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

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

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

How do you get a Vibrio vulnificus infection?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to prevent a Vibrio vulnificus infection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WINNER: El-Sayed

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

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

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

LOSER: Stevens

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

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

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

WINNERS: Populists

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

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

LOSER: AIPAC

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

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

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

WINNER: CAIR

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

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

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

LOSERS: Establishment Democrats

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

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

ACTING LIKE WINNERS: Republicans

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

LOSER: Whitmer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senate control at stake

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

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

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

Trump celebrates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't wait for the right moment

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

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

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

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

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

Lead with the obvious—and then let them talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say the four things that matter most

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

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

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

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

Reassure them about what they're leaving behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to know about Maria Callas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To waiver or not to waiver

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pressure to lower gas prices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to get enough morning light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That should concern anyone who cares about fair housing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is there a chemotherapy drug shortage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the way forward?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of the states have Democratic attorneys general or governors.

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

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

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

Trump's legal battles over tariffs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Project

Humboldt County, Northern Nevada

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

Black Hills Mines

Southwestern South Dakota

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

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

Hell's Kitchen Lithium Project

Imperial Valley, California

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

South32 Hermosa

Patagonia, Arizona

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

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

Stibnite Mine

Valley County, Idaho

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

— With reporting by Kaya Lee Berne

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

The announcement didn’t make much news initially. CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison operators in the country, announced early last month that the U.S. government was buying two of its facilities for $1.5 billion. Both sites are set to be used the same way they have for years—as detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The deal was the latest twist in the Trump Administration’s fumbling efforts to dramatically expand the number of migrants it can hold at once. Over the last year and a half, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has veered from planning to reopen more than a dozen shuttered prisons, to housing thousands of migrants in sprawling tent facilities, to retrofitting nearly a dozen commercial warehouses into new detention centers. Despite billions of dollars spent, each strategy has largely fallen by the wayside, stymied by legal and political headwinds. 

The latest plan, according to ICE sources and officials with private prison companies, is for ICE to take over private detention facilities while building new ones alongside them. Officials with CoreCivic and the GEO Group, the two biggest owners of private ICE detention facilities, have both discussed selling more sites to the U.S. government.

ICE is paying CoreCivic $739.2 million for the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and $732.6 million for the California City Detention Facility in Kern County. Both facilities have been in operation for more than a decade and together hold a daily average of more than 1,200 immigrants, according to the latest ICE data. CoreCivic will continue managing these facilities.

The company also acknowledged in its statement that it has been negotiating with ICE regarding "additional" sales of its detention facilities. GEO Group, said during its earnings call in May that ICE had been in touch with the company about purchasing some of its 19 detention facilities.

Immigration advocates say the Trump Administration is buying private detention centers to clamp down on oversight of what goes on inside them. “Once the facility is entirely owned by the federal government, that limits the ability of state and local inspectors to try to gain some insight as to what is happening in there, or seek changes to conditions that may be potentially violative of people's rights," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, tells TIME.

As immigration enforcement operations have surged nationwide since Trump’s second inauguration, several states have passed laws empowering local officials to inspect privately-owned detention facilities. So far, efforts by private firms to shrug off these laws aren’t working. Soon after California passed a health inspection law in 2024 targeting privately-owned prisons, GEO Group challenged the law in court, but the case was eventually dismissed by a federal judge. GEO Group is battling similar cases in Colorado, New Jersey and Washington state.

“As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities,” George Zoley, CEO of GEO Group, said during the company's earnings call in May. Zoley made clear his thinking on the advantage of federal ownership was all about reducing “unprecedented” lawsuits and oversight. He claimed that transferring the private facilities to the federal government would provide "stronger protections" under the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution.

In a statement to TIME, a DHS spokesperson attributed the acquisition of the two facilities to “sanctuary politicians” who push legislations that make privately-owned prisons “financially infeasible.”

“Now, with federal ownership of these detention centers, which are crucial to ICE’s detention network on the West Coast, ICE retains the detention capacity needed to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens,” the statement added. 

Earlier expansion plans hit roadblocks

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, ICE has set a goal of doubling its detention capacity to more than 100,000 beds by the end of 2025, according to an internal document reported by the Washington Post. That goal has yet to be achieved seven months into 2026. White House border czar Tom Homan conceded earlier this month that ICE currently has "about 70,000 beds" and that he is pushing for more.

The agency's original plan was to build makeshift "soft-sided" detention facilities—tents, essentially—on military bases. That plan was quietly halted after the largest soft-sided facility at the Fort Bliss military base in Texas reported three deaths of detained immigrants and dozens of federal detention-standard deficiencies, according to an internal ICE review. Last summer, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote in a letter to Rep. Herb Conaway, a New Jersey Democrat, that similar tent facilities were being considered at other military bases, including Camp Atterbury in Indiana and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. So far, no such tent facilities have been built. 

ICE then decided in January to execute Plan B: purchasing 11 commercial warehouses for $1 billion and converting them into detention facilities. The agency was quickly hit with eight lawsuits from local and state governments over the environmental impact of those projects on nearby communities. The New York Times reported that, following these lawsuits, ICE is planning to sell or give away seven of the 11 warehouses. It is unclear whether the agency will continue to move forward on its plan for the remaining four.

