Dolly Parton, the country music legend behind hits like “Jolene” and “9 to 5” as well as businesswoman, fashion icon, and philanthropist, has died. She was 80.

Her death was announced in a video featuring her nephew, Bryan Seaver, that was shared on Parton’s social media accounts. Seaver didn’t disclose a cause of death in the video. He said that his aunt “has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by” her loved ones, including her husband Carl Dean, who died last year, as well as her parents and “countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the havens.”

“She never saw a door she couldn’t open, and the doors she opened made and changed history,” Seaver said. “My family and I have shared a lifetime of beautiful memories with Dolly, but so have you. She has always been on your television, your record player, your CD, and on your phone playlist, becoming an extended part of your family whether you liked it or not.”

This is a developing story.

Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on U.S. goods in response to President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs and amid an escalating trade war between the neighboring allies.

Canada’s Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced Tuesday that effective Sept. 8 the country “will match the United States tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate," by imposing counter tariffs of up to 15%, 25%, or 50% on near $20 billion U.S. imports.

“For each product, our tariff would match the American tariff on the same type of Canadian goods,” he said during a press conference alongside Canadian federal officials.

Read More: 'We Don't Need Canada': Trump Escalates Trade War

Tensions between the U.S. and its northern neighbor have deepened after trade negotiations broke down over the weekend, with both sides blaming one another for last-minute changes.

A broad set of 50% tariffs affecting about $20 billion of Canadian exports to the U.S. came into effect Saturday, after which Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to match them “dollar for dollar.”

“Ultimately, the terms proposed by the U.S. Administration were uneconomic, unfair, and ultimately unacceptable. They asked too much of Canada and offered too little in return,” Champagne said.

The tariffs are set to target more than 700 U.S.-made products and, if matched against the U.S. tariffs on Canada, will include everyday purchases such as seafood, cheese, clothing, cosmetics, and toilet paper.

Canadian officials said the goal is not to raise revenue, but to protect Canadian companies and reduce reliance on U.S. imports.

“Canada's counter tariffs are designed primarily to provide protection for Canadian industry impacted by U.S. tariffs and allow them to compete against U.S. products in the Canadian market. It's all about fairness. It's all about level playing field. It's all about supporting Canadian workers and Canadian businesses,” he said.

Trade between the U.S. and Canada totaled an estimated $872.3 billion in 2025.

In Addition to Tariffs, Trump Targets Canada With Taunts

The announcement came shortly after Trump began taunting the Canadian government over a range of cultural issues.

The President said his Administration is considering renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” in the latest cultural swipe at Canada amid the broader trade war.

“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer,” Trump said Tuesday morning.

Lake Ontario is the easternmost of the five Great Lakes and is bordered by the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York and Pennsylvania.

Canada’s retaliation also drew Trump’s ire, with the President unleashing a barrage of insults against the U.S.’s second-largest trading partner in goods.

“I deal with many countries, and Canada is easily the most difficult and unreasonable,” Trump said Tuesday before the official counter tariff announcement by Ottawa, adding his repeated accusation that Canada “has been 'ripping off' the U.S.A. for decades.”

Trump announced Monday that, on top of the initial 50% tariffs, the U.S. would raise tariffs on all Canadian cars and trucks, automotive parts, and steel to 50% starting Jan. 1, 2027.

U.S. officials, including the President, have also appeared to publicly undermine Canada by repeatedly comparing the country to a U.S. state.

“They feel entitled, but they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer!” Trump repeated Tuesday.

Similarly, Vice President J.D. Vance referred to Canada as a “state” during a political rally in Maine on Monday, which he claimed was a "Freudian slip.”

Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state—an idea Carney has strongly rejected.

Why French Language and Culture Became a Sticking Point in U.S.-Canada Talks

Both sides have blamed the other for the breakdown in negotiations over the weekend, but French language and culture have emerged as a contentious point of tension.

Carney said Monday that U.S. negotiators had raised the discoverability of French-language content on streaming platforms, along with French-language labeling rules, as trade irritants.

"For the Americans, French language, francophone culture, Quebec culture, and Canadian culture, for them these are irritants. Here in Quebec, here in Canada, they are rights—fundamental rights,” Carney said in French while taking questions from the media at an event in Lévis, Quebec.

The Canadian leader added that there was “an enormous gap between the U.S. perspective and Canadian perspectives” during negotiations when it came to French culture.

Trump has moved to deny the accusations made by his Canadian counterpart, framing them as a “lie” by Carney to “to gain political support” from those in Quebec.

“I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing,” he said on social media Tuesday.

Last year, Quebec implemented a law requiring streaming giants to add French-language content and make it more easily accessible to users. The French-speaking province also has strict labeling rules requiring packaging to include French.

Which Canadian Goods Are Hit by Trump’s 50% Tariffs?

The tariffs placed on various Canadian goods affect around 5% of all trade between Canada and the U.S. and cover a wide range of products.

Although the Administration has framed the tariffs into three categories of alcoholic beverages, dairy products, and motor vehicles, these are far broader than at first glance.

A variety of Canadian alcoholic beverages, including beer made from malt, sparkling wine and other grape wines, and various spirits are the primary target of the first list, but this also includes a range of wood-based goods, such as selected wooden kitchenware and decorative products, as well as ice hockey and field hockey equipment.

The tariffs set to target a variety of dairy ingredients include powdered or otherwise concentrated milk and cream, various milk protein and whey protein concentrates, and lactose and lactose syrup.

The lengthy list of “motor-vehicle” related items includes a variety of products beyond vehicles themselves. The list ranges from agricultural and plant goods, including natural honey, feathers, selected animal products, and plant extracts, to salt and baking mixes.

Textiles and clothing are also set to be hit by the tariffs, including silk, wool, cotton, yarn, fabrics, carpets, dresses, trousers, T-shirts, sweaters, coats, padded jackets, suits, blazers, tracksuits, and even wigs. Tech-related goods are also included, such as smartphones, video recorders, and camera and computer equipment, alongside leisure and cultural products including toys, puzzles, arcade machines, and video game consoles. Other technology products covered include television and radio transmitters, cameras, radar equipment, and computer monitors.

Canada's newly announced counter tariffs are set to target similar products.

When governments ask people what truly matters to them, they cite things like being healthy, having a secure and affordable home, enough income to live with dignity, and time for the people they love. As the former leaders of Iceland and Scotland, we have heard concerns first-hand. 

But these people-first priorities are not abstract ambitions. They are the conditions for a decent life, and ensuring they are met should be the first priority of any government.

And yet none of this is captured in the number that most economists, the media, and indeed, governments use to measure a country’s success: Gross Domestic Product (GDP), commonly referred to as economic “growth.”

To be sure, GDP has its uses as a measure of many of the goods and services a country exchanges and produces. But today, it is typically used in a way its architects never intended. For instance, a country's GDP rises when a forest is felled and when an oil spill is cleaned up. It rises with financial speculation. But it does not rise when a parent cares for a child or a child for an elderly parent, when the forest is left standing, when a woman can walk home at night without fear, when voters turn out because they trust their institutions, or when a patient sees a doctor in days rather than months.

A new UN Framework, Beyond GDP, promises to change this by offering a dashboard of more meaningful indicators to complement GDP. Governments must now put this framework into action. Not simply by publishing new statistics, but by using them to set priorities, shape budgets, assess policies and be held to account publicly on whether people’s lives are genuinely improving.

Eight years ago, we set out to put the wellbeing of our people ahead of the narrow pursuit of economic growth. Together with New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, we founded the Wellbeing Economy Governments partnership, later joined by Wales and Finland, with Canada actively participating. We shared practical lessons about developing national wellbeing indicators, embedding them in government decision-making and ensuring that economic policy considers social and environmental outcomes alongside financial ones.

In Iceland, we introduced 39 wellbeing indicators, built on what people themselves told us they valued, and used them to inform policy. GDP became one measure among many, alongside life expectancy, unmet healthcare needs, material deprivation and work-life balance. Parental leave shows what this means in practice. We extended leave to 12 months, with six months reserved for each parent and six weeks transferable. In doing so, we recognized that care, family life, gender equality, and the economy are inseparable, and that fathers' time with their children is worth protecting. The reform strengthened families and shifted expectations about work and who does the caring.

In Scotland, a Wellbeing Economy Monitor showed us how the economy was really performing for people, alongside a National Performance Framework of outcomes written into law and aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. Policies followed: the doubling of early years education, a Baby Box to equalize children’s starts in life, the Scottish Child Payment to reduce child poverty directly, and Community Wealth Building to ensure public spending, land and assets create lasting value locally—an approach Scotland has since made the subject of the first national legislation of its kind anywhere in the world. 

While these efforts are still evolving and not perfect, they represent an important shift in how governments understand prosperity. Changes in economic systems take time, but progress begins by changing—and being more explicit about—what we value. Our experience taught us that measuring what matters is only the beginning: wellbeing indicators must also shape budgets, policy decisions and how governments are held accountable. Legal systems need to support this too.

We were, and we still are, far from alone in this endeavor. Bhutan, for example, has been making the argument for more than 50 years. Its Gross National Happiness framework focuses on nine different dimensions of well-being such as living standards, health, education, and ecological diversity. Last year, Malaysia introduced a bold new roadmap that embeds public health, environmental sustainability and economic resilience. The National Planetary Health Action Plan moves away from a narrow focus on economic growth to prioritize the health of people and planet, replacing the short-term idea of return on investment with a “return on values.”

It is worth noting that wellbeing economy approaches often mirror the ways many Indigenous Communities have been providing for collective needs for generations. For example, Buen Vivir—living well together—comes from the Quechua peoples of the Andes, and has been written into the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia since 2008. And Aotearoa New Zealand's wellbeing budget draws on Māori understandings of intergenerational wellbeing.

These ideas are finally moving from the margins into mainstream economic policy. A landmark UN report, written by a high-level expert group appointed by the UN Secretary-General after the Pact for the Future, proposes a dashboard of 31 indicators to sit alongside GDP, with recommendations for governments, business, academia, and civil society on how to bring this agenda to life.

Earlier this year, a roadmap for eradicating poverty without relying on endless growth was launched in Geneva, developed with more than four hundred contributors from governments, trade unions, social movements, UN agencies and universities. It sets out measures that already work in different places, from social protection and care; to tax, universal basic services, and the rights of nature; to the governance of trade, debt, and finance. That work and the work on measurement are currently proceeding separately. Bringing them together would be a valuable contribution of the intergovernmental process now underway. 

The greatest risk now is a process in which governments agree in principle and move slowly in practice. New indicators alone will not be enough. The pursuit of growth at any cost is embedded far beyond the statistics: in how credit agencies rate a country's debt, how finance ministries deem a budget responsible, and in the rarely-questioned assumption that more is always better.

What is needed is not further consensus but more early adopters: countries willing to pilot implementation and share honestly what they learn, supported by civil society, business and the UN itself.

The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals ask every country to sustain economic growth per person. As governments begin to design what will follow them, we have a chance to change the instruction and create a different approach.

After all, the responsibility of every leader is to ensure the wellbeing and safety of his or her people, and to do that, we need to go beyond GDP and think about what truly matters

Most people leave the monkey bars behind with childhood. Yet hanging from a bar—right-side up, don’t worry—may be one youthful habit worth picking back up, especially if you spend your days hunched over your desk and phone. (Guilty.)

“We look at kids on a playground—what are they doing?” says Australian physiotherapist Daniel Vadnal, owner of FitnessFAQs, who posts instructive videos on Instagram and YouTube. “They don’t need to be told to hang. They just intuitively do it.”

A few years ago, Vadnal persuaded his grandmother, now 93, to try a supported hang. That means gripping a bar overhead with straight arms but keeping your feet planted on the floor, rather than dangling your entire body weight. She was skeptical: She hadn’t even raised her arms fully overhead since she was a kid. But after just 30 seconds, she felt taller and looser—and found it easier to reach her kitchen cabinets.

Here’s what hanging can do for your body, how to keep your feet planted while you build strength, and why just 30 seconds is long enough. 

It gives your upper body a stretch

At its simplest, hanging means gripping a secure overhead pull-up bar—the kind that can be installed in a doorway—with straight arms while supporting some or all of your body weight. You remain right-side up: Your hands are above your head, and your feet point toward the floor or remain planted on it. Hanging upside down, known as inversion, is an entirely different exercise. “It’s fairly simple, but it’s not easy,” says Hazel Anderson, a physical therapist and faculty member at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in Austin.

Whether your feet stay planted for support or lift off the floor, there are two ways to position your upper body. “The passive hang is, as the name suggests, just relaxed,” Vadnal says. “You’re letting nature, gravity, your body do whatever it wants.” Your shoulders move toward your ears, creating a stretch through the shoulders, arms, and trunk.

An active hang requires more effort. “You want to think of trying to bring your shoulder blades down away from your ears,” Vadnal says. That engages the muscles around the shoulders and back, creating more stability. Your elbows remain straight—and your feet can remain planted or off the floor—in either type of hang.

Vadnal considers passive and active hangs opposite ends of a spectrum. A passive hang still requires enough muscle effort to remain safely attached to the bar; an active one involves “really making a concerted effort” to hold yourself in position. He recommends choosing the amount of engagement that feels most comfortable for your body.

Reaching overhead may feel especially satisfying after all those hours slumped over your desk. Hanging “stretches all the tight muscles that we tend to have through the pecs, through the triceps on the back of the arms, as well as the lats,” Vadnal says. You’ll likely find it leaves you feeling a little taller—and less scrunched up through the shoulders.

That doesn’t mean 30 seconds on a bar will permanently correct your posture or treat back or shoulder pain; those claims haven’t been established in strong clinical trials. But hanging moves your upper body into a position it might not visit very often, which helps explain why people often step down feeling looser.

It makes your grip work

A hang might look passive, but your hands and forearms are busy keeping you attached to the bar. “First and foremost, it supports grip endurance,” Anderson says. “It’s helping with grip strength, but more with the endurance of being able to hold on to the bar.”

That endurance is useful for everything from carrying groceries to working toward a pull-up. “The hands, fingers, and forearms serve as a link to our back,” Vadnal says. Strengthening that link helps prepare you to support—and eventually pull—your body weight.

Research on short, recreational hangs is limited, and most studies involve climbers. In a small 2026 study, 11 climbers hung on until their grip gave out. As they got tired, their shoulders and other upper-body muscles increasingly pitched in to keep them on the bar.

Another randomized trial found that when experienced climbers hung by their fingers for eight weeks, with progressively more weight attached to the body, some measures of grip strength improved. The study involved extra weight and a climbing hold—not beginners attempting a relaxed 30-second hang—but it supports the idea that regularly asking your hands to hold you up can make them better at the job.

Grip strength is also widely used as a marker of overall health. “We do know that grip strength is correlated with longevity,” Vadnal says. In a study of nearly 140,000 adults across 17 countries, weaker grip was associated with a higher risk of death and cardiovascular disease.

That doesn’t mean hanging longer will make you live longer, Vadnal adds. Think of it as one useful signal—not a path to immortality.

Your feet can stay on the floor

Beginners don’t need to hover heroically above the ground. When you’re starting out, the bar is—quite literally—low. “I love the addition of a little step stool or platform,” Anderson says. Hold the bar with both hands, bend your knees slightly, and keep enough weight in your feet that the stretch feels manageable. You can gradually allow your arms to support more of you as you become comfortable.

“You definitely don’t need to jump straight to 30-second hangs all at once,” Anderson says. She recommends starting with a 10-second supported hang and repeating it three to five times, resting briefly between attempts. From there, work toward the 30-second goal. Vadnal likes three 30-second sets, but only after choosing a variation easy enough to complete with control.

Begin with your hands about shoulder-width apart. “That’s most comfortable for pretty much everyone,” Vadnal says, though you can move your hands wider or narrower based on what feels best. Wrap your thumbs underneath the bar to make your grip more secure.

If the typical overhand position bothers your shoulders, try a neutral grip, with your palms facing each other. Many gyms have parallel handles that allow for it, and gymnastics rings will rotate to accommodate your joints. Vadnal calls it “probably the most friendly position for the shoulders.”

Decide whether a passive or slightly more active hang feels better, and don’t worry about matching someone else’s position. Forcing your shoulders farther overhead than they can comfortably go may leave them sore or irritated, Vadnal says. Let your range of motion improve gradually instead.

Most importantly, remember to breathe. Anderson advises using “slow, controlled breaths” and making sure you’re not holding your air in, whether you’re a beginner or an expert. It’s easy to get so focused on staying on the bar that your whole body clenches up; a few steady breaths can help you relax into the hang.

“Don’t chase the clock,” Anderson says. If your form changes or you can no longer control the hang, put your feet down, rest, and try again.

