these cases have much more discretion in how they make that determination—whether they believe the person is likely to become a public charge,” says Melissa Shepard, the legal services director at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “The difference now is that it’s a much broader analysis, whereas before it was a little more limited.”

Adriana Cadena, the executive director of the Protecting Immigrant Families Coalition, says she worries that, because the new policy is so broad, it “opens the door for abuses by immigration officials” during the green card application process.

“It’s going from having guidance and clarity and understanding to opening the door to any kinds of programs,” she says.

How could the Trump Administration’s new rule affect immigrants?

Immigration experts say that the new policy could result in more green card applications being rejected, as well as cause many immigrants to delay seeking permanent resident status. 

Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer and former national president of the American immigration Lawyers Association, says that he expects there will be “massive numbers of denials” of green card applications as this new policy is rolled out. He adds that he and his colleagues have heard from some of their clients that they plan to wait until after Trump leaves the White House before filing their green card applications.

People who do not have permanent resident status in the U.S. are not eligible for many public assistance programs, but experts also warn that the new rule could result in immigrants disenrolling from public benefit programs that they or their children are eligible for because they are afraid of potentially harming their chances of obtaining a green card in the future.

Experts are additionally concerned that the Trump Administration’s new rule opens the door to immigration officials taking into account whether a green card applicant’s family member used a public benefit. The new rule stipulates that “if there is evidence in the record the alien’s family members whom the alien is legally obligated to support receive means-tested public benefits based on the alien’s income falling below the designated threshold, DHS would consider that fact.”

Kuck says he fears that this could lead to a situation where, for example, if a green card applicant’s child who is a U.S. citizen receives a public benefit, such as a free school lunch program, that could lead to their parent’s application being denied.

According to Shepard, it’s not yet clear how exactly the new policy will be applied in practice because it is so broad and gives immigration officers “so much discretion.” But she says she believes the change will cause people to be “a lot more cautious” and potentially fearful to access public assistance programs.

Cadena says the new rule is “forcing families to choose between either being able to adjust their status in the future or be able to have access to essential programs like food and child care.”

“In the current environment that we are in, where immigrant family safety is constantly being threatened, immigrant families … want to be able to keep their families together,” Cadena says. “And if keeping their child enrolled in an important program like Medicaid is going to threaten that, then they would more than likely disenroll their children from these programs.”

DHS has previously estimated that the rollout of the “public charge” change could lead to more than 950,000 people disenrolling from or choosing not to enroll in public assistance programs.

The change is the latest action the Trump Administration has taken to restrict immigration, including ramping up efforts to limit several legal pathways to immigration and proposing raising the fees associated with applying for citizenship.

“This is just one small factor or small piece of the entire immigration system, I think, that is under attack,” Shepard says.

Russia is just one day into three-day elections that will determine the makeup of the lower house of the country’s parliament, the State Duma. But the outcome of the vote has been all but guaranteed since before the first ballots were cast.

The elections, the first parliamentary vote the country has held since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, are widely expected to result in the Kremlin-aligned United Russia party maintaining its overwhelming dominance in the Duma. 

The party currently holds 310 of the 450 seats in the chamber, giving it a supermajority and the power to make major legislative decisions without the input of other parties. It needs to keep at least 300 seats to retain that supermajority. 

Four other political parties are also expected to be represented in the Duma following the election, all of which generally vote in line with United Russia and support the war in Ukraine. They are the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the A Just Russia party, and the New People party. 

Democracy watchdogs and foreign governments have denounced Russia’s elections as being neither free nor fair. Russian officials have rejected such claims in the past, saying that the country carries out its voting process in line with the law.

But experts tell TIME that the Russian government exerts its influence in ways that all but predetermine the results of elections and ensure that President Vladimir Putin and United Russia maintain control. 

And this year’s vote, says David Szakonyi, an expert on Russia and election fraud who is professor at George Washington University, is “occurring in the most repressive political environment in Russia's post-Soviet history.”

Here's what experts have to say about how the Kremlin ensures elections result in its desired outcome—and why it continues to hold them.

Restricting opposition

The Kremlin uses multiple levers to influence elections on the government level, at the polls, and in daily civilian life, according to Szakonyi. 

“Without a doubt, the most powerful tool” in the Kremlin’s arsenal, Szakonyi says, is limiting which candidates appear on the ballot in the first place.

In the case of the ongoing parliamentary vote, the one anti-war party that was registered by the Central Election Commission, the Yabloko party, was prohibited from participating in the election by Russia’s Supreme Court. The high court ordered that the party be removed from the ballot last month in response to a lawsuit from the pro-Kremlin Rodina party that accused the Yabloko party, which has garnered support from young Russians and those opposed to the war in Ukraine, of copyright infringement, receiving foreign funding, and extremism.

Szakoni says that the Kremlin has the ability to “harness the judicial system to pass rulings” such as the Supreme Court’s decision against the Yabloko party, which it uses as a “legal veneer” that shields the influence of Putin’s government over the ballot. 

This screening of anti-war and other opposition parties, he says, comes months in advance of elections, creating a list of candidates that includes little or no meaningful opposition at all. 

The Kremlin has also labeled opposition figures who oppose the war as “foreign agents,” a designation that prevents them from holding public office. In other instances, opposition leaders and activists such as Alexei Navalny have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Still others have fled the country.

The vote count

Experts tell TIME that the Russian government has also exercised its influence more directly on vote counts to achieve its desired election results. 

“Historically,” Szakonyi says, Russian electoral officials have “intervened regularly to deliver votes to the ruling party and take them away from competitors.” 

In the past, this was done via “crude ballot box stuffing,” he says; now, he asserts it is also performed by altering the results of online votes.

Online voting is used in more than a third of Russia’s regions, which Szakonyi asserts puts more power in the government’s hands since it eliminates the physical tally represented by paper ballots. 

“The way that the electronic votes are being counted is almost completely a black box for the rest of society,” he says. 

Regina Smyth, an expert on Russia and authoritarian regimes who is a professor at Indiana University, says that “falsification,” or the practice of altering the number of votes that are counted, occurs at precinct election commissions, of which there are over 90,000, all across Russia, that she says are “mostly staffed by loyalists, and they will simply report false numbers.”

There is also fraud, Smyth alleges, in “mobile voting,” when officials deliver and pick up ballots from people in their homes who are, for example, disabled or ill and unable to vote otherwise. 

‘Implicit threat’

On a deeper level, an “implicit threat” stemming from the Russian government sways countless votes each election cycle, Szakonyi contends. 

“Many Russian voters do not have the autonomy to cast an independent vote. They work for the state,” he says. He argues that many university students, healthcare workers, and teachers, whose livelihoods depend on state-run organizations, belong to a “block of captive, vulnerable voters” who fear prosecution by the Kremlin more than they value the influence of their ballot. 

Voting is also taking place this year in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine: in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, and in the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions. 

“In the occupied territories of Ukraine, where the elections are being held in these illegally occupied territories, soldiers, heavily armed soldiers, travel from house to house coercing people to vote,” Smyth tells TIME.

A lack of independent election oversight

On top of the various methods the Kremlin allegedly uses to achieve the voting results it wants, there are slim to no oversight mechanisms in place to document election interference in the country. 

Golos, which was the only independent election watchdog within Russia, shuttered in 2025 following years of governmental pressure after its chairman was found guilty of working with an "undesirable organization" and imprisoned in a penal colony. 

Szakonyi describes Golos’ loss as the “biggest blow toward any type of accountability” for the Kremlin, saying it was “the biggest tool that civil society had to identify, uncover, and publicize the fraud that was basically happening in every single electoral cycle.”

Russia has also refused to invite international election monitors from the Organization for Security ​and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest regional security organization, to observe this year’s elections.  

Maria Telalian, director of the OSCE’s election-monitoring office, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, said in a statement last month that the decision not to invite any OSCE monitors was “deeply regrettable, particularly as it continues a pattern of not implementing the commitments that every OSCE participating State has undertaken towards its own citizens and the international community.”

The ongoing vote marks the third nationwide election in Russia to take place without OSCE observation. Russia previously imposed severe limits on OSCE election observation in 2021 that the organization said made monitoring that year’s parliamentary elections in the country impossible. It did not invite the group’s monitors to the 2024 presidential election at all.

So why is Russia holding elections at all? 

Despite the results of the parliamentary elections being all but determined, they carry a symbolic weight crucial to Putin’s legitimacy in the public eye and his desire to continue the war against Ukraine, experts tell TIME. 

“There's lots of reasons to have elections. First and foremost, the Russian population expects elections,” Szakonyi says. “Putin's legitimacy depends on his ability to win election votes to the presidency and have his ruling party win on a regular interval, and demonstrate that they're popular and that their policies are in demand from the citizenry.”

During an address in which Putin urged Russians to vote days before the elections began, the leader said that “your choice and resolve will show once again that millions of people stand behind our fighters” and that “participating in the elections is our shared contribution to Russia’s victory.”

“This is a way for him to theoretically show that the Russian population is united behind his war and wants to continue fighting, and that Russia has had this referendum and will continue to push harder,” Szakonyi says.

This article discusses the full season of Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story

Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is about female rage and repression. That isn’t my personal interpretation of the latest installment of Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy’s Netflix true-crime anthology. It’s the talking point that the show’s makers have been leading with, in publicity materials and in multiple interviews. These are fine themes for the first season of Monster with a female subject, even if they’re not exactly unique within a post-Big-Little-Lies, #MeToo-informed TV landscape where so many dramas aimed at women double as amplifiers for gendered frustrations. The well of misogyny isn’t in danger of running dry anytime soon. But if we must keep diving into it, each descent should at least leave us with some new insight or nuance.

Lizzie Borden, now streaming, fails to clear even that bar. Perhaps the least historically accurate Monster yet—and that’s saying something—the season uses the infamous tale of a Fall River, Mass. woman who probably hacked her wealthy father and stepmother to death with an axe in 1892 as a conduit to just about every plague on womankind you can imagine, past, present, and perennial. Rape. Domestic violence. Pregnancy and childbirth. Housework. Menstrual maladies. Pressure to marry. The premium put on physical beauty. The perils of sex work. Confinement in the home and subjugation to male relatives. By tying together Lizzie’s story with the legends of supposed forerunner Elizabeth Báthory and descendent Aileen Wuornos, Brennan, who wrote every episode, suggests a simplistic kinship between all female killers.

There’s no use fretting over the extremely purposeful anachronisms and inaccuracies in this retelling, which plays as fast and loose with the Borden family as that classic nursery rhyme. With 26-year-old Ella Beatty starring as a dreamy, blank-screen Lizzie, who ages from 32 to her 60s by the end of the season, and Charlie Hunnam and Rebecca Hall cast as parents who were really a couple of decades the actors’ seniors, everyone is much younger and prettier than their real-life counterparts. And more shocking, in some ways, than the hyperspeed double murder reenactment that opens the premiere, is what immediately follows it: a flashback to four months earlier, when Lizzie scares off a suitor by passing a bucket of menstrual blood on the white sofa where they’re sitting. As it turns out, what the fictionalized Bordens refer to as her “lady time” had some relevance to the actual case. But Lizzie Borden is such a massive remix, mingling facts with half-truths and rumors and fabrications, it barely matters which detail is which.

Because its source material is not especially extensive—one double homicide, as opposed to the lengthy and lurid sagas of most past Monster subjects—the show is forced to stretch. The series is padded with Fall River horror scenes that either never happened (the oyster poisoning that leads to so much operatic barfing) or didn’t transpire remotely the way they’re shown (the murder of Bertha Manchester, played by Linda Reiter). Brennan also adds queer love to Lizzie’s life, in the form of the family’s maid, Bridget Sullivan, who they really did call Maggie, after a former servant. He is far from the first to investigate this angle; the 2018 film Lizzie, to take just one example, is also built around a romance, between Chloë Sevigny’s Lizzie and Kristen Stewart’s Bridget. 

Monster is, however, the first dramatization to make such imaginative use of the character. Phantom Thread breakout Vicky Krieps, who played ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ Ilse Koch in Monster’s Ed Gein season, is a conspicuously Germanic Irish maid, with an ahistorical shag haircut dyed a series of shades reminiscent of, by turns, Wuornos and Ziggy Stardust. She has picked up skills in everything from cooking and cleaning to pharmacology in the course of her global travels. It’s no mystery why the awkward, sheltered Lizzie, who craves a bigger life, is enchanted by this glamorous, androgynous outsider. Maggie is easily the best part of the season, thanks in no small part to Krieps’ at once humane and otherworldly performance.

She’s also the unstuck-in-time character who first connects Lizzie to murderesses from other eras. As Maggie reads from a French book about Báthory, a 16th century Hungarian noblewoman said to have killed hundreds of young women and bathed in their blood in pursuit of eternal youth, we see Krieps—with hair and makeup straight out of the goth club—as the so-called Blood Countess. The Runaways’ anthem of teen-girl rebellion “Cherry Bomb” blares. And Lizzie is electrified by the story. She feels a kinship with Báthory. Never mind that killing your cruel parents to free yourself and massacring a village’s worth of peasant girls because La Mer has yet to be invented are about as different as murder motives get. The fact that each woman is acting in response to some form of sexism is, I guess, supposed to bridge that gulf.