A former senior ICE official familiar with the agency’s efforts to expand detention capacity and granted anonymity to speak freely said that some of the warehouses ICE purchased had structural issues that may have prevented them from meeting federal detention standards. “Just because it was a quick way to politicize what the government wanted to do, it doesn't mean it was a well thought-out plan,” the former official added.

Now, there are signs ICE is laying the groundwork to execute Plan C: renting or purchasing existing facilities, while building new ones alongside them. The latest draft government contract revealed that ICE is planning to build additional detention units in as many as 14 locations across the United States, including the Virgin Islands and Guantanamo Bay. The potential locations include a mix of facilities already in use and ones that ICE shut down more than a decade ago; it is unclear whether the agency plans to build additional facilities at all 14 sites.

Reichlin-Melnick says ICE’s latest plan shows it’s leaning toward permanent brick-and-mortar structures, having abandoned the idea of expanding capacity through tents. Yet he is skeptical this latest effort will succeed, given the logistical costs of transporting detainees to facilities scattered so far apart. "Even with the money ICE has right now, it would cause them to burn through their funds very quickly. So I'm skeptical that all 14 of these facilities will be built out to the extent suggested," he added.

Evasion of oversight

ICE's latest move to purchase detention centers from private contractors comes against the backdrop of a renewed push in deportation operations nationwide. According to ICE data, the agency arrested more than 39,000 people in June, the most arrests in a single month in the agency’s history. The rapid increase in arrests also drove up the total number of people in ICE custody to 65,765 — one of the highest levels this year. The influx of detainees is straining resources in ICE facilities nationwide, which have long reported overcrowding and a lack of adequate medical resources and legal representation.

Despite public pressure, ICE continues to instruct its private contractors to disregard state laws in its latest procurement documents. According to a draft contract published on July 10, ICE states that local or state laws and regulations "shall not apply" to private contractors while they are housing detainees, language that had appeared before, in a contract ICE signed with GEO Group for the Washington state facility in March, while that lawsuit was still ongoing. WIRED was first to report the language in the draft contract.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official, said one of the key reasons so many problems persist at ICE detention centers is the reduction of oversight from internal watchdog offices. The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, created by Congress in 2020 to investigate facilities that fall short of detention standards, and the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which protects the civil rights of detained immigrants, were both dismantled under Kristi Noem's leadership.

"Not only are there reduced people in the facilities looking for problems, there is also a lack of interest in making sure that the facilities are performing to the standards," Trickler-McNulty said.

The only remaining ICE office that conducts routine inspections, the Office of Detention Oversight, has been conducting fewer inspections than under previous administrations. A CBS News analysis found that 15 of the 45 detention facilities holding 500 or more people hadn't been inspected in over 12 months — a gap that experts say weakens internal mechanisms for holding contractors accountable.

A DHS spokesperson said immigrants who are in ICE custody receive “comprehensive medical care” as well as legal assistance and religious accommodations. The spokesperson also said ICE detention facilities “undergo regular inspections” as required by the national detention standards. 

“Being in detention is a choice,” the spokesperson said. “The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer.”

Trickler-McNulty added that the civil deportation process doesn't have to be as aggressive and violent toward individuals as it is right now, especially given that the majority of detained immigrants have no criminal record.

"I see way more 'Abolish ICE' [signs] now than I saw before," she said. "People are mad, and this is all just a choice of how to enforce immigration law. It really doesn't have to be this way."

Israel hit Gaza with airstrikes over the weekend that killed more than two dozen Palestinians, Palestinian health officials said.

The intensified bombings came days after President Donald Trump announced that Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza had agreed to disarm. The announcement paves the way to implement the remaining provisions of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which Israel and Hamas signed in October 2025. But the broader framework also requires obligations from Israel, including a halt to its attacks and a phased withdrawal of its military from the enclave, that Israel appears not to have fully complied with since signing the agreement. The framework also outlines a possible pathway toward Palestinian statehood, which the Israeli government has repeatedly rejected.

On Friday, Trump said that Israel was “very happy” with the deal, which he called a “big step for the Middle East.”

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not publicly responded to Trump’s announcement as of Tuesday and other officials have voiced objections to the plan.

Instead, Israel has appeared to buck Trump—not for the first time—by sharply intensifying its deadly attacks on Gaza. The weekend airstrikes are just the latest Israeli attacks since the October cease-fire, which was meant to halt fighting after the war killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Since then, the Palestinian death toll has risen to 73,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, while five Israeli soldiers have been killed, including one in friendly fire, since the cease-fire, according to Israeli officials. The war began after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing around 1,200 people.

Nickolay Mladenov, lead envoy of the U.S.-led Board of Peace, suggested that Israel’s continued attacks could undermine peace efforts in the region. The Board published a 15-point roadmap on Friday outlining the final steps for implementing the plan, which includes the transfer of Gaza’s civilian and security functions to a technocratic committee, the deployment of an International Stabilization Force, and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Mladenov met with Netanyahu in Israel on Monday and reportedly urged the Israeli leader to stop attacking Gaza. But it’s unclear whether Israel will heed Mladenov’s request. In a statement after the meeting, an Israeli official told Israeli media that “Israel will not withdraw from the current line in the Gaza Strip and will continue to thwart any threat to our civilians and soldiers.” While Israeli forces initially withdrew to the Yellow Line established under the cease-fire agreement, Israel has since expanded its control to nearly 70% of the territory. Hamas previously said it would only disarm if Israel withdraws to the agreed-upon line and halted attacks.