Know when to let go

Hanging should feel like work—not like you’re about to injure yourself. “We should feel a stretching sensation; we should feel fatigued,” Vadnal says. “We shouldn’t feel pain.” Put your feet down if you experience sharp or persistent pain, numbness, tingling, or weakness.

Those symptoms are signs to stop, not to push through. Talk to a doctor or a physical therapist before trying again. Some people should seek guidance before they ever reach for the bar: Anderson recommends medical clearance for anyone who recently had shoulder surgery or an injury involving the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, or trunk. The same applies to people with shoulder instability, pain when reaching overhead, cardiovascular concerns, or uncontrolled high blood pressure. 

Osteoporosis doesn’t automatically make hanging off-limits. But because a fall could have more serious consequences, Anderson says, it’s particularly important to keep your feet supported and get personalized guidance.

Anderson recommends practicing two or three times a week on nonconsecutive days, which allows the muscles to recover. There’s no need to progress from zero hanging to auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. Add time or body weight gradually, and take a day off if your hands, forearms, or shoulders remain unusually sore.

If you like hanging, Vadnal suggests keeping a bar somewhere you’ll regularly see it, like in your laundry room. “It’s like daily hygiene,” he says. “You brush your teeth; hanging is a good thing, too.”

What would a company like Google want with data from a failed airline?

Google won a bankruptcy auction this month with a bid to spend $10 million on the corporate data of Spirit Airlines, which stopped flying in May. Google’s offer beat a $7.5 million bid for the data from an AI data company, Mercor.

The cache includes 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and around 30 million lines of code.

AI companies have been battling it out this year to make the best AI coding agent—and they have benefited from an abundance of publicly available code to train these models. But teaching agents to do other kinds of white-collar work may require data that is largely private, buried in corporate emails and chats. If that effort succeeds, it could send ripples across the labor market.

“Buying Spirit Airlines—that's not centrally a coding agent purchase,” says Nick Heiner, the head of reinforcement learning environments at Surge, a data company that supplies the frontier AI labs. “That's a purchase if you believe that your agent is going to generalize into the rest of the economy.”

Reinforcement learning

One of the biggest trends in AI over the last 18 months or so has been the rise of reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards—a method of AI training that has led to rapid improvements in models that can work independently for long periods of time.

Anthropic alone has discussed spending more than $1 billion in a year on so-called reinforcement learning (RL) environments, which are essentially simulations of commonly used software, where AI agents can take strings of actions independently. If these actions lead to a desired outcome, the AI is rewarded and will be more likely to take similar actions in the future.

Until now, the biggest jumps from this type of training have come from coding models, mostly because code has a useful property: it either works or it doesn’t, meaning that the reward signal is immediate, so improvement can happen in a fast loop. (It’s also helpful that there was plenty of coding data already out there on the internet, meaning models were good coders to begin with.)

But AI companies’ long-term goal is to automate large swathes of the economy. That’s where Spirit’s data likely comes in.

What makes the data useful

RL environments are only as good as the data that populates them, says Heiner of Surge AI. Companies like Surge and Mercor often hire human workers who are tasked with populating these environments with realistic data, either from scratch or in partnership with AI tools. “But even that is a little bit removed from literally having actual data that was used in the real world,” Heiner says. “That's where deals like Spirit come in.”

Even though Spirit was a failed company, its data probably still encodes many useful things about how humans carry out their jobs, like how workers collaborate toward shared goals, or the norms of how the aviation industry operates. Even data depicting bad decisions can be helpful, Heiner says. “Maybe you see something where they're actually doing something poorly, and you build a task out of that, and you change what they were doing to be something better.”

But unlike coding, which can be quickly and easily determined to either work or not, office tasks are fuzzier. Human experts can still provide that feedback—a service that companies like Mercor and Surge offer to AI companies—but that work is relatively expensive, time-consuming, and subjective. It’s therefore unclear that even populating RL environments with real-world data like Spirit’s will allow AI companies to move into white-collar fields as quickly as they have ripped through the software industry.

Privacy drama

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of how Spirit’s data would be used, but said the data “can be helpful in improving our products and AI models.” The spokesperson added that personal information would be “rigorously scrubbed” by a third party before the dataset’s delivery to Google, and would include no customer data.

After Google submitted its bid, a union of flight attendants filed an objection, saying that although the deal’s terms would result in personal data being removed, the dataset would maintain “referential integrity,” meaning that links between one type of data and another would be kept. That integrity is what makes the data useful for training AI, but the union said it may also allow for even anonymized information about its members to be reconstructed. The group is seeking additional privacy protections; a judge is set to rule on the matter on Sept. 9.

Another AI data company, Micro1, submitted a higher bid of $12.5 million after the auction closed.

Whichever way the deal goes, it looks like the AI industry is setting its sights on white-collar work. “Google is willing to pay $10 million for a failed budget airline, because if you believe this is really generalizable, you see a path to all these different industries—not just the ones that Spirit was involved in—being something you can replace pretty quickly,” Heiner says.

Your therapist has probably encouraged you to have difficult conversations, advocate for your needs, and resist the urge to avoid things that make you anxious. That’s all well and good—until, one day, the difficult conversation is with them.

If therapy doesn’t feel useful anymore, or if you’ve realized that you and your therapist simply aren’t the right match, it can be tempting to outsource the breakup to the cancel-appointment button. Yet unless there’s an ethical, boundary, or safety concern, experts say it’s usually worth having a conversation with your therapist before ending the relationship. It might improve the therapy. It might also help you find someone better suited to you, or simply allow you to leave without feeling guilty about ghosting the person who knows exactly why you tend to ghost people.

Speaking up could also save you from having to begin the search from scratch. “Your therapist could be the gateway to your next great therapist,” says Ryan Culkin, a licensed professional counselor and chief counselor officer at Thriveworks, which provides therapy and psychiatry services. They might be able to adjust their approach—or recommend someone who would suit you better.

Even if you already know you’re finished, breaking the news doesn’t require a dramatic confrontation or an elaborate defense. Here’s how to decide whether it’s time to call it quits—and how to do it painlessly.

Figure out what kind of discomfort you’re feeling

Good therapy isn’t necessarily easy. “Sometimes therapy can be really uncomfortable, but it can be incredibly productive,” says Eli Kraiem, a clinical psychologist in New York. A therapist might challenge an assumption you’re attached to, point out a pattern you’d rather not see, or encourage you to do something that scares you. Feeling unsettled after a session doesn’t mean it went badly.

Michael G. Wetter, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles, prefers this question: “What is the discomfort accomplishing?” Productive discomfort generally leads to insight, reflection, behavioral change, or progress toward goals you and your therapist have agreed on, he says. If it’s a poor fit, you might notice you leave therapy feeling misunderstood or have the same conversation week after week without much meaningful movement.

Juliann Siwicki, a licensed clinical professional counselor in Vero Beach, Fla., thinks about it this way: “Are you uncomfortable because you’re talking about something hard? Or because you feel like you’re having coffee with someone and not getting help? Those are two different things.”

You should be able to name what you're working toward—a pattern you're trying to break, a decision you're stuck on, a reaction you'd like to change—and to notice how much airtime your therapist is taking up. "A therapist can share something about themselves if it helps the client," Siwicki says. "It becomes too much when the client is spending the session listening to the therapist's stories, or feels like they need to take care of the therapist."

Kamran Eshtehardi, a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, Calif., has heard the far end of that spectrum. One client described a previous therapist who "thought it would be helpful to tell me about when they cheated on their wife"—including that his wife left him, and that he later saw an escort. "And I'm like, ‘What? Like, a therapist told you?’" Eshtehardi says. "Those are major red flags."

What was once a good fit can also change over time. A therapist who helped you through a crisis might not be right for your next stage. "A great therapist might not be great for you," Culkin says. "It's kind of like dating—you're not going to get it right the first time every time."

Even finding that “the therapist gets on your nerves” doesn’t necessarily mean you should quit, says Eshtehardi. A rupture doesn’t mean the therapy has “rotted on the vine,” he says, and progress sometimes develops “underneath the surface” before reaching a tipping point. But if you’ve explained what you need and nothing changes—or there’s no sense of progress—your frustration deserves attention.

Serious boundary violations, unethical behavior, or anything that makes you feel unsafe are different. You don’t need to attempt a repair before leaving, nor do you owe the therapist another session.

Say what isn’t working

If you’re open to continuing with your therapist, with the appropriate changes, describe what you’ve noticed and need—without turning the conversation into a performance review.

Try: “Our sessions have started to feel conversational, and I need more structure, feedback, and therapeutic insight. Can we talk about that?” Or: “I’m not sure what I’m working toward. Could we revisit my goals?” Culkin suggests language as straightforward as: “That didn’t land with me,” “I want to try something different,” or “I really liked when you did this.”

Eshtehardi recalls a client telling him that the usual sympathetic responses—“I’m so sorry to hear that” or “That must have been so hard”—didn’t work for them. “I just want to get stuff on the table and say, ‘OK, what’s going on here? How do we work with this?’” the client told him. That feedback helped Eshtehardi calibrate his approach. “I’m not saying it’s necessarily the client’s job to help train the therapist,” he says, but clients can explain what they’re looking for and how they prefer to work.

If you know you’re ready to leave 

Sometimes you’re not interested in recalibrating the relationship—you’ve already decided to end it. In that case, the goal isn’t to persuade your therapist that you have a good enough reason to go. It’s simply to communicate your decision in whatever way feels most manageable. 

You don’t have to deliver the news face-to-face. A call, email, or text is fine: “I don’t want therapy and the therapeutic relationship to be another source of anxiety for my clients,” Eshtehardi says. For someone accustomed to conflict or pushback, sending “I’m sorry, this isn’t working for me” and receiving a calm response can itself be therapeutic. You might realize, he says, that “maybe there’s a way to connect with people that doesn’t feel like I’m always doing the wrong thing.”

Eshtehardi also encourages clients who feel guilty to view the conversation as an opportunity to “practice trusting that someone else is going to be OK,” and trusting themselves to make the right decision. Your therapist’s response will provide useful information. A therapist who responds with openness and a willingness to adjust is giving you one kind of information; defensiveness or guilt-tripping gives you another. If the therapist acts wounded, Eshtehardi thinks of it as a “double whammy.” It might hurt, but it also “confirms that you’ve made the correct decision to stop therapy.”

You don’t need to build a case for your decision. “When it comes to trying to find the right fit, I don’t think clients should have to worry about having to justify their perspective,” Eshtehardi says. He suggests keeping the message simple: “I don’t think it’s the right fit. I’d like to stop sessions, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you.”

And try not to assume you’ve devastated them. Therapists are trained to handle patients leaving, Kraiem says. If yours can’t tolerate it, “then there’s a problem with the therapist, not with the patients.”

Make the transition easier on yourself

If you need consistent support, try to line up a new therapist before leaving your current one. Ask your therapist if they can recommend someone with a different style or specialty.

Before booking, confirm the new therapist accepts your insurance. “There’s nothing worse than getting through that first session” only to discover they don’t, Culkin says. You can also ask how they structure sessions, establish goals, and respond when a client disagrees. Be candid about what helped the first time around, what didn’t, and what’s important to you this time. Culkin encourages therapists to ask what clients appreciated about past providers and what they wish had been different. “Those are gold answers,” he says.

It’s not mandatory, but Kraiem recommends a wrap-up session, if you’re comfortable: “Let’s have one session to reflect on the experiences, process how you’ve improved, how you’ve grown through therapy, and maybe areas that still need improvement,” he says. 

Ask the practices about transferring relevant records. You’ll typically sign an authorization specifying what can be shared. Whether you want a direct handoff depends on why you’re leaving, Eshtehardi says. If you felt misunderstood, the former therapist’s perspective could “muddy the waters,” and you might prefer a clean start. If your therapist is referring you to someone with more specialized expertise, a conversation could help them get up to speed more quickly. In that case, Eshtehardi tells clients, “I’ll tell you everything I tell them so you know what they know.”

Finally, cancel future appointments and settle outstanding balances or other loose ends. Eshtehardi suggests asking: “Are there any last things we need to do?” If medication is part of your care, coordinate with your prescribing clinician about refills.

Changing therapists isn’t proof that treatment failed. Sometimes successful therapy means repairing a strained relationship. Other times, it means recognizing that the relationship has run its course—and using the difficult-conversation skills you’ve practiced to say so.

TIME, in partnership with Statista, the leading global provider of market and consumer data and rankings, has published the second annual "Best Employers” ranking. Employers can help shape the workforce in a country. However, employee workplace satisfaction not only impacts company culture, but can influence productivity, innovation, profitability, and industry reputation. Here's how the winners were selected.

Methodology

The research project “Best Employers of 2026” was based on surveys conducted using several online access panels to guarantee a representative sample of employees across each country, starting with Brazil, India, and Australia. In Australia, 200,000 employer evaluations were conducted for companies from all sectors employing at least 200 people in the country. In India, 760,000 employer evaluations were conducted from companies employing at least 500 people in the country. In Brazil, more than 900,000 employer evaluations were conducted from companies employing at least 500 people in the country. Participants were asked, through an open-ended question with an auto-complete function, to name their current employer. This method ensures neutrality and prevents companies from influencing the selection of respondents.

Data collection 

The survey was conducted using several online access panels to guarantee a representative sample of employees across the country. Participants were asked, through an open-ended question with an auto-complete function, to name their current employer. This method ensures neutrality and prevents companies from influencing the selection of respondents. 

Scoring model 

The final score combines two types of evaluations: employees’ willingness to recommend their own employer (direct score) and their willingness to recommend other employers in the same industry (indirect perception score), using data from 2025 and 2026.

Direct score:  Respondents were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their employer to friends and family. The responses were graded on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means “I wouldn’t recommend my employer under any circumstances” and 10 means “I would definitely recommend my employer”. 

Indirect score: Employees were also asked about their willingness to recommend other employers within their industry. Respondents were shown an industry list of employers and asked to give an opinion on those that stood out, either positively or negatively (Response options: “would recommend”, “would not recommend”, “no opinion”). Additionally, an open-ended question allowed respondents to name other employers. Greater weight is given to direct recommendations, as they provide the strongest reflection of employee satisfaction. 

Ranking and recognition 

This ranking reflects not only how employees view their own workplace but also how companies are perceived across their sector, creating a balanced and independent view of the top employers.

TIME, in partnership with Statista, the leading global provider of market and consumer data and rankings, has published the inaugural edition of the “America’s Best Colleges 2026-2027” ranking. The underlying quantitative study highlights institutions that excel at student outcomes, learning environment, and attractiveness in the United States.

Methodology

This research project conducted a comprehensive analysis to identify top-performing colleges nationwide. Eligibility criteria required institutions to be: 
(a) Currently active and financially solvent—the institution is confirmed as currently operating and fully open
(b) Federally recognized and eligible—The institution holds active Title IV federal financial aid eligibility status
(c) Public or private not-for-profit—For-profit institutions are excluded
(d) Primarily four-year, degree-granting—The institution's primary focus is on bachelor's degrees or higher; exclusively two-year or certificate-focused institutions are excluded
(e) Located in a U.S. state or the District of Columbia—Institutions in U.S. territories (e.g. Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands) are excluded
(f) Minimum undergraduate enrollment—The institution must have enrolled an average of at least 750 full-time equivalent undergraduate students across the past four years

The analysis is structured around three key pillars: Student Outcome, Learning Environment, and Attractiveness. Institutions receive scores on each pillar, which are then aggregated into a final score used to produce the ranking.

Restrictions

This analysis is subject to several data-related limitations. First, all indicators are based on the most recent data releases from IPEDS and the College Scorecard available as of the beginning of April 2026; subsequent updates or revisions to these datasets are not reflected in the results. Second, earnings data are derived only from graduates who received Pell Grants (Title IV aid), as reported in the College Scorecard. As a result, these figures may not fully represent the outcomes of the entire student population at an institution.

Study design

With this ranking, TIME and Statista evaluate U.S. colleges with a focus on three pillars: student outcomes, learning environment, and attractiveness. This framework retains classical components used in higher education assessments, such as the instructional environment and institutional resources, while placing particular emphasis on what students gain from attending an institution relative to its cost.

In addition, Statista emphasizes indicators that measure institutional performance net of student intake, isolating the value an institution itself contributes from the characteristics of the students it enrolls. These pillars are operationalized through a set of quantitative indicators derived from federal datasets, which are normalized and aggregated according to a transparent weighting scheme. The three pillars are weighted as follows in the overall scoring model: student outcomes – 75%, learning environment – 15%, and attractiveness – 10%.