It takes almost half the season for the third member of the deadly trio, played by Murphyverse MVP Sarah Paulson, to show up. Often framed as America’s first female serial killer, Wuornos, a Florida sex worker who killed seven johns between 1989 and 1990, is, in this telling, as inspired by Lizzie as Lizzie is by Báthory. Her presence, and her unsuccessful attempt to claim in court that she acted in self-defense against rape, allows the show to take on—and force us to watch—sexual violence. I’m not sure it needed to be shoehorned into the rare true-crime drama where it doesn’t have an obvious place. Brennan also connects Aileen’s well-documented queerness with the speculative relationship between Lizzie and Maggie. On a pilgrimage to the Borden home, now a bed and breakfast, Aileen and her girlfriend (Jessie Lee) have public sex. A fantasy sequence has the two couples dancing side-by-side in Lizzie’s sacred garden shed. But it’s never clear what Monster is trying to say about lesbians and murder, and this is a case where ambiguity leaves space to insert some pretty dark assumptions. 

The outcomes for each of the three female killers are as different as their motivations. Lizzie is acquitted and buys a mansion with her inheritance, presumably because sexist men can’t conceive of a woman committing such physical murders—and because she learns to correctly perform femininity, crying and fainting at appropriate moments, during the trial. Despite wrenching testimony, coarse, unfeminine Aileen is convicted and executed. This might lead you to conclude that privilege and falling in line with patriarchal expectations are what it takes for a woman to get away with murder. But then there’s the rich, powerful, and apparently quite appearance-obsessed Báthory. Our last glimpse of the countess is as a rotting corpse, bricked up in her castle for her sins. So what is really being said here?

Not much, as far as I can tell. Lizzie Borden certainly makes a strong case that women have always been repressed, that rage is the obvious product of that repression, and that liberation is the only antidote. (Of course we get a scene in the finale where Lizzie celebrates suffrage.) But if you didn’t know that, it’s probably also news to you that water is wet and the pope is Catholic. The show’s obsession with women’s bodies as the sites of unending horrors reminds me of House of the Dragon’s repeated depictions of traumatic childbirth. It’s as though viewers are expected to go in completely ignorant of basic hardships afflicting half the human population and must see them reproduced over and over again in gory detail to be enlightened, much less empathetic. And in that case, I suppose it’s also necessary to render interchangeable three notorious women defined by actions rooted in a near-universal form of rage. 

But theirs are old stories, already told and retold in every conceivable media, and often, effectively, by women. Wuornos was, of course, most famously portrayed by Charlize Theron, in writer-director Patty Jenkins’ career-making, Oscar-winning 2003 film also titled Monster. Isabelle Huppert stars as Báthory in The Blood Countess, a new feature by German experimental cinema legend Ulrike Ottinger, which is earning praise on the festival circuit for its strangeness and sense of humor. Meanwhile, on TV, creator Liz Meriwether just gave us Furious—another story of female rage, female repression, and yes, even a (fictional) female serial killer. While Krieps is mesmerizing in Monster and frequent Murphy production designer Matthew Flood Ferguson has outdone himself with lavishly suffocating Gilded Age interiors, Furious is the superior show because it takes “being a woman is hard” as the given it is rather than as the endpoint of many repetitive episodes. It has dark, lived-in comedy and real stakes, posing the question of what can realistically be done about systemic misogyny and the anger over it that stains women’s lives.

“All your books are written by men,” Maggie scolds Lizzie in Monster’s season premiere. When you consider how heavily male the creative team behind Lizzie Borden is (executive producer Max Winkler directed six episodes and Sarah Adina Smith, two), this kind of has to be a self-aware line. But whether it’s intended as a wry apology or a small joke, I couldn’t tell you.

President Donald Trump announced on Sept. 18 that he was banning CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House, setting up a new test of the First Amendment’s protection of a free press as his Administration moves to punish news organizations whose coverage he dislikes.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump accused the three outlets of repeatedly publishing “FAKE NEWS” and warned that other news organizations could face similar restrictions.

“Effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW... and Politico... from the White House as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Trump wrote. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America.”

Taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office later, Trump said there were no particular stories that prompted the decision. “It's really just cumulative stories over the last few years, you get sick of it,” he said. “They purposely write negative news, and they do that because they want to try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration.”

It was not immediately clear whether the White House would enforce the prohibition, and CNN reported that its team remained at the White House and continued to cover the Administration on the day it was announced. However, the prohibition was enforced the following day, when journalists from all three organizations were denied entry to the White House and had their press credentials confiscated. The affected outlets condemned the action and said they would continue covering the Administration.

“CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting,” the network said in a statement. “We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government.”

When asked by a reporter what exactly the ban would entail, Trump said, "I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can." The White House Press Office did not immediately respond to questions about the ban.

Last year, Trump barred reporters from the Associated Press from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other events with limited space after the news organization declined to update their widely used stylebook to adopt his preferred name, “Gulf of America,” for the body of water long known as the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press sued, and the case remains ongoing.

The uncertainty could set up another legal confrontation over the boundaries of presidential control over access to the White House and the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press. The First Amendment protects freedom of the press, a principle intended to allow news organizations to scrutinize those in power without government retaliation for their reporting. 

Asked about the likelihood of his latest media ban being struck down in court, Trump responded, “I think it's good to point it out whether it survives or doesn't.” He added, “I don't think that a court should allow fake news to be written day after day after day.”

The White House has historically maintained regular access for journalists representing a broad range of news organizations, allowing them to question the President, attend briefings, and document the activities of the executive branch. The press corps also serves a practical function in providing independent accounts of presidential movements and events to the public. CNN, in particular, has been part of the traditional five-network television pool that follows the President and provides ongoing coverage of presidential appearances.

Trump has tried before to use access to the White House and presidential events as leverage against news organizations whose coverage he disliked. During his first term, he revoked the White House press credentials of Jim Acosta, then a CNN correspondent, after a contentious exchange during a news conference. CNN challenged the decision in court, and the restriction was overturned.

The dispute over access has become part of a broader pattern in Trump’s relationship with the news media. Since returning to office, he has pursued legal action against news organizations including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC after reports he objected to. The cases against the Times and Journal were subsequently dismissed, while the BBC has sought to have the case dismissed.

The Trump Administration has repeatedly called itself the “most transparent Administration in history,” pointing to the President’s frequent gaggles with reporters.

—With reporting by Philip Wang

If Zach Cregger’s career tells us anything, it’s that starting out as a comedian might be the best training for becoming a horror filmmaker. Cregger’s 2022 surprise hit (and directorial debut) Barbarian paved the way for an even bigger success, 2025’s Weapons, a well-written, intelligently directed picture featuring sterling performances from Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and most of all Amy Madigan, who won an Academy Award for her role as Aunt Gladys, an unctuously polite polyester-pantsuit-wearing costume jewelry addict who also happens to be a witch, having lured a town’s schoolkids away in the middle of the night for her own nefarious purposes. So many contemporary horror films lack a sense of humor, about the world or about themselves. But Cregger, a founder of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know, gets that it’s an essential ingredient. Weapons, despite its overarching aura of dread (and more than a few mildly traumatizing visuals), didn’t come at its audience like a doomy thundercloud. Instead, it found ways to lure us in, with scattered morsels of terror as well as laughs. And unlike too many modern horror films, it featured a confident, definitive ending that was both mortifying and funny, the exact opposite of the carelessly worked-out wrap-up we so often get. Cregger didn't leave you wondering what the heck you just watched—or, worse, wondering why you’d invested the time.

His latest film, Resident Evil, a riff on the enduring and now practically antique Japanese video game, isn’t as clever, funny, or grimly haunting as Weapons—but then, it’s simply a different type of beast altogether. The picture is loose-limbed and rambling by design, a kind of shaggy-dog story that reflects the experience of maneuvering a character, via a controller, through a landscape of obstacles. And while some fans of the game have complained that Cregger has failed to include their favorite characters, he has perhaps wisely decided to focus on one: Austin Abrams, who portrayed the drug addict James in Weapons, plays Bryan Hodukavich, a hapless medical courier charged with transporting a very important parcel to far-away Raccoon City General Hospital, which can be reached only by driving across treacherous, icy mountain terrain. His ramshackle vehicle slips and slides on the slick roads, and his headlights flash on the figure of a wild-eyed, bloodied woman just as he hits her.

We know, though he doesn’t seem to, that she’s a zombie lady. Stricken with horror at what he’s just done, he locates the woman—she was hit hard enough to be thrown into the woods nearby—and bundles her into the passenger seat, barely taking note of the fact that she’s shoeless and wearing a sleeveless floral dress in the middle of winter. As he drives, frantically, she repeatedly reaches toward his face with her clawlike fingers, as if to caress him; each time, he fails to notice, and she draws back abruptly, her glassy eyes registering nothing but raw need. It’s a predictable yet somehow hilarious gag, and Andrea Miltner, as the zombie woman, does a lot with a little.

The mishaps pile up one by one: a state trooper stops Bryan for speeding, and reluctantly agrees to transport the zombie woman in his own vehicle—a good solution but, as it turns out, only a temporary one. Other stuff happens. Bryan must race across a fenced-in field, pursued by a dog—which is of course not exactly a dog. He’s thrilled to have located a shotgun in what looks to be a deserted farmhouse—he’s just got to find some ammo learn how to load the thing. Later, he’ll encounter a duo of travelers (Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis) who inform them they’re representatives of a shadowy group known as the Umbrella Corporation, and they reveal the significance of the package he has been protecting so gingerly. (Previously, he’d been convinced it was a tiny heart destined to save the life of a child.) Amid all this, he worries about a cellphone call he’d received earlier from his girlfriend, informing him of a potentially relationship-changing situation. He’s desperate to get back to her, but he can’t get a signal. And over and over again, he's flummoxed by a single, ancient device: he encounters one padlock after another, but of course, he's never got the key.

Naturally, as the story moves forward, the zombies begin piling up in alarming quantities. To describe the creatures in detail would be giving too much away: let’s just say, for now, that there are slimy tentacles involved, and vomit and pustules also make an appearance. Resident Evil is largely a one-man show, and Abrams carries it deftly. In the movie’s early scenes, his eyes have a checked-out quality; he’s like an absentee participant in his own life. But as the action, and the danger, intensifies, he becomes more and more alive. By the end of this movie's fleet 90 minutes, his battle seems unwinnable, and Cregger and his co-write Shay Hatton leave him almost literally hanging, begging for a sequel. The Resident Evil gestalt has been interpreted in movie form before, in the series of pictures made by Paul W.S. Anderson in the early 2000s through 2016; a ten-year gap is certainly a reasonable length of time to warrant a series reboot. In the meantime, although Bryan’s fate is unknowable, Resident Evil leaves you satisfied enough. Time, as we measure it in movies, has already proved that zombies aren’t going anywhere. We need them even more than they need us.

If you know anything about filmmaker John Wilson, you’ll intuit that his new documentary The History of Concrete is barely about concrete at all. Earlier this decade, Wilson’s HBO show, How To With John Wilson, provided a sometimes compelling, sometimes aggravating glimpse into the lives of ordinary New Yorkers, as well as into Wilson’s own woolly, discursive mode of thinking. In one episode, Wilson walked around a New York neighborhood until he saw an Italian flag, figuring that the person who’d hung it would know enough about Italian food to help him learn to cook risotto, which he wanted to make as a treat for his elderly, babushka’ed landlady. In another installment, he sought ways to protect his furniture from his beloved yet destructive cat, and in so doing, stumbled upon an anti-circumcision activist, who in turn led him to a musician and inventor who’d developed a foreskin restoration device. (It was called the TLC Tugger.) In Wilson’s world, the phrase “One thing leads to another” takes on heightened meaning. He shifts gears according to who and what he encounters during the filmmaking process, which is how a simple quest to cover a chair can morph into an anxiety-riddled meditation on the possibility that maybe life is better uncut.

The History of Concrete is essentially more of the same, though this time, Wilson’s observations are stretched out at a more leisurely pace, rather than pieced together into bite-sized segments. Wilson begins by describing the ennui he felt after his show ended. He used to have a purpose; suddenly, he needed to both seek inspiration and drum up work. He describes unsavory moneymaking offers that have come his way, like doing Depend underwear ads with the Naked Cowboy—an easy No. He laments his lack of direction. In his characteristic wry juxtaposition of filmed images and voiceover, he explains that he’d always been proud of taking “the road less traveled, where no one else would dare to voyage,” over grab-and-go footage of street signs that read “Buttzman Road” and “Titman Road.” He takes a WGA-sponsored workshop on how to write a successful Hallmark romance. Then, while doing home repairs—badly, he admits—he begins musing on the fact that concrete is everywhere. Why not make a documentary about it?

Wilson tries to sell his idea to a group of poker-faced potential supporters, each enclosed in a tidy little Zoom square. Somehow, the idea gets off the ground. From there, Wilson explains the basics of this ubiquitous material. For example, he makes the distinction between cement—a component of concrete—and concrete itself, a mix of cement, water, sand, and stone. He travels to Rome, where he films examples of early Roman concrete and also visits a janky wax museum, because why not? He attends a concrete convention, and notes that in order to attend, he had to sign a document promising he would not “paint concrete in a negative light.” He visits a company that preserves the tattoos of loved ones, which also means conserving the skin underneath, which makes the whole thing suitable for framing. You may have no idea what this has to do with concrete, but you’ll be so amazed—and probably appalled—that you’ll forget why it matters.

