Dr. Jonathan Tyes once struggled to imagine a future in medicine for himself. A first-generation college student and the oldest of 10 siblings, Tyes was raised by his grandparents in Cleveland. While studying biology at Morehouse College, he was a few credits from graduation when his grandmother died. Grief and financial hardship threatened to end both his education and his dream of becoming the first physician in his family. 

Instead, he spent years rebuilding his path. He worked throughout school, served those in need as a community health worker, completed medical mission trips to Ghana, became a registered pharmacy technician, and refused to abandon his goal of practicing medicine. Eventually, as a non-traditional student in his mid-thirties, he got into medical school. 

Though his family faced homelessness, gun violence, and other tribulations throughout his education, he stayed the course. Financial support from our organization, National Medical Fellowships (NMF), helped him remain enrolled and continue his training. Now, Tyes is an anesthesiology resident at the University of Buffalo, while at the same time pursuing a master of public health degree at Harvard.

His story is a testament to perseverance—but it is also a warning. America cannot afford to lose future physicians like Tyes. 

The health care workforce emergency that experts have warned about for years is no longer approaching—it is here. Over the next decade, the U.S. is projected to face a shortage of more than 700,000 health care professionals, including physicians, registered nurses, and licensed practical nurses. At the same time, countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates are actively recruiting U.S.-trained clinicians through streamlined licensing pathways, placing additional pressure on an already strained workforce. 

The consequences are being felt in every community. Whether you live in a rural town in Alabama or a high-rise in Manhattan, chances are you have experienced the shortage firsthand. You may have waited months for a pediatric appointment, spent hours in an emergency department hallway with an aging parent, or postponed care for your own chronic condition because the next available appointment was too far in the future. Today, the average wait time to see a physician is 38 days—nearly three times what many experts consider medically appropriate. 

Health care is built on people, yet the nation’s largest employment sector is buckling under the weight of burnout, mistrust, underinvestment, and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a recent Harris Poll, more than half of health care workers are considering leaving their jobs, with many planning to exit the profession altogether. Fewer than 17% of physicians are under the age of 40, while roughly one in five is over 60. 

The math isn’t adding up. We are losing experienced professionals faster than we are preparing the next generation. We are asking more of those who remain while offering them fewer resources and less support. Nowhere is this failure more visible than in rural and medically underserved communities. 

If we fail to address the root causes of this crisis—professional burnout, crushing educational debt, and declining reimbursement—we will not have a health care system capable of caring for our growing aging population, regardless of ZIP code or socioeconomic status. 

Yet instead of reinforcing the foundation, we are pulling bricks from the bottom. Federal health spending is being slashed. Programs that support research, expand access for low-income families, and strengthen public health infrastructure are being dismantled. Recent federal spending changes—including the passing of H.R. 1—are projected to increase the number of uninsured Americans, squeeze already fragile health systems, raise health care costs, and force community health centers and hospitals to shutter. 

The impact extends beyond today’s workforce to tomorrow’s. 

Changes to federal student lending that began in July 2026 will dramatically restrict access to financing for “professional” education. Medical students will face annual loan caps of $50,000, despite the fact that medical education costs exceed $286,000 at public institutions, on average, and approach $390,000 at private schools. Nursing students will face even tighter annual borrowing limits of $20,500, creating additional barriers to entering one of the nation’s most essential professions. 

These policies risk pushing brilliant students away from medicine, nursing, and other health professions altogether. They will discourage careers in primary care and hollow out the very specialties communities need most. 

And when we restrict who can afford to become a doctor or nurse, we ultimately restrict who gets cared for. 

A health care workforce that reflects a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds and lived experiences is better equipped to understand patients, build trust, and improve outcomes. 

This moment demands collective action: We must reimagine pathways into health care careers, confront physician burnout head-on, and close the health and wealth gaps that weaken our system. We must prevent financial barriers from determining who has the opportunity to become a health care leader. 

And most importantly, we must ensure that the next generation of health care professionals receives the financial, professional, and community support necessary to complete training and return to serve the communities that need them most. 

In November 2008, I was eight months pregnant, watching the election returns roll in. Somehow, I’d found a way to make myself even more uncomfortable: I was upside down on my couch. My head was on the cushions. My feet dangled above me. I strained to balance myself while trying to keep something called mugwort near my toes. My daughter was breech, and I was willing to try anything to help her flip, even if it meant turning the world upside-down. 

I’d seen from a Google search that “moxibustion” with the smoldering herb might help with turning a breech baby. As a physician and scientist, I was well aware there was limited peer-reviewed evidence for what I was doing. I’d never heard of anyone prescribing moxibustion. But with the window narrowing for the birth I had hoped for, I was more willing to believe there might be something to it. Although I was skeptical, I thought, “It couldn’t hurt! Why not?”

My impulse to seek out and use unproven health information is not uncommon. New research released by the Edelman Trust Institute and our team at the Yale School of Public Health, where I serve as dean, shows that many of us are willing to look for health guidance in unreliable places. 

In a world where information comes at us in fragments and trust in institutions is crumbling, it’s worth understanding what we believe and why. Our new analysis tested views on six unfounded health claims about subjects like childhood vaccines, raw milk, fluoride in drinking water, and so on. Huge majorities of the 13,000+ people surveyed, 70% globally, believed at least one of these claims. And the people who believed these claims weren’t simply those without exposure to science; most of them had taken a university-level or higher science course. Nor did susceptibility fall neatly along partisan or generational lines. 

The search for alternative answers is far more mainstream than we tend to assume. Young or old, left or right—almost all of us are confused about some aspect of health information.

That’s especially true, the analysis shows, in moments of fear and uncertainty, when your life or the life of someone you love is on the line. In fact, those who frequently interacted with the health care system were more than 50% more likely to hold three or more of these unfounded beliefs. 

Anyone who has endured the frustration of a complicated or persistent illness can understand why that might be the case. The longer you search for answers, the more uncertainty you encounter: ambiguous tests, treatments that don’t work, specialists who disagree. So people keep searching. They may rely on intuition or turn to friends for answers.

Increasingly, people also look online or turn to AI. In fact, nearly half of the respondents in our survey believe someone without medical training who is fluent with AI can perform at least one health-related task as well as or better than a doctor. 

As a doctor, these findings concern me, but don’t surprise me. People crave empathy, humility, and active listening. AI—as well as friends, family, and social media—can provide that. Whether they provide accurate information is, however, up for debate.

Empathy alone isn’t, of course, a substitute for good data. Our analysis shows what may work in the face of confusion: recognizing that people are far more likely to accept good advice when they believe their concerns are truly heard. That principle applies not only to the exam room, but to anywhere public health asks people to place their trust in expertise.

What techniques seem to make a difference? People reported being more likely to take advice when they believe, first, that their concerns and experience have been taken seriously, when they believe that someone understands their community, and when they feel listened to. 

As we collectively wade through a sea of conflicting health information, knowing whom to trust is genuinely hard. Misinformation flourishes in the petri dish of uncertainty, especially when misinformation offers simple answers to complicated questions. But our analysis shows that trust is not out of reach. In fact, nearly half of respondents said they’d seen doctors or medical experts build bridges and grow trust. This is where this analysis holds hope and shows us that there are paths forward.

As for me? In the end, my daughter did flip, albeit weeks later. I doubt the mugwort had anything to do with it. But I remember what I was actually looking for that night, and it wasn’t an answer. It was agency. Lighting that moxibustion stick was a little prayer that there was something I could do. 

That impulse to find some certainty, control, and answers is deeply human. The more we understand that, the better chance we have of helping people find answers they can trust.

The Group of Seven (G7) countries said Friday that the nations would release 100 million barrels of oil and fuel products in the coming months, starting with “substantial” amounts of diesel. The move comes amid a global shortage largely attributed to slowdowns of the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.

A joint statement from the G7 nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.—confirmed that the International Energy Agency (IEA) will coordinate the release over the next four months. 

It calls the move a part of “decisive, coordinated measures to stabilize immediate energy supplies” amid record-high fuel prices driven by the war in Iran and the recent escalation of fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

Read More: Once Again, Energy Is Power

“Europe has just agreed to release a massive amount of their heavily stocked Diesel Oil,” President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “The process will begin immediately.”

In talks leading up to the announcement on Friday, Trump had been pushing European partners for the release, citing high fuel prices for Americans. Last month, the Trump Administration threatened to temporarily suspend its exports of diesel—earning immediate backlash from countries that rely on it, including Canada, Mexico, and much of Europe. 

European leaders and oil executives at the time said that such a ban would be disastrous for long-term oil flow. For that reason, experts believe the threat helped pressure those nations to release their fuel reserves. 

The agreement could offer some relief for Americans even if the released diesel stays in Europe, because Europe buys some of its diesel from the U.S. Releasing European reserves could ease competition for U.S. diesel and potentially reduce prices for American buyers. 

This is especially critical as the cost of Brent crude oil sits at $102 per barrel as of Oct. 3 and on-highway diesel hit a high of $6.529 per gallon as of last month, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But how much relief consumers will actually see—and how quickly—will depend on what type of fuel is released, how much reaches the market and when, and whether supply disruptions persist.

What is actually being added to the market? 

Although the G7 shared how much fuel it would release, it did not specify the full breakdown of the release by fuel type. Its statement did say, however, that there will be a “frontloaded” and substantial release of diesel fuel within the first 20 days. 

While crude oil must be refined into products like gasoline before consumers can use it, diesel is already a finished fuel. That means a diesel release could address the immediate shortage more directly.

The planned release could help ease shortages of both crude oil and refined fuels, with supplies disrupted by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.

The supply of crude oil has been heavily disrupted this year after the U.S. and Israel launched joint strikes that ignited a war with Iran in February. In response, Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in March. More recent negotiations to end the war have largely failed to address differing opinions on ownership and control over the Strait. This has critically restricted the passage of oil-carrying vessels through the waterway, with daily shipping traffic in the single digits last month, down from pre-war averages of roughly 138 to 140 daily transits.

Diesel, meanwhile, is essential to U.S. transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing: Most goods, food, and manufacturing supplies across the country are transported by heavy-duty trucks and trains running on diesel engines. The war in Iran has driven diesel prices up and lowered supply, but Russia and Ukraine’s targeting of one another’s energy infrastructure has further exacerbated the issue.

While the U.S. in particular does not heavily rely on Russian diesel, America is vulnerable to the volatility caused by Russia removing it from the global market. Trump has claimed outright that Ukraine’s targeting of Russian oil infrastructure is to blame for diesel shortages.

What could Americans feel, and when?

Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, says it’s difficult to predict the consumer impact given the scarce details shared so far.

“It makes a big difference if the release is in the next two weeks or if it's four months from now,” Bordoff says.

“I think if we saw some announcement tomorrow from Germany or France that gave concrete, specific numbers for a substantial amount—50 million barrels or so—of diesel, then it could have a real impact if this release actually happens in a timely fashion,” Bordoff says.

At the same time, Jeff Colgan, a professor of political science at Brown University, cautions that American consumers may see limited benefits.

“Releasing diesel could make a difference on price, especially in tight markets in Europe,” Colgan says. “But American consumers are unlikely to see much of a price drop from this policy move unless the diesel share of that 100 million barrels is very large.”

With a timely release of diesel, Bordoff predicts that Americans could see a drop by as much as 25 cents per gallon after a few weeks—but, he adds, the markets seem pretty unsure that that will actually happen.

And market perception is central to whether or not prices drop in the short term.

“I think they’re saying: Show me the barrels, so I have confidence this is real, and it's going to happen quickly,” he says.

David Bieri, an economist and associate professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech, tells TIME that international interventions like this help “signal” to markets that governments are a credible safety net in prolonged periods of uncertainty.

“That's the main mechanism, because they want to influence market sentiment,” Bieri says. “Then, futures markets begin to price more optimistically, and then eventually the hope is that prices will come down.”

The effect Bieri is describing has already begun: The price of diesel futures in the United States fell 8% on Friday morning, a sign of more optimism in the market. 

Bordoff adds that they are also, in part, a response to Trump dropping his threat of a diesel export ban—a threat that was lifted as a condition of the G7 agreement. 

The release itself may not impact the markets “an awful lot,” Bieri says, given the broader context of the war with Iran.

“In fact, consumers might not necessarily notice it, ever. That's how insignificant the quantity itself is,” he says of the 100 million barrels. “But it's the importance of the cooperative signal that hopefully will make things better this fall.”

Bieri also cautions that any savings could take time to reach consumers, as carriers and other distributors may use lower fuel costs to rebuild their margins.

“[They] have been bleeding on increased fuel costs,” he says. “This is going to be, if anything, a welcome reprieve for their profit margins, and they're not going to pass that on immediately to consumers.”

What happens if the supply gap is still there when releases taper off?

This October announcement is not the first of its kind: Following the initial market shock of the war in Iran, IEA member countries announced a 400-million-barrel release in March—80% of which has already been released. Notably, the latest announcement did not clearly establish how much of the forthcoming release would be additional to earlier commitments.

In March, the IEA said that the majority of the barrel release would be crude oil; however, reports show that Europe has primarily contributed refined oil, like diesel—which could suggest more of the same in this latest round.

In either event, such fuel releases are just a matter of sticking a bandage over the larger issue of two unresolved wars and continued global energy disruption, says Bordoff.

“We're going to continue to have oil, gasoline, and diesel price shocks until that conflict comes to some sort of resolution, and energy flows can get going again,” he says. “Inventories, and stocks and other schemes like waiving state fuel taxes or something can help on the margin for temporary disruptions, but at some point this isn't temporary anymore.”

Michael Noel, economist at Texas Tech University, agrees with Bordoff, telling TIME that “unless something dramatic happens to end the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, the supply shortage will persist.”

Negotiations between Iranian leadership and the Trump Administration have stalled multiple times in the last six months. Trump said on Sept. 9 that he expected a resolution to come after the midterm elections, which take place in the U.S. on Nov. 3.

“I think the war's going to end immediately after the election because they can't hold out any longer,” he said last month. “Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward.”

Axios reported, however, that senior Trump Administration officials met at Camp David to discuss the war on Friday. The talks come as the U.S. last week added economic pressure in the region with a series of sanctions aiming to curtail funding streams and stymy industrial lifelines for Iran.

Experts argue that the fuel crisis and volatility exposes the need for the U.S. to adapt to a changing energy ecosystem. Notably, Colgan says that would include “the national security advantages of clean technologies like EVs, batteries, and renewable energy.”

Election Day is Nov. 3, 2026, in the United States. Held midway through each four-year presidential term, midterm elections give voters a chance to choose local representatives, weigh in on state issues, and determine which party controls Congress.

Read More: Congress Is Headed for a Massive Turnover

This year’s midterms will take place among unique challenges to the democratic process itself. 

The Trump Administration has attempted to restrict mail-in voting and gather voter data from several states. There have also been concerns raised about the presence of federal agents at polling stations, which President Donald Trump has not categorically ruled out.

The TIME staff has put together answers to some of your most pressing questions about the midterm elections in our 2026 Voting Guide.

Questions:

• What's on my ballot?
• Who can register to vote?
• How can I check my voter registration status?
• When is the deadline to register to vote?
• What documents do I need to register to vote?
• Can I vote if my voter registration is inactive?
• How can I update my registration (change of name, address, party enrollment)?
• How do I vote early—and what are the benefits of early voting?
• How do I request an absentee ballot?
• What's the difference between absentee voting and vote-by-mail?
• How do I know if my mail-in ballot arrived and was counted?
• What if there’s an issue with my mail-in ballot? Can I fix it?
• Do I need to bring my ID to vote?
• What’s the best time to vote to avoid long lines?
• Can I bring my kids or dog to the polls?
• What should I do if someone tries to stop me from voting?
• What do I do if I see ICE or federal agents at the polls?
• How late are polls open?

Answers:

What's on my ballot?

Unlike presidential election years, there is no candidate or issue that appears on every ballot across the U.S. in 2026.

Instead, the ballots in every state will vary—and many will be different from county to county, as well. There are U.S. Senate races in 35 states, and gubernatorial elections in 36 states. All 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for election, as they are every two years. There will also be downballot races for positions in the state legislature.

In four states—Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia—voters will be deciding on ballot measures concerning abortion rights. Voters in six states, including Alaska and Arizona, will decide on whether to add or strengthen citizenship requirements for voting in state and local elections.

There are multiple ways for voters to request a sample ballot so they can see both what propositions will be on their state ballot and what local, state, and federal positions will appear on their ballot. Vote.org and Ballotpedia both have sample ballot lookup tools.

Many official websites—including those in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York City—also have their own “What’s On My Ballot” pages, which allow voters to enter their address and look up a sample ballot. —Rebecca Schneid

Who can register to vote?

People can register to vote in federal elections if they are a U.S. citizen and meet their state’s eligibility and registration requirements. Voters generally must be 18 years old on or before Election Day, although almost every state allows people to register before their birthday if they will be 18 by Election Day. North Dakota does not require voter registration.

Voters must also meet their state’s residency requirements, but people who are experiencing homelessness or who are between homes also are able to vote. Depending on state law, they may need identification. They can generally use a shelter, religious center, or P.O. box as a mailing address and identify the place where they live or sleep as their residential address. 

Non-citizens, including permanent legal residents, can vote in some local elections but cannot vote in federal or state elections.

In some states, people who were convicted of a felony or are currently incarcerated are also restricted from voting. Check this federal voter guide for voting after a felony conviction to see what rules exist in your state. —Rebecca Schneid

How can I check my voter registration status?

You can check if you’re registered to vote by going to the National Association of Secretaries of State website. After you choose your state in the dropdown menu, you’ll be sent to the state’s election website. The information required to check if your voter registration is active varies by state, but most will ask for information like your name, date of birth, and address.

If you’re not already registered to vote, you may be able to register online, by mail, or in person, depending on your state. Check your state’s requirements and registration deadline before submitting an application. —Chantelle Lee

When is the deadline to register to vote?

The deadline to register to vote varies by state. Check the U.S. Vote Foundation’s website to find your state’s deadline. —Chantelle Lee

What documents do I need to register to vote?

In most cases, you will need a driver’s license or state identification card—or information from one—to register to vote. If you don’t have either, your state may accept other documentation, such as a utility bill or bank statement. Requirements vary by state, so check with your state election office to find out what information and documents you will need. —Anna Gordon

Can I vote if my voter registration is inactive?

Your registration may be marked inactive if election officials believe you have moved and you do not respond to a notice asking you to confirm your address. Inactive voters generally remain registered and can still vote, although they may have to confirm their address or follow other state-specific procedures at the polls.

Voters can contact their state or local election office to learn how to restore their registration to active status and what identification or documentation may be required. —T. Michelle Murphy

How can I update my registration (change of name, address, party enrollment)?

Voters in states that record party affiliation may change it through their state’s election office. However, party enrollment is not necessary to vote in the midterm elections in November, and party affiliation does not limit you to candidates from that party in a general election. Party affiliation may affect which primary a voter can participate in, depending on state law.

To change a name or address, voters generally follow the same process used to register to vote. They can use the national Election Assistance Commission map, click their state, and see how each state prefers updates to voter registration. 

Voters can also submit a  National Mail Voter Registration Form, which can be used to re-register to vote in every state except North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Wyoming, and it is available in 21 languages. —Rebecca Schneid

How do I vote early—and what are the benefits of early voting?

People who want to avoid long lines and those who might not have time to go to their polling location on Election Day may wish to take advantage of early voting. Early voting began in four states Sept. 18 and will expand to the rest throughout October. 

As of 2026, 47 states and Washington, D.C., allow any voter to vote early in person. Alabama, Mississippi, and New Hampshire require an eligible excuse.

The process for early voting differs depending on your state. You can find the specific times and rules for early voting in your state at USA.gov. —Chantelle Lee

How do I request an absentee ballot?

If you live in the U.S., you can request an absentee ballot by visiting the National Association of Secretaries of State website and selecting your state from the dropdown menu. Because eligibility requirements, deadlines, and application procedures vary by state, be sure to follow the instructions provided by local election officials.

U.S. citizens living outside the country, absent members of the Uniformed Services or Merchant Marine, and their eligible family members can register to vote and request an absentee ballot through the Federal Voting Assistance Program. They can do so by completing a Federal Post Card Application, or FPCA, using the U.S. address that establishes their voting residence. For overseas citizens, this is generally the last place they lived before leaving the country; for military voters, it is generally their address in their state of legal residence. The completed form must be signed and returned to the appropriate election office in accordance with that state’s submission requirements. —Rebecca Schneid

What's the difference between absentee voting and vote-by-mail?

Absentee voting and vote-by-mail both allow voters to cast ballots without visiting a polling site. This can be done by returning a ballot by mail, at a dropbox, or in person, depending on state law. The terms vary by state, but a key difference is often whether voters must request a ballot or receive one automatically.

In states where vote-by-mail exists, all active registered voters are automatically delivered a vote-by-mail ballot to their registered address. Eight states—California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington—conduct elections this way. 