In a limited number of cases, university systems report key indicators (such as graduate income) only at an aggregated level across multiple campuses. Given the importance of these indicators, institutions sharing the same OPEID6 identifier in IPEDS were combined and evaluated as a single entity, with all relevant metrics aggregated accordingly. These cases are identified in the results by the use of the institution’s brand name without a specific campus designation. While relatively few, this approach ensures consistent and comprehensive inclusion of available data in the analysis.

Student outcomes

The student outcomes pillar assesses what students gain from attending an institution, measured after they leave it. It is operationalized through three components. The first is graduates' earnings, which evaluates whether an institution's graduates earn more than their intake would predict. The second is the graduation rate, which captures how effectively an institution carries its students through to degree completion. The third is return on education, which weighs the earnings students achieve against the cost of obtaining their degree. The first two components are constructed on a value-added basis, isolating the institution's own contribution from the characteristics of the students it enrolls, while the third reflects the financial payoff of attendance in absolute terms. Together, these components capture both what students achieve after graduating and what they paid to get there.

Student outcomes contribute 75% to the final score.

Graduates’ earnings (value-added income outcome)

The value-added income outcomes metric assesses whether an institution's graduates earn more than would be expected given the characteristics of the students it enrolls. Raw earnings figures alone are a poor basis for comparison: institutions that disproportionately enroll students from high-income backgrounds, or that concentrate in high-earning fields, will show strong earnings outcomes without necessarily adding value through their programs. The metric isolates the portion of graduate earnings attributable to the institution itself, net of student intake.

This is achieved through a linear regression of median graduate earnings on a set of student-body and program characteristics. The predictor set controls for the socioeconomic composition of the student body, the share of students in STEM fields, and the demographic composition of the student body. Earnings are log-transformed prior to estimation, in line with standard practice for wage models. The regression is estimated separately at three earnings horizons—six, eight, and ten years after enrollment—to capture both early-career and medium-term labor market outcomes.

For each horizon, the residual—the difference between an institution's actual log earnings and the level predicted by the model—represents its value-added contribution. These residuals are standardized and, alongside the standardized raw earnings level, combined into a per-horizon score expressed as percentile ranks. The final value-added score averages across the three horizons.

Graduation rate

The graduation outcomes metric assesses how effectively an institution supports its students through to degree completion, independent of the type of students it admits. Graduation rates are strongly shaped by student intake: an institution enrolling well-prepared, well-resourced students will graduate more of them than one serving a higher-need population, regardless of the quality of instruction or support it provides. The metric isolates the portion of an institution's graduation rate attributable to the institution itself, net of the characteristics of its incoming students.

This is achieved through a regression of the four-year graduation rate on a set of student-body and program characteristics. Because graduation rates are proportions bounded between zero and one, the model is estimated using beta regression. The predictor set controls for the socioeconomic composition of the student body, the share of students in STEM fields, and the demographic composition of the student body.

The residual—the difference between an institution's actual graduation rate and the rate predicted by the model—represents its value-added contribution to completion. This residual is standardized and, alongside the standardized raw graduation rate, combined into a single score expressed as percentile ranks across all ranked institutions.

Return on education

The return on education metric captures the financial payoff of attending an institution relative to its cost, expressed as the number of years required for graduate earnings gains to offset the total cost of a degree.

The cost side blends two cost of attendance figures—the average net price paid after financial aid and the total sticker-price cost of attendance—weighted by the share of Pell grant recipients at the institution. This weighting reflects the fact that the financially relevant cost differs systematically across the student population.

The earnings benchmark against which graduate earnings are compared is tailored to each institution's student population. Rather than applying a single national baseline, the benchmark is constructed as a weighted mix of state-level median high school earnings and a national figure, weighted by the proportion of in-state versus out-of-state students enrolled.

The metric is expressed as payback period: the blended four-year cost divided by the annual earnings premium over this baseline. Final scores are expressed percentile ranks, with shorter payback periods receiving higher ranks.

Learning environment

The learning environment pillar assesses the quality of the instructional setting and community that an institution provides for its undergraduate students. It is operationalized through three components. The first is the student-to-faculty ratio, measuring the degree to which students have direct access to teaching staff. The second is expenditure per student, capturing the financial resources an institution directs toward its students across instruction, academic support, and related activities. The third is a diversity index, assessing the demographic breadth of both the student body and the faculty. This index incorporates measures of representation across key demographic dimensions and is further combined with the share of Pell Grant recipients, reflecting socioeconomic diversity, and the share of students with disabilities, capturing inclusivity in access to higher education. Together, these three components reflect the conditions under which students learn, rather than the outcomes they ultimately achieve.

Learning environment contributes 15% to the final score.

Student-to-faculty ratio

The student-to-faculty ratio measures how many undergraduate students are served, on average, by each instructional staff member at an institution. A lower ratio indicates that each faculty member is responsible for fewer students, which is generally associated with greater opportunity for direct interaction, individualized instruction, and academic mentorship. Final scores are expressed as percentile ranks, with lower ratios receiving higher ranks.

Core expenditure per student

This metric captures the financial resources an institution directs toward its students, expressed on a per-head basis. Institutions that spend more per student are generally better positioned to provide a high-quality learning environment, regardless of their overall size.

The expenditure figure is constructed by averaging across several spending categories that reflect direct and indirect investment in the student experience: instructional expenditure, academic support, student services, institutional support, and scholarships and fellowship expenses. This average is then divided by average full-time equivalent undergraduate enrollment to produce a per-student figure. To account for differing reporting forms across institution types in IPEDS, expenditure data is drawn from separate sources for public and private non-profit institutions respectively, and subsequently combined into a single figure per institution.

Both the expenditure components and the enrollment figure are averaged across four annual survey vintages before the per-student ratio is computed. Final scores are expressed as percentile ranks across all ranked institutions, with higher expenditure per student receiving a higher rank.

Diversity

This metric assesses the demographic diversity of an institution's community, capturing both its student body and its faculty. The underlying premise is that a more diverse learning environment—one in which students and staff come from a broad range of demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds—enriches the educational experience for all members of the institution.

Ethnic diversity is measured separately for students and faculty using the Simpson Diversity Index, a standard measure from ecology adapted here to the higher education context. The index captures the probability that any two individuals drawn at random from a group belong to different categories. It takes a value of zero when the entire population belongs to a single group, and approaches one as the population is spread more evenly across groups. Both student and faculty diversity are computed across the same set of ethnic categories reported in IPEDS.

In addition, the share of students with disabilities (as reported in IPEDS) is included as a measure of accessibility and inclusion. The share of Pell Grant recipients is incorporated to capture socioeconomic diversity.

All components—the ethnic diversity scores, disability inclusion measure, and socioeconomic indicator—are averaged across four annual survey vintages to reduce year-to-year volatility. The final diversity score is constructed from these averaged values and expressed as percentile ranks across all ranked institutions.

Attractiveness

Attractiveness assesses the degree to which an institution is genuinely sought-after by prospective students. Unlike measures of academic output or graduate outcomes, attractiveness reflects the demand side of higher education: how strongly students want to attend a given institution, and how that desire manifests in their decisions throughout the application and enrollment process. The pillar is operationalized through the selectivity gap metric.

The metric is constructed from two sequential components drawn from institutional admissions data: the admission rate and the enrollment yield rate. The admission rate captures how freely an institution grants access—what share of applicants receive an offer. The yield rate captures student preference after that offer is made—what share of admitted students ultimately choose to enroll. Where the admission rate reflects the institution's selectiveness, the yield rate reflects the student's revealed preference at the moment of decision.

The selectivity gap is defined as the yield rate minus the admission rate.

Raw values are averaged across four annual survey vintages prior to computing the gap, to reduce year-to-year volatility. Final scores are expressed as percentile ranks across all ranked institutions.

Attractiveness contributes 10% to the final score.

Scoring model

Once the data are collected and evaluated, they are consolidated and weighted within a three-dimension scoring model. Each college's overall score is calculated as a weighted sum of normalized indicator scores, with dimension-level weights reflecting their relative importance in the framework.

Student outcomes – 75% of the overall score

Learning environment – 15% of the overall score

Attractiveness – 10% of the overall score

Within each dimension, multiple indicators and sub-indicators are used (e.g., graduate earnings and graduation outcomes, return on education, resource and staffing ratios, and selectivity measures). Unless stated otherwise, each indicator is constructed by drawing on the four most recent years of available data and averaging across them, in order to reduce the influence of year-to-year fluctuations and reporting noise. Indicators are then, unless otherwise noted, converted into percentile ranks across all eligible institutions, and these ranks form the basis of the scores that are combined according to the detailed weighting scheme defined in the KPI overview and scoring model.

The 500 colleges with the highest final scores are featured in the “America’s Best Colleges 2026-2027” ranking by TIME and Statista.

Sources

The quantitative analysis underlying the ranking draws on a small number of authoritative federal data sources. Institutional characteristics, enrollment figures, admissions data, faculty information, graduation rates, and financial variables are sourced from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics. Graduate earnings data are drawn from the College Scorecard, published by the U.S. Department of Education. State-level earnings benchmarks used in the return on education calculations are derived from the American Community Survey (ACS), published by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Disclaimer:

The ranking is comprised exclusively of colleges that are eligible regarding the scope described in this document. A mention in the ranking is a positive recognition based on available data sources at the time. The ranking is the result of an elaborate process which, due to the interval of data-collection and analysis, is a reflection of the last calendar years. Furthermore, events following June 30, 2026, and/or pertaining to individual persons affiliated/associated with the institutions were not included in the metrics. As such, the results of this ranking should not be used as the sole source of information for future deliberations. The information provided in this ranking should be considered in conjunction with other available information about colleges or, if possible, accompanied by a visit to an institution. The quality of colleges that are not included in the ranking is not disputed.

See the full list here.

As jobs have become more technological, job markets have become more competitive, and the costs of tuition have risen, college students are increasingly considering the ROI of their education, or how efficiently it can be used to acquire a high-paying job post-grad. “We need to be more outcome-oriented, more career-oriented when we think about what we're recommending for students in higher ed,” says John Friedman, a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown University. “There are a lot of people who really do want to get career advancement, to get economic value out of the time and money they're spending in college, and we should help them do that.”

To highlight U.S. institutions that provide the best value for their students, TIME partnered with data research firm Statista on the inaugural edition of America’s Best Colleges of 2026-2027, ranking the colleges that excel at student outcomes, learning environment, and attractiveness to students.

Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined America’s Best Colleges of 2026-2027

The search for high ROI education has led many U.S. college students to pursue STEM careers. According to a 2026 report from the National Science Foundation, the STEM workforce grew by 26% between 2013 and 2023 compared to the non-STEM workforce, which grew 9%—and STEM jobs are projected to continue growing at a faster rate than non-STEM jobs for the next decade or so. From 2021 to 2023, higher-education degrees awarded particularly in science and engineering reached record highs, and the U.S. was the most popular post-secondary STEM education destination for international students.

Schools with historically strong STEM programs—and pipelines into high-paying tech jobs—rank high on the list, like research universities Stanford (no. 1), known for its startup culture and connection to Silicon Valley, and MIT (no. 2), a patent powerhouse.

At no. 3 is Harvey Mudd, a small liberal arts college with a student population of around 900. It offers only majors in STEM—appealing to Gen-Z students who are increasingly turning to trade schools to learn technical skills—but competes with the big schools by encouraging students to be engaged in humanities, social sciences, and arts so they can understand the ethical impact of their work on society.

“If anything, this is the time that the world needs more liberal arts colleges, because we need people to question what's happening,” says Thyra Briggs, Harvey Mudd’s VP of admission and financial aid. “We hear from the graduate programs that admit our students and from the companies that hire them that they are often the translators in their office because they can do the very high level technical conversations that you would expect, but they also know how to translate that to people who may not have that same background.”

The school’s famous Clinic Program is a year-long capstone project developed in the early 1960s that has a team of students work directly with companies like Blue Origin, Sokil, and the Federal Aviation Administration to solve real-life research problems complete with a budget, a deliverable, a due date, and a corporate liaison. Very often, these projects can lead directly to jobs, Briggs says.

Of course, studying science and engineering is not the only option for students to get the most out of their post-secondary education. For example, Claremont McKenna (no. 9), part of the same liberal arts college consortium as Harvey Mudd, offers a wider range of non-STEM majors. Its career center provides career resources for “interest clusters” to help students think about potential post-grad pathways and give them relevant organizations to explore. In a post last year, Claremont reported that over 96% of the recent graduating class had defined plans and a median salary of $80,000. “There are going to be a lot of different fields that provide ROI,” says John Friedman, a professor of economics and international and public affairs at Brown University. “If you look within particular fields, there's often a ton of variation between what people get paid.”

While data shows that STEM jobs tend to pay off, there are also benefits to studying in fields that are undersupplied and growing; but research into more niche high-earning career paths can be more sparse, and sometimes students don’t realize which fields are high-earning or ways in which they can apply their degree creatively.

For students who want certainty of outcome, sector-specific workforce training programs have been found to be most successful in increasing people’s earnings because they train people for a particular job at a company. Some colleges are catching on to the need to link the skills learned during class to what jobs require. For example, Fashion Institute of Technology (no. 51) is partnering with Lightcast to display data about career outlooks, job availability, salary potential, and hard and soft skills required for the niche majors they offer like technical design, spatial experience design, packaging design and toy design.

See the full list of America’s Best Colleges of 2026-2027 below:

The Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump a victory in his efforts to restrict mail-in voting ahead of November’s crucial midterm elections. 

In an unsigned 6-3 ruling, with the court’s liberal justices dissenting, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s June block on the President’s Executive Order targeting mail-in voting after 23 Democratic states and Washington D.C. sued the Administration for the order’s alleged unconstitutionality and presidential overreach.

Democrat lawmakers have responded furiously to Monday’s decision. “Another day, another Trump attempt to rig elections and destroy democracy,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom on social media. “We can stop this. Vote this November.”

Trump, in his push to remake American elections, has repeatedly blamed mail-in voting for widespread electoral fraud. He claimed that mail-in ballots helped him lose in the 2020 election despite audits already refuting those claims, and his own voting by mail in recent elections.

The ruling does not settle whether the Executive Order will proceed ahead of the November midterms, where the Republican Party needs to defend its narrow majority in Congress. Part of the order covering the U.S. Postal Service remains blocked under a separate injunction in August, which still needs to be resolved.

The Supreme Court also did not outright rule on the legality of Trump’s order—only on the timing of the challenges to it—and left it open to future lawsuits, which critics have signaled they will file.

Here’s how other Democrats, as well as some Republicans, have responded to the decision, and what it means for November’s pivotal midterms. 

Democrats vow legal challenges against “terrible” Supreme Court decision 

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said Monday that the legal battle against Trump’s Executive Order would continue, after a previous challenge put a temporary halt on the directive. 

“Not so fast. Today’s SCOTUS decision does not deal with the substance of Trump’s unconstitutional Executive Order and does not mean his illegal attempt to restrict mail-in voting will go forward,” argued Shapiro. “We’ll see the Trump Administration in court.”

Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey also vowed a response to the decision. “This is a terrible decision from Trump’s Supreme Court,” she said. “States run elections, not Donald Trump. I will do everything I can to protect New Jerseyans’ right to vote – by mail and in person.”

Newsom built upon his condemnation on Monday. “California will be suing again to block these Orwellian rules from being implemented,” he said. 

“This decision is a painful setback,” Attorney General Letitia James of New York, one of the plaintiff states from June’s challenge against the Order, said in a statement. “But it will not be the final word.”

More widely, other Democrat lawmakers criticized the Supreme Court’s decision and the impact it could have on the upcoming midterms. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said: “It’s a disgrace that the highest court in the nation is allowing Trump to put a dagger into the heart of our democracy,” following the decision. 

Schumer argued the Order was “blatantly unconstitutional,” and that “his MAGA Supreme Court is refusing to stop it from going forward.”

Hitting out at the President more broadly, the lawmaker continued: “[Trump] wants to make it harder for Americans to vote so they don’t hold him accountable for the skyrocketing costs, illegal war, and rampant corruption that are a hallmark of his administration.”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada issued another direct response at the President himself. “Trump voted by mail eleven days ago. Apparently it’s good enough for him, but he wants to take away your right to vote in the same way,” she said. 

“Trump’s voter suppression order is about making it harder for Americans to hold him accountable - it is shameful that the Supreme Court is enabling it,” the lawmaker continued. 

Sen. Maria Cantwell also expressed concerns over the privacy of voters. “Today’s Supreme Court decision gets the Trump Administration one step closer to implementing its voter suppression order and forcing states to hand over personal voter data to the federal government,” she said. 

Republicans celebrate Supreme Court decision

“With today’s SCOTUS ruling, President Trump has made a giant leap forward in securing our 2026 elections,” said Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a long-standing supporter of Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting. 