But if Wilson has a great gift, it lies in being able to talk to anyone without mocking them. OK, he may gently mock his subjects a little—but only in an amused way, never a cruel one. The best segments in The History of Concrete involve his encounters with the New Yorkers, or Long Islanders, who are essentially right in his own backyard. There’s the exceedingly good-natured guy who runs an outfit called GumBusters out of Brooklyn: he travels around the city with a special gizmo that “vaporizes” dark splotches of gum that have been ground into the sidewalk. Most affecting of all is the friendship Wilson strikes up with a bar-band musician named Jack, who regularly plays dive bars on Long Island. When Jack’s fiancée dies suddenly, it’s Wilson’s company he seeks.

Jack, a somewhat portly past-middle-age rock’n’roller who, by day, hands out whiskey and bourbon samples in liquor stores, is bereft at the loss of his love. Wilson investigates and find out that Jack’s deceased partner was an esteemed judge, the first Asian American judge in New York City. He finds an old picture of the two of them and realizes they’d been a couple for a very long time, musing aloud on how they had truly built a life together, though they may seem like opposites.

Again, what does any of this have to do with concrete? Aside from, perhaps, the metaphorical truth that the most enduring relationships are built on a solid foundation of trust and love? The History of Concrete will answer some questions you never thought to ask about that hard, gray substance found in every developed area around the world. But mostly, it will show you how Wilson’s mind works, how it jumps from one seemingly random thought to the next and somehow miraculously connects them. Depending on your tolerance for Wilson’s somewhat rambling narration, as well as his twangy, cartoon-character speaking voice, your mind may sometimes wander off his track. But Wilson is an affable armchair tour guide into offline worlds you’d never have thought to explore, and the movie has a casual, ambling charm. This is killing time in movie form—though it also flirts with the possibility that killing time and spending it may amount to the same thing.

It’s not easy to adapt a classic novel across cultures, but The Scandal does it beautifully. Like The Handmaiden before it, the Netflix series transposes a story originally set in the Western world—in this case, the frequently adapted 1782 French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses—into the setting of 18th century Joseon. Under Jung Ji-woo’s masterful direction, the story of two aristocrats who toy with the lives of others for fun moves seamlessly into the rigid, Confucian society of the East Asian kingdom. 

There, Son Ye-jin (Crash Landing on You, Decision to Leave) stars as Lady Cho Yun, a deeply intelligent woman whose potential is hindered by her sex. Bored within the limitations placed on her, Lady Cho suggests a game with her cousin Cho-won (The Colony’s Ji Chang-wook), a writer and consummate libertine. If Cho is able to seduce An Hui-yeon (Mask Girl’s Nana), the widow who vows to remain chaste following the death of the husband she never met, then Cho will sleep with Cho-won after years of denying him. However, if he fails to do so, then he must impregnate So-ok (Shin Yoon-ha), the aspiring concubine of Lady Cho’s husband, Lord Yoo (Lee Ji-hoon). 

As the game develops, things get messy, leading to a conclusion that is as devastating as it is inevitable.   

What is The Scandal based on?

The Scandal is based on Les Liaisons dangereuses, the 1782 French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Lactos. The book’s many adaptations include a 1988 film starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich, and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was also the basis of 1999’s Cruel Intentions, which transposes the action to contemporary Manhattan and stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Reese Witherspoon. 

In 2003, Korean filmmaker E J-Yong directed an adaptation set in 18th century Korea. Called Untold Scandal in English, the film stars Lee Mi-sook (Queen of Tears) as Lady Cho, Jeon Do-yeon (Possible Love) as Lady Jeong, and Bae Yong-joon (Winter Sonata) as Cho-won. While The Scandal Netflix series does not follow the exact same plot as Untold Scandal, it is quite close. In this way, The Scandal is an adaptation of Untold Scandal as much as it is an adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses.

The Scandal ending, explained

In the final act of The Scandal, Lady Cho’s scheme spirals out of her control. In an attempt to seduce Hui-yeon, Cho-won convinces her to run away in the middle of the night. Everyone thinks she has finally done the respectable thing and killed herself to join her dead husband, and begins celebrating her extreme virtue. Her mother-in-law, the Left State Councilor’s wife (Kang Ji-eun) pressures Lady Cho into writing to the King to request that a memorial gate be built in Hui-yeon’s honor. 

Unfortunately for most of the powerful people in this story, Hui-yeon is not actually dead. Also, now that she has further interpreted the religious teachings from the secret Catholic gatherings she has been attending, she now believes that it would be wrong to take her own life. When she and Cho-won sleep together, she falls in love with him, finally believing his months of vows that she is also the one he loves. Hui-yeon realizes that she wants to live. 

Meanwhile, Cho-won has been tasked by the King with finding Hui-yeon’s body so that he can rule on the memorial gate request. When he brings these updates to Yun, she outlines the easy solution: Hui-yeon must be convinced to kill herself, wrapping up this situation in a nice, tidy bow. However, Cho-won has begun to develop feelings for Hui-yeon. He decides to run away with her, asking his servant Chil-seong (Kwon Do-gyun) to prepare a ferry for them to leave Joseon. 

The situation is a heartbreaking echo of the plan Cho-won once had with Yun. Years prior, when the two were young, they decided to run away together, rather than allow Yun to marry someone who wasn’t Cho-won. They booked the ferry, but before Yun could sneak out of her home, she found her father crying. When she asked what was wrong, he lamented the fact that she was born a woman, and therefore she could not reach the heights of her massive potential. The conversation convinced Yun to stay and marry Lord Yoo. Cho-won was left waiting for Yun at the ferry port until daybreak, and then yelling for Yun as she married Lord Yoo. Following the heartbreak, Cho-won fell into the life of a notorious playboy, never fully giving up on Yun. 

Worried that Cho-won will face harsh repercussions for lying to the King, Hui-yeon flees to Lady Cho’s in the middle of the night, not knowing Yun’s role in her predicament. When Cho-won finds her there, Yun asks him outright: Who do you choose? In that moment, Cho-won decides he cannot go with Hui-yeon, as he had planned. Even if he loves her, he realizes he is not willing to let go of Yun. A heartbroken and betrayed Hui-yeon runs into the night without her gat to disguise her as a man. 

Lady Cho believes she has won, and that she still has Cho-won’s complete loyalty. However, after he leaves, he finds Hui-yeon and gives her the gat. He tells her the truth, and she tells him that she will live with the resentment she now has for him. They part ways. Meanwhile, Lady Cho realizes that Cho-won has gone to Hui-yeon, and worries that she has lost him. She tears apart her wardrobe in anger before asking her servant to help her look pretty. 

Later, Cho-won brings the official report on Hui-yeon’s supposed death. Written by Lady Cho, it outlines how a papermaker saw a woman fitting Hui-yeon’s description jump from a cliff into the raging river below. The King decides to grant Hui-yeon’s memorial gate in recognition of her exemplary virtue as a lady, but later calls Cho-won into a private meeting. He knows that the report was false because the details of a torrential downpour the night before the death do not match up with his other reports. Cho-won is shocked, either set-up by Lady Cho or felled by her showy arrogance in coming up with the vivid imagery of the report. The King tells Cho-won that he shall never again be welcome in his presence.

In a letter to Yun, Cho-won spares his cousin of this particular outcome, instead saying that the report moved the King to tears and was a resounding success. Lady Cho asks her servants to bring in celebratory drinks and food. She doesn’t yet understand that her schemes have lost her Cho-won forever.

Does Cho-won die in The Scandal?

Cho-won dies in the final episode of The Scandal. After breaking Hui-yeon’s heart and realizing that Yun will never choose him, Cho-won goes to the Mapo port, where he had previously prepared a ferry to bring himself, Hui-yeon, Chil-seong, and Eun-sil to Yanjing (the historical name for Beijing). However, before the ferryman can bring him all the way across, Cho-won jumps off of the boat into the water. The ferryman looks for him in the darkness, but can only see his gat, floating in the water. Cho-won is gone.

Does The Scandal have a happy ending?

Definitely not. As in the novel on which it is based, the cruel machinations of Lady Cho and Cho-won could never lead to happiness. They could only ever lead to the confirmed status quo of their miserable lives as lords and ladies. Yun gets what she ostensibly wants: a continuation of the comfortable life she leads as Lady Cho. However, without Cho-won, she has neither a way to get her writing to a broader audience, nor a confidant in her games. The final shot of the character sees her alone, at her writing table, “left with nothing but longing.” Longing for a love that she will never see again, and for a life she didn’t choose, with no one left to write to. 

Hui-yeon is not doing particularly well, either. She is alive, and committed to her Catholic faith, but she has to live life in the margins. When Eun-sil, her former servant who believes her to be dead, comes to a secret Catholic service of which she is a part, Hui-yeon has to take off into the night to keep from being discovered. She travels to Cho-won’s old home, where she sees a stack of letters Lady Cho has continued to write to her cousin. Cho-won’s loyal servant comforts her, and beckons her inside for a warm cup of tea because it is what Cho-won would have wanted. She cannot, however, offer Hui-yeon the comforting lie that Cho-won is still alive; it’s clear this woman who has known Cho-won since he was a child believes he is dead.

So-ok is doing comparatively well. She has become a concubine for Lady Cho’s husband, but she has continued her love affair with In-ho (Chani), the Left State Councilor’s younger son. When So-ok becomes pregnant, it’s pretty clear to everyone but Lord Yoo that the baby is In-ho’s. For now, So-ok is happy, but there’s an implication that it will not always be like this. What will her future look like? In-ho is unable to claim his child as his own, and So-ok is stuck as a member of Lady Cho’s household. Throughout The Scandal, we see examples of youthful characters able to withstand bitterness solely through their naivete. What will be waiting for So-ok when the ignorance of her youth fades?

Much of the narration for these things left unsaid is given in the form of pansori, a traditional Korean art form that includes a single singer and a drummer. In the final episode, we learn that the pansori describing much of the plot is actually diegetic, as Lady Cho and other members of her household listen to the pansori singer describe their lives through the thinnest veil of fiction. This is a brilliant nod to Les Liaisons dangereuses’ status as one of the earliest and most famous examples of roman à clef, a French term translating to “novel with a key.” It is used to describe works of fiction that are about real-life events, and featuring real-life public figures, overlaid with the facade of fiction. 

What is The Scandal ultimately about?

Like its source material, which famously depicted the French nobility as corrupt shortly before the French Revolution took hold of the country, The Scandal is interested in critiquing the ruling class, giving the series a complexity missing from many romantic historical dramas. Following Cho-won’s jump into the water, the man ferrying him across says aloud to the night, seemingly somewhat facetiously: “Do you know how hard it is to be born a nobleman?” The line serves as a judgment of Cho-won and Lady Cho’s life choices, which, in their carelessness, caused so much pain for those around them. 

In the end, the couple that seems the happiest is also the poorest of our main characters. Prior to his death, Cho-won paid for the freedom of nobi Chil-seong and Eun-sil, who fell in love with one another while serving Cho-won and Hui-yeon, respectively. In the final episode, we see them happy with a baby, and with a steady income. In some ways, they serve as a representation of what Cho-won and Hui-yeon, or perhaps Cho-won and Yun, could have been, if they were not noble. But, in other ways, there is no comparison. A self-involved superiority, born of their social class, is integral to who Cho-won, Yun, and even Hui-yeon are as characters. That—as The Scandal argues through its constant, background depiction of the vibrant, working class life going on around these noble characters—is the point. 

President Donald Trump on Friday signed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill intended to target the country's financial institutions and the energy industry, which has largely financed the assault on Ukraine.

The legislation, which also extends sanctions on Iran's energy and weapons sectors, has been hailed for its harsher measures on Russia, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling it “an extremely powerful tool.” However, Democratic leaders have expressed grave concern over the broader tariff authority it affords to Trump.

The new law allows Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on countries that make “new purchases of crude oil or natural gas” originating from Russia, or any country among the top five importers of Russian oil or gas over the last 12 months. 

According to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), the top three purchasers of Russian oil and gas in August were China, India, and Turkey.

Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation, says Trump’s previous ambition to introduce tariffs using any available avenue has ignited the concern among Democrats.

“The reason why people are so nervous about this is that the authority is extremely wide, and has been handed to an Administration that has already shown great latitude to follow the spirit of the law,” Elms tells TIME. “Tariffs could be set at 100%. It's really at the discretion of the Executive Branch.”

Democratic leaders sound the alarm on “terribly flawed” bill

The House passed the bill with bipartisan support on Wednesday. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, named in honor of the late Republican Senator who spent the final year of his life building support for the measure, passed with 262 votes to 159. Some 58 Democrats voted with the majority of Republicans in favor of the bill, despite objections from party leadership.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries led the Democratic opposition to the bill, raising concerns over extending Trump new tariff powers that he said could "give the President an additional tool to visit economic harm on the American people."

“Why in the world would this Congress or the People's House give this President unfettered authority to visit more tariffs on the world that will have an adverse economic impact on the American people?” the New York Representative questioned ahead of the vote.

After the bill passed, Jeffries told TIME that Trump “cannot be entrusted with new powers to impose tariffs that will further raise costs for American families.”

TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.

Shortly after his return to office, Trump implemented global tariffs as part of what he called a “Liberation Day.” Although the majority of those were shut down by a Supreme Court ruling in February that deemed them illegal, his general use—and threatened use—of tariffs has continued to fuel international tensions.

Tariffs introduced since Trump’s return have already made their mark on American households, experts say. The Yale Budget Lab in late August estimated that household costs due to tariffs “total about $1,100 annually under current law.”

The U.S.-Canada has raised fresh concerns over the financial impact on American consumers.