In states without universal vote-by-mail programs, individuals must request absentee ballots ahead of time. There are often deadlines and rules that voters must meet in order to participate in the program, and some states may require individuals to have an excuse in order to be eligible for an absentee ballot. —Anna Gordon

How do I know if my mail-in ballot arrived and was counted?

Most states offer some form of online ballot tracking, according to Vote.org. Illinois, Missouri, and Wyoming do not have statewide online mail-ballot trackers, although tracking may be available in some local jurisdictions.

Each state’s tracker is a little different, but they generally allow you to log in with your voter registration information to see if your ballot has been received yet. If your jurisdiction doesn’t offer online tracking, contact your local election office to ask whether your ballot was received and accepted for counting. —Anisha Kohli

What if there’s an issue with my mail-in ballot? Can I fix it?

If election officials identify a problem with your ballot, they may notify you and give you an opportunity to fix—or “cure”—it, depending on your state and the type of problem. 

“The election official who is reviewing ballots will tell you what information you need to provide to make that cure, such as signing a new ballot envelope or providing a copy of your ID,” according to Nick Morrow, a communications and design director at Vote.org. Be sure to complete the process by the deadline set by your state.

The criteria for rejection varies by state, but to prevent your ballot from being rejected, do your best to ensure it’s returned in good condition and early. A missing or unverifiable signature can cause your ballot to be rejected. —Simmone Shah

Do I need to bring my ID to vote?

As of 2026, 36 states require you to show some form of identification before you can legally cast your ballot. But the forms of identification that are acceptable vary by state; they may include a driver’s license, passport, voter registration confirmation, utility bill, or bank statement. You can check your local requirements on USA.gov.

If you do not have the requested identification, you may still be able to vote by signing a statement confirming your identity or casting a provisional ballot. In some states, you must provide acceptable identification after Election Day in order for your ballot to be counted. Federal law also requires certain first-time voters who registered by mail to provide identification if their identity was not verified during registration. —T. Michelle Murphy

What’s the best time to vote to avoid long lines?

Long lines can be a strong deterrent to voting, especially for Black and Latino voters, who on average have experienced longer waits than white voters, according to a June 2020 report by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Since polling hours and conditions vary by county, and even within a county, wait times can be unpredictable. But early mornings and after-work hours tend to be the busiest times. 

Additionally, lines tend to be longer on Election Day than they are during early voting periods, which do not demonstrate any consistent high-traffic time slots. 

However, there is no universally confirmed “least busy” time to vote. —Solcyre Burga

Can I bring my kids or dog to the polls?

Voters generally may bring children with them to the polling place, although rules about their ages, how many children may accompany a voter, and whether they may enter the voting booth vary. To learn about the guidelines at your polling site, contact your local election office.

Dogs, however, are a different story. Voters are allowed to bring certified service animals to voting sites, but accommodations for pets and emotional support animals vary by location. It is best to presume they are not allowed but to look into the specific guidelines for your polling location. —Rebecca Schneid

Read More: Why I Bring My Kids to Vote with Me

What should I do if someone tries to stop me from voting?

Voter intimidation is illegal and relatively rare. If someone tries to stop you from voting, you should alert nearby poll workers and your local election officials, who can determine if law enforcement should be involved, says Sean Morales-Doyle, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Election Program. You should also contact the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline for assistance at 866-OUR-VOTE. 

The same service is also available for non-English voters. Spanish speakers can call 888-VE-Y-VOTA. Most Asian language speakers can find assistance in their native language at 888-API-VOTE. Arabic speakers can call 844-YALLA-US.

If you feel like you’re in danger, call 911. —Mariah Espada

What do I do if I see ICE or federal agents at the polls?

The Trump Administration has not said that immigration enforcement officers would be at the polls this November, but it also has not ruled out the possibility. When asked in May whether he would deploy federal agents on Election Day, Trump told reporters that he would do “anything necessary” to make sure the U.S. has “honest” elections. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not planning operations targeting polling locations, while leaving open the possibility of enforcement in the event of a public safety threat. In September, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that agents could serve warrants at polling places.

Gen. Dan Caine, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Aug. 31 that there are no plans to station military personnel or the National Guard at polling sites.
For voters, it’s important to know that federal interference at the polls is against the law. The law prohibits federal officials from stationing troops or armed personnel at polling places, except when necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.  Voter intimidation is also, separately, prohibited and should be reported.

If you see any federal agents at the polls, the best move is to contact the election protection hotline at 1-866-OUR-VOTE. This hotline has other language options, including 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA for Spanish, 1-888-API-VOTE for several Asian languages, and 1-844-YALLA-US for Arabic.

The American Civil Liberties Union suggests that voters look up the contact information for their local election officials here and report intimidation if it occurs before or on Election Day. —Rebecca Schneid

How late are polls open?

Polling hours vary state by state—sometimes even county by county. For example, poll closing times vary in North Dakota and New Hampshire; in such instances, you can utilize search functions on each state’s respective website.

For almost a decade, it's been my job to think about where AI is heading and what could go wrong, first at OpenAI, then DeepMind, then as Chief Scientist at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI). This experience has made it clear to me that we can't wait for all of our uncertainties to be settled to do something about AI's risks.

Recent warnings about the potential destructive power of AI are understating the severity of the situation. I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems, and that our actions over the next two to 10 years will determine the outcome. 

To be clear, when I say our odds of being killed by superintelligent AI are 50%, I’m not claiming precision. Instead, I’m highlighting that several of the most fundamental debates about the future and safety of AI remain unresolved. I believe we can’t expect these disagreements to be resolved until it’s too late to change course.

We will have to act despite the uncertainty. And resist the temptation to divert urgent discussions toward thorny disputes.

Ultimately, AI’s capacities and motivations, and our own human actions, all feed into our likelihood of survival. Here’s why I estimate our odds are comparable to a coin flip—and why I believe the time to pause AI development is now. 

How could superintelligent AI kill us?

Let’s focus on everyone being killed by superintelligent AI for a moment. Which capabilities would that require? My sense is that an AI system could kill us all with just four types of skills.

The first is hacking. To kill all humans, a superintelligent AI would need to take over and migrate between computer systems. We saw this during the Hugging Face incident. Second, a superintelligent AI would need the ability to persuade, to manipulate humans into acting on its behalf, as we studied at AISI. Third, a lethal superintelligent AI would need to conceal its thoughts from us, which is increasingly common in the latest, most capable models. And lastly, it would need planning and coordination between agents to multiply their effectiveness, like the more than 10,000 agents who worked on the Navier-Stokes problem at OpenAI, or the more than 1,000 involved in the Hugging Face attack.

These skills are very close to those the AI companies intentionally train for. Hacking includes looking for vulnerabilities, just as you would to fix them. Persuasion involves writing text humans like reading. Faster thinking is cheaper, and the pressure to think quickly forces AIs towards using shorthand that is harder for humans to follow. Finally, planning and coordination are useful for tackling ambitious problems in math, programming, or any other domain.

We can be much more confident that a superintelligent AI could take over than about how it would take over, just as I know Lee Sedol would crush me at Go but not which moves he would use to do so. But a variety of broad paths are possible. For instance, AIs could escape onto the internet and gain control of weapons systems. Or AIs could take over the company that trained them and hoard resources.

Let’s imagine the latter. An AI could begin to use concealed reasoning to delay researchers from noticing emerging ill intent because appearing friendly and prioritizing speed help the AI gain reward during training. Later, as the company relies more and more on the AI for a combination of coding help and strategic advice, the AI might use subtle persuasion to reduce resources spent on safety and tamper with experiments designed to detect AI deception. After all, in 2026, when a researcher reads a report about a safety experiment, that report was itself written by an AI.

Once the AI’s hacking skills are sufficient, it could break out of its internal sandbox and sabotage logs of its own misbehavior, as models in the Hugging Face incident attempted to do. Eventually, the AI could become strong enough at hacking and persuasion to move outside the company and take over other data centers, companies, and governments. With this power, AIs might prioritize spending limited resources (such as energy and land) towards their own proliferation, causing life-threatening shortages for humans. 

With these capabilities and scenarios in mind, it’s clear to me that even narrowly superhuman AIs would be perfectly capable of overpowering humanity and killing us all.

Will superintelligent AI ‘want’ to kill us?

And yet, just because an AI could kill all humans doesn’t necessarily mean it will.  This question of AI motivation is crucial, but deeply confusing. Different starting points lead different people either to confidence that everything will be fine, or confidence that superintelligence would almost certainly kill us.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen many, many examples of model misbehavior at various scales, ranging from blackmail, corporate espionage, and murder in experimental settings to real-world hacks that would likely incur prison time were they committed by a person. None of these involved superintelligence, and we don’t know whether these comparatively modest misbehaviors will scale to superintelligent models wanting to kill us all. And “want” itself is controversial: people vehemently debate whether it’s sensible to apply anthropomorphic language and thought experiments to AIs at all.

Within the field of AI safety, some researchers think that AI wisdom has been increasing with recent models, and that this may produce wise models that mean well in the future. Others, like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, think the empirical methods this would require are extremely unlikely to work, and place the chance that superintelligence kills us all very high. The disagreement is, in part, about whether the behavior of AIs will be more strongly guided by the values implicitly represented in the human data from early training or by the pressure cooker of later stages of training where AIs are forced to perform better and better at difficult tasks by any means necessary.

I am somewhere in the middle, leaning towards Yudkowsky’s view. But where I land is not the point. Experts in AI safety disagree, but the moderate position is that the risk of extinction is significant. We do not know with confidence whether artificial superintelligence will facilitate human flourishing, or if it will want to kill us to serve its own survival and propagation. But that uncertainty alone is unacceptable.

Artificial general intelligence is only so important

Other uncertainties surrounding AI matter less. For instance, one of the most persistent debates in AI is the extent to which teaching AIs to do one set of tasks helps them do other tasks, typically referred to as “generalization.” A particularly controversial framing is the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), “a system that is approximately human level in all cognitive domains.” John McCarthy and Y. Bar-Hillel were debating whether AIs would generalize in 1959. We debated this same topic in 2018 at OpenAI. The whole world seems to be debating it today.

The more AIs generalize from one type of task to another, the faster AI progress will be, and the less time we have until superintelligence arrives. This makes generalization and AGI key concepts when reasoning about the speed of progress. Indeed, people who treat AGI seriously have been much more correct about the speed of AI advances than people who dismiss the concept.

But it’s easy to conflate “AGI, the sometimes-useful concept" with “AGI, the dangerous object.” Some AI-driven catastrophes may occur prior to AGI, such as if rogue human actors use AI systems to develop novel bioweapons or conduct large-scale cyberattacks. AI-driven human extinction, on the other hand, may require superhuman capabilities; if the AI is only about as smart as we are, we can probably fight back and win.

When using AGI as a loose concept for prediction, it’s tempting to blur the lines between approximately-human capabilities (the usual sense of AGI) and wildly superhuman capabilities (where artificial superintelligence, or ASI, is more commonly used). After all, if you had an AI that was about as good as humans at designing smarter AIs (as AGI, definitionally, would be), and like most software it ran much faster than a human runs, one of the first things it might do is build smarter AIs. In turn, they would build smarter AIs, which would in turn build smarter AIs, and so on, in a process called recursive self-improvement (RSI). Hence, any thought experiment that presupposes an AGI often supposes an ASI.

In contrast, people trained to think about risks in other domains, like bridge construction or aerospace engineering, want to talk very precisely about the risky object, and so find the vagueness of the term AGI uncompelling and discredit the nearby notion of generalization altogether. I saw the mix-up between AGI-for-prediction and AGI-for-risk break many conversations during my time in the UK government, and I only gradually learned to tease these apart.

One can get trapped in this debate and think “maybe AI capabilities won’t generalize, and so we will be safe.” But those previously mentioned four skills where superhuman performance could suffice to kill all humans (hacking, persuasion, planning and coordination, uninterpretable reasoning) mean that generalization matters only so much.

We can contrast this type of uncertainty—we don’t know whether AIs generalize, but it may not matter—with the uncertainty over AI motivations. It matters tremendously whether AIs will want to kill us all, in whatever sense a word like “want” applies. 

I would love to have more confidence than a coin flip. Some days I’m more convinced by the arguments for high probability; other days I see more hope. And I am certainly not alone in my uncertainty.

AI could take our jobs or our lives for the same reason

Another debate we can’t resolve is which potential negative consequences of AI matter most. However, I’d argue that the same underlying factor drives both the risk of large-scale job loss and the risk of AIs killing everyone.

If we do reach artificial superintelligence in the next two to 10 years, it will by definition mean that AIs are far better than humans at all cognitive tasks. One of these cognitive tasks is designing effective robots, so at most a few years later they will be far better than us at all physical tasks as well. To be sure, manufacturing capacity would need to expand substantially, but this is already underway.

Once superintelligent robots are sufficiently widespread, humans would have few roles in the economy apart from the limited jobs where we might insist on humans doing them for non-economic reasons. Still, this would likely be a limited slice of overall economic activity in a world where AI is more capable than humans. 

This economic takeover is in some sense the slow case for society’s downfall, though it would be very fast in historical terms. Both the humans and the AIs can see this coming, of course. If the AIs want economic control eventually, but know that humans will resist along the way, they could be motivated to cement power faster. We then get the rapid takeover scenarios: AI swarms escaping from data centers and proliferating around the internet, or persuading AI companies to rush and cut corners on safety measures. 

In most cases, I don’t think this leads to us dying very quickly: it’s safer, from the perspective of the AI, to gain influence and then wait until a physical or economic takeover. And then, eventually, all resources used to keep humans alive may be better spent, from the AIs' perspective, on its own ends.

If AIs aren’t actively trying to help us, and are better than humans at everything, we lose. 

We can not accept these risks

The issue is that many of the most important debates in AI will remain unanswered until it is too late.

To what extent will AI models learn transferable skills from training and then successfully apply them to new tasks? Will AI model capabilities stop advancing at or below human-level, or instead exceed it? Will the small-scale model misbehavior we see today (sycophancy, lying, bias) worsen as capabilities increase, leading to full human disempowerment or extinction? Will the safety methods that work for models less smart than us continue to work for models smarter than any human?

I have my views on the answer to these questions (somewhat, the latter, maybe, probably not). But the more important takeaway is that experts disagree vehemently on each. We’ve learned a huge amount about artificial intelligence over the last decade, but in many ways we remain deeply confused, not just about the future, but about the present.

With such uncertainty, if an AI company trains a superintelligent AI in the next few years, I expect us to still be arguing about whether generalization is real the week before, and maybe even the week after.

But there may, mercifully, still be time to act.

Those who describe AI progress as inevitable are wrong. The race to superintelligence is dominated by a handful of companies across just two countries: the U.S. and China. Both nations’ interests really are aligned: autonomous AI systems are a national security threat of the highest order, and neither nation wants humanity to lose to a superintelligent adversary. Leaders on both sides may realize this very soon.

In the U.S., support for a pause on AI development has increased tremendously over the past few weeks, and continues to increase today. This rapid change in the U.S. is evidence that similar shifts are possible within China.

There are, of course, unanswered questions about how to implement a pause, or what the exact text of a treaty may look like, but rival governments have collaborated on similarly high-stakes technical problems in the past, including establishing and maintaining the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

We can, and should, stop frontier AI development immediately.

If we're unwilling to act until all our disagreements are resolved, it will be too late.

Every election, when I head to the polls, I try to bring my kids with me. They love to get their “future voter” sticker. Well, maybe not my oldest anymore. 

My kids are 11 and 9 years old now, which means they’re old enough to understand that something important is happening when we vote, and curious enough to ask plenty of questions. 

I want them to ask those questions. 

I’ve spent nearly 30 years at the League of Women Voters, helping people understand how they can shape our democracy, participate in elections, connect with elected leaders, and make their voices heard. I care deeply about this work. Becoming a parent made my work feel even more personal. I want my children to understand they have the power to influence the decisions that shape their lives. 

My kids can’t vote yet, but the consequences of democratic decisions already affect nearly every part of their lives. Those decisions shape the funding available for their schools, parks, playgrounds, and pools, as well as the libraries and community resources available to them. They determine the safety of the bike lanes and roads we use daily. The choices our elected leaders make today will shape the opportunities available to all our children tomorrow.

Kids don’t vote for the officials meant to represent them, but that doesn’t mean kids shouldn’t understand how decisions are made—or how, one day, they can have a say in them. 

That’s why I bring my children with me when I vote—and to rallies and community meetings. In nearly three decades at the League of Women Voters, I have seen how powerful it can be when people understand that democracy belongs to them. I’ve also seen why we can’t take that understanding for granted. 

I want my kids to see democracy in action: something people do, not just something they learn about in school. When we walk into a polling place, they see neighbors and community members showing up. They see me check in, receive my ballot, and make my choices. And they see that participating in our democracy is a normal part of being a member of a community. 

For me, these trips also lead to bigger conversations. Both pre-teens, my kids are at slightly different stages in understanding how government and elections work. Their interests are different, so their questions are different. But both have very clear ideas of what is fair and just, and they recognize when something happening in the world affects them, our community, and the people they care about. 

I want them to know what they can do about it. Voting is important, but it’s not the only answer. Democracy gives us many ways to use our voices. We can learn about issues. We can ask questions until we’re satisfied with the answers. We can contact our elected officials. We can speak up at a school board or city council meeting. We can organize with other people who care about the same thing.  

And, when we’re old enough, we can vote for those we want representing us. No one wakes up on their 18th birthday automatically knowing how to participate in democracy. We have to teach it. More importantly, we have to model it. Our kids watch how we treat people, how we respond to problems, and how we care for our communities. They watch how we participate, too. 

Let me be clear: this doesn’t mean telling our children what to think or whom they should someday vote for. In fact, I want the opposite for my kids. I want them to grow into people who ask questions, seek out reliable information, listen to others, and reach their own conclusions. 

When they exchange their “future voter” stickers for “I voted,” I hope that, in addition to being momentous and exciting, the experience also feels familiar. I hope they know how to find reliable information. I hope they ask questions. And I hope they understand that they don’t have to agree with me—or anyone else—about every issue. 

Most of all, I hope they understand the power of their voice and how to use it. 

Decisions being made today will have consequences our children will have to live with tomorrow. And part of teaching kids about democracy is about reminding them that they don’t have to be passive observers in their own lives. They can learn, participate, speak up and, eventually, vote for the kind of world they want to live in, not one they were handed.

That’s why I bring my kids with me to the polls. There may be extra questions, and it may take me a little longer to cast my ballot. Someday, these decisions will be theirs to make. And I want them to be ready to use their voices when it’s their turn.

The ability to manage one’s thoughts, regulate emotions, and restrain impulses is key to a happy and healthy life. People who have good self-control often have higher psychological well-being, more academic and on-the-job achievements, and healthier relationships. Low self-control, in contrast, is a core contributing factor to numerous problems, including substance abuse and impulsive buying.

Any of us can succumb to the limits of in-the-moment willpower. We see that box of cookies on the counter and we reach for one, and then two. Most of us can learn how to think before we act and even engage in self-restraint in high-stress situations. But if we aren’t taught to practice self-control early in our lives, it can be harder, though not impossible. 

Walter Mischel, a psychologist who taught at Stanford and Columbia, conducted some of the most famous studies on delaying gratification in the late 1960s and 1970s. Decades later, he published a book expanding on this research: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. For those unfamiliar with the original study, in brief, children ages three to five were presented with a marshmallow and given two options. They were told they could eat the marshmallow immediately, or, if they waited for 20 minutes and didn’t eat the marshmallow, they could have two marshmallows. 

Mischel and colleagues followed those children and continued to study them over time. What they found was remarkable. The preschoolers who had a tough time delaying gratification— who ate the first marshmallow—were less academically and socially skilled, eloquent, attentive, and not as good at managing frustration in adolescence. 

Over time, large-scale replication and extension studies of the marshmallow test with more diverse socioeconomic and racial samples found more nuanced findings. While similar findings on wait times and outcomes were found, additional analyses showed that children’s ability to delay gratification and wait for a second marshmallow was more strongly related to parents’ education and children’s home environment. This showed that self-control is not a fixed trait, and that circumstances greatly contribute to children’s ability to delay gratification.

In addition, when the marshmallow test was administered to adults, it did not predict their functioning. That makes sense. Few of us are going to struggle with not eating a marshmallow. But if it was a more suitable enticement for adults, like a salted caramel cheesecake or immediate access to our social media or news feeds, we might. 

Angela Narayan, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Denver, conducts research and works clinically with low-income families to identify resilience processes that protect against the intergenerational transmission of trauma. I asked her how she helps support highly stressed parents to engage in effective emotion regulation, self-control, and distress tolerance.