“Congress must still pass the SAVE America Act to secure future elections. We should’ve passed it months ago,” he continued in reference to the Act which is still awaiting approval in the Senate. 

Lee also responded to Gov. Shapiro’s commitment to continue legal challenges against the President’s Executive Order. “Why are you so determined to let non-citizens vote?” he said. 

“Bravo! Glad to see the Supreme Court get this one right. Election integrity is nonnegotiable,” said Rep. Keith Self of Texas, also pushing the Senate to approve the SAVE Act. 

“This is a major win for the security of American elections,” said White House spokesperson Lauren Bis in a statement to TIME. “These are commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders.

What does the ruling mean for federal elections, and how did we get here?

On June 25, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston ordered an injunction on provisions of Trump’s March Executive Order. Those provisions direct the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create “state citizenship lists” that cover eligible voters, and the Postal Service to create rules that would end sending absentee ballots to individuals not on a state’s mail-in or absentee participation list.

Talwani’s block covered the 23 plaintiff states and Washington, D.C. On July 25, the First Circuit rejected the Trump Administration’s request to block Talwani’s order pending appeal.

The Trump Administration sought the Supreme Court’s intervention in July, arguing that the lower court “lacked jurisdiction” to resolve the dispute, as implementing rules based on the President’s Order haven’t been finalized.

In the Monday ruling, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority agreed with the Trump Administration and paused Talwani’s injunction.

The top court said that Trump’s order regarding state citizenship lists was “an internal directive from the President to a subordinate” and that it “imposes no obligations on the States,” which in turn “suffer no concrete harm.”

It added that, in the case of Trump directing the Postal Service to propose rules on mail-in ballots, the legal challenge was premature and lacked standing. When states filed the suit, the Postal Service had not issued a final rule.

The Supreme Court’s majority said the district court had to engage in a “string of speculations” to arrive at its June injunction: “Federal courts review final rules, not proposed rules—and certainly not antecedent internal directives to propose a rule.”

What the ruling did not cover

While the Supreme Court’s majority paused Talwani’s June injunction for being premature, it does not cover a separate injunction—also from Talwani—on Aug. 11. Ruling on another suit, Talwani barred the Postal Service from implementing the same Executive Order for the November midterms nationwide.

The Supreme Court ruling also simply granted the Trump Administration’s emergency request to pause Talwani’s June injunction. The case on Trump’s Executive Order is still pending before the First Circuit.

It also explicitly left room for challenges on the legality of the rules stemming from Trump’s order, especially with the Postal Service’s final rule.

Norm Eisen, a voting-rights advocate leading one of several legal challenges to Trump’s order, downplayed the Supreme Court’s decision. “Please don’t overreact to Roberts Court decision on the contemplated [Postal Service] ballot moves,” Eisen posted on microblogging platform Bluesky Monday. “They simply held that the injunction came too early in the process, before there was a final rule.”

Iran has pledged to “attack” the U.S. financially after Washington unveiled a sweeping set of sanctions as part of ‘Economic D-Day',  an attempt to further isolate Tehran and curb its access to the global financial system as the war between the two countries drags on. 

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled the measures as part of President Donald Trump’s announcement of the "most crushing economic operation" against Tehran, labeled “Operation Economic Outcast.”

"D-Day marked a historic campaign with our allies,” Bessent said Monday. “Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe."

After the measures were announced, Tehran’s Economy Minister Seyed Ali Madanizadeh said the government was prepared to counter the newly-unveiled U.S. sanctions.

“They want to launch an economic terrorist attack against us. We also have our own tools, and we know the rules of this game,” he said in response to Bessent’s announcement during a televised interview with Iranian state media Monday.

“This time, they shouldn't think that our approach is purely defensive; they should also expect an attack from us.”

Although the Iranian minister did not elaborate on what such an attack would entail, he said the country had developed plans in preparation for the economic threats.

“Plans have been developed for various scenarios, including what actions should be taken if they attempt to cause damage in the financial sector or in the country's financial relations,” he said, adding that “the global financial system is not structured in a way that allows anyone to claim they can cut off” Iran’s economy.

During the announcement, Bessent stopped short of immediately imposing secondary sanctions on countries that trade heavily with Iran, instead favoring an approach that would give them time to decouple from that trade.

When asked why he was waiting to impose those sanctions, Bessent responded: "Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?"

“We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period, but they should know that that will move very quickly, and that we are serious,” he added.

Bessent did not name any countries that could face sanctions, but said "they know who they are."

China, one of Iran's biggest trading partners and the primary buyer of Iranian oil exports, has already pushed back against the threat.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said China-Iran cooperation "should not be disrupted or undermined," noting that it had been conducted in accordance with international law.

“China has made clear on many occasions its firm opposition to illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law or the authorization of the U.N. Security Council. Economic warfare and maximum pressure provide no solution,” Jian said during a press conference Tuesday.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has sanctioned nearly 60 entities, individuals, and vessels connected to Iran’s regime, while also gaining powers to impose additional sanctions on any person operating within the digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping sectors of the Iranian economy.

Iranian leaders had previously dismissed the impact of extensive economic sanctions on the country and instead sought to highlight struggles within the U.S. economy.

Trump, meanwhile, claimed Monday that Iran is "completely collapsing,” without elaborating on what he based the claim.

Strait of Hormuz attack raises stakes after sanctions announcement

Following Bessent's economic announcement, an oil tanker was hit by a projectile off the coast of Oman in the Strait of Hormuz, according to a report by U.K. Maritime Trade Operations.

The incident highlights the continued danger for shipping companies attempting to transit the key waterway, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply passed before the war. The closure of the Strait has rattled energy markets and thrown the global economy into disarray.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) spokesperson Hossein Mohebbi had previously threatened heavy blows against vital U.S. interests and energy chokepoints if Iran’s economy was targeted with sanctions.

"The U.S. President says that he ordered an economic war and launched the most severe economic campaign against Iran,” he said, as reported by Iranian state media Sunday. “We have repeatedly announced that we have scenarios in place for any hostile action by the enemy. One of the enemy’s hostile actions is economic measures and warfare.”

The attack came as a high-level delegation from Pakistan, which has been a key mediator between the United States and Iran, was wrapping up meetings in Tehran aimed, once again, at bringing a return to negotiations and an end to the nearly six-month-old war.

The cease-fire established under the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between Washington and Tehran expired on Aug. 17, but the agreement had already deteriorated after each side presented differing interpretations of its terms.

Both parties had vied for control of the Strait of Hormuz, eventually leading to tit-for-tat strikes, the reimposition of the American blockade on Iranian ports, and minimal dialogue between Washington and Tehran.

Iran has since released a comprehensive list of demands for the U.S. to meet, which Trump immediately rejected. Both sides have since shown little sign of progress in negotiations, despite relatively limited fighting in recent weeks.

Claude now watermarks AI-generated text to comply with European Union transparency rules. OpenAI and Google add invisible fingerprints to AI-generated images. And Substack is touting a feature that scans pieces for signs of AI. Will we finally be able to tell what’s real on the Internet? My take: not even close. 

In fact, AI watermarks and detectors may leave us worse off by creating a false sense of confidence in content marked as genuine.

Watermarks and detectors are gaining traction as we lose our ability to trust our senses online. Look up the Will Smith eating spaghetti test, and you’ll see just how far AI has come. A 2023 AI-generated video shows the actor slurping spaghetti, face distorted, in a way that breaks physics. By 2025, AI was producing lifelike renditions. Deepfakes are so good that experts recommend families develop secret codewords to identify one another. 

“But I know a fake when I see it,” someone might say. 

Unfortunately, research consistently shows that you do not. This can feel especially hard to accept given the abundance of AI slop rocketing around the Internet. You may even start to think you can sniff out offending content. It might work, for a little bit. It almost never lasts. Any signal that becomes discernible is one a sophisticated actor will find ways to avoid. 

We’ve seen this story before. During the earliest days of the Internet, visual polish at least told you something. Major institutions had the resources needed to produce well-designed websites. Janky-looking sites, on the other hand, screamed “scam!” Information experts directed Internet users to dwell on features such as design, broken links, and typos. But when the Internet changed, the advice didn’t. 

A study I led, published in 2022, found that 96% of America’s leading colleges and universities offered outdated advice on how to evaluate online information—long after platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Photoshop made it easier for bad actors to create fake but convincing-looking websites. Inexpensive software made slick graphics ubiquitous. Educators, however, continued to instruct Internet users to search for visual clues like a game of Where’s Waldo?

The most dangerous legacy of this aesthetic fixation is the inverse illusion: the cognitive tendency to believe that if the presence of a signal proves one thing, its absence proves the opposite. Yes, a site with misspellings that claims to show aliens still isn’t legit. But a beautiful site with a dot-org domain can also be harmful. In 2019, our research group found that nearly half of hate groups had dot-org domains. Bad actors know how to adopt the trappings of credibility. 

The same is true with AI. Even if visible flaws sometimes linger, their absence doesn’t mean content is genuine. Yet, too often, experts offer surface-level clues to identifying AI-generated content. This is why in the lead-up to the 2024 elections, Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg and I warned about public officials who advised citizens to pay attention to lighting, strange shadows, or other visual cues to identify deepfakes, even after AI content stopped making these errors. Many 2026 guides to spotting AI content mislead readers with the same poor advice. 

Which brings us to AI watermarks and detectors. These approaches, based on hidden signals in content, promise that while we can’t always spot the signs, their algorithms can. 

I’m not a software engineer. Yet I was able to easily strip metadata from some AI-generated images just by screenshotting them. Anthropic confirms that file metadata can be “stripped through format conversion, re-saving, screenshots, or other means.” Watermarks like SynthID are stronger and can persist after screenshots. But I was able to use a free online tool to remove a SynthID watermark. 

Google admits that the accuracy of detecting watermarked AI text is “greatly reduced” when users thoroughly rewrite what they generate, and that it “is not designed to directly stop motivated adversaries from causing harm.” More broadly, open-weight AI models that can run locally, outside platform terms and conditions, guarantee the spread of unmarked content.

Third-party detectors, too, have a spotty track record. I’ve regularly run AI-generated text through detectors that said it was human and vice versa. Many studies of text, image, and audio detectors find that they don’t work very consistently, and yet, their findings are used as the basis for public accusations. Every detector must confront an arms race with humanizer tools and other workarounds motivated actors find. 

I would argue that the biggest problem for detectors and watermarks remains the inverse illusion. Just because content lacks a watermark doesn’t mean it wasn’t produced or edited with AI. As Anthropic notes: “lack of a detected mark doesn’t mean the content wasn’t AI-generated or processed.” Deferring judgment to AI detectors leaves us vulnerable to bad actors who know how to launder content and make it pass muster.

This is a confusing time. Many of us are, understandably, uncertain. In one recent pilot, our research group showed 117 students a confident chatbot answer about local history with hallucinated facts. Half said they weren’t sure if it was true. One student said AI is sometimes right and sometimes wrong and “you never know which is which.” 

But just because we can’t trust our eyes or place full faith in detectors doesn’t mean we can’t trust anything. Rather than hunt for visual clues or outsource judgment to detectors and watermarks, we can turn to reputation and context. It’s easy to fake content. It’s much harder to fake a good reputation that’s validated by credible sources. 

The next time you see unfamiliar content online, resist the urge to ask, “Does this look like AI?” or run the content through a detector. Instead, ask yourself, “Do I trust where this information is coming from?” Open a new tab and check if reputable people and organizations confirm what you’re seeing. 

In an era of dwindling trust, we should not fork over ours to cheap signals or cheap software.

It’s not often that 3.6 billion people—or 44.4% of the world’s population—look at the same thing at the same time. And it’s not often that something comes along that’s worth the attention of all those billions. But that will happen on the evening of Aug. 27 when much of the world will be able to witness a blood moon lunar eclipse, during which 96% of the face of the full moon will fall into Earth’s shadow, glowing a deep orange-red in the process.

Lunar eclipses occur during a full moon, when the Earth is positioned between the sun and the moon, blocking all or most of the solar light that otherwise bathes the lunar surface. On average, lunar eclipses occur two to three times per year, though total lunar eclipses, when the moon is entirely shadowed, make up only 29% of those events. The autumnal color the moon takes on is due to a trick of the Earth’s atmosphere. Not all of the sunlight that would otherwise be striking the moon during an eclipse is blocked by the Earth; some of it leaks around the periphery of the planet and manages to reach the moon. That light streams through the Earth’s atmosphere during its passage to the moon, and some of the wavelengths of visible light—particularly the blue—are absorbed and scattered. What’s left is principally the red spectrum which partially lights the moon. All total lunar eclipses result in blood moons. 

In theory, a lunar eclipse ought to occur once a month. On every orbit around the Earth on its 27.3-day journey, after all, the moon will always pass through a point at which the planet sits between it and the sun. But the plane of the moon’s orbit around the Earth is tilted about five degrees compared to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. That means that on some passages behind the Earth the moon avoids the shadow, soaring above or ducking below the planet. 

How long will the lunar eclipse last?

An eclipse of the moon plays out slowly. The one that will begin on the evening of Aug. 27 and continue into the early hours of Aug. 28 will last a total of five hours and 38 minutes. Even the most dedicated eclipse chaser, however, may not be able to take it all in. Depending on where in the world an observer is—and this eclipse will be visible in Europe, Africa, North and South America, and western Asia—the moon may set before the eclipse is done or rise after it’s already begun. That will be the case in the Americas, where observers will see an eclipsed moon come up in the skies. Finding a flat area with few buildings and a clean sight line may be necessary to witness the eclipse, since in many places the moon will be low in the sky, close to the horizon. In the U.S., the eclipse will begin at 9:23 p.m. ET on Aug. 27, and end at 3:01 ET the next day.

There are three phases of any lunar eclipse—the penumbral, partial, and total or maximum. The penumbral phase occurs first, when the moon moves into the faint, outer reaches of the Earth’s umbra, or shadow. The partial phase comes next, when the true, darker shadow of the Earth begins to cover the lunar disk. The total or maximum phase is when only a small portion—or none at all—of the moon remains unshadowed. For the upcoming eclipse, the penumbral phase will take one hour and ten minutes, the partial phase one hour and 39 minutes, and the maximum phase, when the moon will be 96% obscured, will also take one hour and 39 minutes. That maximum shadow will occur at 12:12 a.m. ET. The eclipse will then return to the partial and penumbral phases before the moon soars on and leaves the Earth’s shadow behind.

What is an 'eclipse season'?

This eclipse occurs in a busy time for the skies. On Aug. 12, just over two weeks before the lunar eclipse is set to occur, there was a total eclipse of the sun, visible in Spain, Portugal, Iceland, Greenland, and Siberia. There is actually such a thing as an eclipse season, a month-long stretch occurring twice a year—in the summer and winter—when the moon passes the point in its five-degree orbit that the Earth, moon, and sun align in a way to make both types of eclipses possible.

If you fancy eclipses, you’re well advised to take this one in while you can. The next total lunar eclipse will not be until Dec. 31, 2027 to Jan. 1, 2028. New Years Eve fireworks will be going off that night, but they will be nothing compared to the sky show the Earth, the sun, and the moon will serve up.

From the outside, the Myrtle Beach-based Millers appeared to have a picture-perfect marriage. Mica Miller was a beautiful pastor’s wife whose husband, church leader John-Paul Miller, led a devout congregation. But the Solid Rock Church community did not know that behind closed doors, Mica and John-Paul had a tumultuous relationship, and Mica would ultimately be found dead in a state park with a gunshot wound to her head, after telling authorities she planned to take her own life. The next day, on April 27, 2024, John-Paul took the stage at Solid Rock to share the news: The congregation was now without a creative director to lead the worship, youth, and women’s ministry, and he was without a wife. 

It wasn’t long before the Solid Rock patrons began to ask questions about what led to Mica's death.

The new three-part Netflix docuseries, Death of the Pastor's Wife, charts the now infamous—and ongoing—case against John-Paul, who has been charged with cyberstalking and making false statements to federal investigators, and seeks to uncover what really led to Mica’s death at age 30. Co-directed by showrunner Mike Gasparro and Julia Willoughby Nason (Murdaugh Murders, American Murder: Gabby Petito), the series looks back on Mica’s life with never-before-seen footage and firsthand accounts from her friends and family, many of whom are speaking out for the first time. 

Showrunner Gasparro tells TIME that Mica’s story is “complex and deeply resonant.” The responsibility of bringing what really happened to her to light was key to making the docuseries. “We met with Mica’s family and made sure they felt comfortable entrusting us with her story,” Gasparro says. 

Here’s everything we learned about Mica’s story from the new series.