Many Americans are already struggling with the cost of living crisis. The Urban Institute in April found that “49% of people in American families don’t have the resources to cover essential expenses to live securely in their community.”

Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, has also raised concerns about the potential impact on American families.

In the weeks leading up to the Russia sanctions bill, he urged lawmakers to find a “compromise that properly punishes Russia for its illegal war of aggression against the Ukrainian people, while protecting the American people from reckless inflationary tariffs.”

In a statement to TIME after the vote, Meeks said he found it "regrettable" that lawmakers chose not to “place more guardrails” on the bill’s tariff authorities.

Similar concerns were raised by Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, who described the bill as “well intentioned, but terribly flawed” in its efforts to hinder Russia’s war effort against Ukraine.  “Trump has abused every tariff authority Congress has delegated to the President,” Beyer told TIME, accusing his colleagues of choosing to “ignore our warnings that he is highly likely to continue that pattern with this bill.” 

Beyer had delivered a stark warning on the floor ahead of the vote, insisting the bill “would do more harm than good for America and for Ukraine.”

“Trump has abused every presidential tariff authority—every single one—that Congress has given, often to target our allies. This bill has a loophole that would allow him to define basically any country as a facilitator of evading Russian sanctions,” he argued. “He could then hit them with tariffs of up to 100%, with no guardrails or oversight, and no expiration. It’s a much stronger tariff power than those he has already abused, and it would be much harder to challenge in court. Giving him this power when he has shown us over and over again what he will do with it would be an incredible mistake.”

Why other Democratic lawmakers supported the legislation

The legislation’s capacity to economically isolate Russia earned it the bipartisan support needed to get the bill to Trump’s desk. 

The bill allows for the further introduction of sanctions on persons and financial institutions affiliated with the Russian government, the prohibiting of energy exports and investment into Russia, and blocks the transfer of funds to the Kremlin. 

The bill also includes the potential to expand sanctions on Iran, and comes amid growing concerns from the U.S. over the relationship between Moscow and Tehran. The U.S. Treasury on Monday announced the latest sanctions targeting the Russian bank VTB over allegations it is involved “in Iranian sanctions evasion.”

Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, who co-chairs and co-founded the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, is in firm favor of the legislation. ”We're going to pay close attention to the Administration and to see what they're going to do with these new powers that have been given,” she told TIME after the vote.

Kaptur previously said that both the sanctions and tariff measures were “the best chance we have to get bipartisan legislation signed into law to hold Russia accountable and achieve peace.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland also praised the legislation, championing it as an additional way to showcase support for Kyiv. “Today we took a step to redeem our pledge to Ukraine, to support their sovereignty and their democracy,” said Hoyer outside the Capitol. “We will sanction, actively and effectively, Russian criminal behavior.”

How China and India could be impacted by the Russia sanctions bill

The legislation extends Trump the authority to impose tariffs on new and prominent importers of Russian oil and gas. 

The legislation could prompt a new wave of tariffs handed out by the President, experts warn. "The tariffs can be introduced across the board," says Elms. “This is what makes it so alarming.”

China and India are two major importers of Russian oil and gas and therefore stand to be the most affected. In August, China was importing roughly 1.25 million barrels of Russian Crude oil daily, according to commodity analysts Kpler via Reuters. India imported record-highs of 2.5 million barrels daily of Russian Crude in June, per Kpler's analysis.

According to The European External Action Service (EEAS), Russia’s shadow fleet—largely unregulated oil tankers transiting sanctioned oil—includes between 600 to 1,400 vessels. Exports are crucial for China and India, the leading importers of seaborne oil from Russia.

U.S. sanctions have already targeted Russian oil tankers and Moscow’s energy industry in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Still, China and India have remained steady buyers, but the threat of tariffs could change the attitude of both countries, experts predict.

“I think they will be quite concerned on this one,” says Elms. “Presumably because of this [bill], we will see some diversification away from Russian energy by India and China.”

While the Supreme Court ruling barring most of Trump’s prior tariffs cited Congressional power to impose tariffs, this argument won’t be applicable if lawmakers attempt to restrict the President’s ability. “In this case, Congress has quite clearly given that authority to the President,” says Elms.

Beijing has hit back firmly against the tariff measures included in the bill. “China opposes long-arm jurisdiction and unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law,” said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun. 

The legislation comes at a crucial time for U.S.-China relations, just a week ahead of President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is also set to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Vice Premier He Lifeng, this weekend.

The U.S. already has a number of tariffs in place on Chinese goods, including a tariff of up to 12.5% on goods allegedly made with forced labor. The U.S. Trade Representative's last year launched a tariff investigation into China's "apparent failure" to comply with the "Phase One" trade deal signed with Trump in 2020.

Meanwhile, India’s Foreign Ministry responded to the new sanctions bill by saying it was “monitoring further developments." The statement said India "remains firmly committed to ensuring energy security for its 1.4 billion people" and "will continue to do so through diversified sourcing."

The statement said imports of Russian energy had been discussed with U.S. officials in recent months, and that “implications for not just the bilateral relationship, but also the international energy market have been very clearly articulated by the Indian side.”

Trump threatened tariffs on Indian goods last August in response to Delhi’s continued purchasing of Russian oil. “They don’t care how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine,” claimed Trump, days ahead of his meeting with President Vladimir Putin that yielded no concrete results.

Similar to China, India also currently faces a tariff on alleged forced labor goods, with the levy landing at 10%.

After agreeing on a framework for a bilateral trade agreement in February, Delhi and Washington have continued negotiations since.

“India and the U.S. have been supposedly a ‘moment away’ from a bilateral agreement,” says Elms. “I think it is highly unlikely now that India will actually sign that agreement because they are now potentially subject to new tariffs at any time.”

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Resident Evil.

For a movie based on a video game series that's made a name for itself as a testament to human resilience and survival against impossible odds, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil sure serves up a brutal kick in the teeth of an ending. For fans of the video games' traditionally triumphant resolutions, it's a narrative decision that's likely to be divisive. But if you're willing to lean in to the Weapons filmmaker's penchant for expectations-upending final acts, it's one that offers some good old fashioned horror nihilism.

Cregger's adaptation tells an original story in the Resident Evil universe rather than faithfully adapting any of the games, building on previous films, or pulling in legacy characters. Still, the movie manages to successfully capture the atmosphere and experience of playing through a new installment in gaming’s most storied survival horror franchise, first launched in 1996 by Japanese developer Capcom. Like a fair share of Resident Evil leads who came before him, our protagonist, medical courier Bryan Hodukavich (Austin Abrams), finds himself thrown into a nightmarish fight for survival against uber-aggressive biological monstrosities. Ammo is scarce, obstacles are everywhere, and perhaps most relatably, Bryan has no real idea how to operate the progression of increasingly high-caliber guns he picks up along the way.

The film opens with Bryan—whose newly pregnant girlfriend Michele is waiting at home to discuss their future—accepting a last-minute double-pay delivery job transporting a high-priority Schedule A organ carrier case up through the snowy mountains to Raccoon City General Hospital.

Unfortunately, Bryan's situation quickly turns from dangerous to unbelievable to dire after he accidentally hits a woman with his car who turns out to have been infected by a mutating zombie virus that the shadowy Umbrella Corporation accidentally unleashed on the city a few hours prior.

By the time Bryan learns he is actually carrying the final ingredient needed to synthesize a cure to the virus, he has already fought off several infected individuals, who, to his horror, didn't exactly die after being shot in the head. Instead, their remains fused together to transform into a grotesque, Cronenberg-esque amalgamation of limbs and tentacles intent on hunting Bryan down. Not to mention Bryan was also been bitten by one of the aforementioned infected, making his race for an antidote all the more pressing.

How does Resident Evil end?

Despite having to face off with a horde of dive-bombing zombies, an acid-vomiting monster, and a heavily infected maternity ward, among other horrors, Bryan does eventually make it to the secure lab on the 28th floor of Raccoon City General Hospital. However, by the time he hands the key to the cure over to a team led by Umbrella Corporation scientist Carl (Zach Cherry), he has already started to transform.

Just as the team completes the antidote, which they plan to hand over to a unit of National Guard soldiers set to land on the roof at any minute, Bryan's grotesquely mutated limbs start lashing out and savagely killing the scientists before dragging their corpses in to meld with Bryan's body. Bryan begs for one of the scientists to simply stick him with the syringe of cure and end it, but they're all either quickly incapacitated or too frightened. Eventually, monster Bryan crashes through a window with the last-surviving scientist in his grip and there's a final chance for the technician to inject him with the antidote. It seems like he's about to succeed, but in a bleak twist, Bryan knocks the syringe from his hand and it goes crashing down dozens of stories into the darkness below. Bryan roars as the National Guard helicopters circle, and it seems like all hope of preventing a total zombie apocalypse are gone.

There is no moment of triumph or last-minute turn of the tide. Instead, the screen cuts to black and the movie is over, leaving you contemplating just how futile all of Bryan's efforts were. To fans who were hoping for a more conventional Resident Evil final boss battle, it's an ending that may come off as a bit mean-spirited. But according to Cregger, he felt just as assured about this choice of kicker as he did about the much-discussed climax of Weapons.

"I remember when I thought of that moment and that was an 'aha' moment. I was excited. I was like, 'That is perfect,'" he told Men's Health. "There's a similar thing at the end of Resident Evil and I remember, when I had the idea of how this movie should end, I was like, 'That is it.' And it feels good when you know you can stop searching. I'm always looking for the next, 'How can I improve every idea?' and sometimes when you get an idea where you're like, 'Nope, that's what it is,' that's a good feeling. It's like, 'That is a solid table with four legs. Leave it alone.' It's nice when that's the end of the movie too. If you know that you can stick the landing, then you're in good shape."

However, Bryan dying an agonizing and untimely death apparently doesn't necessarily mean Cregger is done with Resident Evil as a whole. "I can’t help thinking about other places this story could go. I’ve got ideas," he told the Playlist. "Let’s see what happens."

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan wants to make this clear: She had to audition for Best of the Best, the coming-of-age comedy playing out against the world of collegiate Bollywood dance competitions.

“Please include that Maitreyi Ramakrishan was not just offered this role,” she says, her almighty finger pointing hard at my notebook. “Maitreyi Ramakrishnan worked!”

She’s responding, in her beguilingly animated way, to my suggestion that her character, Maya, feels as though she were written for Ramakrishnan, the Never Have I Ever star who was introduced to us in 2020 as the fabulously temperamental teen Devi in Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s Netflix dramedy. Maya was actually conceived around the same time, when Patriot Act host Hasan Minhaj and his writing and producing partner Prashanth Venkataramanujam spent their time in lockdown cooking up Best of the Best, their answer to the Step Up franchise, which is finally hitting Netflix on Sept. 18.

For some fans, who were eager to see Devi go to college, Best of the Best might serve as a suitable replacement for a continuation of the show, which ended in 2023 after four seasons. The movie reunites Ramakrishnan with one of her Never Have I Ever directors, Lena Khan, and co-choreographer Joya Kazi, who appeared in its first season, performing a Bollywood-style routine to the song “Nagada Sang Dhol.” In that scene, Kazi fluidly blended India's traditional Kathak dance with the swirling and romantic poses choreographed specifically for the big screen in Mumbai. That fusion, in a nutshell, is what Bollywood dance is all about.

Devi, who harbored complicated insecurities about her cultural identity, scoffed at the performance. Ramakrishnan’s Maya, on the other hand, would scoff at anyone challenging her Bollywood-style supremacy. “Maya is that bitch,” says Ramakrishnan.

A clear casting choice

We’re at dinner, discussing Ramakrishnan’s leap from leading a TV show to carrying a movie, a conversation we will pick up again a week later on a Zoom call with Minhaj. I meet up with Ramakrishnan at East Tea Can, a restaurant in her Mississauga neighbourhood, west of Toronto. She orders the cardamom black tea for us to share but insists she could finish off the entire pot by herself, and introduces me to mana’eesh, a stone-baked Middle Eastern pizza served with minced beef and lamb.

I’ve interviewed Ramakrishnan on several occasions, witnessing how young fans would swarm her in the wild. This time, she avoids all that by strategically choosing a table in the back and facing away from the diners, though our server recognizes her instantaneously, even behind her large burgundy frames. Her nose ring and traditional bell-shaped earrings are less flash and more a reminder that Ramakrishnan, 24, has always been more at home with South Asian culture than Devi was in that first season. That’s one of the many reasons Minhaj felt she was just right to play Maya, the UCLA freshman thrust into competition with her childhood best friend Anjali. 

The latter is played by Priyanka Kedia, a fresh-faced Indian-American actor originally from the Bay area, who joined Best of the Best after graduating from NYU and catching a breakthrough part in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. Her Anjali is the more poised social butterfly to the headstrong and rebellious Maya, their lifelong relationship tested when they both make the school’s esteemed Bollywood dance team and must jockey for parts while adjusting to campus life, rigorous academics, and new relationships. Their story draws from Minhaj and co-writer Venkataramanujam’s own college experiences.

“I'll be honest with you,” says Minhaj later, on that Zoom call. “I for real felt, we would be so lucky to have Maitreyi. She was the person that I felt had the two things that I think Maya needed. Everybody knows that Maitreyi naturally is comedically brilliant. She has that ‘It’ factor that you can't teach. Your Amy Poehlers, your Kristen Wiigs, your Kate McKinnons.” But her comedic talents would also need to be balanced with something deeper. “If you look at Maitreyi’s work, especially in Seasons 3 and 4 of Never Have I Ever, there is an emotional depth, that pathos that she has. I was like, there's no other number one for this film than her.”