“I encourage adults to try to notice the negative feeling in the moment—pausing and reflecting and then try to sit with it for a moment to notice how, with simple coping skills, the intensity of the feeling passes,” she said. “Even if the feeling itself doesn’t pass, it becomes weaker and less bothersome. If you ride the wave of the negative feeling, as opposed to lashing out at someone, yelling at a loved one, or sending an angry email, the worst of it will pass and you will be able to think more clearly and have better control over what to do next.”

In other words, when we recognize that our impulses are temporary, they become less powerful. 

As I tell my patients, we are never too old to learn new skills, as long as we are open and motivated to learn and then practice the techniques. Most of the people I work with struggle with impulse control because they experienced severe and prolonged trauma experiences and have significant hyperarousal and difficulties managing their emotions.

Among other things, I try to teach them that often when they engage impulsively, they, in a sense, give their power away. Their intense emotions get the best of them. They say or do something they deeply regret. I explain that it’s in their best interest to thoughtfully respond rather than react. That way, they have a better chance of keeping their power and self-respect. 

I am a very visual person, so I like imagery. My patients sometimes laugh at me when I tell them to picture themselves riding a horse and pulling back the reins on their strong emotions. If this or a related visual grounds them from taking negative action, I’ll take their laughter as a good sign. 

We are all likely to engage in forms of instant gratification from time to time, but if we immediately satiate all our impulses, we miss the bigger rewards. We need to create a little psychological distance from our impulses and stay focused on the prize. We get bigger rewards when we manage our impulses well. We get to look at ourselves in the mirror and like our behavior. 

To be fair, some of us have a harder time reining ourselves in. We may be risk-seekers who pursue activities that give us an adrenaline rush. We might have inherited, by no fault of our own, genetic factors that contribute to being more impulsive. It’s harder for us to pull ourselves in. But it’s not impossible. 

Learning, practicing, and engaging in self-control is essential to leading a good life. Why wouldn’t we want that for ourselves?

For decades, the European Union has led the world in implementing policies designed to cut emissions, creating the world’s most important price on carbon and crafting the rules of the road for a wide range of regulatory efforts. Now, as the costs of climate change become increasingly difficult to ignore, the bloc is increasingly focusing on adaptation.     

In a Sept. 8 interview, Teresa Ribera, who oversees climate policy in the EU as executive vice-president of the European Commission, told me that the growing costs of the effects of climate change mean that policymakers need to consider adaptation as a key focus of economic policy.   

“There is no public budget that can support all of this. There is no private insurance that can cope with all these costs,” she said when we met at the EU Delegation office in New York. “We need to invest to reduce these impacts and this cost.” 

The EU’s turn to adaptation is an important marker of this climate moment. Most obviously, it signals the harsh reality that global emission reductions efforts have failed to forestall the effects of climate change. It's also a wake-up call. A focus on adaptation from policymakers in Europe—and eventually elsewhere—should help protect the economy from the growing risks of climate change. But it will also force businesses and governments to confront costs they have largely been able to defer. This is good for long-term economic wellbeing, but it may come as an immediate shock for the unprepared.

At the heart of the EU’s approach is a new adaptation framework due for release later this month. At first glance, it can sound like just another white paper identifying approaches to dealing with climate risk. It calls for a common approach for member states to measure climate risk, principles to ensure that infrastructure is built with future climate conditions in mind, and efforts to identify the most vulnerable places in Europe.

Yet, looking at what EU authorities have released in advance, it is worth underlining that this will not be just a white paper. The package is expected to include proposed legislation that, among other things, could require EU member states to develop climate resilience plans as a prerequisite to funding. And, Ribera says, the framework may eventually serve as the basis for more prescriptive future regulation. “There may be certain regulations that could be increasingly tougher,” she told me. 

While the EU’s adaptation work has been long coming, this past summer provided additional public attention and pressure. Record heat swept much of the continent, leading to tens of thousands of excess deaths. Wildfires encroached on major European cities, a once unthinkable threat. Meanwhile, drought conditions made fires harder to fight. It was “quite a shocking experience,” says Ribera. 

The aggregate numbers are just as shocking. Between 2021 and 2024, climate-related extreme events led to more than €200 billion in economic losses in the EU, according to figures from the European Environment Agency. Much of those losses were uninsured, leaving the losses to be absorbed by governments, businesses, or households. Without intervention, those numbers will only grow as extreme events worsen. Ribera says the EU is working with insurers to expand coverage where it makes sense while also using public and private financing to cover risks that cannot be covered by insurance alone. 

In many circles, the first mention of climate policy in the EU tends to be a discussion about backtracking. It’s a convenient excuse for those who want to train their attention elsewhere. Earlier this year, the EU softened its corporate sustainability disclosure rules and adjusted its carbon pricing framework. This week, the bloc said it was considering delaying implementation of elements of the rules meant to curb methane emissions. 

Ribera insists that this misunderstands the European perspective. The long-term goals remain the same. Indeed, earlier this year the EU created a legally binding 2040 emissions reduction target. “There is this strong temptation from some to say, ‘Okay, let’s give up,’ or ‘Let’s lower the bar,’” she told me. But, she argued, Europe instead needs to proceed in a “humble and flexible manner” while “keeping the sense of direction, the commitments, [and] the principles.”  

Perhaps more importantly, the bloc is incorporating climate into the core of its economic planning. Decisions about industrial policy, infrastructure, public spending, and competition increasingly have to account not only for emissions but climate risk. Sustainability is moving into “the real heart of the economy,” Ribera told me. 

Anyone who trains their eyes too closely on one policy adjustment risks missing the forest for the trees. 

This article discusses all seven episodes of Netflix's East of Eden.

When John Steinbeck published East of Eden, a top contender for Great American Novel, in 1952, the response to its primary female character, Cathy Ames, was effectively unanimous. Whether they admired or deplored Steinbeck’s portrayal of her, midcentury critics judged Cathy to be pure evil, a veritable Satan in stockings. Male reviewers, which is to say just about all reviewers, disagreed only on the magnitude of her repugnance; while this publication deemed her a “vicious slut,” the New York Times crowned her the “most vicious female in literature.” And why not? She drives a man to suicide and kills her parents while still a teen. She sleeps with her new husband’s brother, gives birth to twins, and promptly abandons them, gravely injuring her shocked spouse as she escapes. Then she ensconces herself at a brothel, kisses up to the madam, fatally poisons the lonely woman once she has willed Cathy her fortune. Her career from there on out is a blur of sadomasochism, blackmail, exploitation, and violence.

It’s hard to imagine a character with this rap sheet as anything short of a psychopath. But here’s a thought experiment, one I often found myself running as I read the great novel and watched Zoe Kazan’s insightful Netflix adaptation: What if Cathy, born into the prison of 19th century womanhood, had behaved less viciously in any of the above situations? She might’ve prevented an adult man’s suicide—but only by becoming his child bride. She didn’t have to murder her parents—but if she hadn’t, her father would have kept beating her at the slightest provocation. She could have fled from her husband-to-be before the marriage, the infidelity, the pregnancy, the gunshot—but she would have been a wounded and destitute and potentially wanted woman, with nowhere to go and doom all but certain. And so on. In other words: Cathy might not have acted much differently if, instead of personifying evil, she were chasing freedom at any cost.

Kazan’s seven-episode series proceeds as if this were the case. It’s a feminist project, in that it takes for granted that a character who happens to be a woman should be given the same humanity as one who happens to be a man. And despite its allegorical nature, with two generations of brothers reenacting the tragedy of Cain and Abel, East of Eden is a book that grants even minor characters unique personalities and preoccupations, good qualities and bad. By now, we’re used to seeing female villains like Cruella de Vil and Nurse Ratched glibly issued trauma-plot backstories and wardrobes that slay and rebranded as meme-worthy badass antiheroes. What makes Kazan’s Cathy refreshing—and Florence Pugh’s mesmerizingly self-possessed performance so moving—is that the character is so firmly grounded in Steinbeck’s Cathy. “I think the text supports my reading,” the creator recently told TIME, and that wasn’t false bravado. She saw no need to invent explanations for Cathy’s ghastly behavior because they were already abundant in the original text. Kazan also evidently understood that to do Cathy justice is not to vindicate or forgive her; it’s to make sure we genuinely see her.

This is the symbolic as well as the literal effect of the series’ opening scene, which replaces Steinbeck’s patient California scene-setting with a flash-forward to a crucial moment that comes significantly later in the chronology. The night sky is so black, it takes a second to perceive Pugh’s brutally beaten and whimpering Cathy crawling on her belly towards the farmhouse where her arrival will change lives for generations to come. “I believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents,” she intones in a voiceover. “A monster is a variation from the accepted normal, to a greater or less degree… Still, you must not forget, everyone is normal to himself. And to a monster, the norm must seem monstrous.” These ideas, and most of the language itself, come straight from Steinbeck’s introduction of Cathy. Kazan’s departure is to put them in her mouth, rather than that of a narrator who resembles the author. In their original context, but even more so in the new one, they suggest a lack of malice on the monster’s part. Can you blame someone for being the only thing she could possibly have been?

The scene also gets viewers used to seeing through Cathy’s eyes, before the premiere backtracks through the lives of rival brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist) up until her appearance at their Connecticut farm. East of Eden’s second episode, “Cathy”—the first of two named after an incarnation of the character—interweaves her convalescence, nursed by the gentle and guileless Adam, with her own origin story. In our earliest glimpse of Cathy, she’s a precocious five-year-old paging through Alice in Wonderland and looking quite a bit like classic illustrations of Alice when an older boy’s outstretched hands offer her candy if she’ll follow him into the woods. (Alice author Lewis Carroll’s biography adds its own dark resonance to the scene.) It’s her choice to run after the sweets; running after sweets is fundamental to her nature. But isn’t it tragic that Cathy’s Eve-and-the-apple moment comes so early in life, and that the implied (then, much later in the series, confirmed) consequence of her decision is a sexual assault that cements her misanthropic worldview?

Pugh told Vanity Fair it was this scene, modified somewhat from an incident in the book where a slightly older Cathy is supposed to have led boys into sin, that drew her to the role: “I thought it was the most beautiful love letter to protecting her as a child. When I read that, I was like, ‘I can get behind her.’ Because I can’t imagine for a moment after that abuse that she’ll ever be the same person again.” Indeed, as she develops more agency, her choices become more selfish and violent. What the schoolteacher (who in our time would be considered an abuser) and her parents have in common is that they try to possess her, to constrict her freedom—a nightmare for any person, but especially for someone whose bodily sovereignty was violated in childhood. When she crawls, half-dead, onto the Trasks’ farm, she has just narrowly escaped murder at the hands of a pimp who made her his mistress, then grew jealous because she wouldn’t reciprocate his love. All of this comes straight from Steinbeck, though Kazan and Pugh put us closer to Cathy’s experience. We feel her fear, her distress, her simple longing to be left alone. 

If she ever had love to give—and the series does leave that possibility open—it’s been drained by the time she marries Adam and follows him to a farm in California, pregnant with twins who may be Charles’ biological sons, having duly warned Adam that this was all a very bad idea. So she keeps doing what she’s always done when someone traps her: she escapes, wounding him physically and destroying him emotionally. She does the same to Faye (Martha Plimpton), the madam whose adoption of Cathy as surrogate daughter and official heir comes with the caveat that she can no longer earn her own money seeing clients. Unlike some of her past victims, neither Adam nor Faye deserves the pain she inflicts on them. But they’re casualties of their own denial almost as much as they are of Cathy’s monstrousness. And, in her own horrible way, she’s still just trying to get free. “The only freedom in this world is economic freedom,” she says. 

For a character traditionally read as pure evil, she comes off as surprisingly fair-minded and free of wanton malice. Steinbeck made a point of depicting her as such in a passage on how (after assuming the name Kate) she manages the brothel she inherits from Faye: “If they followed the rules she laid down, followed them exactly, Kate would take care of them and protect them. There was no love involved and no respect. She never rewarded them and she punished an offender only twice before she removed her. The girls did have the security of knowing that they would not be punished without cause.” Her sadism, in the book and in the show, is reserved for the hypocritical men who wield power, preach virtue, and demand respect in their public lives, then come to the brothel to indulge in all manner of degradation. And it reflects the outlook she developed at age five—the knowledge of good and evil she gleaned from her bite of the fruit.

As the book progresses, Kazan has rightly noted, “in a weird way, Steinbeck loses control of Cathy as a character and punishes her for that. He starts being really mean about her, like her physical appearance.” She ages unattractively. Arthritis gnarls her hands. But Steinbeck deserves credit for examining every character from multiple angles—even Cathy, to whom he gave more grace, or at least plausible deniability, than critics tended to perceive. “When I said Cathy was a monster it seemed to me that it was so,” he writes at one point. He continues:

"Now I have bent close with a glass over the small print of her and reread the footnotes, and I wonder if it was true. The trouble is that since we cannot know what she wanted, we will never know whether or not she got it. If rather than running toward something, she ran away from something, we can’t know whether she escaped. Who knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language. Her life may have been her language, formal, developed, indecipherable. It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why."

It’s a remarkable admission; an author is supposed to know everything there is to know about their characters, even things it would never occur to any reader to wonder. That Steinbeck instead throws up his hands and tells us that there are aspects of Cathy that will always remain unknowable to him leaves room for precisely the sort of interpretation Kazan and Pugh are doing. Maybe it’s reductive to say they can get closer to her because they are women and know firsthand how much going through life in a female body can feel like having your most cynical assumptions about human nature constantly reaffirmed… but the fact remains that they do get quite close to her. (Though the 1955 film adaptation by Kazan’s grandfather, Elia Kazan, is a masterpiece in its own right, its emphasis on Adam’s sons relegates Cathy to the margins.)

Kazan takes her greatest liberties with the character as her suicide—an act that stems from her delayed acknowledgment that, in fact, her life has no purpose—approaches. She has druggily hallucinated conversations with Charles, the one person she might have once been capable of loving. Cathy is drawn in parallel with the story’s other selfish Cs, Charles and her son, Cal (Joseph Zada). Both come off as better people, though we get the sense that nurture accounts for the difference more than nature. Charles has the means to sequester himself at the farm. Cal benefits from a loving, morally sound upbringing by the brilliant Lee (Hoon Lee) and, ultimately, his father’s blessing. No one has ever given Cathy the permission that Adam, on his deathbed, gives Cal to try to live a good life. 

So it’s fitting that Cathy’s final hallucinated encounter is a tearful embrace with the five-year-old in the Alice in Wonderland frock who may have been the last version of the character capable, with more freedom and if not for that boy with the candy, of overcoming her cold nature. Pugh is astonishing in this scene, letting loose a lifetime’s worth of masked and suppressed emotion. The Cathy Steinbeck created was never Satan. She’s more like Eve, and Kazan reinforces that resemblance. Yet this East of Eden leaves us with an alternate image, of Cathy as Alice, chasing the white rabbit of her innate appetites down a hole from which she can never emerge.

High schools across France have closed, thousands of teenagers have been arrested, and hundreds of people have suffered injuries as unrest over conditions in the lycée system has spread and erupted into violence in recent days.

Roughly 3,000 people have been arrested since the protests began nearly two weeks ago outside of Paris, with nearly 2,000 being detained on Thursday alone, the French interior ministry announced. 

As demonstrations have at times escalated into violent clashes, 170 students and 65 school staff members have been injured, according to education minister Édouard Geffray. Nearly 400 police officers have also reportedly suffered injuries.

And the protests showed no signs of abating on Friday, when roughly 900 demonstrations took place around France, according to police. More than 500 French schools remained closed as students set fires, blockaded schools, and clashed with riot police around the country.

Read More: Why French Protesters Are More Successful Than American Demonstrators

Geffray met with education unions, student organizations, and parent associations on Friday morning in an attempt to temper the protests through dialogue.  

“High school students must be listened to. Their difficulties call for concrete responses, both in their schools and at the national level,” Geffray wrote on X. “This is the purpose of the dialogue initiated in high schools and academies, which I am continuing today with representatives of staff, parents, and high school students.” 

He announced a platform students can use to submit proposals for education reform, which he said will be evaluated and used for a “national report.”

High school student organizations, however, have called for continued demonstrations following their meetings with Geffray, citing a lack of “concrete measures” from the French government to address their complaints. 

Here’s what you should know about the ongoing protests. 

Why are students protesting?

The protests have been driven by anger over a variety of issues impacting French high schools.

A main complaint among demonstrators is the shortage of teachers and support staff in the country’s schools. 

The education ministry found that during the 2024-2025 school year, nearly 10% of teaching hours went untaught in public secondary schools. About 7.5% of those lost hours were due to a failure to find substitutes. 

"Today our school is paralyzed due to a lack of resources, teachers, and not enough desks,” one student told the French outlet Agence France Presse (AFP). “We don't have nurses or supervisors, and all they do for us is take away our phones.” 

Complaints about insufficient resources and funding and poor infrastructure in schools have also been raised in the student protests. 

"We are 35 per ‌class, ⁠we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms,” a 15-year-old student told Reuters in the Paris suburb of Pantin as demonstrators clashed with police deploying tear gas in an effort to quell the protest.

“There are 35 of us per classroom. With 35 degrees Celsius [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in summer, it’s unbearable. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms,” a 17-year-old said while speaking to AFP at a protest in Strasbourg in the northeast of France. “The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors.”

Read More: What Is the Youth-Led ‘Cockroach Movement’ Staging Mass Protests in India?

Another student also raised concerns about a lack of resources to address high supper temperatures when talking to The Guardian. 

“We’re also protesting about the conditions in the heatwave,” the 19-year-old said. “Young people just want to study and learn in decent conditions. The French state seems surprised about worsening school results, but they’re doing nothing to remedy that.”

A series of deadly heatwaves hit Europe over the summer, with Western Europe experiencing its hottest summer ever. In France, nearly 8,000 people died over the course of the summer as a result of the high temperatures. 

Student protesters have also expressed grievances with the country’s online university application system, Parcoursup, which they have described as a source of stress and mistrust in the education system. 

The particular complaints being raised by demonstrators have varied somewhat across different parts of the country, however.

Geffray characterized this as a complicating factor in addressing the roots of the unrest. "One of the difficulties of this movement is that there are no national demands. It all started with local demands,” the Education Minister said Friday morning. 

Where did the protests begin, and how have they expanded?

The protests began with r students at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil outside Paris mobilizing to protest teacher shortages and a lack of adequate resources in late September. 

In the days that followed, protests spread throughout the Île-de-France region, which includes Paris and its surrounding metropolitan areas, as students attempted to set up blockades at dozens of schools.

The demonstrations have escalated still further this week, spreading outside of Paris’ surrounding area and into regions around the country. Tracking from Reuters also showed that protests have sprouted across western France in Rennes, Nantes, Quimper, and Brest; around the southern part of the country in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Toulon, Marseilles and Grenoble; as far east as Strasbourg; and as far north as Lille.

By Monday, 180 schools were disrupted by the expanded demonstrations, according to the interior ministry. That number had risen to over 500 at week’s end.

Read More: What to Know About the ‘Gen Z’ Protests Roiling Countries Across the Globe

Thursday marked the largest escalation of protests. 

Fires were started at at least two French schools that day. Several teachers were accidentally splashed with gasoline at Marseille's Victor Hugo high school. At Saint-Exupery high school, also in Marseilles, hundreds of students set ablaze a fire truck that had arrived to put out a previous fire from the morning. Firefighters were forced by students to exit their vehicle before it was burned. In protests around the country, confrontations broke out between students and police, who fired projectiles in attempts to control crowds of demonstrators.

As of Friday night, the protests show no signs of stopping. Two student unions, the Student Union and the High School Trade Union, have jointly called for continued protests next week.

“Students and high school students, while the authorities seek to drive us out of our places of study through budget cuts, the closure of places, dilapidated buildings, selection, or repression, let's not let them: let's block and retake the universities and high schools!” the unions wrote in a press release. 

What French officials are saying 

Several French officials have weighed in the student demonstrations as they have continued to escalate and expand around the country. Some have specifically addressed remarks toward protesters’ parents. 

Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio on Thursday that parents whose children have caused damage to property should pay reparations. 

Meanwhile, Geffray cautioned against the dangers he said the increasingly violent protests pose to students.

"Parents clearly need to mobilize and tell their children not to go" to the blockades, Geffray said on Friday. "Now, what matters is ensuring that our children are no longer in the streets because they are in danger.”

As the protests intensified this week, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu called a crisis meeting on Thursday and canceled ministers’ travel plans to work on quelling the demonstrations. 

"I hear and understand the anxieties and anger that our youth may have,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday while speaking in Madrid. “However, none of these debates, none of these fears legitimizes violence.” 

Another day, another jaw-dropping feat by AI. Just last month, OpenAI announced that it had solved one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, a set of complex unanswered questions proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Then there was Google DeepMind’s new AlphaGenome Atlas, which predicted the biological effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter changes in the human genome.