A whirlwind romance 

John-Paul Miller first saw Mica Francis when she was a teenager attending Solid Rock Church. The Francis family had recently relocated to Myrtle Beach and soon became regulars at the evangelical parish. At the time, Pastor John-Paul was a married father of five. Mica worked as his nanny, according to an affidavit filed by Miller’s first wife, Alison Williams. 

Mica got married at 18 to her first husband, who was also a member of Solid Rock Church. Mica and John-Paul began having an affair in 2015, when Mica was 20 and John-Paul was 35, according to the Francis family; the couple then divorced their respective spouses and wed each other on Nov. 7, 2017 when Mica was 23 and John-Paul, 38. 

“Their 15-year age difference was significant, but even more important was the fact that Mica first met John-Paul ‘JP’ when she was at such a young age,” Nason tells TIME. “She grew up in the church, dedicated much of her life to it, and spent an enormous amount of time around JP and the congregation during some of her most formative years. Mica looked up to JP as both a pastor and an authority figure. As we examined their relationship, it became clear how deeply that imbalance influenced its development. He held a position of tremendous power in her life long before they became romantically involved.” 

Mica’s sister, Sierra Francis, alleged to the Myrtle Beach Sun News that she believed John-Paul “had his sights set on [Mica] from a young age,” and that he had groomed her. John-Paul always maintained that they had a "great marriage" and an "amazing" relationship. Mica Miller’s father, Michael Francis, echoed that their family was never supportive of Mica’s relationship with John-Paul. “I had lunch with her with a minister friend of mine and we talked with her extensively about how it is very, very unwise to be in a relationship with John-Paul,” Michael told the Sun News. 

A tumultuous marriage 

According to the Francis family in the docuseries, Mica was fully wrapped up in John-Paul’s world: She even had gotten John-Paul’s signature tattooed on her body, a choice that seemed “possessive” to her sister Sierra Francis at the time, especially since Mica and John-Paul allegedly had a dynamic others describe as toxic—one that culminated in numerous filings for divorce and legal separations from both sides. 

Mica first filed for divorce from John-Paul after almost exactly six years of marriage, on Oct. 8, 2023, according to court documents. Yet just in time for Valentine’s Day, on Feb. 13, 2024, the divorce was dismissed. Ten days later, John-Paul filed for separation from Mica, which was subsequently dismissed without prejudice on March 12, 2024. 

The legal merry-go-round continued, but as it did, it escalated: Mica contacted Horry County Police for a report of a razor blade being placed in her tire on March 11, 2024, telling police this was the second time her tires were slashed in the past week. Police were dispatched at 1:30 a.m. and Mica named who she believed was responsible for the actions; the name was redacted from the public report. Mica added that she had witnessed “strange activity and what she believes as people following or watching her,” the report said. She even told the officer that “she was afraid for her life.”

This wasn’t the first time Mica had expressed this fear: After her death, her sister Sierra expressed in an affidavit that Mica had voiced her fears of being followed and even allegedly told Sierra, “If I end up with a bullet in my head, it was not by me, it was JP [John-Paul].”

Sierra continued, “I know my sister to have expressed the abuse and violence against her by her husband to others, including family members and members of the church congregation.” Mica had additionally sought a restraining order against her husband in the days prior to her death. 

Yet John-Paul was adamant that he and Mica had a happy family and home life at their Coldwater Circle house in the Azalea Lakes neighborhood near Myrtle Beach. “We were good for each other. She was incredibly affirming. She was a great pastor’s wife,” John-Paul told the Sun News. “She always wanted me to look in the very best light possible.”

John-Paul and Mica also worked closely professionally: Mica served as the church’s creative director and his personal assistant. The duo wanted to keep their marriage and work separated like church and state, and went so far as to include in a joint postnuptial agreement that they would not speak negatively of Solid Rock Ministries and would keep their personal life confidential. The document additionally saw them both waive their rights to seek alimony or financial spousal support in the case of divorce, and that their shared family home—which was owned by Solid Rock—would not be considered marital property.

The final straw

Mica filed for separation for the last time on April 15, 2024. A hearing for the separation was scheduled for June 5. Mica also moved out of her home with John-Paul and began living in an apartment during this time. According to the affidavit, John-Paul was served the papers on April 25, 2024, notifying him of the hearing. Mica was found dead two days later, on April 27, 2024.

The timeline of Mica’s last day goes as follows: At 11:38 a.m., Mica left her residence, as seen on her ring camera. At 12:12 p.m., Mica was seen purchasing a firearm and ammunition at Dick’s Pawn Shop in Myrtle Beach. She left the store by 12:34 p.m. and drove to a North Carolina state park. At 2:54 p.m., Mica called 911 to announce that she was going to kill herself and asked operators to trace her call so her family would be able to find her body. 

Law enforcement officials began investigating the area where the phone call had been made. A witness told the police that they had heard a person crying and then a gunshot. Mica’s body was found in a river by a kayaker. She died from a gunshot wound to the head.

The next day, John-Paul returned to the Solid Rock lectern and gave a sermon, announcing Mica’s death at the end. He told the audience that her death was self-inflicted and cited Mica’s alleged ongoing mental health struggles. 

John-Paul told the press that he was grateful to have the sheriff’s department investigating his wife’s death. “I want them to find out every detail,” Miller said. “I want to know everything, every detail.”

The case goes viral 

John-Paul’s immediate return to public work was one of the first things that raised flags in the Myrtle Beach community. Many found it a bit odd for a grieving husband to not take time away from his parish to cope with the sudden loss of his wife. His sermon was recorded and shared on the church’s website and YouTube page (the video has since been deleted) and included the details of Mica’s service: Solid Rock Church in Market Common was to host the memorial on May 5. 

Mica’s family took to social media to speak out against John-Paul and publicly share their concerns over Mica’s well-being before her death. The Francis family began posting about Mica’s experiences, alluding to the alleged abuse that Mica had suffered at the hands of her husband. (John-Paul has denied any wrongdoing and claims they had a loving marriage.) 

Mica’s mother posted on the Facebook page Voices in the Wilderness that her daughter had “a no contact order and a divorce was filed just days before this tragedy.” Mica’s own past Facebook posts, which detailed abuse and leaving a dangerous situation with the hashtag #abuseawareness, were also recirculated. 

The Robeson County Sheriff’s Department was investigating the case, with Chief Deputy Damien McLean taking the lead. Following a New York Post article about Mica, the story went viral on TikTok, with both Solid Rock church members and strangers from outside the community using the hashtag #JusticeForMica. Protesters stood outside of Solid Rock church wearing shirts that read “Break the silence and end domestic violence #JusticeForMica.”

John-Paul began posting TikTok videos to share his side of the story and refute allegations that he was involved in Mica’s death. Some protesters set forth the theory that John-Paul had murdered Mica; that claim was determined to be unfounded by investigators who proved that John-Paul had an alibi: He was in Charleston, South Carolina, on the day Mica died. John-Paul was at his children’s school for a soccer tournament, the police confirmed.

“When we first became involved, there was an enormous amount of public speculation surrounding Mica’s death. Many people we spoke with questioned what had happened, and media coverage was actively discussing the possibility that she had been killed,” Gasparro told TIME. “We knew it would be impossible to tell Mica’s story responsibly without examining those questions thoroughly. We followed the evidence and spoke with the people closest to the investigation so that we could understand how authorities reached their conclusion.” 

Gasparro added, “Once we had done that, our focus shifted from questioning the official ruling to examining the much more complicated question of why: How a 30-year-old woman who was actively trying to reclaim control of her life reached a point where she felt she could no longer go on. To us, understanding everything that preceded Mica’s death was the heartbeat of the story.” 

The viral nature of the case, and the doubt it seeded, contributed to the closure of Solid Rock in November 2024. John-Paul originally set out to start a new ministry, but instead created a nonprofit, Living Water Church.

The battle between Mica’s family and her widow 

John-Paul publicly pointed to Mica’s mental health issues immediately after her death, citing that he believed she had a mental breakdown at the start of 2024. He claimed that Mica had previously attempted to take her own life, and that she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and dependent personality disorder. A toxicology report from the North Carolina medical examiner’s officer listed Mica as having had bipolar disorder and a history of suicide attempts.

Mica was open about working through mental health struggles, and even posted social media videos about her journey and offered testimonies at church. But Mica’s family was convinced that her stress and diagnoses were only caused by her strained marriage with John-Paul. 

Mica was hospitalized for mental illness multiple times over the course of the marriage. The most recent time was in February 2024; Mica never permanently returned to the home shared with John-Paul after being discharged. 

John-Paul claimed to Sun News that Mica had told him she wanted to live with him again but was afraid her family would be upset with her since they disapproved of him. “When she was with me for seven years, she was happy, healthy, whole and lived her life and loved it. Apart from me for three months, she committed suicide,” John-Paul said. John-Paul added that he believed Mica’s family convinced her not to take her medications, including lithium, which could have contributed to her decision to end her life. 

Meanwhile, Mica’s family alleged that John-Paul abused Mica for years. Regina Ward, Mica’s family lawyer, said that Mica was never prescribed medications for her mental health and accused John-Paul of forcing her to take his own lithium prescription, even sneaking pills into her food or forcing her to swallow them against her will. There was no lithium prescription for Mica noted on any medical records that surfaced during the investigation. 

“She was mentally healthy until she got snared in his web,” Ward said of Mica on July 15, 2024. “[There has been] no evidence or incident or evaluations or diagnosis of her having any mental health problem until after she gets involved with John-Paul.”

John-Paul, in turn, claimed that the Francis family was so religiously devout that taking medications was against their beliefs, and that they instead encouraged Mica to undergo holistic medical practices. “If her family had simply looked at her and said, ‘Mica if you love him, you can go home and we’ll support you,’ she’d be alive today,” John-Paul told Sun News. “The fact that we had such a great marriage that we did was pretty amazing. It’s very amazing, considering the stress of my job, considering the mental illness, considering her family. I mean, we did very, very well.”

Generations of controversy

John-Paul’s father, Reginald Wayne Miller, is also a pastor. Reginald founded the Cathedral Bible College, which offered degrees in theology, ministry, and other Christian studies. Reginald also once led one of South Carolina’s largest charismatic churches, rooted in the religious movement that emphasizes speaking in tongues, prophecy, and faith healing. 

In 2014, Reginald pleaded guilty in federal court to felony charges relating to the treatment of Cathedral Bible College international students ranging from visa fraud to hourly wage violations. He further was at the center of a controversy about sexual improprieties that forced him to move his ministry from Florence to Myrtle Beach, where his son John-Paul later led Solid Rock. In a lawsuit filed by “Jane Doe #1” in February 2025, Reginald and John-Paul were both accused of using their positions within their church communities to engage in “sexual abuse and predatory conduct -- often targeting minors.” Father and son filed a counterclaim in which they "expressly denied" all of the allegations in the lawsuit.

Mica’s belief that she was being stalked

In the time leading up to her death, Mica’s tires were slashed multiple times and she told officers that she was being followed. John-Paul originally denied being involved in this alleged stalking. But in December 2025, the FBI determined that John-Paul had not been telling the truth to officials. A federal grand jury indicted John-Paul on charges of cyberstalking and making false statements to the FBI.

Prosecutors claimed that John-Paul admitted to hiring a private investigator to “protect Mica from buying firearms,” but that he had actually hired people to follow her and and cyberstalk her over alleged adultery. The indictment also stated that John-Paul lied when he denied damaging Mica’s tires; the FBI later learned that he had purchased a tire deflation device online.

The federal indictment further alleged that John-Paul had a pattern of abusive behavior toward Mica that began in November 2022. John-Paul tracked her car via surveillance devices, called her excessively at more than 50 times in a single day, and anonymously posted nude images online without her consent. Department of Justice documents cite that John-Paul began harassing Mica while they were estranged and interfered with her finances to exert control when they were apart. . 

John-Paul was arraigned on Jan. 12, 2026 in federal court in Florence, South Carolina. The case has been continued to October 2026 for a court date. The pastor pleaded not guilty to the federal charges and has maintained that he has no responsibility for Mica’s death, per ABC News. If he is found guilty, he could face a maximum penalty of five years in prison for cyberstalking and two years in prison for making false statements, plus a fine of up to $250,000.

"The FBI, as well as our local partners that helped us solve this case, were incredibly thorough, detail-oriented; they left no stone unturned. And when they were ready and we were ready, we brought the charges as soon as we could," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Elle E. Klein. "We're in constant contact with the victim's family. We're trying to respect them as they're going through this, because while Mica's gone, she's certainly not forgotten, and we want to stand by them through this whole process."

The legacy of Mica’s Law

While the Francis family awaits John-Paul’s trial, they are focusing on helping people who have suffered from spousal emotional violence and domestic abuse. Ward, their lawyer, told supporters to turn their attention away from protesting John-Paul and instead work to get a coercive control bill passed; they intend to call it Mica’s Law. The bill will modify the domestic violence law to include coercive control behaviors like isolating victims from their family, depriving them of basic needs, and stalking. 

“There are still major gaps in how coercive control is understood—not only by the public, but within our legal system,” Nason tells TIME. “ It can be difficult to recognize and even harder to legislate because it often involves a sustained pattern of behavior rather than one isolated incident.” 

Nason continues, “I think audiences are becoming more aware that domestic abuse does not always begin as physical violence. Technology has created additional ways for someone to exert control over another person…Stories like Mica’s are important because they give audiences a fuller understanding of what abuse can look like. When these behaviors are viewed individually, they may be minimized or dismissed. When you see the entire pattern, the danger becomes much clearer.” 

Death of the Pastor's Wife showrunner Gasparro has a stark message for viewers: “Our role as filmmakers is not to predict or control what happens legislatively. Our responsibility is to tell Mica’s story as honestly and effectively as possible, raise awareness, and help viewers recognize patterns that can otherwise be difficult to see. That is the kind of impact we hope Mica’s story can have. If it helps even one person recognize a dangerous situation in their own life, or in the life of someone they love, we would consider that incredibly meaningful.” 

If you or someone you know need help, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

The Trump Administration has removed a painting by artist Kehinde Wiley, who notably painted former President Barack Obama’s official portrait, from one of its embassies over what officials called its “woke ideologies.”

The painting was removed from the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, earlier this month on ideological grounds. Commissioned by the State Department in 2013, the painting, “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” depicts four Dominican models against a floral backdrop in Wiley’s quintessential style.

The U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic Leah Campos posted a video of the painting’s removal on social media to the tune of heavy metal song “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” The video shows the painting covered in a tarp emblazoned with the American flag prior to its removal.

“In the Trump Administration and under my leadership we are turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country!” Campos wrote.

The State Department is looking into whether it can legally sell the painting, which was paid for with taxpayer dollars, a spokesperson for the department told The New York Times on Monday.

TIME has reached out to Wiley for comment.

Renowned artist

Wiley is known for his large-scale portraits of Black subjects, whom he depicts in the style of classical European portraiture, often placing them against vibrant floral backgrounds. Art critics have described Wiley’s work as challenging traditional ideas of race and representation. He has described his own work as centering on “power and who has it.” His presidential portrait of Obama was unveiled in 2018 and hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

For “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” Wiley collaborated with students from the Facultad de Artes and the Altos de Chavon School of Design, both prominent art schools in the Dominican Republic. The subjects in the painting were modeled by four local art students. The work drew inspiration from two Dominican art works, Celeste Woss y Gil’s 1940 painting “Desnudo Feminine” and Gilberto Hernández Ortega’s 1960 work “Siamesas.”

The painting was part of the embassy’s permanent exhibition, assembled through the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. Established in 1963, the program is aimed at fostering cross-cultural dialogue and diplomacy through art. In 2015, the State Department awarded Wiley its Medal of Arts in recognition of his contributions to the program.

But in recent years, Wiley faced criticism from conservative commentators over his 2012 painting “Judith and Holofernes.” The painting portrays a Black woman holding the severed head of a white woman, which Wiley later described as a play on the “kill whitey thing.” The work, currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, reimagines a 17th century painting by Giovanni Baglione that depicts the biblical story of Judith beheading an invading general to save her town.

Wiley also faced scrutiny in 2024 for sexual assault allegations, which he denies.

The State Department spokesperson told the Times that “the work of an individual with such violent and racist words and depictions has no place in the America First State Department.”

In a recent interview with former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Erin Scavino, director of Art in Embassies, called the painting “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” Scavino became director of the program at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term after previously working as an attorney and appearing as a contestant on Trump’s reality show The Apprentice. She is also the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.

Art attack

As part of the Art in Embassies program, Scavino has emphasized acquiring and displaying works with patriotic imagery. Last month, she organized an exhibition in Washington titled “Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy” that featured 68 representations of the American flag across 56 works.