More bombs fall

July became the deadliest month this year for Palestinians in Gaza, with more than 150 fatalities. Most of the recent Israeli strikes have targeted western Gaza, where almost all of the enclave’s two million residents reside, United Nations deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Monday. Israel also destroyed at least 1,500 buildings in parts of Gaza under its control after the cease-fire, according to a BBC Verify report from November.

Israeli strikes over the weekend killed at least 25 people, including four people in Deir-al-Balah, according to Palestinian health officials. A strike on a house in Mawasi killed a couple and their 9-year-old son. Another strike on an apartment in Gaza city killed another couple and their child. Several more people were killed in strikes on a tent near an Egyptian mission, a car near Saraya Square, and elsewhere in Gaza City and Jabalia. 

The Israeli military said the strike in Deir-al-Balah was targeting two Hamas commanders, and that the deadly strikes on Gaza City and Jabalia were targeting “military operatives.”

Israel casts doubt on Trump plan

Israeli officials expressed skepticism towards Trump’s disarmament plan on Sunday. Energy Minister Eli Cohen told Israel’s Army Radio that he was “very skeptical” Hamas would disarm and said Israel did not agree to halt attacks on Gaza. Rather, he argued that Israel would need to take full military control of Gaza if Hamas does not disarm.

Also on Sunday, Doron Spielman, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s office, told Reuters that “nothing can happen before Hamas completely and truly disarms.”

On Monday, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Settlements Minister Orit Strouk sent a formal letter to Netanyahu calling on him to convene the security cabinet and bar the entry of the International Stabilization Force into Gaza. The security cabinet had approved the deployment of the force in a pilot zone in Rafah a week earlier.

“You can wrap tomorrow’s fish with this agreement; it has no meaning. Not a single soldier will move from Beit Hanoun or Khan Younis [in Gaza],” lawmaker Amit Halevi of Netanyahu’s Likud party said in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan, according to CNN.

Netanyahu faces the challenge of balancing competing demands: avoid alienating Israel’s most powerful ally while also maintaining domestic political support, including from the far-right members of his coalition, ahead of an election at the end of October.

Humanity has been putting metal on the moon ever since Sept. 13, 1959, when the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 spacecraft completed a 36-hour translunar journey, performing a planned crash landing between the Sea of Rains and the Sea of Serenity on the moon’s near side. Since then, nearly 70 spacecraft and spent boosters have soft landed or crash landed on the moon—including six ships carrying people. This week one more big hunk of hardware is set to join them: the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, on track for an unplanned lunar impact on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 2:35 a.m. ET, after a 19-month journey.

The 230-ft. Falcon 9 lifted off from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 15, 2025, packed with a pair of spacecraft bound for the moon. One of them, the Blue Ghost lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, landed on the moon on March 2, 2025, becoming the first privately built ship to pull off a completely successful lunar touchdown. The other, the Resilience lander, built by the Japanese company ispace, wasn’t so fortunate, crash-landing on the moon on June 5, 2025, after its laser range-finder failed. At the beginning of their missions, once the ships had climbed to near-Earth space, both of them relied on the Falcon 9’s 45-ft. upper stage to blast them away from the Earth and outward to the moon. After releasing the two lunar landers, that Falcon stage was supposed to fall harmlessly away, but instead it’s hung around.

Why is the SpaceX rocket booster crashing into the moon? 

Typically, a Falcon 9’s second stage used for a deep space mission would enter a highly elliptical orbit of the Earth and ultimately be brought down by atmospheric drag for a fiery reentry. But for reasons not quite clear, this stage managed to avoid the atmosphere on its closer approaches to Earth, and persist in an orbit that brought it nearer and nearer the moon. 

On April 29, 2026 astronomer Bill Gray first predicted the second stage’s lunar crack-up and the precise date and time it would happen. Gray is the author of the Project Pluto website, which relies on telescope surveys by amateur astronomers, and software he wrote to compute orbits of objects the U.S. military doesn’t track. Using this information, he was also able to forecast the precise spot the spent booster will hit the moon: near the Einstein Crater at the far western lunar horizon.

What is the history of rockets crashing into the moon?

This is not the first time a spent rocket stage will strike the lunar surface. During the Apollo landings in the 1960s and 1970s, the empty third stage of the Saturn V rocket was deliberately targeted for a lunar impact, with the goal of setting off small moonquakes that could be detected by the seismographs left by earlier landing missions. 

Analyzing a temblor that resulted from a known object of a known mass striking the moon at a known speed can reveal valuable information about the structure of the lunar interior. During the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970, commander Jim Lovell was informed of the successful impact while piloting his crippled spacecraft around the moon. “Well,” he said to the ground, “at least something worked on this flight.”

Can you see the SpaceX lunar crash from Earth?