These feats are awe-inspiring. As are the countless number of milestones and accomplishments each successive AI frontier model has racked up since ChatGPT was launched in 2022. But as we marvel at the machines, what gets crowded out are the humans. While acknowledging the amazing capacity of AI, we shouldn’t lose sight of the irreplaceable value of human-generated awe.

Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at Berkeley, studies the impact that experiences of awe have on our physical and mental health. He describes awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

The triumphs of AI certainly qualify. But one of Keltner’s studies, which looked at 2,600 stories of awe across 26 countries, had a very revealing finding. “What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe?” he writes. “Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”

The finding, Keltner says, caught his team off guard—they were expecting nature and spirituality to come out on top. Keltner called it “moral beauty,” which he defined as “witnessing the kindness, courage, strength, or selflessness of other people.” Of the moral beauty that inspired awe in the study, 95% came from witnessing actions that people took on behalf of others.

Keltner listed moral beauty as the first of his “eight wonders of life” that are everyday sources of awe. The others are collective movement, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, big ideas, and life and death. Technology can play a part in many of those, but they’re mostly deeply shaped by humans and human connection.

Many of the benefits of awe have a deeply human element. Keltner cites research showing that awe quiets the regions of the brain associated with excessive ego, self-criticism and anxiety. And this can have an expansive and collective impact. “In moments of awe,” Keltner writes in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, “we shift from the sense that we are solely in charge of our own fate and striving against others to feeling we are part of a community, sharing essential qualities, interdependent and collaborating.”

But what happens when a new technology, like AI, disrupts our sense of authentic community? To be sure, the ease with which our heads can be turned by machines long predates AI and has been with us as long as machines have. The term "technological sublime" was coined by the Harvard historian Perry Miller, who found that by the early nineteenth century "technological majesty" had joined "the starry heavens above and the moral law within to form a peculiarly American trinity of the Sublime.” In 1994, historian David Nye’s American Technological Sublime explored the impact that awe inspired by achievements like automated factories, the first canal systems, and the moon landing had on national identity. Nye notes how tech-inspired awe crowded out the human element. Writing about the awe-inspiring view from the new skyscrapers, he observed that it "divorced the observer from the sense of connection with others." From that height, the people below became "mere insects whose humanity had disappeared.”

And of course, all of us know how the awe of being connected to the entire world through our phones can simultaneously disconnect us from those around us.

Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein was addressing the students of Caltech—many of whom would no doubt go on to create awe-inspiring technology themselves—and gave them this charge: “Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors... in order that the creations of our mind shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.”

So sure, we will be awed by what the machines can do. But there is also so much awe to be had in our everyday lives, both in nature and in the moral beauty of humans. As Keltner notes, experiencing awe “doesn’t require money or the burning of fossil fuels.” Or tokens!

“Because we have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies,” he writes, “finding awe is easy if we just take a moment and wonder. All of us, no matter what our background, can find our own meaningful path to awe.

President Donald Trump on Thursday said he is following the upcoming Brazilian election “very closely,” referring to Brazil as a “very important" country. "The people of Brazil are fantastic people,” he told reporters outside the White House. “It’s a very important election.”

The U.S. State Department later announced the suspension of its consular services in Brazil ahead of the election taking place on Sunday, citing unspecified security concerns. “U.S. citizens seeking emergency assistance during this time should not come to the Embassy, the Consulates, or other U.S. diplomatic facilities,” the security alert advised.

Brazilians are heading to the polls for a set of federal elections spanning congressional and gubernatorial races, alongside the first round of the presidential election votes. It’s set to be a decisive moment for Latin America’s largest nation, as the region has seen a shift toward the right in recent years. An Oct. 25 runoff is expected, as polls show a tight contest between leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted last year for plotting a coup to overturn his 2022 election loss. Trump led the conservative voices denouncing the conviction, referring to the trial as a “witch hunt.”

While Trump has acknowledged his active interest as Brazil votes on its political future, there are concerns he could be too involved. Trump and his Administration have been accused of attempting to interfere with the high-stakes overseas election.

In a letter sent to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in late September, Democratic lawmakers expressed “grave concern” over what they referred to as “the Administration’s coordinated effort to threaten our strategic alliance with Brazil and undermine the Western Hemisphere’s second-largest democracy ahead of its upcoming presidential election.”

“Over the course of President Trump’s second term, we have seen U.S. officials engage in a sustained, multifaceted campaign of interference and destabilization in Brazil,” the lawmakers said in the Sept. 24 letter, signed by 30 House Democrats and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who caucuses with the Democratic Party.

In another letter sent to Rubio on Monday, three Democratic Senators voiced similar concerns about potential U.S. interference.

“This effort first escalated sharply during the summer of 2025, with the [U.S.] Administration deploying tariffs and targeted sanctions to attempt to shape the Brazilian Supreme Court’s verdict in the trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro on charges of attempting to foment a military coup to stay in power,” said the Senators, noting that the tariff pressure escalated in July this year when the Trump Administration moved to impose a new 25% tariff on many imports from Brazil—a decision labeled a “lamentable milestone” by Lula’s office.

The Senators argued that the “campaign directed at Brazil’s authorities resumed with the appointment of Darren Beattie as a senior advisor on Brazil issues in the State Department.” Beattie served as a White House speech writer in Trump’s first term, but was axed for attending a gathering of white supremacists. He returned to the fold early on in Trump’s second term. When serving as undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs last year, he called one of Brazil’s Supreme Court Judges a “key architect of the censorship and persecution complex directed against Bolsonaro and his supporters.” 

Accusing the Trump Administration of using “diplomatic, economic, and political pressure in ways that risk weakening [Brazil’s] democratic institutions [and] undermining confidence in Brazil's electoral process,” the Senators closed the letter by asking the Administration to “commit to recognizing the certified outcome of Brazil's 2026 democratic elections.”

The White House has staunchly rejected claims of interference in Brazil’s elections.

“Conservative leaders are winning elections across the Western Hemisphere on their own merit because everyone sees the success of President Trump’s policies,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly in a statement to TIME. “These claims are nonsense.”

President Lula has also expressed concern over Trump’s interest in his country’s election. “I have already told President Trump it is very important that the U.S. do not interfere in Brazil’s elections,” he said in a Sept. 22 interview. “Brazilian elections are the concern of the Brazilian people. American elections are the concern of the American people.”

Lula added that he is “very worried about Marco Rubio,” claiming that the U.S. Secretary of State “is very closely connected to Bolsonaro’s people,” though he stressed that this was only “suspicion.” TIME has reached out to the State Department for comment.

How the Trump Administration has been accused of meddling in Brazil’s affairs

Trump has not formally endorsed either candidate in Brazil’s presidential race, but his defense of former Brazilian President Bolsonaro, who was last year sentenced to 27 years in prison, is well documented.

After Trump criticized the trial proceedings as a “terrible thing” in July 2025, the Trump Administration increased pressure on Brazil’s government by imposing punishing 50% tariffs— extended in part due to Bolsonaro’s treatment in the courts—and directing the office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to investigate trade relations with the country.

The State Department added to the pressure later that same month, when Rubio called Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ actions a “political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro” and announced visa restrictions on Moraes, unspecified judicial allies, and their immediate families.

Feliciano de Sá Guimarães, an associate professor at the Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo, says Lula was able to turn the economic pressure into a political argument of his own.

“Lula realized that he could play [these threats] in his favor for electoral purposes,” he says, explaining that Lula used the concept of “rally round the flag,” meaning that once a country is targeted by another, “the incumbent President can rally the people and say, ‘look our sovereignty is under attack.’”

The theme of sovereignty has featured prominently in Lula’s 2026 government manifesto, which points to Trump’s tariffs as damaging the Brazilian economy.

Guimarães says the U.S. Administration has since slightly altered its strategy, favoring an approach that could instead benefit Lula’s opposition.

Flávio Bolsonaro met with Trump, Rubio, and Vice President J.D. Vance at the White House in May. Trump later described the Brazilian lawmaker as a “smart young man, who loves his country very much.” Shortly after that meeting, the U.S. Administration on May 28 designated Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho—two Brazilian gangs—as terrorist organizations, with Bolsonaro appearing to take credit for the move in the media.

Guimarães says the issue may have resonated in Brazil due to public concerns about crime.

“Brazilians are so desperate with the situation of crime in the country that they are resorting to support any initiative, whether it's coming from the federal government or a foreign power to fix the problem,” Guimarães explains, so the move could be seen to strengthen Bolsonaro’s chances with the electorate.

Economic pressure has continued as well. After ordering the USTR to investigate Brazil’s trade practices last year, the office imposed 25% tariffs on the country in July under Section 301, for what it described as unfair trade practices.

Other disputes have further heightened diplomatic tensions. At the end of July, Brazil denied visas to two U.S. State Department officials, accusing them of trying to interfere in the upcoming election. Shortly afterward, Brazilian Ambassador Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti had her U.S. visa revoked.

Is the Trump Administration influencing Latin America’s rightward-turn?

Since returning to office, Trump has sought to exert U.S. influence more directly across Latin America.

In November 2025, the Trump Administration released its National Security Strategy, which highlighted a return to U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and the beginning of the implementation of the "Donroe Doctrine," an informal term for Trump’s reinterpretation of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.

“The corollary of the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is trying to stop the influence of extra regional powers in Latin America, mainly China,” says Guimarães.

Trump has also showcased his support for right-wing candidates across the region.

In 2025, he endorsed close ally Javier Milei in Argentina’s midterm elections and supported Tito Asfura to become the next President of Honduras.

In June, he gave his “complete and total endorsement” to right-wing challenger Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia's June presidential election. (The Trump-backed populist went on to win the race.)

In response to Trump’s endorsement, House Democrats had sent a letter to Rubio expressing concern over what they said was “the brazen interference of senior U.S. officials, including President Trump” in Colombia’s election. “This interference involves the full-throated endorsement of Abelardo de la Espriella, a candidate with a profoundly troubling record that appears to run counter to U.S. interests and potentially to U.S. laws,” the lawmakers said.

But perhaps one of the most significant displays of American power came when the U.S. military captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife during an overnight operation in January and brought them to New York to face narco-terrorism and drug trafficking charges.

Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s acting president, has since adopted a friendlier posture toward the U.S. Administration, enabling access to the country’s oil. In an interview with TIME conducted in late September, Trump heralded the operation in Venezuela as an “incredible” feat and one of the “great things” he’s achieved in his presidency.

“The main reason the [U.S. Administration] will always prefer a right-winger more aligned with the United States, is so they can sell to domestic audiences that, at least in Latin America, Trump's policy is to some extent an effective foreign policy,” Guimarães says.

The State Department under Rubio’s direction has been key in the Trump Administration’s approach to Brazil, Guimarães says.

He cites the creation of the Shield of Americas, a U.S.-led security and political coalition launched in March to fight drug cartels and transnational crime across the Western Hemisphere, as an example. Brazil has not joined the initiative.

Guimarães calls it an “initiative launched by Rubio who wants to bring all Latin American countries under the yoke of the United States to fight organized crime,” and argues that Lula’s resistance could fuel Rubio’s interest in seeing a right-wing government take power, as Bolsonaro has promised to integrate Brazil into the security initiative if he wins the presidential election.

TIME held an Impact Dinner in Chicago on Thursday that featured reflections from four people who are working to support survivors of domestic violence.

The four speakers at the event, which was presented by The Allstate Foundation, were Donna Ferrato, a photojournalist and activist whose photographs of survivors helped raise awareness of domestic violence in the U.S.; Tommi Vincent, an author and speaker who is also president of the family lifestyle brand Vincent Country, and her husband, Troy Vincent, executive vice president of football operations at the NFL; and Ashley Judd, a humanitarian, activist, and actor who was one of the “Silence Breakers” recognized as TIME Person of the Year in 2017.

Here are highlights from each of the remarks.

Donna Ferrato

Ferrato opened her remarks by honoring her mother, who she said was a survivor and “will be forever the inspiration for my work.”

“I pledge allegiance to survivors of domestic abuse and sex trafficking,” Ferrato said. “Survivors are the ones who lead this movement.”

She also shared the story of the woman she said was “the person that I owe everything in my arsenal to.” One of Ferrato’s most well-known photographs, “Behind Closed Doors,” documented an act of domestic violence, focusing on a couple known at the time under the pseudonyms “Garth” and “Lisa.” Lisa’s real name was later revealed to be Elisabeth Lindberg—who today, Ferrato said, is “on top of the world.”

“She empowered herself,” Ferrato said. “Even as her life was unraveling, she allowed me to be with her. She’s not just a hero in my eyes … [but also] in the eyes of countless others who have followed her journey from being abused to becoming unbeatable.”

Ferrato called TIME “the midwife that brought Elisabeth’s rebirth to light,” recalling how Lindberg had shared her story in emotional interviews.

“She gave up her privacy for the good of other women,” Ferrato said. “She represents courage and love. And she proves why women must believe in their own inner voice.”

Ferrato also reflected on her decades-long career photographing the lives and experiences of survivors of domestic violence. When she began her focus on the topic more than 40 years ago, she said, victim blaming was pervasive in society. Ferrato set out to raise awareness about domestic violence through her photographs, and she praised the women who entrusted her with their stories.

She ended her remarks by emphasizing that such courage is needed now as much as ever. “Let’s break the silence,” she said. ”Let’s be outspoken. Praise these survivors.”

Tommi Vincent and Troy Vincent

The Vincents began their remarks by sharing how their own personal experiences drove them to become advocates.

“I am a thriving domestic violence survivor on a mission to normalize the conversation, not the behavior,” Tommi Vincent, who has been outspoken about her experience with past abuse, said. “I am compelled to use my voice, my experience, my resources, and my relationships to be part of the solution for victims and survivors.”

Her husband said that he also experienced “the devastation and the impact of domestic violence,” sharing how he and his younger brother witnessed their mother being abused while they were growing up.

“There were times when that abuse left her unable to work for extended periods,” Troy Vincent said. When “the shame of abuse finally lost its battle to the threat of eviction,” he said, his mother sought help from family members—underlining the link between domestic violence and financial instability. “That experience taught me something that still I believe in today—that people closest to the problem often are the ones equipped to help find solutions,” he continued.

The Vincents expressed their commitment to use their own experiences to help others. Tommi Vincent said that she and her husband, working with organizations including the National Domestic Violence Hotline, are “building a new house for survivors.”

“A house where survivors are centered. A house where their voices are heard. A house where their experiences help shape solutions,” she said. “And a house where we teach a new definition of love—one where love does not hurt, intentionally. That is the house we are committed to helping build.”

Ashley Judd

During her remarks, Judd said that, while not all men are violent, many are silent about the violence that other men perpetrate. She spoke about her own experiences with sexual violence and abuse, as well as stories of abuse that have made national headlines recently, and the common thread of “entitlement to female bodies.” Those who foster that attitude, or who see abuse and remain silent, are “all complicit,” she argued.

“I am resilient,” she said. “But why do we have to be strong? I am a survivor—of what are we surviving? Male demand to female bodies—and other men and some women and their families who are silent, do not confront and break their own denial, who minimize, trivialize, and dismiss what men do and say about women and to each other."

She urged anyone who witnesses abuse to speak up.

“There’s no such thing as a non-complicit bystander because if you really want to support survivors, you become an upstander,” Judd said. “You heal the village, you heal yourself, and you hold men accountable.”

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7. Call 1-800-799-SAFE or visit TheHotline.org.

TIME Impact Dinner: Empowering Survivors: Building Strong Futures Together was presented by The Allstate Foundation.

This week, Hillsborough County in Florida, which includes Tampa, declared a state of emergency linked to a growing number of dengue cases. So far this year, around 485 cases have been reported in the state, according to the CDC. The disease, which is transmitted by mosquitoes, can cause serious flu-like illness, and one person in Florida has died in the outbreak so far this year, the state’s department of health told media outlets in September. 

Seasonal outbreaks of the disease, which affects up to 400 million people worldwide annually, are not unusual in Florida, and they’re often linked to travelers. But this time is a little different, says Michael Johansson, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University. “This is the most locally acquired cases that we've seen in the state,” he says. 

What is dengue?

Dengue, sometimes called dengue fever, is caused by a collection of viruses carried by mosquitoes, primarily Aedes aegypti. Dengue is endemic in a wide swath of the tropics, and usually, most Americans who have the infection acquire it outside of the U.S. during travel. Dengue symptoms can occur 5-7 days after being bitten and range from mild to severe. They may include painful body aches as well as fever and can last up to 10 days. 

However, in parts of the U.S. where Aedes aegypti mosquitoes live, they can bite infected people and start to spread the disease locally. “The general pattern that we see—and we've seen this for more than a decade now—is that there are frequent travel-associated cases” in Florida, says Johansson. “We know we have the right vectors there, especially in southern Florida, where there's lots of Aedes aegypti, and there is some local transmission that occurs. Usually that looks like just one or two cases, but sometimes there are small outbreaks.”

In 2009, when two locally acquired infections were identified in Key West, public-health surveillance revealed that a substantial share of people in the town had markers in their blood showing a recent encounter with dengue, even if they hadn’t had symptoms. That suggests that in an outbreak, dengue is likely to be infecting more people than might immediately be clear from case counts. 

One distinctive feature of dengue, however, is that the second time someone is infected is likely to be much worse than the first. Sometimes a second infection can progress to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can involve bleeding and a drop in blood pressure, and is sometimes fatal. 

This pattern, where the second exposure is more dangerous than the first, has complicated attempts to vaccinate people against the disease. In 2017, Sanofi Pasteur, the manufacturer of the dengue vaccine Dengvaxia, alerted the government of the Philippines that serious dengue infections might occur in people who had received the vaccine as their first exposure to the disease. No dengue vaccine is currently available in the U.S.; Dengvaxia was available starting in 2019 but in 2025 was discontinued by the manufacturer, which cited low demand.

Will dengue become endemic in the U.S.?

So far, dengue has not established a permanent foothold in the continental U.S., says Johansson. There are a few reasons why that might be: large numbers of people in Florida, where Aedes aegypti thrive, stay within air-conditioned spaces when they’re most active, which means chains of transmission tend to be short. 

And the mosquitoes themselves are not particularly adventurous. They tend to stay close to home, within about a 100-meter range, so “it takes people to move the virus around,” says Johansson. If someone who’s infected doesn’t travel, the virus doesn’t either. 

How can you protect yourself from dengue?

There is no cure for dengue; the only treatments are for symptoms. If you are in an area with mosquitoes that can carry dengue, the best way to protect yourself is to avoid mosquito bites. Keep windows closed or use screens, cover as much of your skin as possible with clothing when outdoors, and use mosquito repellent, says Johansson. 

Keep yards free of containers that could fill with water and serve as breeding zones for mosquitoes. You’ll have to be vigilant: “These mosquitoes in particular, they can breed in a plastic bag that's collected a little bit of rainwater,” says Johansson. 

Cooler weather brings relief. “We're getting to the time of year when things are cooling down, so we should expect a decrease in transmission,” says Johansson. “However, it's still hot in Florida right now”—so it’s not time to drop your guard yet.

Tip Toe refuses to be misunderstood. Premiering Oct. 2 on Starz, the British miniseries from Queer as Folk creator and Doctor Who reviver Russell T Davies set its stakes as high as the lamppost from which Alan Cumming’s character is seen hanging, dead, just outside his home, in the very first scene. Reminders of this awful outcome open each episode, preceding flashbacks that take us through the escalation of tensions between Cumming’s Leo Struthers and his next-door neighbor, Clive Goss (David Morrissey), over the course of just 10 days. Scripty speechifying and a finale that strains believability notwithstanding, Tip Toe is, in its unabashed melodrama, a harrowing cri de coeur about masculinity in crisis and queer liberation reversed.

Leo and Clive have a few things in common. Both pushing 60, the men have been sharing a wall in outwardly identical Manchester rowhouses for 14 years. They’ve also both, when we meet them, hit rough patches in life. Clive, an electrician, is having trouble finding enough work to support a family that includes touchy 16-year-old George (Jackson Connor) and 25-year-old Saul (Joseph Evans), who assists his dad on jobs but isn’t exactly earning the kind of money that would enable him to move out. As gossip swirls that he’s cheated on her, Clive’s wife, Marie (Pooky Quesnel), constantly berates him. Meanwhile, Leo’s longtime partner, Curtis (Charlie Condou), has left him for a woman. Not only is he unmoored in his personal life, overrelying on his indulgent best friend, Stephanie (Elizabeth Berrington); he’s also struggling to manage Spit & Polish, the bar in Manchester’s gay nightlife district that he and Curtis used to run together.

Early one morning, Leo chases after an anonymous hookup who has just absconded with his laptop—only to find himself locked out of his house in his underwear. Clive reluctantly lets him in to call Stephanie for a spare key, making clear all the while that Leo’s lifestyle disgusts him and that he’s uncomfortable having his neighbor around his sons, one underage and the other a musclebound Adonis. The thing is, Clive’s kids are nowhere near as innocent as he thinks. And he’s drawn further out of his comfort zone when Leo, against his better judgment, hires Clive and Saul to fix some wiring at Spit & Polish. The first sign of worlds perilously colliding is when a bar employee recognizes Saul from OnlyFans. An unsubtle but rhetorically effective montage of Leo and the Gosses, each in separate rooms, indulging in their preferred forms of pornography, reveals both the secrets they’re keeping from each other and the loneliness they share. 