Despite, Minhaj’s confidence in her, Ramakrishnan auditioned to reassure the whole team she was ready to transition from the snappy sitcom pacing of Never Have I Ever to the more considered emotional stakes of a feature film.

Even Kazi, who went to college with Minhaj, had to jump through similar hoops. “She was a dance Superstar at UC Davis,” says Minhaj. “Even when we were interviewing, I had to recuse myself. I needed her LinkedIn profile to speak for itself. The friendship is real. It goes back to the second Bush Administration.”

Minhaj is at his parent’s home in Sacramento, dressed in a blue and white baseball jersey. He’s immediately heartened to see my daughter’s bedroom, where I set up shop, in the background, pointing out the kids’ toys scattered on the floor around him. He pulls out framed photos of baby Hasan, clearly taken at some department store photo studio. The space feels familiar, if only because you could immediately imagine it filled with the characters he’s intimately described in his semi-autobiographical standup specials like Homecoming King and The King’s Jester.

Small talk with Minhaj includes some history on the Punjabi community in Northern California, the early 19th century immigrant farmers who would later hide their identity after the Chinese Exclusion Act. “This becomes the milieu of South Asian identity, specifically in Northern California,” says Minhaj, who just unpacked the context behind where his family resides as if he were freestyling a Patriot Act segment for an audience of two.

Long before they met, Ramakrishnan was a huge fan of Patriot Act, a Netflix series in which Minhaj wielded punchlines and PowerPoint presentations to unpack politics and the perils of unchecked capitalism.

“The first time I met you was way later at one of your first ever performances of Hasan Hates Ronnie / Ronnie Hates Hasan,” she tells Minhaj, referring to his live comedy tour with Ronny Chieng.

“And you were in full costume, right? You were dressed as Princess Leia or something like that?”

“It wasn’t a costume,” says Maitreyi. You can hear the eyeroll in her voice. “It was fashion.”

“Wait wait,” Minhaj says, shrinking.

“But it’s fine. Whatever. Wouldn’t expect you to know, Minhaj.”

“You had a full hood.”

“It was sick.”

“It was a karate gi meets Obi-Wan Kenobi up top.”

This jabbing rapport reads as a playful generational tete-a-tete between millennial and Gen Z, but it also speaks to the exchange of perspectives that informed their collaboration on Best of the Best. “What you're seeing in the movie,” says Minhaj, “is Maitreyi and Lena coming together, and really masterminding and creating the tone and the feeling of the film.”

A fusion of many styles of dance

During weekly script sessions, Ramakrishnan would join Khan, Minhaj, and Venkataramanujam to share her input on drafts, and her character. These workshops would come at the end of the day for Ramakrishnan, who had a jam-packed training schedule to ensure she could convincingly play the part of a teen who’s been dancing all her life.

Ramakrishnan is the first to admit she’s not a dancer. She spent a year as a child learning Bharatnatyam, the traditional 3,000-year-old dance originating from Tamil Nadu in India, but decided that all that ballet-like discipline wasn’t for her. “The structure of being told, ‘This is what you have to do in this order,’ over and over again, didn't work for my child brain,” says Ramakrishnan. “I just wanted to run around.”

She was in her nerves about signing on to do a dance movie and potentially misrepresenting a community that she admires. “Dancers are no joke,” she says. But she says her mother offered the objective perspective she needed to face the job: “You read the script. You don’t need to be a great dancer. You just need to be good at seven dances.”

Choreographers Phillip & McKenzie, who tapped Kazi’s cultural expertise, organized a two-month boot camp for Ramakrishnan in L.A. She attended six classes a day, six days a week, training in everything from Bharatnatyam and Kathak to contemporary, hip-hop, heels, and groove. Then it was off to New Jersey, where she joined the rest of the cast and dancers for another two months. That’s four months of training for an eight-week shoot that left Ramakrishan physically broken but with an even deeper appreciation for the commitment and the craft.

“I got to witness so many great talents,” she says. “I noticed the dancers that have this sparkle. There’s many that can nail the choreo, be on time with the counts, understand musicality, do the trick and the flip. But then there’s some dancers that can do it all in a way that makes an audience member, who has never danced before in their life, want to get up and dance with them, because you’re as intimidated and impressed by their dancing as you are welcomed and invited.”

That welcoming and invitational vibe can be applied to the movie’s diverse approach to the dances, as well. The term “Bollywood dance” is a bit misleading. Best of the Best boasts a fusion of styles, reflecting trends within Bollywood dance competitions, and the culture online. In the same way that Save The Last Dance folded hip-hop into the ballet space, young classically trained Bharatnatyam dancers in North America have been blending traditional movements with krumping and breaking.

The real-life sister dance duo Poonam and Priyanka Shah went viral a decade ago, performing butterflies and splits to the Bollywood song Ramta Jogi, taking their “Bfusion” routines from the collegiate circuit to the internet. In recent years, French-Tamil dancer Usha Jey broke the internet busting moves in a saree to Lil’ Wayne. These children of South Asian immigrants have been using fusion dance to broker a new cultural identity for themselves, with one foot in their ancestral lands and another in the place they call home.

Best of the Best is the first popular movie to explore that fusion, and its evolution. There’s storytelling in the dance sequences that shift between Bharatnatyam and Brooklyn styles like bone breaking. That intentionality extends to the soundtrack, which at one point tips its hat to the music that got this cultural exchange started, the early-2000s hip-hop produced by Timbaland and Dr. Dre sampling Bollywood. One extravagant Bollywood musical number features the Truth Hurts song “Addictive,” produced by Dre, battling with the iconic 1969 Hindi song that it famously sampled, “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai.”

“The beautiful thing that we wanted to do in this film,” says Minhaj, “is to take all of these things that make our identity and create something new with it.” He turns his attention to the varied identities spread across South Asia. “This is a rare opportunity where all of us from the diaspora can reconcile a lot of paradoxes that we couldn’t necessarily participate in if we were to do this film in India. There are all these other social, political and language barriers that separate Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka. They become sequestered to their own cinema. In the States, all of that becomes kind of irrelevant.”

Best of the Best breaks up monolithic representations of being South Asian, with a cast hailing from all regions, and a dance troupe composed of cheeky character types. These go beyond the nerd, the heartthrob, the Paul Rudd in Clueless sensitive type and the mean girl, to include the rich slick-haired wealthy “FOBs” (meaning “fresh off the boat”), and even a token white guy (Nico Greetham) so hilariously obsessed with Indian culture that he speaks fluent Hindi.

Prioritizing cultural specificity

The filmmakers also accounted for Ramakrishnan, and the very specific Eelam Tamil identity she brings to the film, with all its fraught political connotations. When Maya introduces herself at one point, she says, “I'm Tamil. My family's from Sri Lanka.” The wording is precise. Ramakrishnan’s family is not, for instance, from Tamil Nadu in India, like Devi’s in Never Have I Ever. Nor do they identify as Sri Lankan. The state, which her family fled, stands accused of perpetrating a genocide against the Eelam Tamil population in 2009, after a 25-year civil war. For Ramakrishnan’s family, calling themselves Sri Lankan would be akin to a Palestinian identifying as Israeli.

“Is it something that I expect everyone to catch?” asks Ramakrishnan. “No. Everyone will catch that she's saying she's Tamil. She doesn't understand Hindi, because not every South Asian person understands Hindi. But I think the Tamil Eelam folks, like yourself, will catch that.”

Ramakrishnan has never shied away from discussing her identity and that history, and how both have shaped her. As a child, she joined her activist parents at protests in Toronto, calling for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Sri Lanka. She kept that spirit alive last year, at a “No Tyrants” rally in Vancouver, holding up a sign that said, “Never Have I Ever Thought Genocide Was OK."

“Maitreyi has such a strong sense of self, and such a strong sense of pride in her culture,” says Minhaj. He describes one of his favorite moments on set, seeing that cultural pride pour out of her when Ramakrishnan and Kedia’s characters perform a Kuthu dance at a frat party. Kuthu is a high energy, high impact Tamil folk dance that can appear like jumping jacks and aggressive pelvic thrusts colliding. It’s the kind of dance that isn’t taught in professional studios. “A lot of people over time have seen Kuthu as lower-class rowdy street dance,” says Ramakrishnan,

She likens Kuthu to Bhangra, which started as a dance for Punjab farmers, and is now a common sight at Indian weddings. The best place to learn both Bhangra and Kuthu? “At the function,” she says. Regarding Bhangra, “You learn it at the wedding. You learn it with the vibes. You get the beat in your shoulders and you're going.” As for Kuthu: “It’s at whatever banquet hall birthday party, for some 2-year-old kid who will never remember any of this, because he’s passed out in the corner while all the uncles and aunties are going off on the dance floor.”

The Kuthu sequence is riotous, befitting the chaos of the frat-party environment. Ramakrishnan and Kedia bound over lawn furniture and kick up grass. Ramakrishnan gets all the background actors hyped while she tugs at the collar of her blue checkered shirt, a nod to the red flannel that Prabhu Deva wears during the dance number in the 2007 gangster movie Pokkiri.

A grand and meaningful finale

Minhaj also says that he and Venkataramanujam leaned into Ramakrishnan’s identity for the film’s spectacular finale, which plays out on a stage decorated like a museum, a playground of colonial artifacts. The climactic dance number, according to Minhaj, is meant to inhabit and challenge the South Asian literary discourse on colonial reparations. Did you expect anything less from the duo behind Patriot Act?

The finale incorporates the Koh-i-Noor, the 105-carat diamond recorded to be from India that had changed hands across Asian empires for centuries before being surrendered to the British during the Victorian-era. It’s currently set in the Queen Mother’s crown and housed in the Tower of London. Indian politician Shashi Tharoor and British MP Kieth Vaz are among the voices who have called for the diamond’s return. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani echoed their sentiments earlier this year when pressed about what he would discuss if given the opportunity to meet with King Charles.

Minhaj questions whether such a symbolic reparation is useful, especially when it could sow further division in a region torn apart over centuries. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan all lay claim to the diamond of obscure origin, which, as Minhaj points out, could just be an anchor tying a new generation down to a complicated colonial history as opposed to encouraging us to flourish. 

“Even if the Koh-i-Noor diamond would be returned to us,” he asks, “What does that change for us today? How does it shape our tomorrow? The uncomfortable reality is that it's up to us to shape that, irrespective of that diamond ever coming back to us."

I won’t spoil how, but it’s Ramakrishnan, as Maya, who steps up to embody what Minhaj has in mind as the way forward.

“Maitreyi is the actor for this moment because she comes from very special cloth. Her parents are incredible activists and academics. She understands her political and social place in history and in time. It only feels right that she's the lead of our film, and the voice of what is new and what is to come.”

The timing could hardly be worse. Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent prepares to meet Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng this weekend to discuss AI, President Donald Trump has dismissed public warnings about runaway AI as a “hoax.” Meanwhile, an editorial in the state-owned China Daily accused America’s leading AI companies of using calls for a slowdown to “blunt China’s AI advance.”

Neither the United States nor China is ready to slow down. Neither trusts the other. And rapidly advancing AI systems will not wait for diplomacy to catch up. But these realities do not mean Trump and Xi can ignore the mounting calls for the U.S. and China to talk about AI. Any such dialogue must avoid the two most common pitfalls for U.S.-China diplomacy: setting the ambitions so low that the talks become meaningless or so high that agreement becomes impossible.

Aim too low, and the dialogue becomes a photo op followed by an anodyne communiqué about promoting innovation and reducing risks. Aim too high, chasing sweeping restrictions on frontier development that neither side has the political trust or the capacity to verify and enforce, and the meeting is set up for failure. The former path fails to meet the stakes of the moment; the latter fails to recognize its constraints.

The path to AI safety

A better near-term goal would be for the U.S. and China to pursue AI safety in parallel and demonstrate their progress in practice. That effort should be anchored in technical exchanges that make each country’s AI systems safer on their own terms. The two countries should also establish a protocol to communicate about emerging AI incidents before they spiral into international crises. These steps would represent meaningful progress, far more valuable than lofty statements or unverifiable commitments.

The Trump Administration should push for technical exchanges on how to actually test models for dangerous capabilities and behaviors that neither country wants to see released into the wild. These include AI systems capable of helping amateurs develop bioweapons, or evading human oversight and control. American AI companies have been studying these risks for years, and they have also begun to appear in Chinese technical standards related to safety testing. Exchanging best practices and new insights about how to test for and mitigate these risks could render the systems built in both countries meaningfully safer.

These proposed technical exchanges would not depend on “trust” or even strict “reciprocity” between the two superpowers, nor would they require identical conceptions of AI risk. They would be driven by self-interest. As the most advanced AI models grow even more powerful, both countries have an interest in ensuring that these systems remain controllable, regardless of where they are built or deployed. That will require both countries to improve their model testing, monitoring and safeguards, and share promising findings that could enhance safety without surrendering a competitive edge or undermining national security. 

This diplomacy is less like negotiating a sweeping arms-control treaty than establishing shared safety practices and procedures for a technology neither government fully understands or controls. The premise is not that Washington should trust Beijing, or vice versa, but that neither country benefits if the other loses control of a powerful system.