For the Falcon 9 upper stage, like the Saturn V third stage, the size and speed metrics are known. Like all liquid-fueled rockets, the stage is essentially hollow—basically a giant fuel tank with an engine at its business end. That means it carries much less mass than a solid object of the same size, like an asteroid. Still, it weighs nearly 45 tons and is moving at 5,400 miles per hour. With that size and speed, Gray calculates, its impact will release a blast equal to 15,000 sticks of dynamite—or three tons. That will produce a considerable debris plume.

“Let's say that rocks are blasted out at 100 meters a second (224 mph),” Gray writes on the Project Pluto site. “On the moon, if you are a rock shooting upward at that speed, you will rise for about one minute, reaching a height of three kilometers (1.9 mi.). You'll then plummet down for a minute and be returned to the moon.”

That raises the possibility of observing the flash and plume with telescopes and even binoculars from Earth. “The impact probably won't be visible from Earth,” Gray writes. “The ejecta plume might be. Surprises are possible; it will probably be at least worth taking a look.”

Other researchers predict a much more dramatic event. In a study appearing on the pre-publication site arxiv, computer models suggest an ejecta spike rising as high as 100 km (62 mi.) and spreading 183 km (114 mi.) laterally from the impact point.

The site of the impact will make a difference in visibility. Located so close to the western edge—or limb—of the moon, the bright plume resulting from impact might extend out into the black background of space, setting up a stark, easily discernible light-dark contrast.

Whatever the size of the blast, skygazers will certainly be monitoring it —and so will at least one spacecraft, NASA’s trusty Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). LRO has been circling the moon since 2009, and has returned albums of remarkable images—including overhead shots of the six Apollo landing sites. The satellite will not be in position to witness the Aug. 5 impact as it takes place, but it did pass over the site on July 29 and will be over it again on Aug. 12. Those sequential passes will allow comparison shots and measurements of the crater the rocket stage produces. Gray predicts a pit more than 50 ft. across.

“After the impact we might have a little bit more knowledge of where it is,” LRO project scientist Brent Garry told Space.com. “We can do some additional targeting about a week after the impact.” 

Analyzing the scale of the blast and the size of the scar it leaves can yield valuable scientific data about the gravitational and geological physics of the moon. It can also address questions of future astronaut safety—just how many dozens or hundreds of miles lunar explorers will have to be from an impact site to be safe.

For now, nothing can get in the way of the inevitable hit at the appointed time. Rocket scientists have been skeet-shooting the moon for 67 years now. With both the U.S. and China aiming for crewed lunar landings before 2030 and uncrewed cargo deliveries to support them—with who knows how many more spent rocket stages tumbling out of the skies over the moon—our punchdrunk nearest neighbor is in for more poundings.

This summer, as record-breaking heat sweeps across Europe and the United States, millions of people are searching for a way to cool off. They crowd into public pools, and libraries turned into cooling centers. They run their air conditioners around the clock—if they have them. They flee to the mountains or the coast for relief, only to find that many of those traditional escapes are under heat advisories.

For many, the very real dangers of extreme heat (early analyses of Europe’s June heatwave estimate a death toll of at least 20,000) will pass with the season. But for millions of others, heat is not just something to survive for a few weeks. It has become a reason to leave home altogether.

Scientists have identified a “human climate niche”—the range of rainfall, humidity, and temperatures in which human societies have thrived for thousands of years. Climate change is rapidly shrinking that niche. 

By 2070, up to one-third of humanity could be living outside these conditions most suitable for human survival if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Extreme heat is central to that shift. Scientists have long warned that sustained wet-bulb temperatures of 35°C (95°F) or more—when heat and humidity combine to prevent the human body from cooling itself—are not survivable. Several cities have already breached this threshold, and emerging evidence suggests the body’s breaking point may be even lower. Long before entire regions become physiologically uninhabitable, however, they become economically, socially, and practically impossible to live in.

People rarely move because of heat alone. They move because heat makes it too costly to stay. Whether someone can remain in place increasingly depends on whether they can afford to adapt. Extreme heat is not just a climate hazard, it is a force multiplier for inequality. Wealthier households can cool their homes, absorb higher utility bills, and relocate temporarily during heat waves. Wealthier cities can invest in solutions to keep cool. However, billions of people around the globe have no such options. For them, each hotter year brings a new set of compounding losses.

Crops fail after repeated heat waves. Livestock die. Construction workers, street vendors, and farmers lose income as dangerous temperatures shorten working hours or make outdoor labor impossible. Families spend more on water, food, electricity, and healthcare while earning less than before. Pregnant women face higher risks of miscarriage and preterm birth. Children suffer heat-related illness and education losses as schools shut down. Older adults become increasingly vulnerable. And when scorching days are followed by nights that never cool, the body doesn’t have a chance to recover. 

Migration is rarely the result of a single heat wave. It is the culmination of years of mounting losses that steadily erode income, health, and hope.