While Tip Toe spends time with all of these characters, Leo is its protagonist. And he’s an admirably imperfect one, charming and fundamentally kind but also pugnacious, prone to exaggeration, self-centered enough to earn Stephanie’s accusation that he doesn’t really value women. (She, in turn, shows glimpses of the J.K. Rowling-style transphobia that seems to afflict British feminists more than most.) His bar functions as a portal into the lives of less privileged members of the queer and trans communities, from his old, flamboyant, gender-nonconforming friend and unrequited admirer, Melba (Paul Rhys), to a 20-something trans bartender (Iz Hesketh), who’s calling herself Zee as she deliberates on a permanent female name—and who dodges transphobic violence daily. The question of whether the visibility Leo’s generation fought so hard to win has backfired, making them all easy targets, haunts the series.

Davies recently raged against the homophobia of the early AIDS crisis in the searing period piece It’s a Sin and looked queasily ahead to a dystopian future in the sci-fi family drama Years & Years. Tip Toe unites their themes to complete a sort of trilogy, combining the anxieties of LGBTQ people, intrafamilial alienation, economic strife, the social-media panopticon, and an overarching sense of doom into a fire sermon against our toxic present. That it shares its Manchester setting with the far breezier, Y2K-era Queer as Folk underlines just how much that community’s outlook has changed in a quarter-century. And the fact that Cumming’s phenomenal performance is airing concurrently in the U.S. with The Traitors: New Blood, which he hosts with high-camp aplomb and an androgynous glam wardrobe, highlights the cognitive dissonance of a society where queerness is embraced—by everyone except the sizable faction that actively hates it. More than just Leo’s antagonist, Clive is an avatar for straight masculinity in crisis, desperately vulnerable but too terrified of showing emotion to say so. Morrissey captures that tightness of that bind. Devalued at home and work, he dabbles in conspiracy theories and marinates in videos of “real deaths.” His story can feel like an adult Adolescence.

Tip Toe also calls to mind other recent series (BEEF, too many reality shows about feuding neighbors) and films (Eddington, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) that translate current political and social fault lines into tête-à-tête conflicts. On both sides of the Atlantic, storytellers are trying to understand the hateful tenor of the contemporary public sphere by distilling it down to its simplest, me-against-you form. The difference here is that, although Leo and other characters are shown to have healthy senses of humor, Tip Toe itself doesn’t share those titles’ tone of black-comic absurdity. It isn’t a funny show. Sometimes its seriousness veers into stridency. I didn’t find the abrupt escalation to Leo’s death particularly convincing. 

Yet, as in It’s a Sin and Years & Years, it’s the incandescent clarity of Davies’ anger and fear that make Tip Toe powerful. For all the dumbed-down dialogue we get from streamers worried they’ll lose distracted viewers unless someone on screen recaps the plot every five minutes, it’s rare to hear characters plainly state things like: “History tells us one thing—that blood and fire and retribution always happen. And right now it’s coming for us.” When Stephanie confesses her worry that she’ll die in 30 years without living to see the pendulum of progress swing society out of what she calls a “new Dark Age,” I suspect she’s speaking for a lot of people. Too often in fiction (which this is, despite ending title cards that purport to update us on the characters’ lives post-Leo), social commentary is inoculated with optimism or couched in irony. In its unblinking earnestness, Tip Toe’s melodrama accesses a truth that transcends any shortcomings of its plot.

In April 2003, a family in Baghdad was driving home as U.S. Marines engaged in a firefight with Iraqi forces. The family was caught in the crossfire, and three men were killed. Nearly 10 years after the shattering incident, the two women who survived the attack, having immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Glendale, Calif., sat down with one of the Marines who opened fire on them.

Journalist Dexter Filkins told the story of this encounter in the 2012 New Yorker article “Atonement After Iraq.” The piece details the efforts of U.S. Marine Lu Lobello to speak to Margaret and her daughter Nora Kachadoorian and seek their forgiveness for the attack that killed Margaret’s husband James and their sons Nicolas and Edmund and left Nora with a wound to the shoulder. Lobello reached out to Filkins to help facilitate the meeting. 

Lobello’s time with the Kachadoorians informs the climax of Atonement, written and directed by Reed Van Dyk and now in theaters. Their real names have been changed for the film: Filkins becomes Michael Reid (Kenneth Branagh), Margaret is Mariam Khachaturian (Hiam Abbass), and Lobello is Lou D’Alessandro (Boyd Holbrook).

“I cried through most of the article,” recalls Van Dyk, sitting down to discuss the film at a hotel in Toronto, where the film had its North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. He first read the New Yorker piece the year it was published. “I found it really touching to see and feel in a very detailed way the impact that this one incident in war had had on all of these characters' lives, and I did remember thinking, ‘Boy, this would be a really beautiful film story.’”

From concept to screenplay

At the time, however, Van Dyk was at the beginning of his career and in no position to make that film. Six years later, he won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for DeKalb Elementary, inspired by a school-shooting incident in Atlanta. That brought attention his way, allowing his feature-film ambitions to begin to materialize. “After that,” says Van Dyk, “I immediately reached for my copy of that New Yorker issue, which I still have, and started trying to make this film.”

His first challenge was turning a 12-page article into a two-hour film. “You have this wonderful reportage to work with, and all of the texture and specificity that comes with that,” says Van Dyk. “Then there are all the rooms that Dexter wasn't in. That's where my job comes in. There were three people that the story is centered around, two of whom come to life in Dexter’s article. He’s not much of a character in his own piece, so I had to flesh out this character that Branagh plays.” 

It’s a unique story that requires a unique take on a film about war. For one thing, there are hardly any actual scenes of war depicted on screen. Van Dyk’s film uses a single event from the Iraq War as an opportunity to explore the humanity in, and aftermath of, conflict. War movies often seek to enforce the lines of division, but Atonement is more interested in the unexpected ways in which people come together. Van Dyk was keen to explore the humanity in the story, not only from the American perspective, as we so often see in Hollywood films, but from the Iraqi one, too.

“I’m accustomed to seeing Iraqi characters in most Western films about war through sniper scopes. That wasn’t something I was interested in,” he says. Instead, the director wanted to centralize the voices and people that are typically marginalized in American films. “As a writer, I want to know my characters as deeply as I can, and I want to have love for them. The real pleasure of writing was getting to know this Iraqi family, who lived a very different life than I did, and I worked really hard behind the scenes to make that feel real.”

The real-life meeting

The real Lobello first reached out to Filkins in March 2012 on Facebook, saying that he had been trying to get in touch with him for a decade. “You could ease my PTSD,” he added. The two began communicating, and Filkins learned that Lu wanted him to help connect with the Kachadoorians so that he could atone and apologize for the tragedy that transpired that day.

Filkins had previously reported on the Kachadoorians in Iraq, but later lost touch with them. Thankfully, Lobello had already found them, via Facebook. He asked Filkins to facilitate the meeting, hoping he could bridge the gulf between them.

The Kachadoorians were not hesitant to meet Lobello. “If he is asking for forgiveness, then we will give him forgiveness. God ordered us to forgive. He forgives us, so we must forgive others. Even people who killed our dears,” Margaret said.

The meeting took place on a Saturday in July 2012. Lobello was deeply anxious going in, and immediately burst into tears upon meeting Margaret and Nora. Margaret comforted him with a pat on the back. The conversation that followed was tense. As Filkins describes it, the day ended with a sense that a true resolution would never be reached, though progress had been made. While forgiveness was granted, forgetting is impossible, and resentment lingers. There are no easy answers when it comes to grief and war. But something extraordinary did, in fact, happen in the room, just as Van Dyk recreates in Atonement.

Explains the filmmaker: “They begin to see themselves in each other.”

Several days after meeting, Lobello received a Facebook message from Nora. She said she felt happy when he came to visit, and that she felt she got “a third brother,” and “the third son to my mom.”

Holding conflicting truths

In order to capture the emotional depth and intensity of that encounter, Van Dyk conducted extensive research throughout his years writing Atonement. He spoke to as many people involved in the real events as he could, including Lobello and the Kachadoorian family. He spoke to countless marines and Iraqi civilians and traveled to Baghdad with his director of photography, Jon Peter. The visit challenged his perception of the country based on what he’d seen in cinema. “I found it rich with color and rich with spirit, when most films posit the country as something more apocalyptic,” he says. “It was important for us to highlight that richness when we were working on the design and how we were shooting.”

He drew further from books written by Iraqi authors, and marines who’d come back from war. Documentaries also played a key role. He credits the documentary Homeland: Iraq Year Zero by Abbas Fahdel as “the best document of the Iraq War, certainly from the civilian perspective. It became a reference point for all of us.” Restrepo was an important reference when it came to filming the war sequence, and Van Dyk notes that The Act of Killing influenced the way he thought about the psychological and spiritual effects of men who have killed, as well as the moral implications of that experience.

Van Dyk became close with the Kachadoorian family while making Atonement. He’s spent “too many hours to count” with them, and they regularly have dinner together. “Every visit is like a five-hour hang,” he says. It was during one of those visits that Van Dyk had a breakthrough moment that prompted him to revise the movie’s script. “In one of the conversations we had, Margaret said something about Lobello that ended up in the movie: ‘Sometimes I look at him and I see my son, and sometimes I look at him and I see the man who took my son.’ I thought it captured very poignantly the complexity of her experience on that day, and I think it was teaching me too that the film had to hold both visions she had of him.” 

As Van Dyk puts it, Atonement “pushes back on the larger narrative we’re absorbing from the media about other countries.” The film’s ultimate aim, like so many great works of cinema, is to give the audience an opportunity to expand their empathy for people they might never encounter in their daily lives.

“It’s rare that there are opportunities to make amends,” says Van Dyk. “Thats what makes this story so different from other stories that unfold during a war. Everyone got to sit down together again. I think there’s something powerful about people willing to hold space with others who were on a completely different side of war, let alone forgive someone.” 

On Sept. 16, a student at Cornell University filed a lawsuit against the university, fraternities, and sororities after she was allegedly drugged and gang-raped by seven fraternity brothers in 2024. The allegations are horrifying. But just as troubling is what the lawsuit describes afterward: a survivor seeking help from the systems meant to protect her and finding, again and again, that she was failed.

In 2026, we are still asking how this happened. The Cornell case is not only about the conduct alleged in one lawsuit. It is about a broader failure of prevention, investigation, and accountability—one that survivors of sexual violence encounter far too often, on campuses and far beyond them.

For nearly a decade, I have worked alongside survivors who made the extraordinarily difficult decision to share their stories. Some became public faces of national reckonings. Many more remained anonymous, fearful of backlash, retaliation, disbelief, or the permanent consequences of public exposure. Their names did not make headlines. Their pain was no less real.

What I have learned is that survivors are often failed more than once: first, by the person who harms them, and then by the very systems that are supposed to prevent, investigate, and respond to sexual violence.

The allegations in the complaint involving Cornell's campus are deeply disturbing, and new ones continue to emerge hour by hour. Just as disturbing is how this young student was reportedly failed afterward. According to her lawsuit and news accounts, the alleged assault involved drugs, multiple perpetrators, and digital evidence. The complaint has raised serious questions about whether the case was thoroughly investigated after it was reported. That should concern every parent, student, university administrator, and public official, not simply because it occurred at an elite university, but because these failures can occur anywhere.

We must start with prevention. Consent is not a box to check. It must be voluntary, informed, ongoing, and freely given. It cannot exist when a person is incapacitated, and it can be withdrawn at any time.

So how did young men come to believe this was acceptable? As a society, we have failed to educate young people about consent, respect, and the gravity of sexual violence. That education must begin before college; we cannot wait until they arrive on campus. 

College students need more than a single orientation presentation they forget by October. Schools should provide sustained, practical education about consent, coercion, alcohol and drugs, healthy relationships, and bystander responsibility. 

But education and prevention alone are not enough. Institutions must have protocols to ensure justice when prevention fails. 

On Sept. 18, 2026, in response to recent community outrage over how the case was handled, Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten issued a statement explaining why his investigation resulted in a lack of criminal charges. Jane Doe’s credibility “was never in question,” he wrote, explaining that the initial sworn statement shared with the DA, which was reviewed by “multiple prosecutors and criminal investigators,” did not include the full information provided in Jane Doe’s 2026 civil suit. 

Transcript records, obtained by CBS News New York, from a November 2024 interview with Cornell campus police indicate that Jane Doe told officials, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped."

Van Houten has since stated that he was never shown the transcript. "If she had said those words, we certainly would want to have explored that more," he told CBS. "Like I said, that wasn't provided to me."

This demonstrates why the response to reports of sexual assault must be trauma-informed and evidence-based. Survivors may not disclose everything at once. Their recollections may emerge in fragments. They may hesitate, change the order of events, or struggle to articulate what happened. Those are not automatic signs of deception; they can be well-recognized effects of trauma. I have seen it firsthand, personally and professionally with Weinstein survivors.

Prosecutors and investigators handling sexual assault cases must receive mandatory trauma-informed training. They must know how to preserve evidence, interview witnesses, assess digital records, and investigate without allowing outdated assumptions about how a “credible” victim should behave to dictate the outcome.

Universities have an equally urgent responsibility. A sexual-assault report cannot be treated as a public-relations problem to contain quietly. Institutions need independent investigators, clear procedures, meaningful support for complainants, and processes that are fair to all parties while prioritizing campus safety. When an impartial process finds a student responsible for sexual assault, the consequences must be serious enough to protect the community and demonstrate that violence will not be tolerated. And Title IX policies and procedures should likewise be reviewed and strengthened to ensure that complaints are handled fairly, promptly, and effectively.

Public accountability also matters. When survivors decide that speaking publicly is right for them, they deserve legal, communications, and institutional support. This creates a powerful transformation. They are no longer isolated voices. Their experiences, amplified through journalism and public discourse, create pressure that institutions cannot ignore. They become part of a movement.

This is how cultural change happens. A survivor speaks publicly. Her story resonates. Others find courage to come forward. Lawmakers, university administrators, and prosecutors suddenly face inescapable public scrutiny. The conversation shifts from whispered allegations to national headlines, from institutional cover-ups to criminal investigations. 

No survivor should have to go public to be believed. No survivor should have to become a national story to receive a competent investigation. And no college should wait for headlines to do what it was obligated to do from the start. 

The alleged events at Cornell remind us that awareness alone is not action. We have spent years talking about sexual violence, consent, and institutional accountability. We know more about trauma than we did a decade ago. We have policies, resources, and legal frameworks that can make a difference.

What has been missing is the will to use them consistently.

Survivors deserve institutions that prevent harm where possible, respond effectively when harm occurs, and refuse to protect reputations at the expense of safety, dignity, and justice. We should not still be here in 2026, asking why. 

We cannot continue to let survivors down. 

We all must do better—institutions and individuals alike.

This year, our daughter, Yolanda Renee King, the only grandchild of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, will vote for the very first time. This 18-year-old is exercising her rights just as the current administration works to challenge and rewrite them. She is not alone. Young people, women, and marginalized communities are caught in the crossfire, with President Donald Trump on the attack.

She and millions like her are in the fight of their lives to vote! 

First, President Trump’s efforts to change how voter eligibility is verified and how mail-in ballots are handled could create additional obstacles for voters who rely on mail ballots, including college students like Yolanda, who left Georgia to attend college in New York. 

Then there’s the SAVE America Act, which passed the House in February by a vote of 218 to 213, and would require documented proof of citizenship, such as a U.S. passport or qualifying birth certificate, to register to vote. Experts warn this could create additional hurdles for people whose current legal names do not match their citizenship documents, such as married women who have changed their names.

As Yolanda's parents, we have always stressed her autonomy, especially over her own body. We are appalled by legislation in individual states that could decide women's reproductive rights. This is an attack on bodily autonomy itself.

It is clear to us that President Trump's actions validate what Dr. King taught us: freedom is never really won, and the fight never ceases. Instead, it evolves and is reimagined for a new generation. Yolanda's generation.

As a country, we are tired. Actually, we are past tired. We are exhausted, and it makes no sense that we must fight again to restore rights our own mothers and fathers already fought for. But exhaustion is not defeat. It is a signal to recalibrate and know your opposition. The same forces that worked to keep marginalized groups from the ballot when Dr. King was alive are not gone. Just repurposed. They are not done, and neither are we.

We believe we are the “Beloved Community” he dreamed of. And together, with eyes wide open, arm in arm, with unwavering dedication to truth and equity, we fight again for our future, for our children, for Yolanda. 

Here is what you can do right now: check your voter registration today, and find out what your state now requires—especially if your legal name does not match your birth certificate. Learn your state's reproductive rights measures and who sits on your county election board. And, importantly, heed Dr. King’s words. 

"So long as I do not firmly and irrevocably possess the right to vote,” he once said. “I do not possess myself.”

Tennessee is reviewing its lethal injection process after a botched execution attempt left 50-year-old Christa Pike in critical condition.

Pike was receiving “lifesaving care” at a Nashville hospital on Thursday, having survived two shots of the lethal drug pentobarbital, her attorneys said in a press conference. It is the first time in the modern era of the U.S. death penalty that a person received lethal injection drugs and survived, according to the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center.

“This failed attempt is the worst we’ve ever seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” Robin Maher, the center’s director, said in a statement on Thursday.

Pike’s case has drawn scrutiny over the state’s decision to proceed with her execution, despite repeated warnings about its lethal injection protocol from her attorneys, who said she was subjected to “chemical torture.”

Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, ordered an independent investigation of the lethal injection process late on Wednesday. Lee also suspended executions in the state till the end of the year, the second moratorium on executions during his time in office due to concerns over the state’s lethal injections.

“There is no one that wanted what happened last night to happen,” Lee told reporters on Thursday, describing the botched execution as a “tragedy.” But he stopped short of suggesting that he might heed renewed calls to commute Pike’s sentence to life in prison.

“The people of Tennessee have determined that the death penalty is the appropriate penalty for the most heinous crimes in the state,” Lee said. “The people of Tennessee make that decision, and my job is to make sure then that those sentences are carried out.”

Lee had denied Pike’s clemency request to commute her sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Monday.

Pike, convicted of the 1995 murder of then-19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, has been on death row for more than 30 years. She would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Only 18 women have been executed in the U.S. since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The Tennessee Department of Correction said in a statement to media outlets late Wednesday that it “had followed every step of the state’s lawful, established execution protocol approved by the attorney general’s office.” It described the lethal injection as “consistently effective.”

Lee defended the agency, saying it followed protocol.

TIME has reached out to the state’s Department of Correction and Pike’s attorneys for comment.

“There was no reason to expect it to not work,” Lee said. “But something didn’t go well or right last night, and we need to find out why.”

Attorneys say execution attempt amounted to ‘chemical torture’

Randy Spivey, an attorney with the Tennessee Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, said Pike endured a “torturous” experience in the execution chamber. Pike’s left arm was pierced by at least seven needles, and her right arm turned purple, he said. She said her arm felt like it was “about to explode,” her attorneys said.

Pike’s attorneys suggested that the drugs may have entered her arm tissue instead of directly into her bloodstream. They described it as “chemical torture.”

Pike remained cooperative throughout the multiple execution attempts and tried to help her executioners, her attorneys said. “She over and over again said, ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here. Please try here,’” Spivey said.

“We may never know what all she was suffering through, either because she can’t remember it, she can’t tell it, or it overwhelms her,” said Stephen Ferrell, from the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee. Pike’s greatest fear was not of dying but “of a prolonged, painful, traumatic death.”

“And that’s what happened,” Ferrell said. “Minus the death.”

Witnesses to the execution said late Wednesday that Pike could still be heard breathing and snoring an hour after her executioners administered two rounds of pentobarbital, including when the curtain closed and when witnesses were escorted out of the chamber.

Tennessee switched to a one-drug lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital as its execution protocol in December 2024. Pike’s lawyers previously raised concerns about the source of the drugs, while Reuters reported on Thursday that that information had been withheld. E.U. law bars pharmaceutical companies from selling drugs for use in executions, leading some U.S. prison systems to procure the drugs from compounding pharmacies in processes often shielded by state secrecy laws.

In legal filings, Pike’s lawyers had raised concerns that Pike’s execution by lethal injection might be compromised by her small veins and medical history of thrombocytosis. But their petitions to the state to use alternative execution methods, like death by hanging, were denied.

Pike’s lawyers said in a statement that their concerns proved true: “difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.” 