For this approach to work, it must be accompanied by a government-to-government crisis-communication protocol. What if an American AI model escapes its company’s control and hacks the networks of a Chinese company or the Chinese government? What if a Chinese AI-powered drone attacks a U.S. Navy vessel, and neither side can immediately determine whether the incident was accidental or deliberate? What if Washington detects a Chinese model conducting a dangerous cyber operation but cannot tell whether Beijing authorized it or whether a company has lost control of it?

These are not the kind of existential risks President Trump has dismissed, but they are close cousins of incidents already unfolding in real time. The two countries need to lay the basic groundwork for dealing with them. Whether the communication channel succeeds or fails will depend on its operational design. What constitutes a notifiable incident? Who are the designated contacts? How do the two sides signal that an incident was unauthorized without revealing sensitive intelligence? Serious, technically-informed diplomacy will be required to reach even provisional answers to these questions.

One essential feature of the channel should be that information about an incident, at least initially, be transmitted in writing rather than solely by phone. Real-time calls are often poor vehicles for conveying technical information with a Chinese system that runs on committees and documents, increasing the risk of miscommunication and misunderstanding.

Sending a message in writing gives the relevant committees in China the ability to disseminate and analyze it and formulate a response that no individual official in China would feel empowered to give. It also reduces the recipient’s ability to shade or distort the message. Even this approach will be challenging, given China’s spotty record of suspending crisis-communication channels—or simply refusing to use them—precisely when tensions are highest. But it would eliminate one of the stumbling blocks: the refusal to pick up the phone.

How to talk to Beijing

The talks should begin without preconditions or concessions in the broader technology competition. If Beijing seeks to make any progress on AI safety conditional on relief from U.S. export controls on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment, Washington should keep the two issues separate. The goal of AI safety diplomacy is not to turn the United States and China from intense competitors into cooperative partners. It is to keep their competition from producing outcomes neither side wants.

The two sides are nowhere near the political conditions necessary for a sweeping agreement. Trump has rejected calls to slow American AI development, while Beijing increasingly interprets American pacing proposals through the lens of technological containment. Neither side seems prepared to accept broad restrictions on frontier development, and the United States has barely begun to regulate its own AI sector, which is a far more important step toward addressing AI risk than what diplomatic engagement can deliver. That is precisely why the two countries should begin with something narrower.

Starting modestly does not mean succumbing to fatalism. The politics of AI have shifted dramatically in just a few weeks, and advancing capabilities will continue to alter the calculations in both capitals. The upcoming U.S.-China talks will not be the last word. A limited start could build momentum over time, creating channels, expertise, and habits of interaction that will become more valuable if the trajectory of AI development increases Washington’s and Beijing’s levels of concern about severe risks.

Someday, as unlikely as it may seem now, the two countries may realize that they do not have to agree on who should win the AI race to agree that neither side can afford to lose control of it. 

There are plenty of shows that could have been titled Youth. Most have casts in their teens and 20s. One of these is called Adults, the joke being that its postcollegiate characters are more like children—playful at best, feckless at worst. HBO’s Youth, a comedy premiering Sept. 20 about a divorced 50-year-old sandwiched between her college-aged son and declining parents, sounds like it might be similarly ironic. It isn’t, really. As in everything its creator and star, Catastrophe and Bad Sisters hitmaker Sharon Horgan, does, the title’s rueful humor conceals an emotionally complex truth. This is a perceptive, spit-takingly funny show about clinging to the most desirable aspects of youth while also craving comforts that can only come with age and experience. 

If youth is, as the saying goes, wasted on the young, then Horgan’s Alex is a character actually equipped to savor what little she has left of it. “I have 10 years left as a sexual person,” she determines in the premiere. With the petulant son, Ruarí (Aran Murphy, a near-clone of dad Cillian), whom she raised with minimal help from her ex-husband Lorcan (Owen McDonnell) packing up for uni, she’s resolved to end a long celibate streak. This search for not just a sex partner, but also the enduring love that has so far eluded her should be aided by Alex’s genuine youthfulness. But with guys like Lorcan and another former flame, Patrick (a rakish Rupert Friend), dodging adulthood with girlfriends decades their junior, the dating pool seems sparse. Set up on a blind date with a patient 67-year-old (Tim McInnerny’s Michael) who looks like he could be her dad, she can’t hide her disappointment. She treats him atrociously. Then again, the double standard that dictates she’s now too old for men her own age is also pretty atrocious.

At work, meanwhile, Alex is longing to be treated like the accomplished veteran literary agent she is. The trouble is, her boss, Sam (Sharlene Whyte), is also her best friend. They have a great, funny and foulmouthed and in many ways candid, rapport. But the more we see of this perceptively drawn relationship, the clearer it becomes that Sam doesn’t quite consider Alex an equal. In the office, she questions Alex’s judgment. Outside of it, Sam fails to keep her friend’s secrets, with real consequences. It’s a delicate problem for our protagonist to navigate. If Sam were simply toxic, Alex would simply need to realize it and free herself. Instead, Sam is a pragmatic businesswoman with trust issues rooted in her marriage. Which means it may be worth the hard work it would take to save the friendship as well as the professional relationship. 

No one working in TV is better than Horgan at writing—or playing—selfish and self-sabotaging characters that, like members of our own families, we love all the more for how much they frustrate us. She’s been doing it since her first series, Pulling, a portrait of faintly desperate single women at that age (30ish) when everyone else seems to be marrying, starting families, and getting serious about their careers. Ruarí can be infuriating; he rots in bed watching manosphere videos and treats his mother like a servant. Yet, thanks in large part to Murphy’s sensitive performance, there’s tenderness in him from the beginning. He’s earnestly confused about how to be a man in the world. As well he should be.

Horgan is not the kind of TV creator who makes half-hour dramas with the occasional awkward beat and calls them comedies, though. Her shows, even the one about murdering an abusive husband, will always make you laugh out loud, and Youth is no exception. Sometimes it’s pure physical humor; one episode makes an unexpected, perimenopausal period into a running joke (“Apropos of nothing, she’s back”). Sometimes it’s the pleasure of witty banter or a ridiculous sentence that makes perfect sense in context: “If I send you my dad’s number, can you help him turn his IRA podcast off?” (I do wish Horgan had made a bit more space to flesh out Alex's parents, played by Bríd Brennan and David Hargreaves.) Alex and Sam’s work yields a menagerie of delightfully ghoulish literary-world types, from a snakey rival agent who greets them as “sluts” and “lesbians” (Freddie Fox) to a creepy author (Douglas Hodge) who self-published a terrible yet depressingly popular romantasy novel after Alex dropped him as a client (title: The Goblin Seed).

In interviews, Horgan has said she sees Youth as a complement to Pulling and Catastrophe, the mid-2010s Prime Video comedy in which her character and a guy who was supposed to be an anonymous hookup (Rob Delaney) decide to build a family around a surprise pregnancy: “There’s a small element of autobiography to it.” The tones are certainly similar, though the range of emotions has broadened with proximity to life’s hard deadlines (fertility, mortality). “I just don’t know if there’s anything left in my life that I like anymore,” Alex admits. She and Sam and Patrick could all be characters from the previous two shows, 10 or 20 years on, with more residual mess than they’d expected to be cleaning up by middle age. Youth suggests that, in fact, disorder springs eternal; if it isn’t a canceled wedding, it’s an elderly parent losing toes to diabetes. Every new stage of life is another form of youth. How exciting. And terrifying. And funny.

If you’ve always worn the same size shoe but your sneakers and boots feel tighter now that you’re in, say, your 40s or beyond, you’re not alone. People on TikTok are also sharing their experiences with growing feet as they’re getting older. But do your feet really get bigger with age? 

“Yes, but ‘bigger’ is somewhat misleading,” says Dr. Kimberly Koury, an orthopedic surgeon at Atlantic Health. “Adult feet do not continue to grow in the same way they do during childhood. Instead, the shape of the foot can gradually change with age.”

This can happen for a variety of reasons and cause feet to become wider, flatter, and slightly longer, she explains. “Someone may notice that a shoe that fit well when they were younger now feels too tight, even though their actual foot bones have not continued to grow.” 

Here’s what to know about why your feet may get bigger with age and what to do about it. 

What causes feet to get bigger? 

The main reason is that over time, your arch “flattens and spreads,” says Lesly Robinson, a podiatrist and interim dean of the Temple University School of Podiatric Medicine. 

This is often due to decreased collagen—the protein that provides strength and elasticity to your skin, muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments—that naturally happens with age. This can cause the ligaments supporting your arches to become lax, Robinson says. “When the arch falls, the foot both widens and lengthens,” adds Dr. Alexis Dixon, an orthopedic surgeon and foot and ankle specialist in Marina Del Ray, Calif. 

Another reason feet may change in shape and size is a foot deformity, like a bunion or hammertoe, which become more prevalent as you get older. A bunion is a bump that forms on the inside of your big toe joint, but it’s not an extra bone growth. Instead, it’s a change in alignment, where the big toe moves toward the other toes, Koury says. “That makes the forefoot wider and can make previously comfortable shoes feel too narrow.” This can also contribute to flattening arches, Robinson says. Hammertoes happen when the tissue of your toes weakens, causing the muscles and tendons to buckle and curve, Dixon says. 

Bunions and hammertoes can be genetic or result from wearing tight, narrow shoes over a lifetime, she says. They’re more common for women. 

Arthritis is also common in feet and ankles, especially in the big-toe joint, Dixon says. It can cause bone spurs (extra growths of bone tissue) on top of the foot or at the back of the heel, which may rub against your shoe and make it feel too tight.   

When do these changes happen, and who’s most affected?

People may notice foot changes starting in their 30s, but there’s no specific age when they happen, says Sindhu Srinivas, a podiatrist in Atlanta. 

Age-related foot changes are generally more common for women, Koury says. The hormonal fluctuations in pregnancy and menopause affect collagen, and years of wearing high heels or narrow or ill-fitting shoes may contribute to structural changes in the feet. 

People with previous foot injuries, flat feet or bunions (or a family history of these conditions), and a higher body weight are more at risk, Koury adds. 

Being overweight puts pressure and stress on the feet, Srinivas says. “Over time, this increased load can contribute to changes in the foot's supporting structures and overall biomechanics.” 

How much bigger will your feet get? 

The changes happen gradually and can affect your foot’s length, width, and arch height, Srinivas says. But how much bigger your feet can get varies.

A study published in 2016 examined the foot measurements of 68 women aged 20 to over 80. It found that the widths of the balls of the feet increased by 3 to 4 millimeters per decade, while ball circumferences increased by about 5 to 7 millimeters, high-step circumferences 0.4 to 4.8 millimeters, and heel instep circumferences up to 2 millimeters. 

“That may sound small, but these changes accumulate over several decades and can become enough to affect shoe fit,” Koury says. 

Some people may need a wider shoe, while others might need one a half size larger, Dixon says. 

When to see a doctor

If your feet seem to be getting wider or longer and you’re experiencing pain, swelling, numbness, tingling, or difficulty walking or doing other activities, see your doctor, Koury says. Also, talk to your doctor if you’re getting recurrent calluses, blisters, or skin breakdown, or if your bunions, hammertoes, or flatfoot are worsening. Sudden foot changes, especially if they only affect one foot, should also get checked, Srinivas says. 

Pay extra attention to your feet if you have diabetes, neuropathy, or circulation problems, as even minor changes in your shoes’ fit can cause more serious problems, Koury says. 

Doctors will recommend the best treatment for your feet. This may include orthotics to improve arch support, Robinson says. It’s also possible to modify footwear for bunions or hammertoes, Dixon adds. Physical therapy or exercises may be helpful for some, Koury says. Surgery may be necessary for some foot issues if other treatments don’t help. 

How to protect your feet as you age

You can’t necessarily prevent age-related foot changes, but you can take steps to keep your feet healthy as you get older, Koury says. 

Most important: wear shoes that fit well. Avoid footwear with narrow toe boxes, which compress your toes (and may cause bunions), and limit high heels, which put stress on the front of the foot and may even cause a deformity, Koury says. Shoes should be supportive and have a wider toe box, Robinson says. “It’s helpful to have your feet measured periodically, including the width, not just the length,” Koury says. 

Maintaining a healthy weight can “help reduce unnecessary stress on the tendons, ligaments, and bones,” Sirinivas says. 

Regular physical activity strengthens your feet and ankles. Low-impact, weight-bearing activities can maintain foot function and stability, improve balance, and prevent falls, Dixon says. Also try foot exercises, such as standing on one foot while holding onto a counter, or toe scrunches, which involves curling your toes to pick up a washcloth or other object off of the floor. 

Treat bunions, flattening feet, or other foot problems as early as possible to avoid problems later, Koury says. “The goal is to accommodate the new foot shape and prevent the changes from becoming painful or functionally limiting.” 

In June 2024, Zoe Kazan boarded a flight to New Zealand. She was excited. For a mother of small children, a quiet solo flight is a vacation unto itself. She scrolled through the in-flight movies. “They had East of Eden, and I was like, ‘I guess the gods are conspiring,’” she says. She pressed play.

Until then she had been avoiding rewatching her grandfather Elia Kazan’s 1955 masterpiece. She was flying halfway across the world to scout locations for her own version of East of Eden, a seven-part adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel that premieres on Netflix on Oct. 1. She hadn’t wanted the film to influence her. But her script, which she’d begun working on in 2020, was finally turned in. 

As the end credits rolled, she sighed in relief. “It was less like the book than I remembered,” she says. The film, which introduced a brooding James Dean to cinema, is more inspired by the novel than a direct adaptation of it: It covers only the last third, crucial characters have been excised, and famous lines are missing. “For me,” says Kazan over cold brew, extra ice on the side, at a Brooklyn cafe on an August morning, “the power of the story is how, over 50 years, it shows history repeating itself—or not.”