Earlier this year, Scavino claimed her objections to so-called “satanic baby art” at the U.S. ambassador’s residence in Bucharest had forced Kathleen Kavalec from her post. The ambassador’s departure had previously been described as a planned retirement.

The State Department also changed its process for selecting the 2026 U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale, including replacing diversity language with requirements concerning “American values.” Critics described the process as politicized and opaque, pointing to the appointment of Jenni Parido, a reported friend of Scavino with no prior professional museum experience, as the pavilion’s commissioner. Last July, Parido founded the nonprofit American Arts Conservancy, which the State Department selected as the pavilion’s commissioning institution.

The Trump Administration has pursued similar changes across other federal cultural institutions especially in connection with the country’s 250th anniversary this year. In an executive order issued last March, Trump directed the Smithsonian to remove what he called “improper ideology” and “divisive narratives” and instead emphasize American greatness. The same month, his Administration sharply cut the federal staff responsible for preserving a collection of 26,000 publicly owned artworks.

The Trump Administration also canceled more than 1,400 humanities grants, but a federal judge permanently blocked the action in May. And the Administration proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), independent federal agencies created to support cultural projects, in its budget requests for 2026 and 2027.

Vice President J.D. Vance on Monday called Canada a “state,” before claiming it was an accident.

“We have to remember, Canada is a state—sorry, Freudian slip,” Vance said during a political event in Maine, after being asked about the recent heated trade talks between the U.S. and its northern neighbor. “That was actually an accident.”

He went on to say that “Canada is a country that has underinvested in its military that quite literally would get invaded by a foreign country were it not for the umbrella of protection provided by the United States of America.”

Vance’s slip-up comes after President Donald Trump has hurled a number of barbs at Canada and its political leaders since he took office for a second term. The President has repeatedly referred to Canada as the “51st state,” suggesting that the U.S. should annex its northern neighbor. In March, Trump called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “future Governor of Canada.” 

Carney has repeatedly and firmly pushed back on Trump’s comments; last year, the Canadian Prime Minister said of the suggestion of annexing Canada: “As I’ve said to anyone who’s raised this issue in private or in public, including the President, it will never happen.”

When TIME asked Trump last year whether he was “trolling a little bit” when he speaks about making Canada a U.S. state, Trump replied, “Actually, no, I’m not.”

Trump: ‘Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive’

In a Truth Social post on Monday afternoon, Trump continued to fling digs at Canada.

“America has been carrying Canada for decades, but no longer!” Trump said in his post. “The U.S.A. will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada. Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive — It’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States — Their key to survival.”

Trump referred to Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has been a vocal critic of the tariffs that the Trump Administration has imposed or threatened to impose on Canadian goods. In addition to calling Ford Carney’s “Flunky,” Trump said the Premier was “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford,” a former mayor of Ontario’s capital, Toronto.

Tensions between the allied countries have escalated in recent days. Trump claimed earlier last week that, “subject to the finalization of documents,” the two nations had reached a deal, but trade negotiations between the two broke down on Friday, and both sides have pointed the finger at the other.

In a statement shared late on Friday, Carney said that “progress has not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians” and so he “decided to suspend trade negotiations with the U.S.” He accused the U.S. of proposing “last-minute changes” that he called “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal."

On Monday, Trump said that he plans to raise automobile tariffs on Canada to 50% starting on Jan. 1, 2027. His 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of goods imported into the U.S. from Canada went into effect over the weekend, and Carney said that Canada would respond with retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods that will take effect on Sept. 8.

At a press conference on Monday, Carney said that Canada was still open to trade talks, but that any deal would have to “be one that respects Canada’s sovereignty.”

“When the Americans go to the negotiation table first with the right attitude towards our industries and a true partnership, of course we’ll come to the negotiating table,” he said.

“An attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” he continued, “that’s not something we’re going to accept.”

The ongoing “Hawk” fire outside the city of Reno, Nevada, has prompted the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in yet another devastating blaze contributing to one of the worst U.S. wildfire seasons in recent history. 

Roughly 42,000 people have been evacuated around Reno, while an additional 45,000 were warned that they may also have to flee. The evacuation is among the largest prompted by a U.S. wildfire this year, following the fires around Spokane, Washington, in early August during which roughly 60,000 people were evacuated.

The Reno evacuations mark another flashpoint of a record-breaking fire season. The fire is dwarfed in acreage by larger blazes from this year, at roughly 15,000 acres burned so far, but its direct effect on civilians is one of the largest in recent years, and demonstrates the potential risk that worsening wildfires may have on people and their communities in years to come.

Here’s how fires around the U.S. have set new records, and why they have been so bad this year.

More acres burned and more entrapments

Compared to the past 10 years, more acres have been burned this year in the U.S. to date.

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) posted on Monday that firefighters have responded to 50,784 wildfires that have scorched over 7.8 million acres this year: 168% of the 10-year average for acres burned, and 129% of the average for total fires.

Around the same time last year, roughly 4 million acres had been burned, around 50% of the current acreage for 2026 so far, according to NIFC tracking.

The U.S. has also been at the highest level of “fire preparedness” for 38 days, since July 18th, at a five out of five, which means that federal resources are strained and may not be available to address every new fire.

Read More: The U.S. Is Now At Its Worst Level of Wildfire Preparedness. What Does That Mean?

The 10-year average for fire preparedness in August is four. The last time the fire preparedness level was at a five for the entire month of August was in 2021.

Meanwhile the 10-year annual average for days spent at level four and five combined is 48 days, and so far, the U.S. has already spent 57 days within that range, after reaching level four in late June.

There has also been a 20-year high of firefighter entrapments, life-threatening situations in which firefighters’ safety zones and escape routes are compromised. According to a Reuters report, there had been 12 entrapments in 2026 as of Aug. 13, more than the year-total average of nine in the last 20 years. This year’s entrapments also marked the highest year-to-date figure since 2006.

Six out of 13 firefighter deaths have involved entrapments, the report shows. An average of 17 firefighter fatalities occur each year from wildfires.

Hotter, drier, and windier conditions

Wildfire trackers often use the “30-30-30” rule to identify conditions that can lead to extreme wildfires. The rule refers to when the temperature is at least 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), humidity is at 30% or lower, and wind speeds are at 30 kilometers per hour or more (roughly 19 miles per hour). When combined, these hot, dry, and windy conditions can produce extremely large and destructive fires, as they have this year.

Reno has experienced an average daily high temperature of 92.8 degrees Fahrenheit (33.7 Celsius), 27% humidity, and 18 miles per hour (29 kilometers per hour) daily maximum wind speed over the last 10 days, including the week before the “Hawk” fires began on Saturday and the three days since as the blaze continues.

Although the 30-30-30 rule is a metric for local weather conditions’ effect on wildfires, increases have been exhibited this year compared to past years across the U.S. in each of its categories—temperature, dryness, and wind speed.

When it came to temperature, the average in the contiguous U.S. from January through July was the second warmest in 132 years, at 4.2 degrees Celsius (55.5 Fahrenheit), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

July in particular was the hottest month on record in the U.S., with an average of 76.9 degrees Fahrenheit (24.9 Celsius). Nevada specifically had one of its warmest July’s on record, according to NOAA.

Read More: What Living Through the Hottest July Ever Looked Like Across the U.S.

The U.S. also had its driest January-July since 2012, according to NOAA. And as of Aug. 4, nearly half of the contiguous U.S. was experiencing drought, including across much of the West.

Wind speeds generally fluctuate the most by region, but from January through June of this year, they averaged 0.5% above the 20-year average during 2005-2024, according to an S&P Global analysis.

These hotter, drier, and windier conditions have set the stage for an active wildfire season.

One underlying explanation for increasingly fire-prone conditions is climate change, which has contributed to longer-lasting fire seasons, now lasting for six to eight months in some areas, compared to what used to be roughly four months in past decades.

“Generally we're having drier summers and higher winds,” Peter Sunderland, professor of fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland, previously told TIME. “We are seeing more and more climate extremes.”

If you’ve been excitedly awaiting the return of the woolly mammoth, you’ll have to be patient a little longer. It was in 2021 that the newly established, Dallas-based company Colossal Biosciences announced plans to use modern gene-editing technology and DNA harvested from mammoth remains to manufacture a mammoth embryo, implant it in the womb of an elephant surrogate, and bring the great, gentle, six-ton beast—which vanished from the planet more than 4,000 years ago—back into the modern world. The target date for a pregnancy was 2027; the target date for the birth was 2028.

No more. In a recent conversation with TIME, Colossal CEO and co-founder Ben Lamm concedes that those goal posts have moved more than a little. “We are thinking it will be in the early 2030s,” he says. “We don’t have a hard date. Not 2036, but not 2030 either.”

In just the past year, Colossal has learned vastly more about both the mammoth and the elephant genomes than has ever been known before, not only improving the odds that the mammoth can be brought back to life, or de-extincted, but also unpacking basic genetic science that could one day have knock-on effects for humans—including potentially increasing resistance to cancer.

Bringing back the dire wolf

Colossal proved its de-extinction chops in the spring of 2025, when it announced that it had brought the extinct dire wolf back to life, editing the genome of the closely related gray wolf to replicate the features of its vanished cousin—including a white coat, larger size, more powerful shoulders, wider head, larger teeth and jaws, more-muscular legs, and characteristic vocalizations, especially howling and whining. 

To work that genetic magic, Colossal scientists collected dire wolf DNA from an ear bone and a tooth unearthed in two ancient samples, sequenced the genome, and compared it to that of the gray wolf. They then harvested cells from a living gray wolf and made 20 edits on 14 genes using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, which produced the critical dire wolf characteristics. Finally, they extracted the nucleus of the edited cell, inserted it into a domestic dog ovum whose own nucleus had been removed, and implanted the resulting embryo into the womb of a domestic hound. Nine weeks later, the dire wolves were born.

Why woolly mammoths are so hard to de-extinct

To do something similar with the woolly mammoth, Colossal discovered that the work would be a heavier genetic lift than their research teams had originally expected. The initial estimate was that it would take edits to about 60 genes to turn an elephant nucleus into a mammoth nucleus that could then be used to create a mammoth embryo. Now that number is about 150—and rising. 

Among the genes and regulatory switches that have been discovered are ones that shrink the mammoth ear to about one-tenth the size of an elephant’s ear. In the hot climates in which Asian and African elephants live, large, heavily vascularized ears serve as heat dumps, cooling the blood and the body as a whole. That would not do for the mammoth, which made its home during the Ice Age and needed to husband all the heat it could. Mammoth tails are shorter than those of elephants too— for the same heat-retention reason—and Colossal scientists have found the gene that expresses that as well.

The genetics of the mammoth’s characteristic heavy coat have also been unpacked. Nearly all hairy mammals—humans included—have oil-secreting glands known as sebaceous glands in the skin. The oil keeps individual hairs supple and prevents them from drying and breaking. Elephants, which have a very sparse covering of bristly hair across their bodies, were thought to be an exception to this rule. That made the job of engineering a mammoth from an elephant more difficult, since mammoths surely had sebaceous glands to sustain their extravagant coat. But Colossal researchers conducted dissection and close examination of samples of elephant skin and found that that earlier received wisdom was wrong—the skin does contain small, rudimentary sebaceous-like structures. The trick now is to isolate the genes that code for the glands and edit them to create the fully developed version the mammoth will need.

The researchers also analyzed the makeup of elephant hair and determined that 90% of every strand is composed of nine different proteins. They then tracked down which genes code for that protein production and govern hair developmental patterns, which typically include periods of growth, rest, and regrowth. Tests of these genes are underway, sometimes with the assistance of other animals.

In March 2025, Colossal revealed that it had created a small brood of 38 woolly mice, engineered with mammoth coding for shaggy hair written into their genome. The mice have thrived and bred, passing on their long, coarse hair to their pups. That was a good start, but mice aren’t mammoths, and to study how effective the genetic editing is, researchers will need to work with a larger mammal. Colossal promises that a woolly pig is coming, though the company does not say when it will be revealed.

Digging deeper into the genome of the mammoth, Colossal scientists have extracted bits of its regulatory DNA and inserted them into living elephant skin cells and watched as regulators turned the behavior of the genes up or down—critical work if you want to design other genes to order.

“It’s a little weird and Frankensteiny,” says Lamm, “but we’ve done that.”

Potential implications for humans

Colossal researchers are also exploring one of the elephant’s more remarkable features: its resistance to cancer. As a large-bodied mammal, elephants ought to be highly susceptible to the disease, especially considering that an elephant's body contains 100 times more cells than a human’s, creating more opportunities for cancer to occur. But cancer accounts for less than 5% of elephant deaths, compared to 16% for humans.

That was a longstanding mystery until recently. Both human and elephant cells are now known to carry a tumor-suppressor gene labeled TP53. When DNA in a cell is damaged—by cancer or other means—the gene codes for the release of the p53 protein, which either halts the damaged cell’s growth cycle to allow for repair, or, if the DNA is too corrupted, kills the cell. Humans carry two copies of the TP53 gene, while elephants carry 20—making for much greater cancer resistance. Additionally, elephants but not humans carry what is known as an LIF6 gene, which also produces a p53 protein, one that specifically targets the mitochondria—an energy-producing organelle located in the cellular cytoplasm—of damaged calls, killing them before they can divide and spread. 

Other researchers are already exploring if p53 proteins can be manipulated in humans to increase cancer resistance. Colossal is casting a wider net. On August 20, it announced the launch of a new company, Astromech, which uses AI and deep learning to analyze the genomic data of any species, trace its evolutionary history, and forecast its future, anticipating its adaptation to changing environment, its disease susceptibility, and the possibility of so-called genetic bottlenecks—or lack of genetic diversity—that occur when an endangered population of animals grows too small. Colossal scientists are using Astromech to study elephants’ cancer resistance in depth—which could have broader uses and implications.

“Colossal is not conducting research on humans, but its work with mammoth, elephant, and other genomic datasets could yield insights relevant to human cancer research,” says a company spokesperson. “Understanding mechanisms such as elephants’ TP53-related cancer resistance is exactly the kind of problems Astromech is trying to understand, leveraging the mammoth, elephants and other datasets.”

For now, the goal of turning all of this scientific benchwork into a walking, breathing, breeding mammoth goes on—even if at a slower pace than originally predicted. “I hate to say this, because I don’t want to call the mammoth a product,” says Lamm, “but it will be a better product because of our deeper analysis of what truly made a mammoth a mammoth.”

Iran’s currency plummeted in value Monday, hitting a record-low open-market rate of 2.02 million rials to the dollar, amid the White House’s launch of “Operation Economic Outcast,” which aims to force concessions from Iran through isolation and a financial stranglehold.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Sunday that an “economic D-Day” was coming, and he shared a first sense of what that might look like at a press conference the following day.

"D-Day marked a historic campaign with our allies,” Bessent said Monday. “Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe."

The U.S. announced sanctions on more than 60 targets while expanding sanctionable sectors to digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping—which Bessent described as some of the country’s “most vital lifelines.”

The government may also impose secondary sanctions on Iran’s trade partners, Bessent said, adding that those sanctions could roll out in a matter of weeks. 

The threat is meant to deter countries from bolstering the country’s waning economy and “collapse every last option for Iran,” Bessent said, describing it as "economic asphyxiation." 

Read More: The U.S.-Iran War: By the Numbers

Though Bessent didn’t identify which Iranian partners might be targeted by a new round of sanctions, he did name one financial institution: Bank Melli, the Iranian government-owned bank with branches in about a dozen countries. Bessent said that “every branch” of the bank must be “shuttered and dark” or it will lose access to the U.S. dollar. The Treasury has previously claimed that the bank provides services to entities that support Iran’s nuclear and ballistic programs.

Since the start of its war with Iran on Feb. 28, the Trump Administration has applied both military and economic pressure to achieve its goal of dismantling the nation’s nuclear program.

Bessent’s remarks elaborate on President Donald Trump’s announcement on Aug. 19 that the U.S. would launch “the most crushing economic operation ever mounted” against Iran. 

Iran initially dismissed the threat. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, on Sunday called the U.S. “desperate.” And Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told state television on Aug. 22 that Iran would turn against any neighboring Gulf states that yield to the U.S. in what he called an “economic war.” 

“Any country that takes part in imposing economic restrictions on us will be regarded as an enemy,” he said.

Given Iran’s sustained control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, any retaliation could push Brent crude oil above Monday’s closing price of about $92 per barrel or the wartime high of about $120 per barrel.

In a war that has been largely defined by its threat to the global economy, experts wonder whether sanctions against Tehran’s trade allies will further isolate it—and if that will succeed in forcing Iran to capitulate to the demands of the United States.

Could U.S. sanctions force Iran to end the war?

The Trump Administration has argued that in tightening sanctions against Iran, the country will face unprecedented isolation and economic pain.

But Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, tells TIME that the move doesn’t guarantee compliance. 

“We really need to keep in mind here that Iran has been under U.S. sanctions for the last 40 years, and we've had several moments in which we have done some sort of a major escalation,” he says. “And each time, it has failed to translate into a policy change from Iran.”

Parsi notes that neither Bessent nor Trump has outlined specific demands for Iran—focusing more on maximum isolation rather than defining clear, achievable diplomatic terms. 

Because of this, he argues that Iran is even less likely to succumb to increased pressure.

“What we know of the pattern in the past is that the Iranians will not capitulate—they will escalate,” Parsi says. “This is the same miscalculation Trump made when he thought that the threat of war would cause them to surrender, and instead they prepared themselves for war, and they fought back. And six months later, we're here.”

Further complicating matters is the fact that Iran is meeting with its neighbor, Oman, about regulating passage through the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil formerly passed. Oman’s foreign minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, is visiting Tehran on Tuesday to continue high-level talks on “bilateral and regional issues.”

Controlling the waterway—a pain point for the global economy—has been Iran’s greatest strength in the war. Any agreement could affect Iran’s leverage over the waterway, although Oman has not publicly endorsed Tehran’s broader demands.

Trump last week threatened that the U.S. would target Oman next if it cooperated with Iran on this matter, telling Fox News: “We’ll bomb the s— out of them.” Experts have said, however, that this is an idle threat and that bombing Oman would be a mistake. 

Continuing to enforce its blockade on the Strait does, however, come at a cost to Iran. A June analysis from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies estimated that Iran may be incurring economic damages of about $435 million per day while enforcing it. 

How is the plummeting value of the rial affecting Iranians?

Ryan Costello, the policy director at the National Iranian American Council, tells TIME that implementing additional sanctions may not achieve the desired result—but will likely hurt Iranians. 

“Regrettably, it has had very harsh impacts on ordinary Iranians—pushing millions out of the middle class, which is often seen as an engine for successful democratic change over time,” Costello says. “This currency depreciation has a real cost for ordinary Iranians, making their life ever more unaffordable.”

According to the International Monetary Fund, Iran’s average annual inflation rate is projected to reach 68.9% in 2026. The depreciation of the rial—which was already the world’s least valuable currency before it dipped this week—will strain Iranian citizens who are already struggling to buy groceries and pay for monthly living expenses.

There is a “real risk” of greater global market destabilization the longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, Costello says. 

“Iran's leadership is signaling that it will respond to intensified economic pressure by further restricting energy flows, and it appears to have the capacity to act on their threat,” Costello says.

In addition to its command of the Strait, he explains: "Iran and other aligned forces are demonstrating an ability to strike energy targets with missiles and drones, both in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. So Iran and/or its allies could target commercial ships, as well as pipelines, ports, refineries, and other critical energy infrastructure."

And there’s a second major risk if the U.S. places sanctions on certain global powers who buy Iranian oil—particularly economic powerhouse China.

“China could take steps to punish the U.S. economy in turn,” Costello explains. 

He says that both risks could be “very damaging,” with economic ramifications that span the globe.

Why Trump is escalating economic pressure on Iran

The U.S.-Iran war is nearing its six-month mark, and peace negotiations have effectively stalled.

The memorandum of understanding established in June—which gave the nations 60 days to work out terms for Iran’s nuclear program and renew uninterrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—expired Aug. 17. It unraveled in July as the U.S. struck hundreds of targets in Iran, and Tehran retaliated against its allies in the region, including Kuwait and Bahrain. But as the U.S. continued to draw down its munitions stockpiles, Iran held steady with its blockade of the Strait.

Now, Trump has changed his tactics.

“This is where the real problem is: He's going back to economic warfare because military warfare didn't work,” Parsi says. 

If additional sanctions fail to force Iran to yield to some of Trump’s demands, Parsi says the President may be running out of options.

“The only exit out of this is actually through diplomacy,” he says. “Otherwise, the U.S. is just going to go back and forth between economic and military action.”

One route to relief may come by way of Pakistan, which helped mediate the June ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. It dispatched a high-level delegation, led by Field Marshal Asim Munir, to Tehran this week to encourage its leadership to work toward a more lasting peace agreement. 

But Parsi contends that the stream of threats from the U.S. may make Iran even less likely to reconcile, saying: “This does not end up becoming the end of the conflict. It just ends up becoming another cycle in the escalation spiral.”

Extraordinary Attorney Woo’s Park Eun-bin and Doona!’s Yang Se-jong star as ghost-whispering hotel heiress Cheon Yeo-ri and ace prosecutor Ma Gang-uk, respectively, in the supernatural romance series Spooky in Love. In the Korean drama, which broadcast domestically on tvN and was distributed globally by Netflix, Yeo-ri and Gang-uk are initially brought together by their shared desire for justice. For Yeo-ri, this takes the form of helping the ghosts she alone can see. For Gang-uk, it means doing a good, by-the-book job as an investigator. But when Gang-uk learns Yeo-ri’s secret, the two grow closer.

While Spooky in Love starts out with a strong, ghost-of-the-week format, the second half of the drama leans more into corporate in-fighting and family drama as context for Yeo-ri and Gang-uk’s romance. When Chairwoman Baek insists that Yeo-ri get engaged in order to secure a more stable future for the hotel and resort company, Yeo-ri side-steps the advances of family friend and fellow chaebol Kang Min-hwan (Ong Seong-wu) to announce she is engaged to Gang-uk. What starts as a fake relationship to keep Yeo-ri’s grandmother off of her back soon develops into the real thing. But can Yeo-ri and Gang-uk’s love survive Min-hwan’s machinations to take control of both Yeo-ri and her company? Here’s everything that happens in the Spooky in Love finale.

Yeo-ri’s supernatural powers, explained

Yeo-ri wasn’t born with the ability to see ghosts. She developed it 12 years prior to the start of the series, when she nearly died in the mysterious yacht accident that killed her boyfriend and Min-hwan’s little brother, Kang Ji-hwan (Kim Min-chul). The condition has ghosts constantly nagging Yeo-ri for help, and also keeps her isolated from the land of the living. If she touches hands with someone else, they will temporarily gain the ability to see ghosts for a month. As a result, she wears gloves constantly, and keeps a physical distance from her friends, family, and co-workers. 

The stakes of Yeo-ri’s secret are intensified due to the power her family holds. Yeo-ri is the heir to the Reina Group, a corporate hotel chain that wields immense wealth. Yeo-ri’s grandmother, Baek Kyung-ja (Ye Soo-jung), plans to pass the baton to Yeo-ri—rather than step-daughter Ok Gye-hui (Baek Ji-won) or her adult children, Ha-ri (Cho Hye-joo) and Don-jun (Lee Dal). However, if Chairwoman Baek, or the larger public, finds out that Yeo-ri is haunted by ghosts, it could call her ability to run the family corporation into question. 

Still, Yeo-ri’s sense of justice runs deep. In Spooky in Love’s early episodes, Yeo-ri is visited by the ghost of Jang Eun-ju (Yoon Hye-rim), a young woman who was murdered by her boyfriend, Park Seung-jae (Kim Do-wan), after she becomes pregnant with their child. Seung-jae is well-connected. Not only is he a rich pro golfer, but his father is one of the leading contenders in the next presidential race. When he is initially tried for murder, with Gang-uk acting as prosecutor, he is acquitted due to his father’s immense influence. It is only when Gang-uk and Yeo-ri team up that they are able to gather more evidence, and definitively pin the murder on Seung-jae.

What happened on the yacht?

Yeo-ri grew up close to Kang Ji-hwan and Kang Min-hwan, brothers poised to inherit ownership of CL Raymond Group. Though both brothers had feelings for Yeo-ri, Ji-hwan was the first to ask her out. For Min-hwan, this intensified the jealousy he had long felt of his little brother. Jin-hwan, who looked up to his brother, didn’t realize that he was often treated better by some members of the family compared to Min-hwan, who was adopted. When Jin-hwan started dating Yeo-ri, it was the final straw for Min-hwan.

On the day of the accident, the brothers are out on a yacht with their friends, including Yeo-ri and fellow rich kid Park Seung-jae. We learn in the penultimate episode that when the yacht hit a rock and Jin-hwan was thrown over the side, Min-hwan had the chance to pull his brother back onboard, but let the pleading Jin-hwan fall into the water below instead. Jin-hwan dies, and Yeo-ri, who also went overboard in the accident, is rescued from the water. She is wearing a protective pendant gifted to Jin-hwan by his grandmother. He asked her to wear it while they were on the boat, joking that, if something should happen, she should live and he will die. 

Later, Yeo-ri and Gang-uk seek out the shaman who made the pendant. The original maker is dead, but her daughter informs them that the power of the pendant changed Yeo-ri and Jin-hwan’s fates. That power, paired with Yeo-ri’s inability to let Jin-hwan move on in the immediate aftermath of the accident, led to Yeo-ri’s ability to see ghosts. The shaman tells Gang-uk and Yeo-ri that, in order for Yeo-ri to stop seeing ghosts, she owes the afterlife a life.

Gang-uk’s connection to Jin-hwan

Gang-uk, who was raised by his grandmother, did not grow up in the same social circles as Yeo-ri, Min-hwan, and the other members of the chaebol class. However, he shares a unique connection to Jin-hwan. When Jin-hwan died, a sick Gang-uk was given Jin-hwan’s heart. The transplant allowed him to live on. Ever since, Jin-hwan and Min-hwan’s mother, Song Hee-won (Kim Seo-ra) has kept tabs on Gang-uk through his grandmother. Though she lost one of her sons, it makes her happy to see Gang-uk doing well. 

Min-hwan’s crimes escalate

This truth of Jin-hwan’s death is known only by Min-hwan for more than a decade. Yeo-ri doesn’t remember what happened during the accident and, even if she did, she didn’t witness what occurred between the brothers that day. However, when Seung-jae temporarily gets out of jail to attend his father’s funeral, he happens to stumble upon a camcorder memory card with footage of Min-hwan choosing not to save Jin-hwan. Seung-jae attempts to blackmail Min-hwan with the evidence. When the two meet up in an abandoned warehouse, Min-hwan kills him for it.

Gang-uk finds Min-hwan’s cufflink at the scene of the crime, but Min-hwan counters. He hires someone to hit Gang-uk with a truck. Yeo-ri pushes the man she loves out of the way at the last second, saving his life and putting her own in grave danger. She is hit by the truck, and ends up in a coma. As Yeo-ri’s life hangs in the balance, we see her traverse a beautiful kind of purgatory. The ghosts she has helped in the past 12 years, including Eun-ju, are waiting for her there. They lend her some of their warmth to keep her from crossing to the other side. 

Yeo-ri and Jin-hwan balance the scales

Still, Yeo-ri finally does make it to a Styx-like river, a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Before she can step onto the boat that would bring her across, the ghost of Jin-hwan appears to take her place. The two share a teary conversation in which they process Jin-hwan’s death. Yeo-ri apologizes for living instead of him, but Jin-hwan doesn’t see it that way. He says she still has so much to live for, and that the ghosts she has helped are rooting for her. When Yeo-ri wakes back up, she no longer has the power to see ghosts. Jin-hwan has crossed to the other side; the afterlife has been given the soul it was robbed of 12 years prior. 

Min-hwan is brought to justice

Unbeknownst to Min-hwan, Seung-jae has hidden the memory card in a hollow golf ball at the warehouse. When Yeo-ri and Gang-uk are investigating, they find the card and have the evidence to take Min-hwan down. In the most dramatic way possible, Yeo-ri reveals the evidence to Min-hwan’s mother and the other people gathered at Jin-hwan’s memorial service. More than losing his power or going to jail, Min-hwan seems most distraught at the idea of his mother discovering his betrayal. A year later, when she visits her remorseful son in jail, she tells him that after he has finished serving his time, she will be waiting for him. Min-hwan, who always thought his mother’s love for her biological son diminished her love for her adopted son, can perhaps finally see otherwise.

Does Spooky in Love have a happy ending? 

Spooky in Love has the happiest of endings. A year following the main events of the series finale, Yeo-ri is announced as the new chairwoman of Reina. Yeo-ri and Gang-uk are happily together. Gang-uk, who had been transferred out of Seoul after reporting internal corruption at the prosecutor’s office, has just received a promotion back in the capital city where Yeo-ri lives. The two visit Siena Hall, the Reina wedding property that symbolizes Yeo-ri’s late parents’ love for one another, and walk together, hand in hand. 

When the two first started falling for one another, Yeo-ri had said that her greatest wish was to walk hand-in-hand with the person she liked. Then, she was too afraid to touch anyone, burdened by the certainty she would pass her curse onto them. Now, she does so, unafraid. The simple scene doesn’t just demonstrate the love between Yeo-ri and Gang-uk; it demonstrates the intimacy and warmth Yeo-ri is able to let into her life more broadly. She is no longer alone, and Gang-uk is only one part of that reality.

President Donald Trump threatened to raise automobile tariffs on Canada to 50% as the trade rift and political slanging match between the neighboring nations escalated.

Trump announced Monday morning that U.S. tariffs on all Canadian cars and trucks, automotive parts, and steel will increase to 50% starting Jan. 1, 2027.

“Build in the U.S. and there are zero tariffs. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst nations in the world to deal with,” he said on social media.

Trump’s comments came after trade talks between the two countries broke down, with each side accusing the other of making eleventh-hour demands that derailed negotiations.

“They feel entitled, and yet, we don’t need Canada, they need us!” the President said, repeating his accusation that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years.”

Trump previously touted the nearly finished deal between the two countries last Tuesday.

However, negotiations broke down on Friday, and the Administration's 50% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of imports into the U.S. from Canada took effect Saturday.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to match the U.S.’s tariffs “dollar for dollar.”

“We are stronger now than when the United States started this trade war. More unified, more determined, and more ambitious,” Carney said during a press conference Saturday, referring to the year-long trade rift that has come to affect both countries.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And promised: “That will never, ever happen.” We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America.”

Both sides have since blamed the other for making unreasonable demands late in the negotiating process.

“While we believed, earlier this week, that we were moving toward a mutually beneficial agreement, in recent days, the U.S. proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermined the net benefits to Canada, calling into question the reliability of any deal,” Carney said on Saturday. “In short, they asked too much and offered too little.”

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, meanwhile, framed the breakdown in negotiations as leaving the U.S. with little choice but to retaliate against Canada.

“We’ve said enough, and so we’ve taken countermeasures. Our interest is in protecting American workers and protecting American supply chains,” he told "Fox & Friends" on Saturday.

Greer said the Republican Administration had offered to cut tariffs on steel, autos, and lumber, “things that are sensitive for them. And they’ve always had the best deal, and they still would have an even better deal, but they didn’t want that.”

As a result, he said, “We’re moving forward with measures that respond to Canadian retaliation.”

The broader 50% tariffs that took effect Saturday were initially announced in July, and would affect around 5% of trade between the U.S.-Canada.

Shortly after the collapse of the talks, Trump took to Truth Social on Sunday and said that Canada “wants the benefits of being a State, without being one” and that it has “also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of tariffs. No more!!!”

Despite not being clear what the President meant, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state—an idea Carney has strongly rejected.

Canada retaliates as U.S. lawmakers warn of higher costs

The collapse of the deal and escalating trade tensions between Washington and Ottawa have been met with both praise and criticism on either side of the border.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford praised Carney for standing firm and refusing to accept what he described as a “bad deal.”

“It was a bad deal for Ontario. It was a bad deal for the auto sector, the steel sector and manufacturing sector,” he said. “We never started this fight, but I can assure you we're going to win.”

On the U.S. side, Trump has faced criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Trump’s tariffs “have created higher costs and chaos.”

“His 50% tariffs on Canadian goods will raise prices. And now Canada is retaliating dollar for dollar, which will hurt Minnesota farmers, businesses, and workers,” she said Monday of the newly announced tariffs.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine similarly warned that the “on-again/off-again trade talks between the U.S. and Canada lead to higher costs, risk, and uncertainty for Maine businesses.”

“If the Administration proceeds with these tariffs, they will increase costs for Maine families, as most businesses will have no choice but to pass on the tariffs to their customers through higher prices,” she said Saturday after trade talks broke down, urging “both sides to return to the negotiating table.”

Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia warned that this latest round of automobile tariffs will have “devastating consequences.”  

“President Trump’s new 50% tariffs on Canada will disrupt supply chains and raise costs for Virginia businesses of every size and in every industry, and retaliatory tariffs will hurt Virginians,” she said Monday.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries met privately with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner in recent weeks, prompting criticism from some Democrats ahead of approaching midterm elections, according to reports.