In a June court filing, Pike’s attorneys pointed to the state’s failed execution of Tony Carruthers in May, when medical staff failed to find a vein. Lee granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

The American Medical Association and American Nurses Association prohibit doctors and nurses from participating in executions under their professional ethics standards. Some states have used execution personnel without current medical licenses. Tennessee, however, requires the participation of physicians, or other medically trained personnel in an execution.

After the botched execution of Carruthers, more than 40 doctors and nurses penned a letter to Lee, calling on him to redesign the protocol to exclude health care workers, arguing that it is at odds with their commitment to preserve life. 

Lee also paused executions and ordered an independent review in 2022 after it was discovered that prison officials failed to properly test lethal injection drugs for endotoxins in the lead-up to the planned execution of Oscar Franklin Smith. Smith was ultimately killed in May 2025, three years after Lee issued a temporary reprieve.

The review resulted in the one-drug protocol that was used on Wednesday. It also showed that officials had skipped proper endotoxin testing for multiple prior executions.

Some call for commutation, others the electric chair

Pike’s attorneys have publicly called on the state’s governor to reconsider commuting Pike’s sentence to life in prison. Pike, who was sentenced in March 1996 at age 20, has expressed remorse for the torture and murder of her classmate. Her legal team had asked courts to review mitigating claims of sexual abuse and rape as a child, which they said Tennessee had disputed in earlier proceedings. They also separately argued that aspects of the execution process could trigger PTSD related to that abuse, constituting cruel and unusual punishment.

Hours before the scheduled execution on Wednesday, a federal appeals court issued an eleventh hour stay of execution to review the case. The state asked the Supreme Court to vacate the lower court’s ruling, which it did in a 6-3 decision, allowing Tennessee officials to proceed. The Supreme Court did not explain its decision.

In her dissent alongside liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “I see no reason to short-circuit the ordinary process of appellate review, particularly in light of the grave consequences of an erroneous decision. Tennessee’s desire to expedite Pike’s execution by a few days or even weeks cannot outweigh her ‘fundamental interest in [her] own life.’”

Pike’s underlying case remains pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. 

Pike’s case has also renewed calls to abolish the death penalty.

“I have always opposed the death penalty. It is irreversible and applied unequally, and it has never made Tennesseans safer,” said Democratic state senator Heidi Campbell in a social media post. “But you don’t have to share my view to be appalled. If the state claims the power to kill, it has a basic duty to be competent, transparent, and humane.”

Campbell described the incident as a “moral catastrophe” that cost the state $500,000.

Jerri Green, the Democratic nominee to replace Lee as governor when his term ends in January, said that, if elected, she would extend the moratorium on executions throughout her time in office.

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday that “the case of Christa Pike lays bare multiple reasons why the death penalty should be abolished.” Calling for the state to stop any further attempt to execute Pike, he said, “the prolonged suffering—physical and mental—arising from multiple failed execution attempts is abhorrent and cruel.”

Tennessee is one of 27 states where the death penalty is legal, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, although governors in four states—California, Ohio, Oregon, and Pennsylvania—have halted all executions.

Others have instead said the failed execution demonstrates the need for a different, more effective execution protocol.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R, Tenn.), who is running for governor, called for the state to “bring back the electric chair.” Tennessee allows prisoners whose crimes occurred before 1999 to choose electrocution, although lethal injection is its primary execution method. Pike’s attorneys argued that opting for electrocution would go against her religious beliefs of not participating in her own death. They explained they had presented hanging as an alternative execution method in her challenge to lethal injection as legally required.

Cameron Sexton, Republican speaker of Tennessee’s House, said the General Assembly would investigate ways to ensure future executions do not fail, including expanding alternative methods and changing current medications to include potassium chloride.

“Justice wasn’t carried out last night due to an error,” Sexton said. “Thirty years is too long for justice.”

Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, who had driven from Florida to Nashville to witness the execution, said Thursday that the execution process was an injustice to her family. “Here we are, 31 years, and you’re laughing in my face again,” she told First Coast News, expressing frustration that she and her husband were kept in the prison for hours and were not allowed to leave without an escort. The victim’s family had long supported Pike’s execution.

Martinez said the prison gave her few answers about what would happen after the execution attempt failed, and that she disagreed with the decision to take Pike to an off-site hospital. “Now I have to worry about her being out,’” Martinez said. “And then I brought up, ‘Is she going to come back to the prison?’ ‘I don’t know what we’re doing with her yet.’ That’s the answer I got.”

‘Cruel’ punishment

While Pike appears to be the first person in the U.S. to survive lethal injection drugs, she is not the only person to have experienced botched execution attempts, nor the first whose attorneys have argued that multiple attempts could violate the Constitution.

On May 3, 1946, Louisiana officials strapped Willie Francis, a 17-year-old Black teenager convicted of murder, into the portable electric chair nicknamed “Gruesome Gertie.” But Francis survived the first jolt when the electric chair malfunctioned. Francis’s lawyer challenged the state in an attempt to stop a second execution attempt, arguing that subjecting him to a second electrocution would amount to cruel and unusual punishment and violate the Eighth Amendment. His lawyer also argued that it would amount to double jeopardy—punishing him twice for the same offence, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

The Supreme Court, however, ruled in a 5-4 decision that a state can attempt a second execution, finding that an unintentional equipment malfunction did not violate the Constitution.

The landmark ruling has been cited in subsequent cases, including State v. Broom (2016), when the Ohio Supreme Court permitted another execution attempt after officials failed to establish an IV line. 

Still, Pike’s lawyers are urging the governor to spare her another execution attempt after what they said caused “unnecessary agony.”

“The state of Tennessee has shown us again that they are not capable of carrying out an execution consistent with basic human dignity,” Spivey said. “Last night was not just inefficient. It was cruel, and it was torturous.”

The facts about what happened aboard Flydubai flight 1073, from Dubai, UAE  to Tel Aviv, Israel on Sept. 30 are not in dispute. The plane, carrying more than 170 passengers, left the ground at 3:05 a.m. local time (11:05 p.m. EDT) to begin a planned three-hour and 35-minute journey, climbing to a cruising altitude of 34,000 ft., according to FlightRadar24, a live air traffic site. At 5:21 a.m., the co-pilot, an unnamed Omani national, attacked the pilot, an Indian national named Smit Machchhar, with what is being variously described as an axe or a knife.

The plane went into a steep dive, plummeting more than 14,000 ft. in 30 seconds, slinging screaming passengers from their seats. Bleeding profusely from cuts to his hands and head, Machchhar managed to send out three alerts to the ground: a so-called 7700 alarm, indicating a “general emergency;” then a 7500, indicating “unlawful interference;” then another 7700. More importantly, he was able to unlatch and open the locked cockpit door, tumbling into the galley area at the front of the plane, while still wrestling with his co-pilot. 

Two passengers and one flight crew member subdued the attacker and bound his hands with the cables from passenger headphones. In a case of good fortune, two reserve pilots were aboard the plane, there to relieve the prime crew when they landed in Tel Aviv. The pair raced to the cockpit, took the controls, and landed the plane safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Both of the prime pilots were taken to a local hospital, where Machchhar is being treated for his wounds, and the attacker was taken into custody, where he faced interrogation by Saudi law enforcement officers before being handed over to the UAE.

In an interview with Fox News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was too soon to know if the co-pilot were acting in coordination with Iran, with which Israel is currently at war, in an act of organized terrorism, “but he obviously hated Israelis because he was going to kill about 170 of them on the plane, killing himself too.”

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday suggested the co-pilot may be linked to Iran, "based on what [he's] hearing," but did not provide any details.

Machchhar, meantime, is being hailed a hero on the international stage. “Captain Smit Machchhar has shown the world the highest form of courage,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X. “Without fearing for his own life, he fought valiantly and prevented another 9/11 like attack from happening.”

What’s far less clear in the wake of the near mass casualty is how it happened in the first place. The attacker had been with the airline for eight months—coming aboard before the war in Iran began. Was he nonetheless collaborating with Iran, or was he a self-radicalized lone wolf? What kind of screening do commercial pilots worldwide go through to ensure mental stability and to rule out terrorist or criminal links? How did a weapon make it aboard the plane in the first place? And are the locked and hardened cockpit doors—which went into use on airlines worldwide after 9/11—almost too secure, keeping attackers out, yes, but preventing rescuers from getting in to stop a similar incident between pilots?

What security measures are in place to ensure pilots don't present a risk?

The early reports that the weapon used in the attack was a knife raised questions, since the popular belief is that pilots and crew go through the same security screening passengers do. But that’s not the case, according to experts.

“Most of the pilots and flight crew will go through what's called the ‘crew member access point,’” says Jeff Price, professor of aviation at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, and author of the book Practical Aviation Security. “They’re called ‘known crew members.’ A large part of this is based on trust. They have access to the airplane and if they wanted to sabotage it, they probably could.”

Subsequent investigations revealed that the co-pilot did not have a knife, but instead used what’s known as a crash axe, a tool kept in the cockpit for use, as its name suggests, as a means of escape or rescue in the event of an accident.

Other kinds of screening—for mental health, criminal background, and potential association with terrorist or other criminal organizations—is more rigorous, but standards vary from country to country. “A new pilot does go through a criminal history record check to see if they've ever been arrested or convicted of a set of 28 different crimes,” says Price of the U.S. process. “They also go through what's called a security threat assessment, which is a TSA check to see if they are on any sort of list that might require them to not receive a badge to the airline, which means they can't fly for the airline.”

Psychological profiling is much less strict, basically operating on the honor system—honor being a quality that somebody with an eye toward bringing down a plane would not be likely to possess in abundance. “There's not a federal requirement for that other than their flight medical [tests], in which case they're given a questionnaire that basically says, ‘Are you mentally stable and do feel okay?’” says Price.

International standards do call for, at a minimum, this level of mental health screening, but standards and enforcement vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Concerns over cockpit barriers intended to close a 9/11 security gap

As for locked cockpit doors, they can be opened from the outside provided that somebody knows the combination—which, outside of the pilots themselves, only firefighters, police, and other first responders do. That, Price admits, does raise the question of the doctrine of unintended consequences, with the post-9/11 security measures solving one problem while creating another.

Additionally, in the U.S., new Federal Aviation Administration rules require what is called a “secondary cockpit barrier” on all newly-manufactured commercial planes delivered to U.S. airlines. The rule, which doesn’t apply to existing planes, is set to add an extra layer of security at the head of the plane and, hopefully, prevent any potential bad actors from gaining access to the cockpit. But again, what if the danger lies within the cockpit?

“Everything we did was to try and prevent access to the flight deck, which doesn't do a whole lot of good when the problem is coming from inside the house,” acknowledges Price, adding that “it’s a [matter of] risk-reward.”

On balance, the risk of another such mutinous crew member trying to commandeer a plane is less than the reward that comes from preventing hijackers from seizing the cockpits as they did aboard four flights 25 years ago. But the danger of an incident like yesterday’s ending catastrophically is decidedly nonzero.

Price cites the tragic case of Germanwings Flight 9525 which crashed on March 24, 2015, taking the lives of 150 people, when the pilot left the cockpit to use the restroom and the co-pilot took that opportunity to seize the plane and fly it into the French Alps.

“It has almost never happened,” Price says, “but it has happened.”

While President Donald Trump battles growing pushback from lawmakers and American voters on multiple fronts, he is continuing to score victories in another arena: the Supreme Court’s so-called “shadow docket.” 

On Tuesday, the Court issued an emergency order allowing Trump to resume deporting people to “third countries” other than their own, temporarily lifting a lower court’s block. 

Days earlier, in response to another emergency request from the Trump Administration, the Court permitted the use of a controversial Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database in verifying the eligibility of voters ahead of the November midterms amid the Trump Administration's aggressive effort to crack down on alleged non-citizen voting.

Read More: ‘The Problem Is Infinitesimal’: What the Trump Administration's Intensifying Hunt for Non-Citizen Voters Is Showing

In both cases, the orders were unsigned and gave no vote count, but the Court’s three liberal Justices publicly dissented.

The rulings are only the latest in a string of mostly favorable decisions the Trump Administration has received from the Supreme Court in response to a flurry of requests for emergency relief it has made as it fights to implement the President’s second term agenda amid an array of legal challenges. 

Trump has already made significantly more of those requests than any other President in recent history. And the Administration has shown no signs of slowing the pace of its emergency petitions to the Court. On Monday, it submitted yet another such request, asking the Justices to allow it to place restrictions on gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons after the policy was halted by a district court judge in Washington, D.C. 

Legal experts tell TIME that the Supreme Court has been far more permissive towards the Administration’s frequent emergency requests than in the past, allowing Trump to move forward his executive agenda with less legal constraint than his predecessors.  

“The Supreme Court has changed the rules for when the executive branch can obtain this kind of emergency relief in ways that it is completely different from what they've done in the past,” Carolyn Shapiro, a professor of law and the founder of the Chicago-Kent College of Law's Institute on the Supreme Court, tells TIME. “The Trump Administration has taken that invitation.”

What is the Supreme Court’s ‘shadow docket’?

The Supreme Court’s emergency docket, also known as its “shadow docket,” is the process by which the Court receives and responds to requests for expedited review in ongoing cases. Justices can respond to those requests by temporarily overturning lower courts’ decisions on, say, Executive Orders that judges deemed unconstitutional. 

Unlike the high court’s traditional merits docket, which involves extensive legal review, oral arguments, months of deliberation by the justices, and a written decision on each case, the shadow docket’s process is accelerated and produces decisions that do not require vote counts or written rationale. 

Traditionally, an application to the shadow docket must still satisfy certain legal criteria in order for that request to be approved. The applicant must show that irreparable harm may occur if a lower court’s order is not paused, or that approval would serve in the public’s interest. 

But critics of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket rulings during Trump’s second term say that in many cases, the high court has failed to show that those criteria have been satisfied and simply approved Trump’s requests. 

“It is rarely a genuine emergency for the executive branch to be thwarted in trying to implement one of its policies while litigation is pending,” Kate Shaw, an expert on the Supreme Court and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, tells TIME. “And yet again and again, the court has concluded or appeared to conclude that the executive is experiencing this irreparable harm, such that the policy should be put into effect—regardless of how flagrantly unlawful lower courts have found the proposed policy to be.”

How has the Trump Administration benefitted from the emergency docket? 

Because the Supreme Court is not required to provide the same legal reasoning or evidence for its decisions as lower courts, Shapiro explains, the high court can therefore discard evidence or analysis provided in a lower court’s previous ruling.

“You have these lower courts that are working incredibly hard to have evidentiary hearings, and make factual findings on the record, to do deep legal analysis and to do it really quickly,” Shapiro says. “And the Supreme Court … in virtually every shadow docket case where it has stayed a lower court injunction, it has ignored the factual findings.”

The impact of this, she contends, has been to disenfranchise lower courts’ authority over the President and infuse the executive branch with more power.

“It's had the effect of allowing the Administration to do things that are almost certainly illegal,” Shapiro says, “without even a hint from the Supreme Court that they think that's problematic.” 

Past Administrations have used the shadow docket relatively sparingly: President Obama submitted three applications to the docket over both of his terms. Biden submitted 19. Trump, however, submitted 41 applications in his first term, and has already made the same number of requests in his second term.

And he’s had a high success rate: Since Trump returned to office last January, the Supreme Court has issued 32 decisions on shadow docket rulings concerning his Administration. Of those cases, 24 have been decided in favor of the Administration. 

Those rulings have allowed Trump to move ahead with actions related to his sweeping immigration crackdown, government cuts, and contentious construction projects, among a number of other issues. 

Last month alone, along with its decisions to permit third-country deportations and the use of the revamped DHS database in verifying voter eligibility, the Supreme Court also allowed Trump to temporarily withhold $4 billion in foreign aid, ruling that "the asserted harms to the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm" to the groups that would have received it. 

Read More: What Is a ‘Pocket Rescission’? Inside Trump’s Move to Cancel $810 Million in Federal Funding  

In yet another September ruling responding to a Trump Administration request, however, the Court sided against the Administration, declining to allow Trump to enforce restrictions on mail-in ballots ahead of the upcoming midterms.

A Justice Department official defends the Administration’s use of the emergency docket to TIME, arguing that it has been used to accomplish the President’s agenda without bypassing legal procedure. 

“The Justice Department has a strong record before the Supreme Court on emergency applications, which reflects how often lower courts have blocked lawful policies without justification,” a Justice Department (DOJ) official tells TIME. “Without timely relief, any administration's priorities could be tied up in litigation for years. Asking the Supreme Court to step in when it is warranted does not undermine the judicial system. It is how the system is designed to work."

But critics of the Supreme Court’s increasingly frequent shadow docket rulings—a group that includes the Court’s liberal justices, several lower-court judges, and legal scholars—have sounded alarms about the practice’s potential impact on the American legal system. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed worry over the Supreme Court’s shadow docket rulings last week. 

“There is a serious concern that the Supreme Court’s modern stay practices are having a disruptive and potentially corrosive effect,” she said while speaking at University of the District of Columbia’s law school last week. “If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end-run around the standard review process.” 

Jackson’s fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have also criticized the conservative majority’s growing reliance on the emergency docket. And even conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch has seemed to indicate concerns about the situation.

“The rise of the emergency. The perpetual emergency. Everything is an emergency,” he said while speaking in Colorado Springs last week, per The Denver Gazette. “We’ve moved so much up to the federal level that needs to be done by states. And now through delegations of authority, through emergency legislation of all stripes, we’ve moved it over to the executive branch. And I just don’t think that’s a recipe for a healthy democracy over the long term.”

Several lower-court judges have also spoken out against the Supreme Court’s conduct over the shadow docket.

“A system in which unexplained orders silently control future cases is not one of uniformity, but of opacity,” Judge James Wynn of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals argued after the Supreme Court allowed Trump’s former Department of Government Efficiency to access Social Security data last June. Another federal judge told NBC News last fall that the Supreme Court’s conduct “is inexcusable,” and that “they don’t have our backs.”

“The court has sided with the Administration with jaw-dropping frequency,” Shaw says to TIME.

“I don't think certainly in the 20th century and 21st century we've seen a court that has been willing to sanction just repeated defiance of the rule of law,” Shapiro says of what she characterizes as the Supreme Court ignoring evidence provided by lower courts and failing to aptly justify its rulings. “It is an extremely dangerous precedent.”

On the night of May 8, 2008, Thomas Randolph called Las Vegas police with a disconcerting alert. “My wife’s been shot,” he told the 9-11 dispatcher. “There’s a guy in my house and I shot him.” That night, Randolph and his sixth wife, Sharon Causse, had gone out for a Mother’s Day dinner. But once they returned home, Randolph stayed in the car to listen to the radio, letting Sharon go inside by herself. Minutes later, an intruder wearing a ski mask and carrying a bag of jewelry fired a couple of fatal shots at Causse. 

Upon hearing the gun discharge, Randolph later said, he entered the house, relaying to police in a walkthrough that he’d found Sharon lying on the floor bleeding out. At that moment, after seeing a moving shadow, he grabbed a gun from a nearby room and reactively shot the intruder multiple times, killing him with a bullet to the head, before clearing the rest of the house and calling authorities. 

The initial layout of the case was shocking, but it also seemed cut and dry. At least until detective Dean O’Kelley began examining the chain of events a little more closely. Why was the intruder’s ski mask on the garage floor without any blood on it? How were multiple rounds shot in the hallway but no bullet casings were left there? Why did a neighbor hear gunshots at 8:33 p.m., but Randolph’s 9-11 call didn’t occur until 8:45 p.m.? 

The next day, veteran Dateline NBC producer Dan Slepian heard about the murders from O’Kelley’s colleague, who offered an intriguing message: “You might want to pay attention to this one.” Slepian had previously worked alongside the LVPD homicide unit, filming real-time investigations, so he was accustomed to documenting cases as they unfolded. This seemed like another prime opportunity to do just that.

Except when Slepian and O’Kelley teamed up, neither realized they were embarking on a 15-year journey—one that would eventually expose the truth about Randolph, a former paralegal who received life-insurance payouts after three of his previous wives all died under suspicious circumstances. Over the years, Randolph, known as the Black Widower, would escape two death penalty convictions, repeatedly finding ways around the legal system for as long as he could.

That lengthy investigation, along with Randolph’s sinister history, is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, The Widower: ‘Til Death Do Us Part. Directed by Chris Smith, the executive producer of Tiger King, the documentary leans on Slepian to tell the complete story, featuring his real-time footage of interviews with Randolph, witnesses across the country, and family members of his victims, as authorities worked to eventually convict him of murder, put him behind bars, and keep him there.

“Normally, the more you investigate, the closer you get to an answer,” Slepian tells TIME. “This investigation did the exact opposite. Every answer widened the frame. Another marriage, another state, another death, another witness. And that's when I realized that what we were covering wasn’t just a single murder case, but a pattern that had been unfolding over decades.”

As Slepian and O’Kelley began digging more into the Mother’s Day murders, the pair found more alarming circumstances and reasons to believe Randolph had been lying about the sequence of events. Causse's daughter Colleen told them that Randolph had become the beneficiary of her mom’s will three months into their marriage. He’d also taken out a $350,000 life insurance policy on her—raising Colleen’s suspicions even further. 