Her faithful adaptation covers the entirety of the multi-generational saga, which reimagines the tale of Cain and Abel twice over. Cyrus (Tracy Letts in the new series), a self-mythologizing Civil War veteran, prefers his gentle son Adam (Christopher Abbott) to the violent one, Charles (Mike Faist). A generation later, Adam’s twin sons Aron and Cal (Joe Anders and Joseph Zada) vie for the affection of their emotionally absent father. Kazan wrangles with the novel’s central question: Whether those boys can escape the shadows of their family history and forge their own paths—and whether America, carrying the sins of slavery, campaigns of violence against Native Americans, and racism against immigrants building a future in the West, can do the same. 

Both versions are, in Kazan’s estimation, self-portraits of the artists who made them. Renowned for directing A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and co-founding the influential Actors Studio from which the school of “method acting” was born, Elia Kazan was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. The Hollywood blacklist was in effect and, Faced with the possibility of never being able to work in Hollywood again, he named names. His granddaughter has never read his autobiography, though she has tried. “There’s some very young part of me that’s like, I still want my grandpa to be my grandpa and not have access to all of this adult stuff,” she says. But she believes that Elia Kazan, who died in 2003 when she was 20, saw himself in the black sheep of the family: “He had this cold and demanding father, and I think he was projecting onto Cal.” Made during a period when the director was facing significant backlash, his version focuses on guilt, rejection, and alienation.

What most intrigued Zoe Kazan, a new mother when she started on the script, were characters her grandfather rewrote or omitted: Cathy (Florence Pugh), a mother who walks out on her infant sons and whom Kazan calls “irredeemable, irresistible, and so full of agency,” and Lee (Hoon Lee), a Chinese American servant who steps in to raise the boys.

Kazan may live closest to Cathy and Lee in her script. But perhaps the reason she was drawn to the project is the notion of living and working in her grandfather’s shadow. One cannot help but draw the parallel between her and the grandchildren in East of Eden, struggling with whether to embrace or break away from a burdensome legacy. “The irony was not lost on me. There’s a literal way that I’m following in my family’s footsteps,” Kazan admits. “I don’t think I’d be doing my job as an artist if I weren’t thinking about my family while making this family story.”

Zoe Kazan was a teenager when she fell hard for Steinbeck. At 15, the Los Angeles native embarked on a Steinbeck-themed road trip up the California coast with her parents, dog-eared East of Eden in hand. Years later, she asked her agents to contact her if anyone purchased the rights. The call came in December 2019, while Kazan was shooting in Australia. She emerged bleary-eyed from a flight back to L.A. with her 15-month-old to pitch her idea to the buyers. “I talked about America and the way that we don’t want to look at our shadow, and how the book argues that embracing your shadow, all of yourself, the good and the bad, is the only way to change,” she says. 

By then she had built a career not just as an actor in The Big Sick and She Said but as a screenwriter with Ruby Sparks, a satirical take on the manic pixie dream girl, and Wildlife, a drama she co-wrote with her partner, Paul Dano. She landed the East of Eden job and spent the next six years in Steinbeck’s world, and much of that time in the head of one of literature’s most complicated female characters, Cathy.

Cathy appears mysteriously on Adam and Charles’ doorstep, badly beaten. From there, she vacillates between a mesmerizing seductress and evil incarnate. She’s a manipulator or a survivor, depending on your perspective. “I don’t think anything in her background excuses her behavior,” says Kazan, laughing. “At the same time, there’s something really compelling about her insistence on her autonomy and selfishness, especially as a woman. I was such a good girl, reading that felt very exciting.”

Cathy became the center of Kazan’s adaptation. Often accused by the narrator of being a liar, Cathy in fact often tells the truth. It’s just not a truth the men around her want to hear. She says she does not want to move to California. She says does not want kids. She says she does not want to stay once Cal and Aron are born. Today’s readers may be appalled by the way she earns her freedom, but we can also sympathize with a woman whose wishes are so blatantly ignored.

Not even Steinbeck could decide. In letters to his editor, “He starts out like, ‘You’ve never read a monster like this,’” says Kazan. “Then he starts referring to her like, ‘I’ll finally get back to my dear Cathy.’ He seems very seduced by her.” Kazan relied heavily on the book to flesh Cathy out. This is not some girlboss version of one of literature’s great antagonists. “I think the text supports my reading,” she says. “I don’t like historical fiction that imposes modern values on the past. I don’t think Cathy is a feminist. I don’t think she cares about other women. I think she cares about herself.”

Pugh was the only actor Kazan named in her script. She’s made an career of morally complex characters in Lady Macbeth, Midsommar, and even the Marvel movies. As Cathy, she’s transfixing. “Florence looks like a doll, but she has this steel rod inside,” says Kazan. “Cathy is all action, like a shark that always has to be moving forward.” 

East of Eden has aged so well in some respects that Kazan might get accused of making modern updates by those who haven’t read the text. After Cathy leaves Adam, the story centers on two men, Adam and Lee, platonically raising a family and navigating the complicated gender-role implications of that arrangement. 

Lee’s parents were brought from China to build the railroads. He spends his life being the smartest man in any room but feigning broken English to make the white men around him comfortable, only revealing his intellect to those he trusts. For a few chapters, Lee departs for San Francisco to pursue the dream of opening his own bookstore. He returns with little to say about what happened while he was gone. "Even though [Steinbeck] imagines things like Lee code-switching, which is such a shocking thing to read in this book from 1952, I felt like it was this mystery of what happens to Lee when he goes away,” says Kazan. “I wanted to give him a little bit more." Kazan brought in the novelist Alexander Chee to build out the scenes for Lee that Steinbeck left off the page. 

She wrote eight episodes, including one exclusively following Lee on his San Francisco excursion. Netflix greenlit seven. "It was the obvious stuff that had to go, partially because it's off the main track of the story, but also because it's all new locations. It would have added a third to our budget,” she says. She had to weave the plot into another episode. “I was so sad to lose that episode, but I do think it's stronger for it, because he's not siloed. He's part of the cohesive story." 

When Adam checks out psychologically for the better part of a decade, Lee raises Cal and Aron, deliberately trying to prevent in this new generation the fractures and violence of the previous one. Steinbeck’s narrator observes Lee’s domestic and emotional work with admiration and grants Lee an unexpected dignity given the time period. The Netflix series doubles down, lingering on Lee’s face to capture a flicker of resigned sorrow at moments when Adam claims ownership over the boys and their accomplishments. 

“A lot of this caretaking, doing the invisible work, my experience of becoming a mother, is embedded in Lee,” Kazan says. But so, too, is she Cathy. “There’s also a part of me, as there is for many mothers, that’s like, ‘I love my children more than anything, and I wish I could disappear.’” 

Early in our nearly two-hour conversation, Kazan asks a server to lower the music so we can dig our teeth into Lee’s famous monologue on timshel, a Hebrew word that translates to “thou mayest” in the Cain and Abel story. It offers Cain and others the choice to triumph over sin. It frees younger generations from repeating the mistakes of their forebears. One can guess why this may ring true for Zoe Kazan. We circle the question of the divide between an artist and their art as ice melts in her cup. I bring up a tweet she wrote over the summer.

When Taylor Swift got married in July and observers clocked the absence of a longtime friend from the wedding, Kazan posted her interpretation of the situation online: "I think she didn't invite her because she has come to the end of her marriage plot, thus cutting off access to her first great subject. Rather than root for her own divorce, she is generating the next chapter of interpersonal drama for herself via female friendship." The tweet read like a literary critic’s interpretation of a pop star’s public art. Swifties called it out of line. Kazan deleted it.

"When an artist makes her personal life the subject of her work, and has her wedding in one of our nation's foremost arenas with billboards outside saying ‘Just Married,’ I don't think it's a personal critique to talk about what they're doing in their personal life," she says. "I am very careful to be kind online. I never say anything mean about anyone's work. So I erased those tweets once I realized how upset people were by it. Should I have known better? Probably. But I had never been on the receiving end of Swifties before, so I didn't know." 

I have spent much of the interview trying to divine how much of East of Eden is an extension of Kazan herself—she cites the timshel passage when referring to her relationship with her family’s legacy. Viewers familiar with her history may theorize about her connection to the material in the same way that Kazan offered up a theory about Swift. “[Swift] puts the names of her exes in her liner notes. There's a way that she has made her private life incredibly public and explicit,” she says. “The overlap with my personal history in this was all very conscious, and made more conscious the longer I worked on it. But it’s not the explicit subject of it.” 

She hopes the story opens doors inside viewers, the way it did for her. “I think we have tendencies as humans to feel the weight of our nation’s original sins, or our family’s original sins, that they are so shameful and heavy that anything good we do is going to be insignificant,” she says. “And then I think we have this other, very Trumpian impulse, of whitewashing the past. I think the thing the book is arguing for, and that I find very moving, is this idea that we actually have to carry both things. The weight of our original sins, and the idea that we are not defined by them.”

In an early scene of the exquisitely devastating miniseries Trespasses, two strangers in a pub ruminate on the relationship between art and pain. Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a schoolteacher taking a shift behind her family’s bar, admits she couldn’t finish reading A Clockwork Orange; the knowledge that the novel’s author, Anthony Burgess, was inspired by soldiers’ savage attack on his wife disturbed her too much. “He turned his suffering into art,” protests her customer, Michael (Tom Cullen). “I’d rather have the art without the suffering,” she retorts. “I’m sure his wife would, too.” Michael isn’t quite swayed. “Can you have one without the other?” he wonders.

Such beer-in-hand debates are as old as public drunkenness, but the conversation takes on new layers as the Troubles rage and Cushla and Michael’s romance blossoms in mid-1970s Belfast. She’s an empathetic Catholic, caring for a hypercritical mom (Gillian Anderson’s Gina) who has been lost in alcoholism since the death of her saintly husband and trying to help a young student who’s being bullied by the religious school’s leaders as well as his peers about his own parents’ “mixed” marriage. A Protestant barrister who speaks out against brutality by loyalist police, Michael has made fierce enemies on both sides of the conflict. All around the nascent couple is evidence that their love is doomed. Yet, like so many star-crossed lovers of fiction, they are drawn together by a force stronger than the ones pushing them apart. Whether you see their story, which debuted on Channel 4 in the UK and will premiere Sept. 20 on PBS, as a triumph or as a tragedy will depend on whose view of suffering you find most convincing.

Adapted by Ailbhe Keogan (Bad Sisters) from Louise Kennedy’s celebrated 2022 novel, Trespasses defies Romeo and Juliet cliché through specificity. It is a profound geopolitical injustice that the past few generations of Westerners mostly know war, even when it’s initiated by our own governments, as a misfortune that befalls people thousands of miles away, in dusty deserts and steaming jungles. Keogan subverts that notion, depicting Belfast as a war zone with violence at every doorstep and hatred festering on every corner. Everyone knows which side their neighbors are on—and surveils them, consciously or not, to make sure they stay on it.   

The characters are no mere victims of circumstance. Petticrew, fresh off a thrillingly dark turn in Furious and returning to the place and era of her breakthrough role in the IRA drama Say Nothing, gives us a protagonist who is as bright and stubborn as she is compassionate. You can see why she’d fall for an older, more mature man over the boyish types who clumsily court her. Cullen makes his character irresistible—a crusader who voices unpopular truths, warning law enforcement that their cruelty only mints new IRA recruits. He’s not a pure hero, though. He faces his minefield of a life by compartmentalizing; Cushla knows he’s married, but his infidelity is not up for discussion. The slumped and slurring Gina seems, at first, to be the kind of messy grande dame Anderson has taken to playing in recent years, with mixed results. But even this broad matriarch deepens, and the performance hits subtler notes, in later episodes.      

Just about every character surprises us, at least once, for good or ill. That complexity serves a thematic purpose as well as a narrative one. War flattens the enemy to slurs and stereotypes. Fighting for humanity means insisting upon individual identity; it means believing a Catholic and a Protestant in ’70s Belfast might belong together. “We must find the bravery to choose freedom over fear,” Michael proclaims in one of his righteous moments. “We cannot let the old bigots and the boys with guns tell us how to live.” For a couple on opposite sides of a war that allows for no gray area, this may be a suicidal ideology. But even if art is possible in the absence of suffering, love never comes without the risk of heartbreak. Whether it justifies that pain, Trespasses suggests, is a question too fraught and personal to be resolved by any glib barroom debate.

At a time when companies are racing to deliver commercial fusion energy and promising a new generation of geothermal wells across the U.S., three-wheel electric vehicles may not seem like the most exciting clean energy technology. But in India, three-wheel vehicles are an essential part of daily transportation and account for up to a quarter of motorized trips in many cities.

The majority of new full-size passenger auto rickshaws sold in India are now electric, according to registration data, a striking milestone given that 10 years ago they were barely off the ground. Initially, scaling took a mix of policy, infrastructure build out, and innovative financing; now, the market has taken on a life of its own. “Once you cross 50%, electric becomes the dominant technology,” says Suman Mishra, the CEO of Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, a key player in the market.

The development underscores an idea that is gaining currency in some climate circles: sometimes technologies that matter most are not the futuristic breakthroughs waiting to scale but the familiar ones where adoption begins to reinforce itself.