Consider Santuben Kantibhai, a farmer from Gujarat, India. Over the past two years, her family has endured a cascade of climate and economic shocks. A severe heatwave destroyed much of their standing crop, causing her family’s income to plummet. At the same time, her father—a co-earner who relied on farm labor and daily wage work—developed cataracts that gradually robbed him of his eyesight, making it increasingly difficult for him to help their family earn a living. When another heatwave struck in 2025, crop yields fell again just as his condition required surgery. For Santuben, the question is not whether heat is becoming more dangerous; she already knows it is. It is how many more failed harvests and lost workdays can her family absorb before staying becomes impossible.

The encouraging news is that we are far from powerless. We already know many of the solutions. Trees can cool neighborhoods by several degrees. Cool roofs, shaded streets, and passive building design reduce dangerous temperatures. Early warning systems save lives. For Santuben, financial tools—in her case, parametric insurance—cushioned income losses during extreme heat and allowed her to cover her father’s medical expenses, which enabled him to return to work and recoup some of the income heat had wiped out. The value of that support extended beyond protecting her family’s income, it helped preserve their ability to decide whether to remain on their land rather than being forced to leave because they had exhausted every other option. 

The challenge is not a lack of solutions but a lack of resources. The communities most exposed to extreme heat are often those least able to finance adaptation, making increased domestic investment and international climate finance essential. None of these measures replace the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nor can they fully erase the pressures heat puts on families, but together they can often give people the choice to stay.

To succeed, however, solutions must also reflect that heat does not affect everyone equally. Just as economic status can impact whether someone is forced from their homes, so too can social factors, including gender, race, disability, and legal status, which often intersect to increase exposure to heat risks and reduce access to support systems. 

Women, for instance, already account for an estimated 80% of people displaced by climate change and are significantly more likely to die during climate-related hazards. Women and girls often bear a disproportionate burden because they are more likely to shoulder unpaid caregiving, water collection, and cooking—responsibilities that continue even during dangerous heat. Cultural expectations around clothing and freedom of movement within a community can further increase their exposure. Adaptation strategies that ignore these realities risk leaving the most vulnerable behind.

Even when people leave home to escape the impacts of extreme heat, they may remain dangerously exposed. Many migrants face lethal temperatures on the journey itself, whether moving within a country from rural to urban areas where livelihoods are not as dependent on temperature, or crossing the Sonoran Desert or other increasingly hostile routes across borders. 

Others arrive only to find themselves working in some of the hottest and most dangerous occupations. In 2021, Sebastian Perez, an undocumented farmworker from Guatemala, died after working outdoors during Oregon’s record-breaking heat wave when temperatures soared to 107°F and the asphalt softened beneath workers' feet. Heat followed him across borders.

Migration has always been part of the human story. But people should not be forced to abandon their homes, livelihoods, cultures, and communities because heat has become impossible to endure. 

The World Bank estimates that, under a high-emissions scenario, as many as 216 million people could be internally displaced by climate impacts in the next quarter century. But it also finds that ambitious adaptation and emissions reductions could cut that number by as much as 80%. When people leave because climate impacts force them out, migration is not adaptation. It is evidence that adaptation came too late.

We already know how to reduce the risks of extreme heat. We know how to build cooler cities, protect workers, strengthen livelihoods, and cut the fossil fuel consumption driving temperatures ever higher. What has been missing is not knowledge, but political will. If we fail to act, the question will no longer be where we go to escape the heat. It will be whether any place remains beyond its reach.

Three victims died and seven others were injured on Saturday, after a man began shooting at an In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho. Police said the suspect died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Shortly before 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, the Twin Falls Police Department received multiple 911 calls about shots fired near the fast food restaurant, which had just opened in Twin Falls the week before.

Of the seven people who were injured, two have received treatment and have been released from the hospital; three are in stable condition; and two are in critical condition, the Twin Falls Police Department said on Sunday. Authorities said the same day that they weren’t sharing the identities of the victims at the moment, out of respect for the families, some of whom had not yet been notified.

The family of one of the victims shared the name of their loved one who was killed in the shooting: Ashley Garibay, who was an In-N-Out employee. In a statement, her family described Garibay as “an amazing, beautiful soul who loved living life.”

“She was adventurous, outgoing, smart and driven, never letting obstacles get in her way,” her family said. “She lit up a room with her bright smile and a laugh that was contagious. She was a friend to all, and no matter what difficulties she was facing, she always found a way to help others find the light in the darkness.”

 “In-N-Out Burger was Ashley’s first job, and she fell in love with it,” her family continued. “She proudly traveled to open new stores, and her dream was to one day manage an In-N-Out store. She was passionate about serving Customers and left this world doing what she loved to do.”

On Sunday, Lynsi Snyder, the president of In-N-Out, had revealed in a social media post that one of the victims who was killed in the shooting was a restaurant employee, though she didn’t share the name of the employee. Snyder said that the restaurant “lost one of our beautiful Associates.”

“She was taking care of our most important asset—our Customers, and her life was taken by a disgusting human who doesn’t value the lives of others or his own,” Snyder said. “He shot both on our property and off, and ended his life shortly after he took the precious lives of our Associate and Customers, innocent people who never saw it coming.”

“IN-N-OUT will be mourning with the families and praying for them as they tread through a very painful season,” Snyder continued.

While authorities were conducting their search for the suspect on Saturday, an officer-involved shooting occurred, but police said no one was wounded and they didn’t share further details about the incident.