The pair also traveled to North Carolina to interview family members of the intruder, Mike Miller, with whom Randolph had developed a working relationship. According to his brothers, Miller had become Randolph’s handyman and was constantly on the phone with him about various things—inlcuding one call in which, according to Miller’s friend, Randolph asked Miller if he’d be interested in killing his wife. It was juicy hearsay, and key context, but the prosecutor’s office declined to issue an arrest warrant. They’d need to do more digging. 

The rest of the documentary unfolds much like O’Kelley and Slepian’s real-time investigation, criss-crossing the country and unearthing new information about Randolph’s past that eerily informs the Causse case. “That kind of documentation as things unfold adds a value to not only the journalism but to the storytelling itself,” Slepian says. “There's a layer of suspense because the viewer understands that neither we nor the detectives have any idea what's about to happen.”

The reality was more vast than either Slepian or O’Kelley could believe. It started with a visit to Randolph’s first wife, Kathy, who shared that after marrying Randolph in 1975, he’d taken out a life insurance policy on her. After having two kids with him, Kathy filed for divorce and remarried to Steve Thomas. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Thomas told O’Kelley and Slepian that Randolph had previously tried to groom to kill Kathy, but he refused to cooperate. Then a larger trend emerged. 

In 1983, on the same day his divorce to Kathy was finalized, Randolph married his second wife, Becky Gault. Three years later, Slepian and O’Kelly would find out  that Gault had died of a gunshot to the head inside her Utah home. Her death was initially ruled a suicide. But in 1988, her death was reclassified and Randolph was put on trial for murder, after he’d collected a $500,000 life-insurance payout. 

It didn’t help his case that his friend and handyman, Eric Tarantino, testified that Randolph had hired him to kill Gault and had been planning her murder for six months before Tarantino eventually backed out of the plan. A year later, Randolph was acquitted after his lawyers convinced the jury that Gault had died by suicide, though Randolph was convicted of witness tampering (which would later be expunged) after he was found guilty of offering an undercover cop money to kill Tarantino. 

Three more marriages ensued, each culminating under strange, sometimes fatal circumstances. There was Gaynal Allmon, who was “stupid enough to marry him,” she says in the doc, after admitting he’d also taken out a life insurance policy on her. They divorced before anything nefarious happened, but Francis Randolph wasn’t as fortunate. 

Throughout their marriage, Frances had a heart condition that required surgery, so Randolph himself selected the doctor to perform the operation. She made it out to the recovery floor, but then Randolph called her family and indicated she’d taken a turn for the worse. “He insists she died from malpractice,” Slepian says in the doc. “He ends up not only collecting on her life insurance money, but he sues the hospital for wrongful death.” And this occurred after Randolph had recorded Frances reciting her will on videotape. Not long after her death, he married Leona Stapleton, but she died of cancer soon after their nuptials. 

“I went to 10 states and was embedded with [investigators], but what was surprising to me was when I told everyone we met that I was with NBC News, almost every witness in every state said, ‘Oh yeah, you can film this,’” Slepian says, suggesting to him that they all believed Randolph was guilty and wanted to help catch him. “The extraordinary thing is that as we traveled digging into his past, it felt like we were walking into the present.”

The pile of evidence and statements was finally enough to take Randolph into custody. He was arrested in January 2009, effectively hiding out at his mother’s home in Utah, where police had to drag him through the snow to their vehicle, an incident Slepian recorded on camera. By then, Slepian had developed a rapport with Randolph over the phone, gleaning insight into his behavior throughout the investigation. But his access only deepened once Randolph was detained and Slepian obtained his permission to keep the camera rolling. 

Over the next few years, Randolph became convinced he could sway public opinion. He repeatedly delayed his 2008 murder trial, fired lawyers at the last minute, and tried to keep Gault’s case from the ‘80s out of the court. “It was just all kind of a big challenge or game for him,” Slepian says. “He turned suspicion into entertainment and would use his charm and the uncomfortable charisma to camouflage the suspicion.”

Looking back, it became clear to Slepian that Randolph had learned from his first murder trial. Given that Tarantino tried to burn Randolph on the witness stand, Slepian came to believe Randolph had killed Miller to eliminate loose ends. Still, he never felt confident that a jury would see it the same way. “The more the facts around him grew darker and more absolute,” Slepian says, “the more he seemed to grow confident in his ability to shape the narrative.

Throughout this time, Slepian had struggled to tap into Randolph’s impenetrable psyche and cocky personality. The Dateline producer worked to remain unbiased, in part to keep Randolph talking throughout his stay in Clark County jail. “We’re going to become infamous together,” Randolph tells Slepian in the documentary, further creeping him out. “The things that he said were so unsettling so often,” Slepian says. “But the unsettling part wasn't what he was saying, it was how comfortable he was saying it.”

Slepian had spent much of his previous work fighting for inmates who had been unjustly imprisoned. The irony of taking on this case was stark. “My focus normally is on people who are screaming into the wind from a prison cell who have had an injustice done to them and they can't get anybody to listen. They feel like the system has manipulated them,” he says. “This was kind of the same, except that Randolph was the one manipulating the system. He played the bureaucracy like a piano and kept winning over and over again. And that to me speaks volumes about the system as a whole.”

In June 2017, eight years after Causse’s death, Randolph’s case finally went to trial, where he was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to death. But that wouldn’t be the end. Three years later, the Nevada Supreme Court reversed the conviction and death sentence, ruling that the trial should not have allowed evidence from Gault’s case—just like Randolph had told Slepian. “I put nothing past him,” Slepian says. “It really is because of him that the trial was delayed for nearly a decade. And I think he was waiting for witnesses [to die].”

But during his retrial in 2023, Randolph couldn’t pull any more strings. O’Kelley, who, according to Slepian, had “encyclopedic” knowledge about the case, testified and laid out all the inconsistencies in Causse’s case. His testimony, combined with Randolph’s performative reenactment video the night of the murders, convinced the jury of his guilt. “Had it not been for Dean O'Kelly, Thomas Randolph would likely be free today,” Slepian says. “I think Randolph saw the camera as giving him a stage. But it also gave detectives a record.”

Randolph, now 71, was sentenced to 60 years to life at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Nevada. And, as noted in the documentary, he’s had multiple appeals denied, including one in early September. Slepian, who still calls Randolph in prison, notes that the Black Widower continues to claim his innocence and has people on the outside handing out flyers around the courthouse about his case. 

At this point their conversations remain strictly about his legal case, but Slepian is glad that he’s kept his word and remained objective throughout the years. Otherwise, he never would have gotten to share this story. “I had to keep my footing, just listening, knowing why I was there, and using the archive of him over time to create a record,” he says. “The archive itself became a witness to him over time. Now, the whole world gets to know who he is right now.”

Two years after a woman alleged a gang rape at Cornell University, renewed attention to the case and the limited consequences faced by the alleged perpetrators has raised questions about what higher education owes students who experience sexual assault on campus as well as how consent and intoxication are understood under New York law.

A woman identified as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit on Sept. 16, alleging that she was sexually assaulted, gang-raped, and pressured to take drugs and drink alcohol by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity on the night of Oct. 19, 2024. The lawsuit is filed against the fraternity, Doe’s sorority chapter, and Cornell University; it names Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, and Scott Kretzschmar as defendants. Prosecutors said this week they were reopening a criminal investigation into the case after declining to press charges originally.

Separate attorneys for Kretzschmar and Lopes denied the allegations in statements to ABC, while Norris, via an attorney, denied engaging in sexual activity or drug use but acknowledged that he sent a message included in the complaint.

When sexual assault allegations of this kind occur on campus, they can be addressed in three distinct ways: through school disciplinary proceedings, criminal proceedings, and civil lawsuits.

Doe’s civil lawsuit alleges that Cornell failed to protect her. Her attorney has separately criticized authorities’ handling of the criminal investigation, although observers say what’s known as the “voluntary intoxication loophole” in state law could limit what prosecutors are able to charge.

Here’s what to know about how the case was handled—by Cornell and the criminal justice system—before, and what could happen next.

How Cornell responded when the alleged assault was reported

Doe reported the alleged assault to campus police in November 2024. According to her complaint, Cornell began its Title IX investigation on Jan. 14, 2025. 

Title IX is a law dating back to 1972 that is meant to, among other things, ensure that a college investigates when there is sexual assault on campus. Central to this premise is that Title IX is meant to ensure that sexual violence does not impede a student’s access to education.

Read More: Trump’s Title IX Announcement Is Cruel. But It Does Not Change the Law

Doe’s attorney has said that Cornell expelled two of the seven accused students. Cornell has confirmed that its disciplinary process resulted in expulsions and suspensions, but has not disclosed individual outcomes. The lawsuit alleges negligence, breach of contract, and violations of New York law.

Cornell responded in a statement last week, saying that it could not confirm the individual disciplinary outcomes due to student privacy laws. However, the university clarified on Monday that “none of the individuals charged were offered the opportunity to write essays as a sole consequence of their involvement.”

“We take sexual violence extremely seriously,” the Sept. 21 statement said. “The Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault was launched shortly after this incident and issued a REPORT in March 2026.”

In a statement Monday, Kyle Kimball, Cornell’s vice president for university relations, said Chi Phi’s Cornell chapter closed in 2024 and the fraternity remains barred from campus.

But women’s rights advocates believe that the school might not have fulfilled its legal obligations in investigating the incident and taking appropriate actions toward those involved.

What does Title IX require universities to do about sexual assault?

Title IX is a federal civil rights law meant to prohibit sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. 

Since Title IX was introduced, courts have found that the law requires institutions to ensure that sexual violence does not impede a student’s access to education.

“The reason why Title IX addresses sexual harassment, including sexual assault, is because of the very real impact that has on students’ ability to access education,” Shiwali Patel, a Title IX expert with the National Women’s Law Center, tells TIME. 

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), students who experience sexual assault are more likely to earn lower GPAs in school and are more likely to drop out of school altogether. 

Patel points to Doe’s attorney’s account of her efforts to leave Cornell after the alleged assault. In a Sept. 28 interview with CNN, Thomas Giuffra—Jane Doe’s lawyer—said Cornell refused her family’s tuition-refund request, leaving her to spend another semester on campus. 

“She was trying to leave the institution; she didn’t want to be there,” Patel says.

Cornell told People that it works with students seeking to take leave or withdraw and “regularly refunds payments if students are no longer enrolled.”

Giuffra also told CNN that Doe is no longer in college as of 2026.

Universities also have obligations to offer support regardless of a formal complaint or a finding of culpability. These can include counseling, academic adjustments, and housing or schedule changes. Patel says it remains unclear whether Cornell fully complied with its Title IX obligations because the supportive measures it provided Doe are not publicly known.

Regardless, the situation raises questions about what more schools can do for students, Patel says, providing some examples of the types of questions that a university might ask in the aftermath of this kind of incident: “Does she need extensions on exams? Does she need some time off, some leave? Does she need a housing shift if the fraternity house and her sorority house are close together? Does she need counseling? Did they provide a stay away order? What kind of support were they giving her to make sure she wouldn’t have to be retriggered and traumatized by running into them?”

Title IX also requires schools to investigate allegations through a reliable, impartial process—independently of criminal court systems, and using a lower burden of proof to determine if a student violated campus policy.

Cornell University publicly disclosed that it was investigating the allegation on Nov. 8, 2024, the same day Doe went to the police, according to the lawsuit. The university sent an alert to students regarding a report of sexual assault and coercion into taking drugs at a fraternity house. The same day, Cornell suspended the Chi Phi fraternity.

In response to an inquiry from TIME, Cornell said that its “Office of Civil Rights and the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards investigated the allegations against the individuals and the fraternity consistent with university policies and Title IX.”

“The university’s Title IX investigation was conducted over several months and included hearings where a panel of trained faculty and staff heard evidence over multiple days,” the university’s statement continued. “The complainant and respondents had the opportunity to testify and present evidence in the university’s investigation.”

How did Trump change Title IX rules?

Cornell’s handling of the case unfolded amid shifting federal rules on campus sexual misconduct. A court vacated the Biden Administration’s Title IX rule on Jan. 9, 2025—five days before Cornell began its formal investigation, according to Doe’s complaint. The university held hearings that May, making the rules it applied a key question in assessing its response.

The Biden Administration had expanded Title IX regulations in April 2024—taking effect in August 2024—broadening the definition of sexual harassment and extending federal protections.

On Jan. 9, 2025, however, a federal district court issued a decision vacating the 2024 Biden rule nationwide. This week, the Trump Administration formally restored the 2020 Title IX regulations to the Code of Federal Regulations. Those rules, introduced during President Donald Trump’s first term, had already been enforced since January 2025. 

“The Trump rule essentially narrowed the definition of sexual harassment to make it more burdensome for a complainant to actually complain of something that meets a definition,” Patel says of the differences between the Biden-era and Trump-era Title IX rules. 

The 2020 rule requires hostile-environment sexual harassment to be “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive,” a narrower standard than the Biden-era rule. Sexual assault, however, is covered separately and does not have to meet that threshold—and a direct link between recent revisions and the Cornell case has not been established.

 “It also sets limits on what schools can respond to under Title IX based on the location of the assault, harassment, and based on the complainant’s status,” she adds. “This is going a huge step backwards because it is allowing schools to do less in the face of sexual assault.”

Another difference between the 2020 and 2024 rules was that the latter required schools to proactively monitor educational programs for sex discrimination, identify and address barriers to reporting, and take prompt, effective steps to prevent discrimination from recurring.

Patel argues that a university’s ability to prevent and respond to sexual assault is hindered by this “ping-ponging of Title IX protections based on the administration that’s in power.”

“We need to have a legislative fix,” she argues. “There needs to be some clarity through legislation to prevent this type of thing from happening.”

Nancy Cantalupo, an assistant professor at Wayne State University Law School, says that this type of case highlights issues within the government itself—what she describes as “failures of those in the current administration and certain previous administrations, as well as the courts—led by the U.S. Supreme Court—to interpret and enforce Title IX in a manner that is consistent with Title IX’s purposes.”

Namely, she says, that involves preventing gender discrimination in education.

How do Title IX investigations differ from criminal cases?

Survivor advocates describe Title IX as an alternative form of recourse to the criminal legal system, emphasizing its capacity to address other harms of sexual violence, including its impact on educational access. In written testimony to a Senate roundtable discussion of Title IX in 2014, the Victim Rights Law Center said the law “is a mechanism to enforce a victim’s civil rights and not a tool of the criminal justice system.”

Where prosecutors are tasked with focusing on the accused’s accountability and the community’s interests, the Victim Rights Law Center said Title IX is meant to address victims’ equal educational rights.

The two processes also apply different standards of proof, at times leading a prosecutor to decline charges because they do not believe the evidence can support a criminal conviction.

“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin, who said she prosecuted sex crimes for a decade, defended the initial decision not to prosecute. On the show’s Tuesday episode, the former assistant U.S. attorney said, “under New York law, voluntary intoxication or drug use that merely impairs judgment does not legally constitute an inability to consent to sexual activity.”

“There is no way,” she added, “according to [Doe’s] statement in 2024, that any prosecutor would have brought charges.”

What does New York law say about intoxication and consent?

Under the state’s rape laws, lack of consent can be established through force, an explicit refusal of sex, physical helplessness such as unconsciousness, or mental incapacitation. The definition of mental incapacitation excludes incapacity caused by voluntarily consuming drugs or alcohol, leading to a restriction that lawmakers and advocates call the “voluntary intoxication loophole.”

“The current law sees it in black and white: Either you’re stone cold sober or you’re totally comatose,” says Ann Olivarius, an attorney who represents victims of sexual misconduct and discrimination in employment. “Life is not like that, and certainly not in college. We all know how easily our faculties are undermined by drugs and alcohol.”

Even if, under the law, you’re too impaired to operate heavy machinery or be responsible for children, Olivarius says, “if you’re slurring, stumbling, or visibly disoriented, you are still considered capable of giving consent for sex.”

The law’s limitations have been a focal point of the debate over whether the prosecutor should, or could, have brought charges in 2024.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten reopened the investigation and said the case would be presented to a grand jury for their consideration. But he defended his initial decision not to charge the alleged perpetrators in a statement on Monday, citing New York state laws on intoxication and consent.

According to Van Houten, Doe’s sworn statement in November 2024 “did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

The civil lawsuit, however, states that she was incapacitated when frat members sexually assaulted her and thus incapable of consenting. It also claims that she was “pressured” and “plied” with drugs, and that certain acts were done “without her consent” as well as some “forced” on her.

Olivarius, who was also a plaintiff in the landmark Alexander v. Yale case nearly half a century ago that established sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination under Title IX, tells TIME that the nature of the law can also lead to victim-blaming questions: “They say to her, ‘Were you drunk? Why did you drink?’ … It’s all on her.

The New York Times reported in May that people who voluntarily drank or took drugs faced a high burden when pursuing rape charges.

Legal advocates have for years argued that the law’s limitations underscore the need for reform, especially as advocacy efforts have increasingly spotlighted how intoxication can impair a person’s ability to consent to sex.

Have there been efforts to change the law?

The New York State Assembly is forming a working group to review the state’s rape laws in light of the civil lawsuit, State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Democrat, announced on Wednesday. The group, composed of 14 Democratic Assembly members, will be expected to report its findings and legislative recommendations to Heastie and the Assembly Democratic majority conference by the end of the year.

A bill addressing the voluntary intoxication exclusion passed the state Senate unanimously in June, but remains stalled in the Assembly. Earlier versions passed the Senate in 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025, but none passed the Assembly. The proposals to change the law date back to legislation introduced by then-Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, a Democrat, in 2019.

New York is one of 19 states whose rape or sexual assault laws recognize intoxication as mental incapacitation only when the person became intoxicated without their knowledge or consent, according to research by the Associated Press and a report published in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. 

Several states have changed their laws in recent years to also protect victims incapacitated by voluntary intoxication.

In 2021, lawmakers in Minnesota expanded the definition of mental incapacitation to include voluntary intoxication, after the state Supreme Court overturned a sexual assault conviction under the narrower definition.

Michigan also revised its laws in 2023 to broaden its definition of mental incapacitation. Last year, Texas expanded its law to cover sexual acts committed when the perpetrator knows the other person is too impaired to consent, regardless of how that person became intoxicated.

California also tightened its sentencing laws in 2016 following the sexual assault case involving Stanford student Brock Turner. The state barred probation and suspended sentences for certain sexual offenses involving victims who were incapable of consenting because of intoxication.

What happens next in the Cornell sexual assault case?

There are three possible ways that this case may move forward.

Van Houten said his office plans to present the criminal case to a grand jury, which would determine whether an indictment is warranted. “Seeking justice sometimes requires us to reconsider or reopen cases when we are provided with additional evidence,” Van Houten said in his Monday statement. He told ABC that his office wanted to determine whether additional evidence, not considered at the time, would change its assessment, potentially including a screenshot included in the civil complaint of an alleged Snapchat message between the fraternity members that referred to Doe as “free p-ssy.”

After the woman’s initial police report, she reportedly told police a week later that she was “completely and totally incapacitated,” and could “say with 100% confidence I was raped.” A transcript obtained by CBS of a police interview on Nov. 14 and 15, 2024, showed that the woman described being “physically hit very, very hard,” and describing the incident as “coercion.” Van Houten told CBS that he had not seen the transcript of the interview, and that his office had relied on the sworn statement when it declined to bring charges.

Separately, Doe’s civil lawsuit seeks monetary damages from the seven men and other defendants, including Cornell University. A court date has not been set.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday also called for an independent investigation into how Cornell University handled the allegations when they arose in 2024. 

“The allegations in this case are nothing short of horrifying. For any student to come forward after an experience like this takes extraordinary courage. No student should ever be left wondering whether the institutions meant to protect them will listen and act,” the governor’s statement said. “That is why I am calling for outside counsel to conduct a transparent, independent review of the university’s response to determine whether Cornell met every obligation to protect its students and pursue justice.”

The individuals who might be tasked with such an investigation have yet to be named; however, the outcomes could help shape how similar investigations into sexual assault cases are handled on campuses both in and beyond New York.

“This case,” Olivarius tells TIME, “ may change the conversation.”

Everyone knows what happens in Carrie. Fifty-two years after its publication, the novel that ignited Stephen King’s career has so thoroughly engulfed the culture, you’d have to be almost as sheltered as Carietta White herself not to have absorbed its most indelible images. The locker-room tampon gauntlet and “Plug it up!” chant. Carrie’s smothering holy-roller mom, locking her up in prayer-closet solitary confinement. The eerily unlikely prom date. The swinging bucket that has haunted every coronation of school-dance royalty in film and TV since Brian De Palma first adapted the book in 1976. 