That shift sits at the heart of a new framework the Earthshot Prize is using this year to evaluate climate solutions. Rather than simply picking the climate solution with the most impressive technology, the judges looked for ways to recognize and advance “positive tipping points” that will unlock transformative changes beyond any individual company or project. “We know exactly the things that we’re looking for to try to tip these global systems in the right direction,” says Jason Knauf, CEO of the Earthshot Prize.

The pattern is visible across the finalist list. Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, one of this year’s Earthshot finalists announced on Sept. 18, has not just built affordable electric three-wheelers but also helped facilitate the infrastructure and policy necessary for them to take off. Another finalist, the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance, or ZEMBA for short, has sought to coordinate demand for low-carbon shipping fuel from customers that ship goods. And Yellowstone to Yukon restores habitat corridors across North America, which then unlocks feedbacks that restore the underlying ecological ecosystem.

The concept of climate tipping points entered the vernacular nearly two decades ago to describe some of the most alarming risks posed by climate change. At the time, tipping points referred to the thresholds that, when crossed, would trigger a chain reaction of often irreversible damage—think of Antarctic ice sheet collapse leading to sea level rise or the destruction of the Amazon releasing stored carbon dioxide.

More recently, scientists have sought to reframe tipping points, showing that positive developments can have tipping points, too. Cheap energy leads to a rewiring of economies. Social movements unlock widespread policy changes. “The tipping point is where you have strong amplification within the system,” says Tim Lenton, a professor of the University of Exeter who has written seminal papers on the tipping points concept.

The reframe comes at an important moment for the climate narrative. With increasingly bleak climate news, positive tipping points offer grounded optimism about how things may change. That was a key logic for Earthshot’s embrace of tipping points.

“We don’t think you can just leave people with the negatives and the warnings,” says Knauf. “We think we have a responsibility to show them” where positive action is possible.

But the positive tipping point framework is also useful from a capital allocation perspective. As companies cut costs and governments look for ways to trim public spending, tipping points offer a way to identify what Lenton describes as the best “bang for your buck” for climate investment dollars.

In some cases, that means supporting initiatives outside the typical wheelhouse of climate technology startups. ZEMBA, for example, works with the customers who would like to reduce their shipping footprint with low-carbon fuel but cannot afford to do so on their own, thereby helping create a demand signal. That’s a coordinated effort that competitors rarely engage in. “Once those markets are spinning, we will fade into the mist,” says Ingrid Irigoyen, the organization’s CEO.

Such an approach makes sense for governments evaluating how they spend their public dollars. It also makes sense for pension funds and institutional investors concerned with the long-term economic implications of climate change. With relatively few dollars, certain investments will generate a long-tail of positive climate outcomes.

In a future world where climate impact is an important investment metric, tipping points may be a useful tool. For those interested, the Earthshot finalists may offer a useful place to start.

Recently, the world has collectively mourned the unexpected losses of several well-known public figures, from Dolly Parton and Gloria Steinem to Bob Mackie and Tim Curry. Their deaths have hit fans, followers, and industry colleagues hard, and their tributes are going viral online. 

Although these celebrities primarily appear to us on screen or on stage, many people feel as though they know them personally because of the meaningful impact they’ve had on their lives. These are known as parasocial relationships or “nonreciprocal social-emotional connections” with public figures and celebrities, per the journal of Current Opinion in Psychology.

When a public figure or celebrity dies, we grieve collectively. According to Gina Moffa, grief therapist and author of the book, Moving on Doesn’t Mean Letting Go, this happens when a large group of people mourns at the same time. “This can be felt even if they never knew the person or community, or weren’t directly affected by the event,” says Moffa. And it isn’t limited to the passing of public figures and celebrities. Many people also experienced shared loss after 9/11, Sandy Hook, COVID-19, and the Nepal floods.

In this current cultural moment, we’re seeing collective grief intersect with a psychological phenomenon called parasocial grief. According to psychotherapist and NYU adjunct professor Olivia Verhulst, this can occur when there’s a one-sided sense of familiarity with a public figure after they die. “Relationships don’t need to be reciprocal for feelings to be real,” Verhulst says. “Loss brings up a lot for all of us no matter what form it takes, whether it’s shock, disbelief, or confrontation with our own mortality.”

A small study in 2025 from the journal Acta Psychologica found that parasocial grief can negatively impact mental health and can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance use. 

In comparison with individual grief, shared bereavement is more diffuse. “It doesn’t have the built-in rituals we rely on, like experiences of a funeral and traditional closure,” Moffa explains. Therefore, when celebrities or public figures die, it’s now common practice to post online and engage in comments sections with other grievers. In this way, the comment sections become public memorials. 

After Steinem’s passing, people expressed their gratitude and heartbreak by leaving flowers and cards outside her home. When Parton died, fans held up their iPhones with the flashlight on during Harry Styles concert at Madison Square Garden while her song, “I Will Always Love You,” played. Both of these in-person tributes circulated on social media and were widely shared.

Verhulst argues that the most significant difference in mutual sorrow is its “being witnessed” and it can offer more validation than individualized grief. “Given that human beings are fundamentally wired for connection, this broader sense of communal loss can feel comforting in many ways,” she says. 

Shared bereavement isn’t a new idea; it dates back for centuries. Some of the most visible representations in recent decades have been the outpouring of support after the deaths of President John F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Princess Diana. At her funeral, there were an estimated one million people in-person and roughly 2.5 billion viewers who watched it on television. 

Society often pushes individual grievers to move on from their losses, rushing them to heal before they’re ready, which can lead to more people struggling alone. But in our current culture, shared bereavement has become more widely accepted. “Social media has become a kind of ‘modern funeral,’ a space where people can come together online, without the barriers of physical geography getting in the way,” Moffa says. “For a lot of people, it’s become the primary place mourning happens now.” 

Research has found grieving together is more beneficial than doing it without help. A meta-review from 2022 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology discusses the theory of collective effervescence, a phrase coined by sociologist Émilie Durkheim, as it relates to mourning practices, public memorials, and communal storytelling like after the loss of a public figure. This “intense state of shared emotional activation and sense of unity” can help people feel connected in the long term to others who understand their pain.  

“When Steinem and Parton passed within days of each other, comment sections turned into genuine gathering places, telling each other how these women shaped their lives. It made the feeling less isolating and more like something they were carrying alongside a whole community instead of alone,” Moffa says. 

Working with a therapist, especially for cognitive behavioral therapy, can also be effective. Treatment can give people a safe space to talk about discomfort and divulge feelings of loss over someone they didn’t know personally, with validation and without shame. It can provide more insight into a person’s emotional state, to see if there’s any unresolved or prolonged grief.

Integration is another useful method. Moffa suggests creating a small ritual in honor of that person, like playing their music, reading their books, or rewatching a favorite video clip. Then, write down what that person meant to you, rather than what they meant to the world, and talk about it with someone. “This can provide validation and connection, instead of having to carry it alone,” she adds. In fact, a recent study from the Death Studies journal in 2026 found sharing emotions, ceremonies, and rituals offer “sense making, solidarity and healing” in shared mourning. 

While these are effective ways to navigate the pain, they aren’t the only ones. It’s key to adapt them to meet your needs and determine what works for you. 

Verhulst noted there’s an outdated idea that grief occurs in fixed stages which is somehow linear. But, she says, there are truly no universal stages to heal from loss and no right way to grieve. 

Sometimes, the best way to mourn is together.

The U.S. may have committed war crimes when its strikes allegedly hit an elementary school and a sports facility in Iran, according to a United Nations report publicly released on Thursday.

The U.N.’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran said it found “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed a war crime by launching indiscriminate attacks that killed or injured civilians or damaged civilian objects.”

The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, triggering a war that has stretched into its seventh month. Among those attacks, the mission identified U.S. Tomahawk missile strikes that hit Tree of Tayyiba Elementary School in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including 120 children, and an alleged U.S. missile strike that dispersed tens of thousands of tungsten pellets over a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd, killing 22 civilians. (The U.S. denied carrying out any strike within the vicinity of Lamerd on Feb. 28.)

Both civilian facilities were “clearly identifiable,” the report said.

“The U.S.’s failure to update information in relation to the school in its targeting databases and to verify that the building was a military objective before launching the attack went beyond mere negligence,” the report said. “Rather, the U.S. directed the strikes at the building of the school while being aware of a substantial risk of striking a civilian object and acting recklessly as regards the possibility that this would happen.”

The mission is expected to present its findings, which also conclude that Iranian authorities likely committed crimes against humanity during their deadly crackdown on protesters in December and January, to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday.

“People in Iran are caught between intensified repression and violence by their government and renewed armed conflict and insecurity resulting from the hostilities between Iran and the U.S and Israel,” the report said.

The war has produced a significant civilian toll, with at least 2,100 people killed across the region by late April. In Iran, human rights groups estimate that more than 1,700 civilians were killed by the end of April, including more than 1,000 civilians who were killed in the first five days of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign. That includes hundreds of women and children, dozens of health care workers, and at least nine journalists. Iranian authorities reported another 18 deaths from U.S. strikes on Sept. 1, which included several civilians. Israel’s strikes on Lebanon have also killed more than 4,300 people and displaced more than one million since early March, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

U.S. conduct in its war against Iran has come under growing scrutiny. On Sept. 1, an apparent U.S. strike hit a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, killing five people and wounding more than 60. Washington has not accepted responsibility, although it launched an internal probe into the strike. An analysis by Reuters indicated that the damage was likely caused by a direct hit from a U.S. munition.

The U.S. also carried out strikes on bridges and electrical infrastructure in Iran in July, after President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened attacks on Iranian bridges and power plants. In March, Trump threatened to “blow up” Iran’s desalination plants if Tehran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a move that legal experts said could violate international law. He also warned in April that a “whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran acquiesced to U.S. demands. Israel’s bombing of Iranian fuel depots, which shrouded Tehran in plumes of toxic black smoke, also raised warnings of potentially decades-long harm to public health.

The State Department told the Associated Press that it did not consider the latest U.N. report credible. The Trump Administration withdrew from the Human Rights Council, which comprises 47 countries, in February 2025, over its “anti-American rhetoric and antisemitism,” the department said.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told news outlets the Human Rights Council has “accomplished nothing for human rights while spouting unserious nonsense for decades.”

“The only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes is the Iranian regime, which has murdered thousands of its own people, killed Americans overseas, executed acts of terrorism in the Strait of Hormuz, and launched indiscriminate attacks against its neighbors in the region,” Kelly said.

What the U.S. has said about the strikes

In March, the Pentagon launched a formal command investigation into the Minab school strike following a preliminary review. It has not released its preliminary findings, although a U.S. official told the Associated Press that the strike was likely the result of outdated target coordinates supplied by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The school was adjacent to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps complex, but satellite imagery showed the school had been separated from the compound in 2016. It had been publicly listed as a girls’ elementary school for years.

Members of Congress have also questioned whether the Pentagon used artificial intelligence tools to identify the school as a target. No publicly disclosed evidence has established that an AI model independently selected the school as a target.

In June, Trump said the incident was still under investigation. “Nobody did that on purpose,” he told reporters at a press conference in France.

The Pentagon told Reuters on Thursday that the investigation is ongoing.

The U.S. was also accused of carrying out strikes with precision missiles that scattered clouds of tungsten pellets in the city of Lamerd, which the U.N. report also mentioned.

On March 28, BBC Verify reported that weapons experts had identified the type of missile used in Lamerd from video footage as a probable U.S.-made Precision Strike Missile (PrSM). A visual analysis by the New York Times also indicated the same type of missile.

A review by the conflict monitor Airwars last month mapped three apparent missile detonations over a sports complex and two residential neighborhoods in Lamerd. Weapons experts told AP that the missiles appeared to be PrSMs and were unlikely to have been fired by Iran or Israel.

On March 31, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) refuted claims that the U.S. struck Lamerd and said U.S. forces did not launch strikes in Lamerd or within 30 miles of the city on Feb. 28.

CENTCOM said that the missile visible in video footage was too long to be a PrSM, and suggested it was instead an Iranian Hoveyzeh cruise missile.

“U.S. forces do not target civilians, unlike the Iranian regime which has attacked civilian locations in neighboring countries more than 300 times,” CENTCOM said on March 31. No formal investigation into the alleged strike has been announced since.

In May, CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper told Congress that the military was investigating only one case involving possible U.S.-caused civilian deaths: the Minab school strike.

Iran may have committed crimes against humanity in deadly crackdown

The mission also found grounds to believe that the Iranian government committed crimes against humanity during their “violent” crackdown on mass protests beginning late December. Iranian security forces killed 3,038 people and injured 25,000, according to official counts, although the report said the toll is likely higher. At least 221 children, including two two-year-olds, were killed in the crackdown, the report said, citing a human rights organization.

The government arbitrarily detained tens of thousands of people, some of whom were subjected to torture, solitary confinement and denial of legal advice, the report said.

Security forces also attacked health care facilities, arresting wounded protesters and health care workers, the report said.

The mission said at least 29 men were executed, five publicly, in connection with the protests following summary trial. More than 70 people, including five women and three children, are at “imminent risk” of execution, the report said.

Iran has not publicly commented on the report.

In January, Iranian protesters urged Trump to make good on his promise that “help is on its way.” Trump said he was considering military action, although he ultimately declined to launch a strike at the time, and called on demonstrators to continue standing up to the theocratic regime.

In recent weeks, amid renewed U.S.-Iran hostilities, Trump has again urged the Iranian public to resist their government, asking “When are the Iranian people going to rise up and fight?”