Authorities also credited two bystanders with intervening during the shooting, saying that “their heroic actions” likely helped prevent more people from being injured in the incident.

Little information has so far been shared about the suspect and about the bystanders, who authorities have not publicly identified. Here’s what we know about them so far.

Who was the shooter?

The Twin Falls Police Department identified the suspect as a 24-year-old man named Chad Williams. While the authorities didn’t share any details about a possible motive for the shooting, they said that they “are confident the suspect acted alone.”

“Investigators are continuing to review evidence, conduct interviews, and determine the full circumstances, including possible motivation,” the department said in a social media post on Sunday.

Twin Falls Police Chief Matthew Hicks said at a press conference on Sunday that the suspect’s family was cooperating with investigators.

Police also dispelled misinformation that had been circulating online about the suspect’s identity, saying that some social media posts had erroneously identified a different individual as the suspect. Authorities urged the public not to share any unconfirmed information about the shooting.

Who are the bystanders who intervened?

The Twin Falls Police Department said that two bystanders—an off-duty state trooper and a private citizen—”returned gunfire toward the suspect” during the shooting on Saturday. 

Authorities didn’t release the identities of the bystanders, but thanked them for intervening.

“We commend their heroic actions, which we believe helped drive the suspect away from the scene and prevent further casualties,” the department said in its social media post.

One of the bystanders came forward to share his account of the incident with the Idaho Statesman. Jordan Salinas and his girlfriend were driving into the In-N-Out for lunch on Saturday when they saw people running out of the restaurant and heard gunshots. Salinas told the news outlet that his “automatic” response was to run toward the building, pulling out his semi-automatic pistol.

Salinas, who cares for his wheelchair-bound brother full-time, told the Idaho Statesman that he took firearm training seriously after a shooting occurred at the Boise Towne Square mall five years ago. He worried that shooters would target a person in a wheelchair.

On Saturday, he saw the suspect near the In-N-Out drive-through window, shooting at nearby cars. Salinas fired at the suspect.

“He did not like it when bullets started firing both ways,” Salinas told the Idaho Statesman.

He told the news outlet that he wasn’t afraid during the shooting, thinking to himself “there’s a task that needs to be done, and we’re the ones who need to do it.” When officers responded to the scene, Salinas stepped back so that they could take over.

“My part,” he recounted thinking, “is done."

Not only are people unable to tell the difference between stories written by humans or artificial intelligence, they actually prefer it when the stories are created by AI. And that’s especially true when they are told that the stories had human authors, according to a new study from Villanova University.

The study consisted of multiple experiments, all of which indicated a preference for AI. In the first, 1,682 participants were told to rate both the quality of six short stories they were given and how “engaging” they were. They were told, either correctly or incorrectly, who or what had authored each one. 

Read More: Is AI Making Our Brains Weaker?

Not only were AI-generated stories found to be higher-quality (by 6%) and more engaging (by 8%), they were rated “even more highly,” researchers concluded, when participants believed that they were written by humans (by an additional 3%).

Deena Weisberg, the senior author of the study and an associate professor from Villanova’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, said in a press release that the finding “reveals a bias towards narratives written by real people.”

That may be because “we assume creative writing requires uniquely human qualities, such as emotional understanding and lived experience,” she said, explaining that it shows how “public assumptions about AI's capabilities are increasingly out of date.”

Furthermore, people were only able to identify AI-generated content roughly 40% and 52% of the time in two subsequent experiments, each with over 400 participants. People who said they were AI-literate had more success than people who claimed to have a background in literature. 

“Familiarity with AI systems appeared to help people recognize the patterns typical of AI-generated writing, such as em dashes and sentence structures such as ‘it’s not just X, it’s Y,’” Weisberg said. “That suggests that improving AI literacy would be one way to help people to navigate the new AI-enabled world that we’re living in.”

Cameron Jones, assistant professor of psychology at Stony Brook University tells TIME that the study’s findings are not necessarily surprising, considering the history of research going back years that shows people’s diminishing ability to tell between artificial intelligence and humans. 

He also points to the trajectory of his own studies, which look at whether people can differentiate between them in conversation. In those scenarios, he says, “The person actually gets to quiz the model and ask follow-up questions.” 

Even then, they had trouble distinguishing between human and generative content partners.

Jones says that this is because the large language models driving the content responses are trained to appeal to users.

“We basically get the model to generate little bits of text, and then we get people to read them, and they give a thumbs up if they like what the model's saying and they give a thumbs down if they don't like what the model's saying,” he says. 

It’s no surprise that people prefer the results, he explains, when “we're optimizing these models' outputs against our preferences.”

It can oversimplify output, but it leads to writing with higher overall appeal—whereas humans might write something truly exceptional that only caters to select tastes.

“Real humans are weird and idiosyncratic, and they're very different from one another,” Jones says. “But models can kind of learn to be this kind of milquetoast everyman who appeals to everybody.”

While the findings align with rising exposure to artificial intelligence, along with algorithmic reward systems for broadly approachable content on platforms like TikTok, Weisberg does not think that the current digital landscape is to blame for the results. She says, “Technologies amplify existing tendencies, rather than creating them.”

Plus, she adds, the human-authored content might have simply challenged readers more.