Although Kushner, who served as a senior West Wing adviser during Trump’s first term, does not have a formal role in the current Administration, he has remained involved in Trump’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and Russia.

During the meeting, the pair were said to have discussed housing, immigration, and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground.

The report comes less than three months before the November midterms, when Democrats are favored to retake control of the House from Republicans, who currently hold both chambers of Congress. A Democratic victory would put Jeffries in line to become speaker and give the party greater oversight powers to investigate the Trump Administration.

The meeting—an unusual instance of a top Democrat and a Trump confidant coming together to discuss potential areas of agreement—has drawn scrutiny from some within Democratic circles. It was first reported Sunday by The New York Times and has since been confirmed by multiple outlets.

“Throughout this Congress, Republicans have adopted a my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing that has failed the American people," Jeffries says in a statement to TIME. "To stop the madness, we have repeatedly made clear that an extremist approach will not work and will be met with forceful opposition. The American people want bold change and that’s what House Democrats will deliver.”

“In every conversation that we have with the Trump administration, we will continue to make it explicitly clear that the affordability crisis is not a hoax and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable. We are fighting for an affordable America. The question is whether Republicans will join us,” the statement reads.

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

Asked whether he supported the meeting during an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said: “I’m in favor of people meeting with whoever they want to discuss ideas. But it’s one thing to have a meeting. It’s another thing to see something real come out of that.”

Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Barack Obama and now a co-host of the podcast Pod Save America, was far less diplomatic.

“Jared Kushner has no actual government job, he just uses his family connections to get money from Gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way Jeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas,” Vietor said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that he first learned of the meeting that same day, when reports began circulating in the media.

"I don't know what that's about," Johnson said on Fox News. "I know Jared has interests and lots of other things going on. He's not really directly involved in the admin, at least in the day-to-day in the White House."

Johnson, however, remained confident that Republicans could retain control of the House.

“I’m telling you what, you better not bet against the House Republicans,” he said.

Trump has met with the top Democratic leaders of the House and Senate only once since returning to office, when the President attempted last year to reach an agreement to prevent a government shutdown. Those talks ultimately failed, leading to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

The relationship between Trump, Jeffries, and other members of the Democratic leadership has often been marked by conflict and back-and-forth name-calling.

In late April, Trump called Jeffries a “low IQ person” and attacked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer over their opposition to the Iran war, branding them “traitor Democrats.”

Jeffries, in turn, called Trump the “dumbest President ever” in response to the President’s insults during a press conference.

Trump has continued to attack the top House Democrat as "low IQ" and a "thug” branding him as a “danger” to the country.

More recently, however, Trump’s tone toward Jeffries appears to have softened. In an interview earlier this month with Punchbowl News, the President said he could work with the Democratic leader and described him as a "nice guy."

"People are harsh on me. I'm harsh on them. It's part of the world," Trump said. "I'd probably get along with him very well."

Since returning to the White House, Trump has often sought to bypass Congress and pursue policy through executive action, from curbing birthright citizenship to the implementation of tariffs.

That dynamic could change if Democrats take control of the House, where Republicans currently hold a slim majority of 218 Republicans to 212 Democrats and one independent.

A Democratic-controlled House would give the party the power to block parts of Trump’s legislative agenda, launch high-profile congressional investigations, issue subpoenas, and initiate impeachment proceedings.

Trump—who was impeached twice during his first term—has urged voters to back Republicans in the midterms, arguing that Democrats would use their power to impeach him again.

“I’m going to be impeached. They're going to impeach me. They have no idea why,” he told a crowd during a rally in South Carolina last Friday.

The latest Emerson College polling, released August 20, found congressional Democrats leading Republicans by nearly 8 points. A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll released Aug. 17 found Democrats ahead by 5 points. All 435 House seats are up for election in November.

Look closely at a painting, and you might be able to see where an artist changed their mind. Beneath the finished surface, there may be an abandoned line, a figure moved several inches to the left, a color that looked splendid in the morning and became unbearable by night. There may be a smudgy fingerprint at the edge of the canvas. The back may hold a date, a repair, uneven staples, a signature, or the name of a previous owner. These messy marks were once incidental to the artwork. Today they are considered evidence.

AI can produce an image in nano-seconds, then create hundreds of variations before a painter has mixed a color or cleaned a brush. Some of the results are technically bewildering and others inspire disbelief: How is this possible? Yet their abundance is changing our relationship to novelty. When nearly any visual idea can be summoned on demand, newness becomes easier to manufacture but harder to believe in. In an age of effortless images, the mess left behind by making something may become part of what makes it valuable.

So much recent visual culture can appear at once new and strangely familiar. Generative systems learn from immense archives of existing images, then assemble patterns according to statistical relationships. Their output can startle us, though the surprise often arrives cloaked in a recognizable visual fluency: the cinematic light, the dreamlike architecture, the glossy portrait or the eerily composed impossibility. After enough exposure, even the surreal can begin to feel conventional.

A study presented at the 2024 CHI Conference proffers one perspective about how this happens. Participants who used an AI image generator during a visual ideation exercise became more fixed on an initial example and produced fewer ideas, with less variety and originality, than those in the control group. The study involved only 60 people, so its findings should be treated cautiously, though they articulate something many artists and designers have begun to notice: a tool built to accelerate imagination can also narrow it by presenting a polished answer before a more difficult, original idea has had time to form.

Against this flood of frictionless imagery, fine art acquires another kind of presence. A physical artwork occupies time and holds emotion. An artist stood before it, considered it, changed it, ruined it, waited for it, and eventually decided to either finish or abandon it. All artwork contains a sequence of often messy choices that could have gone in any number of directions. The object becomes a record of attention, and attention is becoming one of the scarcest materials we have.

Researchers have already observed a version of this shift. Across six experiments involving 2,965 people, participants consistently valued art labeled “AI-made” less than work labeled “human-made,” even when the images themselves were identical. Awareness of the machine changed the perceived value of the human hand.

This preference extends beyond art. A 2015 study in the Journal of Marketing found that people considered handmade objects more attractive in part because they believed those objects symbolically contained the maker’s love. The participants were projecting on and responding to an imagined human presence embedded in the object, expressed through the perceived time and care required to make it.

Nostalgia is part of the current attraction to the handmade. We remember darkrooms, paste-up boards, paint-stained clothes, and the physical tools that digital technology has made unnecessary or irrelevant, and often forget the expense and tedium the processes demanded. Still, the renewed power of visible erasure or the pleasure of encountering an unrestrained line reaches beyond nostalgia. These marks allow us to envision the intent and the decisions behind them.

AI can attempt to imitate these marks. It can add a false thumbprint, invent pentimenti, reproduce a stray brush bristle, and generate an image that appears to have survived a century in an attic. But mess itself will soon prove very little. Provenance and an intelligible creative process will become more important as appearance ceases to represent authenticity.

In educated hands, AI can still become a profound artistic medium. Photography and digital tools have disrupted ideas about skill and authorship before becoming vehicles for extraordinary art. AI will be shaped by artists whose choices are specific enough to resist its defaults, and those artists may create work we cannot yet imagine. The presence of a tool has never settled the question of artistic value; the depth and consequence of the decisions made with it still matter.

We are entering a period in which polished images and endless variations are available on command. The works we retain or collect may be those that let us encounter another person’s limits: the place where control faltered or the artist had to surrender to something unresolved. 

I think our nostalgia for mess is growing from a hunger for evidence that making something still requires time, effort, commitment, and—dare I say it—love.

Everyone has a vision of the ultimate future, some picture of what the world looks like at its best (or worst), and whether that future is even reachable. In religious studies, we call this an “eschatology.” 

Eschatology isn’t just the Book of Revelation or the Rapture. The Greek meaning of eschaton is “last things,” and today the word captures the set of beliefs a person holds about where things are headed and what that implies for the present. 

You don’t have to be religious to have an eschatology. Political optimism is an eschatology, whatever side you’re on. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, thinks the future is something we build our way toward with free childcare and buses. Stephen Miller, one of the architects of the current immigration crackdown, thinks it’s something we had and lost, but can get back through sealing the border and mass deportations. Neither one just describes the future. Both are telling you what you’re obligated to do about it right now. In other words, your eschatology shapes your ethics, because what you believe is coming determines what you feel obligated to do today.

Silicon Valley has an eschatology too, and some of its leading figures have been pretty candid about what it is: AI surpasses humanity, humans become obsolete as a species, and what matters is making sure your version of AI is the one that wins. Understanding that vision as an eschatology, not just a business strategy, explains why some of the most powerful people alive seem so unbothered by what we seem to be losing—our attention spans, our critical thinking, our basic competence at things we used to just know how to do—and so uninterested in being accountable to anyone about it. 

Shades of Silicon Valley eschatology

To be sure, Silicon Valley CEOs each express their own flavor of this view of AI’s power.

Let’s start with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, because he was explicit about where he believes AI is going years before most people had even heard of a chatbot. In 2015, at a startup conference, he told the audience: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” This doomsday eschatology was the basis for his business plan: race to the top because extinction is coming. 

Since then, Altman’s views have shifted widely. “Working towards prosperity for everyone, empowering all people, and advancing science and technology are moral obligations for me,” he wrote in an April 2026 blog post. “AI will be the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen. Demand for this tool will be essentially uncapped, and people will do incredible things with it. The world deserves huge amounts of AI, and we must figure out how to make it happen.” 

This is a very different eschatology and a very different business pitch: we must invest in AI because it will help humans do powerful things. 

And then there’s the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, whose life’s work makes sense once you see the eschatology underneath it. The OpenAI co-founder has said that human extinction is a very real threat that he’s personally trying to prevent. “If you think about the future of humanity, it’s going to fundamentally bifurcate in two directions,” he said back in 2013. “Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to be confined to one planet, until some eventual extinction event.” 

You could argue that SpaceX exists as insurance against that second path, a hedge against asteroids, supervolcanoes, pandemics, or an AI that decides to take us out. In this case, his eschatology is that salvation is possible if we can colonize space, but only for those who can get there. This may also be why he has said empathy is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” As bleak as I may personally find this perspective, it is in line with his eschatology. After all, it is illogical to care for others when most of humanity won’t survive.

Since Musk made his now-famous 2013 remarks, he has continued his claims about an AI apocalypse. And during his recent high-profile lawsuit against Altman, OpenAI, and its president, Greg Brockman, for altering OpenAI’s original non-profit structure, Musk referred to his ominous eschatology once more. 

“The worst-case situation is where it is a terminator situation,” said Musk in April, “where AI will kill us all.” 

“We are not going to talk much about extinction in this case,” interrupted Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. “They got it, that’s enough.” 

By May, an Oakland jury unanimously dismissed Musk’s case. But based on his worldview, you could understand why Musk maintains that OpenAI should remain not-for-profit. OpenAI’s lawyers had another theory: maybe Musk is jealous of OpenAI’s financial success? 

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel has arguably taken eschatology the furthest. He’s taken to giving lectures arguing that the Antichrist of the 21st century is a “Luddite who wants to stop all science.” And he gives examples: AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and climate activist Greta Thunberg. In his framework, caution and regulation are the apocalyptic threat. This is perhaps why, when Pope Leo XIV used his first encyclical this year to call for international AI oversight, Thiel said the Pope was effectively a “Chinese communist agent,” restraining America so that China can beat us in the technology arms race. That seems like a strange thing to say about a pope, until you realize in Thiel’s version of the future anyone suggesting limits is getting in the way.

What our eschatologies excuse 

Three tech leaders, three different pictures of humanity’s ultimate destiny—resignation, survivalism, apocalypticism. But I would assert that they share the same consequences. For one, in each version, the future isn’t something we build together. It’s something they get to build on our behalf. 

And notice who is left out of each version. Altman’s future has room for “great companies” and “expanding human capability,” but arguably less concern for the people whose jobs AI might make irrelevant in the process. Musk’s future may have some room for wealthy people who can book a seat on a colony ship but less for the rest of us. Thiel’s future has room for innovation, but little for those who want to question what we are innovating for and towards. In every case, the very people who have a stake in the future are not part of building that vision of that future.

This also helps explain why some tech bros seem so disinterested in philanthropy or profit-sharing. If you genuinely believe the human era is ending and something else is taking its place, it stands to reason you have no need to feel obligated to the people around you. Why invest in public health, or housing, or building a robust civil society, if the relevant future doesn’t include most of the people who’d benefit? Why fund a school, or fix a subway, or pay taxes toward anything you won’t personally need in twenty years? This eschatology doesn’t just fail to produce ethics. It actively excuses their absence. Empathy stops looking like a virtue and starts looking like a waste of resources on people who, in this version of the future, don’t really count.

And this is where the theology does its real work: it doesn’t just predict the future, it shapes what futures are possible by dictating actions today. If humanity’s time is about to expire regardless of what anyone does, then choosing not to help others doesn’t feel like a moral failure. It feels like realism. That’s the result of every eschatology like these: it allows cruelty to feel like an accurate read of the situation rather than a choice.

What makes this eschatology dangerous is that it is held by the people with the most resources to act on it. Musk, Altman, and Thiel aren’t theologians speculating about the end times. They’re building the thing their theology tells them is coming, funding the politics that protects their ability to build it, and treating anyone who asks them to slow down as a luddite or Antichrist rather than a citizen with a legitimate concern. A belief that the present doesn’t matter, held by people with the power to shape it, doesn’t stay a belief. It becomes policy, product, and precedent, with tech bros deciding the future on behalf of everyone else, without anyone else’s consent.

Volodymyr Zelensky may be under pressure to hold elections in Ukraine, including from his former defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, but in remarks over the weekend, the Ukrainian President argued that doing so during the ongoing conflict with Russia would “destroy” the country.

“I believe that in a war like this, elections as such are a huge risk,” Zelensky said in remarks to journalists during a two-hour meeting Saturday—parts of which were made public on Sunday. “Elections right now are a tsunami for the country that will split Ukraine.”

Read More: Zelensky Faces Pressure to Hold Elections. What Stands in the Way?

The renewed push for wartime elections was bolstered by Fedorov, who, in a video posted to social media last week, argued that  "democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia.” Zelensky fired Fedorov, once his longtime ally, in July over disagreements in how to run the war with Russia.

“I believe that if we want to destroy the country, then during such a war we can move towards elections,” Zelensky said. 

Fedorov’s call for elections is the latest leadership test for Zelensky, whose five-year term expired in May 2024 but continues under wartime rules. Elections are suspended under martial law. 

Zelensky recently fired a top aide amid a growing corruption scandal involving members of his office. Zelensky himself has not been implicated, but it has added to his political woes.

For the first time with journalists, Zelensky addressed the ongoing controversy involving Fedorov on Saturday, claiming that the former defense minister’s actions were misguided. 

Zelensky added that “there can be no conflict at such a level between leaders,” referring to Fedorov's conflict with the former Armed Forces commander-in-chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky. Zelensky also replaced Syrsky last month after Fedorov’s removal spurred massive protests within the military and on the streets of Kyiv.

Syrsky was widely viewed as part of the old guard, while Fedorov had pushed for the adoption of modern warfare technology, including drones.

“I really had and still have a very positive attitude towards Mykhailo [Fedorov],” he said, according to local news outlet Interfax. “We’ve been through a lot together. But I think that he himself is going—or he's being pushed—into the wrong things.”

In a post on X, Zelensky also mentioned that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense was under severe strain with a $27 billion shortfall. 

“At the beginning of the year, decisions were made at the Ministry to use in the first half of the year funds that were intended to be disbursed in the second half, and that money went toward drone production and other needs,” Zelensky posted. “Now, in the second half of the year, those funds need to be compensated for and supplemented.”

Zelensky discussed the defense budget deficit during a summit with Nordic and Baltic leaders in Kyiv on Sunday, where the leaders of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden agreed to continue to provide military and financial support. 

U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham is set to visit Ukraine Monday, in his first international visit. 

“Russia should be in no doubt of our resolve. We will not back down until there is a just and lasting peace,” Burnham said in a statement Monday.

Successive polls have shown a lack of public interest in holding elections during the war. The latest, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology from July 20 to Aug. 3, shows that 57% of Ukrainians believe elections should be held after fighting has ended, down from 69% in March. Experts have previously said that the invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin launched in 2022, nixed the possibility of holding safe and secure elections in Ukraine. 

Zelensky has denied postponing the polls to cling to power, and told reporters on Saturday that holding elections “is impossible under the conditions we have now, when Putin does not want to accept any ceasefire options.”

In the same conversation, Zelensky said he believes Russia will draft an additional 300,000 troops to fight in Ukraine after Russian parliamentary elections, which are scheduled on Sept. 18-20.

Zelensky said Russia could also draft more ​troops in 2027. He expects most of the additional forces to be deployed in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, where military clashes are ongoing.