“AI writing tends to be clearer, more direct and easier to process,” she said. And it’s reasonable for participants to find themselves more deeply engaged with content that offers greater predictability and less friction. 

In other words, Weisberg says, “Difficult or subtle material requires more brainpower.”

Dr. Daniel Griffin doesn’t like to get sick. The first reason why is obvious—the congestion, the aching, the cough that overstays its welcome, the unpleasant stomach symptoms.

The second is a matter of professional dignity. "It's almost like a gardener with dead plants," says Griffin, chief of the division of infectious disease at Island Infectious Disease Medical in Long Island, N.Y. and president of Parasites Without Borders. "I really don't want to be sick—because then the infectious disease doctor got sick.”

So what do infectious disease doctors and experts like him do differently than the rest of us when it comes to preventing illness? Not as much as you'd think. Infectious disease specialists aren't disinfecting every surface or hiding from the outside world. Instead, they've built a collection of practical habits into their daily lives—simple routines that reduce risk without making life less enjoyable.

We asked six infectious disease experts which habits they never skip.

Set up your kitchen so cross-contamination can't happen

Jill Roberts tries to take the guesswork out of food safety. "One of the major causes of foodborne illness is cross-contamination," says Roberts, a molecular epidemiologist and professor at the University of South Florida College of Public Health. "It's when you have something that's raw and you get microbes from the raw thing into the ready-to-eat thing." 

Her favorite solution: color-coded cutting boards. Meat always goes on the red one; vegetables never do. "If your meat is always on the red cutting board, you're never gonna have your salad stuff on your red cutting board,” she says. 

Order matters just as much. She makes the salad first, puts it in the refrigerator, and only then brings out the red boards and raw meat. Once she starts handling meat, she’s vigilant about sanitizing any surfaces she may have contaminated—from the counters and sink to the faucet handles and refrigerator door.

Wash your produce under running water—not in a bowl

Some people think rinsing produce means filling a bowl with water and letting everything soak. But that's not the best approach. "What you actually need is that little bit of friction to break the surface," says Dr. Heidi Torres, an infectious disease physician and assistant professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. About 30 seconds under running water, while gently rubbing the produce with your hands, does far more than a passive soak.

The problem with a bowl is that you're washing everything in the same water. "If you have one piece that's contaminated, that water could contaminate the other vegetables," Torres says. Running water washes germs away instead of moving them from one piece of produce to another. It won't remove everything—Cyclospora, for example, doesn't simply rinse off—but it does reduce bacteria, viruses, and even some pesticide residue. 

Microwave your kitchen sponge

A sponge is a nearly perfect habitat for germs: damp, warm, and studded with food particles, sitting next to the counter where you just set down raw chicken. "Sponges and wet dishcloths are really good at growing bacteria," says Kelley Steury, a clinical associate professor in the school of public health at the University of Nevada, Reno, who specializes in veterinary preventive medicine. Her routine: Rinse her sponge until no food particles come out, then microwave it for 20 seconds. Just make sure it's wet. "If you did it when it was pretty dry, you could start a fire,” she says.

Brush your teeth like it's infection control

Most people brush their teeth to prevent cavities. Torres brushes hers to prevent infections.

"At least 25% of infections that I see are related to dental disease," she says. Here's why: Every day, small amounts of bacteria slip into your bloodstream, and a healthy immune system clears them without you ever noticing. Cavities and gum disease change the equation. They allow more bacteria—and more aggressive bacteria—to leak into the blood, which Torres describes as "a highway to all your organs." In some cases, she says, doctors can trace an infection back to the mouth because the bacteria involved simply don't live anywhere else.

That makes brushing about much more than fresh breath. "Rinsing alone wouldn’t replace it, because you really need that mechanical brushing to break down that film of bacteria," Torres says. Hospitals have even started treating basic oral care as a form of infection prevention, she says—which is a pretty compelling reason to take it seriously at home, too.

Rethink the rug in your bathroom

Your bath mat outside the tub should be washable, hung to dry between uses, and tossed in the laundry about once a week. "We don't leave the wet stuff on the floor, because that's gross," Roberts says. A damp bath mat can also spread athlete's foot from one person to another.

As for the old-fashioned rug wrapped around the base of the toilet? Roberts would get rid of it altogether. Rubber backings don’t often hold up well in the wash, which means it probably doesn't get cleaned as thoroughly as it should. "Especially if you have kids, they don't aim well," she says. "You have splash-overs." In other words: Nothing around the toilet should be soaking anything up.

Leave your shoes at the door

Shoes pick up a lot more than dirt. Every sidewalk has been shared with other people, their pets, and whatever else has passed through. Dr. Cesar J. Figueroa Ortiz, an infectious diseases specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, would rather not track any of that across the floors where his family walks and spends time—so shoes come off at the door.

His job reinforces the habit. Hospitals are meticulously cleaned, but there's always "the risk of bringing pathogens with you on your shoes," he says. 

Open a window before company comes over

Before guests arrive, most people wipe down the counters. Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, thinks they should be paying more attention to the air. "I respect air more than surfaces," he says. "You're probably going to have a bigger bang for your buck when you think about ventilation."

His solution is simple: crack a window. If the air conditioning is running, make sure it's bringing in fresh outdoor air rather than recirculating the same indoor air all evening, he adds.

Wash your hands like you're not in a hurry

Even infectious disease doctors don't always practice perfect hand hygiene. Griffin has watched colleagues race out of a public restroom because they were about to miss a lecture at a conference. "They're so anxious to get back out because they're missing whatever the lecture is, and they're not really doing proper hand hygiene," he says. "Even the people that should know better are rushing back out."

And when people do wash their hands, they're often rushing through that, too. "Nobody's singing 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' to time themselves," Griffin says (besides him).

His other rule is knowing when soap and water beat sanitizer. (Basically always.) Alcohol-based hand sanitizer doesn't kill everything: Norovirus—the highly contagious stomach bug behind many cruise ship outbreaks—is particularly resistant. Soap and water keep you safe, though, so if someone around you is vomiting or has diarrhea, Griffin says, head for the sink.

Use your shirt tail

Steury will happily look a little strange to save herself a bout with a germ. "Someone might look at me and think I'm crazy, but I'll use the bottom of a shirt, like my shirt tails," she says—or the hem of a cardigan, whatever's handy—around her hand when she has to touch certain surfaces.

She's selective about when she does it. What worries her are high-touch surfaces that are indoors and out of the sun: elevator buttons, soda fountain dispensers, and the door handle to a medical clinic, for instance. And if she does touch one of those surfaces directly, she waits until she can wash her hands before touching her eyes, nose, or mouth. 

Decline the grocery-store sample

Before you accept that free cube of cheese, think about the cart you're pushing.

"I always think about what happened to the grocery cart before you got there," Roberts says. "Somebody picked up raw chicken. Somebody picked up raw seafood. And all of that is on the cart. It's on the handle."

Then someone offers you a toothpick with a sample. "I'm supposed to take my hand off this dirty cart and then take that food and put it in my mouth?" she says. "There's no way."

Wear sandals in every locker-room shower

At the gym, Torres worries less about the person coughing on the treadmill than the surfaces her bare skin touches. Benches, mats, and other shared equipment can harbor MRSA and fungi like ringworm—even at the nicest gyms. She wipes equipment down before using it, not just afterward, and if there aren't disinfecting wipes available, she puts a towel between herself and the bench.

The locker-room shower gets its own rule. "It's this wet, damp floor, walking around the locker room, walking around the joint showers," she says. "I always recommend bringing a pair of sandals." Foot fungus is the biggest concern, and some infections can be surprisingly difficult to get rid of.

Wash any cuts before reaching for the antiseptic

Most of us instinctively reach for the antiseptic after nicking a finger. Chin-Hong heads for the sink instead. "The more important thing is to rinse it well with running water and soap, which is more important than the aggressive disinfectant," he says. Disinfectants don't kill everything, but running water can physically flush away germs before they have a chance to cause trouble.

His reasoning comes down to one simple idea. "Running things are better than stagnant things," Chin-Hong says. "We get infections when things are in stasis rather than in movement." It's the same reason standing water becomes a mosquito breeding ground. 

Pack a pair of tweezers

Torres never leaves for a weekend in tick country without packing a pair of tweezers. It might sound excessive, she admits, but after years of treating tickborne illnesses, it's become second nature. "This is a little unusual—maybe my colleagues don't do this," she says, "but whenever I go away for a weekend, I always pack a pair of tweezers."

These days, that means much of the country: the Northeast, the Midwest, the South, and parts of the West Coast. After spending time in tall grass or wooded areas, do a full-body tick check, paying special attention to places they like to hide, like under the arms and behind the knees. 

It matters more than you might think. "Most people that develop Lyme disease or tickborne illness have no recollection of ever being bitten by a tick or ever seeing a tick," Torres says. She's also vigilant against ticks to try to prevent alpha-gal syndrome—the tick-triggered allergy to red meat that has become increasingly common.

Reapply bug spray like it's sunscreen

Bug spray is a permanent fixture in Chin-Hong's travel bag. "I respect mosquitoes," he says. "They actually kill more people than any other animal." It's West Nile season, and dengue keeps extending its reach into new parts of the U.S., so he travels with insect repellent as a matter of course.

The biggest mistake people make, he says, is treating bug spray like a one-and-done product. "It's like sunscreen. You don't get away with just applying it once." If you're outdoors all day, reapply at least every six hours. He also recommends choosing a repellent with about 20% to 50% DEET—or 20% picaridin if you prefer to avoid DEET—and remembering that the mosquitoes most likely to spread disease are busiest from dusk to dawn.

Rinse your toothbrush with bottled water when traveling abroad

Most travelers remember to avoid the tap water in destinations with questionable water supplies. Griffin worries about the toothbrush. "We tell people to be careful of ice cubes and tap water and all the rest," he says. "But then people brush their teeth with the tap water."

He calls what often follows "third-day sickness." By then, your toothbrush has been rinsed repeatedly in tap water and left to sit in a warm, humid bathroom—giving any lingering microbes plenty of time to multiply before the brush goes right back into your mouth. His solution takes just a few seconds: rinse your mouth and toothbrush with bottled water, too.