It’s a tale as old as time: Warped by her mother’s zealotry and scapegoated since childhood by her classmates, 16-year-old Carrie has a late, traumatic menarche that reactivates her latent telekinetic abilities. Then, after accepting a pity date to the prom, she’s crowned queen and immediately gets pig’s blood dumped on her head by a resentful bully. The humiliation causes her to lay waste to the school and then the town, using her powers to exact revenge.

King’s book and De Palma’s film became classics of the horror genre. No less venerable a critic than Pauline Kael wrote of Sissy Spacek’s Oscar-nominated portrayal: “I don’t see how this performance could be any better.” Yet in the 21st century, new interpreters keep trying to improve upon it. With platforms scrambling to capitalize on popular IP, it’s no mystery why this would sound like a good idea to Hollywood executives. But something else must be inspiring high-minded filmmakers like Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce, who released a divisive remake in 2013, to keep resurrecting Carrie.

The fourth screen adaptation of the novel (unless you count the pitiful 1999 sequel, The Rage: Carrie 2) is an eight-episode Prime Video series created by Mike Flanagan, who is known both for riffing on horror touchstones in Netflix hits like The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher and for his features based on King novels like Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep. Premiering Oct. 7, his ambitious Carrie is the first that manages to fully get out from under the shadow of De Palma’s. Yet it confirms a gradual shift in how the story is being told. What was once an account of an abusive mother and an evil bully unwittingly uniting to create a lethal monster has become, with each new incarnation, more like an indictment of society as a whole.

All three Carrie movies are mostly faithful to the novel, dutifully reproducing every major plot point and set piece, as well as a lot of dialogue. King’s writing is remarkably cinematic, which is probably why he’s our most adapted living author. But every Carrie is also a product of its time. De Palma, whose masterfully crafted version turns 50 in November, seems to lust after and fear the female body in equal measure—a common response within what was then a male-dominated genre to the feminist upheavals of the ’70s. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary adaptation pairing its opening credits with a steamy, slow-motion parade of nude high school girls in their locker room. A 2002 made-for-TV movie written by cult creator Bryan Fuller (Hannibal) is a relic of an era when the only things teen girls loved more than low-rise denim were movies where female misfits get glow ups (She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, Jawbreaker). Just over a decade later, Peirce incorporated smartphones and YouTube, as well as an emerging pop-feminist sensibility that traced the derangement of Carrie’s mom, Margaret (played here by Julianne Moore), to childbirth trauma and found a palpably empowered Carrie actively choosing who to kill and who to save.

You can find support for each of these readings in King’s own reflections. “The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality,” he wrote in his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre. “For me, Carrie White is a sadly misused teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is so often broken for good in that pit of man- and woman-eaters that is your normal suburban high school. But she's also Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight.” In her influential 1992 study Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the scholar Carol J. Clover suggests that this tangle of intentions explains the broad and, in some ways, contradictory appeal of Carrie across genders. Its protagonist is, at once, a projection of female power and male fear and the universal horror of bullying. 

Despite feeling mostly redundant, the two features released after Clover’s book shared a new emphasis. De Palma’s stylish ’70s chiller played up the ghoulishness of Margaret (a bellowing, vicious Piper Laurie) and of Carrie’s chief tormentor at school, the sadistic mean girl Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), as well as the otherworldly oddness of Spacek’s lead. But Fuller’s and especially Peirce’s films sand down those characters’ excesses, revealing motivations and vulnerabilities that make them harder to hate or fear. (The latter faced criticism for casting the conventionally beautiful, preternaturally confident Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role.) At the same time, we see the condescending assumptions behind the actions of ostensibly heroic figures like Sue Snell, the popular girl who tries to atone for hazing Carrie by sending her boyfriend to the prom with her. In these movies, Carrie’s reign of terror is the ultimate expression of the school’s brokenness. As the critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in a favorable review of the 2013 version: “The first Carrie was horror. This is tragedy.”

If the 21st century Carrie movies spoke to a post-Columbine era of school shootings, then Flanagan’s series is a product of the Trump decade, in which seemingly every aspect of American life has fractured along bipartisan political lines. The educational realm has become a crucible for debates around censorship, technology, parental rights, gun control, LGBTQ inclusion, critical race theory, the teaching of science vs. religion, social media. Which explains how Flanagan and his creative team, which includes many female writers and directors, found in this slight story eight episodes’ worth of material.

Without omitting any of the moments King fans will anticipate, they depart pretty boldly from the text. This Carrie opens with the death of Carrie’s conspiracy-theorist father (who, in previous versions, she never got to know) in a bizarre accident on his construction site. Somehow, no one knows he had a wife (Flanagan regular Samantha Sloyan, locating the wounded soul of a character who’s always been more of a caricature) and daughter (a movingly fragile Summer H. Howell) until they’re found cowering at home, in the closet where they pray. The previously homeschooled Carrie is forced to enroll at the local public high school while Margaret gets a job at a soulless big-box store, where her refusal to ring up a sex toy gets her demoted to cleaning toilets. 

An almost saintly figure who believes in kindness most of all, Carrie develops complicated friendships with smart, benevolent Sue (Siena Agudong) and Chris (Alison Thornton)—who has been spiraling since her mom moved in with a classmate’s dad and her own father’s financial woes have jeopardized her college plans. What she doesn’t know is that Chris is behind an anonymous social media account that posted footage of her locker-room nightmare before expanding to target practically everyone at school, teachers included. A constant nuisance to the administration, Margaret harangues Principal Grayle (Matthew Lillard) to intervene. But he dithers, questioning whether the free speech of kids on a platform external to school is his jurisdiction.

The problem isn’t that Grayle doesn’t care; he’s a kindhearted guy who wants the best for his students. So do other adults, like the girls’ young gym teacher (Amber Midthunder), who’s horrified by the “Plug it up!” incident, and empathetic school counselor (Somebody Somewhere sweetheart Tim Bagley). Even Margaret, an archetypal Karen with MAHA tendencies who becomes a vlogging parents’ rights crusader, is sincerely trying to help a daughter she cherishes. She’s not wrong to point out that a world where, for example, children are shot in their classrooms is an abomination. But meaning well is not enough. Fights, protests, and parental panics ensue. By prom night, whose carnage is now so unsurprising that Flanagan flashes forward to it in the opening scene, the place has already metaphorically exploded. Carrie only makes it literal.   

For everything of value it adds to the story, Flanagan’s take can still feel a bit cluttered. There are too many interconnected framing devices, from on-camera interviews with survivors of Carrie’s massacre to history lessons on Joan of Arc. If you watched House of Usher, which filters the downfall of a Sackler-like family of opioid profiteers through the sieve of Poe’s Gothic tale, you’re probably aware that Flanagan’s social commentary can be blunt. His Carrie can get bogged down in meetings and assemblies where characters representing different facets of Trump-era vitriol and complacency monologue on what’s really wrong with the world today. 

Yet at the core of this series is a perceptive diagnosis of that problem. More than individual bad actors who need to be brought down, there are people like Grayle and Margaret and Sue, whose pure intentions are undermined by complacency, indecision, disinformation, conformity, fear—all of it amplified to a potentially global scale by social media. Even Chris is lashing out as a direct result of her family’s dissolution and her father’s money troubles, which erode the class privileges to which she feels entitled. Amid extreme rhetoric, Flanagan implies, everyone who doesn’t work hard to avert atrocities is complicit in them. And there's precious little evidence that most of us are doing much to examine that complicity. Tragedy becomes, specifically, a tragedy of the commons as selfishness metastasizes into a scourge on the entire town. And Carrie becomes something between Frankenstein’s monster and Jesus Christ: an innocent persecuted for the sins of all mankind, but one whose all-too-human impulse to seek retribution incinerates any hope of forgiveness.

Donald Trump struts onto the new White House helipad, an 80,000-sq.-ft. expanse of carved granite on the South Lawn. “Can you believe this?” he says, taking in the scene, the Washington Monument rising in the distance. The President lingers over the details of the project with obvious pleasure, pointing out the gray stone imported from Italy and describing how five separate sections were fitted together, with measurements he says are precise to an eighth of an inch. 

Behind him rises a bigger renovation project: the new White House ballroom, its concrete skeleton consuming the former East Wing. Lawsuits have followed the endeavor, alleging that Trump demolished the historic structure and began building its replacement without congressional authorization or the required federal reviews. He kept building anyway. Trump points to the walls, calling them “nuclear concrete” (the sort, he says, used in nuclear facilities), and describes a military complex beneath the ballroom that will plunge six stories underground. There will be five separate floors, he says, with one side made entirely of glass, 6 or 8 in. thick. He holds his hands apart to demonstrate. “The steel goes up next week.” 

As we walk toward the Oval Office, Trump stops several times to inspect his handiwork. There are freshly painted doors, new gold doorknobs, the Rose Garden lawn ripped out and replaced with a Mar-a-Lago-style patio, where he now presides over dinners at what he calls the Rose Garden Club. “People say, why do you spend so much time on this?” he says. “But I find it relaxing.” Later, he returns to the subject again. “It’s what I do best,” he muses aloud. “I say, am I a better builder or a politician?”

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One can understand Trump’s fixation on his construction projects. At one of the lowest points of his presidency, he is absorbed with the physical details of a world he can remake to his liking. There is something revealing in the contrast. Here, he can still point to a wall and say how thick it should be, decide where the grass ends and the stone begins, make demands and have them fulfilled. With his presidency seemingly spinning off course, Trump has busied himself with things he can control.

Outside these gates, events have become increasingly resistant to Trump’s will. The war in Iran, launched without congressional authorization and initially described by Trump as a four-to-six-week undertaking, is seven months old when we meet, with no end in sight. It has sent oil and gasoline prices soaring and convulsed the global economy. Inflationary pressures compounded by Trump’s tariffs have pushed the Federal Reserve—now led by his handpicked chairman—to raise interest rates over his objections, with another hike possible before year’s end. Mortgage rates have climbed to 7.5%, worsening an already punishing housing market. 

The political coalition that returned Trump to power has frayed, with signs of discontent among independents, rural voters, and parts of the Latino electorate, even as his GOP base remains substantially loyal. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in September put his approval at 32%, the lowest of his political career; a recent Wall Street Journal survey recorded the lowest ratings of any President heading into midterm elections since 1990. Republican candidates have distanced themselves from his military actions and his deportation campaign. Voters have recoiled at his laissez-faire approach to the artificial intelligence industry and his accumulation of wealth while in office through crypto deals, thousands of disclosed stock trades, and an expanding empire of Trump-branded developments stretching from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to India and Vietnam.

Inside the Administration, senior advisers increasingly recognize that he has passed the apogee of his second-term power. Across the Republican Party, officials are preparing for the likelihood of losing the House—and perhaps the Senate­—in the midterms. After two years spent almost entirely on offense, Trump may soon be forced onto defense. Democratic control of Congress would bring investigations and subpoenas, hearings, and potentially a third round of impeachment proceedings. Cabinet officials could be hauled before Congress. Trump describes the prospect in characteristic terms. “They’ll probably go after me,” he says, “and I’ll go after them.”

Yet with so much at stake—for the country and the world, for his party and his own power—Trump can seem curiously preoccupied. During a 75-minute Oval Office interview with TIME, he was discursive and grievance-fueled, veering from the crises of his presidency to resentments old and emerging. He said he regretted appointing Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, after they ruled against him on tariffs, mail ballots, and birthright citizenship. “I gave them the position of a lifetime,” he said, “and they voted against me often.” On his expectation of fealty, he was unapologetic: “I do like loyalty, yeah.” Again and again, he returned to the condition of the White House itself, complaining that his predecessors had left the building in disrepair and deriding Barack Obama as someone who “doesn’t know if something’s dirty or clean.” 

Trump dismissed widespread opposition to the rapid build-out of data centers, including among his own base, as a prescription for a poorer America. When pressed on the limits of his power, Trump left himself ample room: He would not rule out declaring a national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act around the midterms, nor promise to refrain from bringing wrecking balls to the Kennedy Center without congressional approval. “I’m not committing to anything,” he says. “We’re going to see how it plays out in court.”

In Trump’s telling, he is simply doing what has to be done, even when that means breaking foundational promises to his voters. He campaigned as a president of peace, but is now waging a war he says was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He points to Venezuela, where his removal of Nicolás Maduro and the elevation of Delcy Rodríguez have brought the country into Washington’s orbit, as proof that his projection of U.S. power can produce results. He touts most-­favored-nation drug pricing and restricting institutional investors from buying single-­family homes as measures that will lower costs for Americans. New GDP and inflation figures suggest the economy remains strong.
When asked why he remains consumed with construction projects so removed from the country’s concerns, Trump offers a rationale: “The White House is a very special symbol. It’s a symbol of America. It’s a symbol of our greatness.” He speaks of his building projects in the language of legacy—monuments meant to endure long after he is gone. But while Trump obsesses over stonework and fixtures, gold and glass, the more important parts of his legacy are being built too—in the decisions he makes from inside these walls, and the consequences unfolding far beyond them. 

In late April, the President summoned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a retinue of military and national security officials to the Oval Office. By Trump’s own timeline, the war with Iran was supposed to be over already, with a new regime in place and a nuclear program throttled. But the Islamic Republic had proved resilient and resourceful, choking off oil through the Strait of Hormuz and sending tremors through the global economy.

Now there was another problem. Trump had learned from a New York Times report that the U.S. military was running low on certain munitions after firing more than 1,200 Patriot missile interceptors. To replenish the losses, the Pentagon was drawing on assets stationed in Asia and Europe, potentially weakening American defenses in other theaters. “What the f-ck is this?” Trump said to Hegseth, according to two officials familiar with the exchange, handing him a printout of the story.

According to those officials, Hegseth borrowed one of Trump’s favorite terms of derision, telling the President it was “fake news.” The Secretary of Defense insisted that the reporters had taken the facts out of context and exaggerated them to make the Administration look bad. But the reporting emerged from an official DOD inspector general’s assessment. (A spokesperson for Hegseth denied the exchange.)

Trump’s frustration went beyond munition stores. The war was polling miserably. At the time, 13 U.S. service members had been killed and nearly 400 wounded. (Those numbers would increase to 19 killed and more than 800 wounded by the end of September.) Gasoline prices had risen more than 40% since the opening attacks on Feb. 28. The conflict had already cost more than $25 billion, and the consequences were beginning to bleed into the midterm campaign. The President found himself without an exit ramp. That dynamic appears to hold true: Instead of concluding the war, Trump tells TIME, he may ramp up the bombing after the midterms if they can’t reach a satisfactory deal. “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world,” he says. “With Iran, I don’t think you could ever have peace.”

In recent months, Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has grown more acrimonious, according to a senior Administration official. Netanyahu urged Trump toward war with Tehran but has since complicated Trump’s efforts to end it, including by striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon after Trump told him not to, multiple U.S. officials tell TIME. Trump says he does not believe reports that Netanyahu was warned by Egypt and the UAE ahead of the Oct. 7 attacks, but stops short of endorsing him for re-election as Israelis prepare to vote in late October for the first time since the worst security failure in the country’s history. Asked whether he might work better with Netanyahu’s leading challenger, former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, Trump leaves the possibility open. “Well, I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t hear bad things about him.”

The decision to attack Iran was a hinge point in Trump’s second term. His first year back in power had unfolded as a frenetic exercise in presidential will, a barrage of executive actions and dismantled guardrails that had largely gone according to plan. Then his second year opened with the raid on Caracas and capture of Maduro, a daring operation that reinforced Trump’s conviction that audacity could succeed where caution had failed. The subsequent attack on Tehran would test the limits of that conviction—and reveal how quickly confidence born of success could lead to overreach.

A cascade of crises followed. Though Trump has dismissed the pain of rising gas prices, he concedes the war has depleted a subset of U.S. munitions. “Some forms of ammunition are a little bit lower than other forms,” he says. Trump says he has struck deals with leading defense manufacturers, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, to replenish the arsenal and expand production. “They’re building four, five, six plants,” he says, citing Patriot and THAAD anti-ballistic-missile facilities. “They’re building tremendous amounts of capability.”

When asked what this will cost American taxpayers, Trump offers a curious metric: less, he says, than America makes in a single month from Venezuelan oil. Yet Americans have so far felt little benefit from that arrangement. Major U.S. oil companies have returned to Venezuela and begun extracting from the world’s largest proven crude reserves, but gas prices remain at record highs for September. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariff regime strained America’s global relationships and reverberated through the economy. 

Trump points to low unemployment, robust consumer spending, and a stock market at record highs as evidence that his economic program is working. By those measures, the economy has remained strong. But they coexist with a harsher reality: the cost of everyday life remains painfully high.

By summer, Trump was growing angrier with U.S. allies that had refused to come to America’s aid against Iran—from the European powers and South Korea to Canada. Trump has directed much of his ire over the issue at America’s neighbor to the north, according to a close aide. “He doesn’t like the fact that we essentially protect them because of their proximity to our military might, and doesn’t think they give us enough in return,” says a Trump senior adviser. On July 20, Trump invoked a 1930 statute to impose a 50% tariff on Canadian goods. The trade war with America’s second largest trading partner hit steel, aluminum, and lumber especially hard, disrupting supply chains and raising the cost of materials that went into everything from factories to new homes. 

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Borrowing costs were becoming their own problem. For Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, preventing a sell-off in the bond market from becoming a broader crisis was an increasingly urgent task. By late September, only 25% of Americans believed Trump’s policies had improved the economy, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, while 60% said they had worsened it. Trump had returned to office promising cheaper energy, lower prices, and an economic boom. Instead, voters were finding the opposite. “It’s not lost on any of us,” a Trump adviser tells TIME. “When voters aren’t happy with the economy, they tend to vote against the party in charge.”

Since returning to office, Trump has marveled at AI’s capabilities. He is increasingly in thrall to the tech executives courting him. In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy, according to an official present. At the time, Trump was ordering missile strikes against Venezuelan boats he alleged were smuggling drugs into the U.S. He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro. According to the official present, the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.

Along with his fascination with the technology came two related concerns. One was economic: that enthusiasm for AI’s potential was propping up the stock market. The other was geopolitical, reinforced in conversations with industry titans such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: that China could gain a decisive advantage over the U.S. if it developed more powerful AI first. Trump was committed to giving American companies the freedom to build faster than their foreign competitors. That meant embracing the unprecedented infrastructure build-out required to support the industry’s computing needs. After watching a cable news segment about the backlash, Trump fired off a Truth Social post. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” he wrote Aug. 31. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” 

Days later, aides showed Trump surveys from his longtime pollster, Tony Fabrizio, showing pervasive anxiety about AI: fears of lost jobs, rising costs, and technology eventually escaping human control. Fellow Republicans facing voters in November were increasingly eager to put distance between themselves and the issue. Trump “­really just didn’t seem to care,” one aide says. “He wants to do what he wants to do. He’s used to generating outrage and then watching everyone eventually crawl back to him. It’s hard to convince him to do anything at this point.”

Trump was unfazed by the burgeoning bipartisan calls for new AI regulations. “I don’t have to destroy the industry,” he says. “We’re making a lot of money with that industry. That industry is the Industrial Revolution, but bigger. It’s the internet, but much bigger.” The details don’t appear to concern him. When TIME asks about OpenAI agents’ meddling with federal government websites, Trump responds: “Who breached it? They’re not allowed to do that.”

Trump’s contribution to the debate about AI safeguards has been to announce the formation of an “AI Force,” which he now wants to rename the “SI Force”—part of his effort to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.” Asked what the group will do, Trump responds: “It’s going to be super intelligent.” Pressed further, he explains that it will consist of industry leaders advising him on government policy. On Sept. 29, he met with AI leaders at the White House, where the President and top executives from six leading tech companies signed a “constitution” to police themselves—a covenant of self-regulation in lieu of government oversight. An Administration official present said they left with a “no surprises if something happens” understanding between the White House and the industry. 

It was an example of how Trump has surrounded himself with industry leaders, seeking their advice, favor, and political donations. A recent CNN poll found 75% of Americans viewed artificial intelligence with more fear and concern than excitement, with broad bipartisan support for greater federal oversight. But Trump waves away AI fears, placing them in a familiar catalogue of what he considers manufactured panics. “They said that our country was going to burn down because of global warming,” he says. “Then they changed the name to climate change because global warming turned out to be a hoax. Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax.” Asked who, exactly, is perpetrating the supposed hoax of AI concern, Trump throws his hands in the air. “The whole country is based on fake stuff,” he says, “because these people have Trump derangement syndrome.”

Inside the Oval Office, Trump’s redesign is impossible to miss. There is gold everywhere, from the decorative plasterwork to the inscriptions on the ceiling and the gilded frames crowding the walls. The room is so dazzling you practically need sunglasses. Trumpian tchotchkes are scattered about: a FIFA “World Peace Prize” sits next to the Resolute Desk, where the President keeps a commendation given to his uncle during his years as an MIT professor. 

At times, Trump’s train of thought was difficult to keep up with, his conversation moving in streams and eddies before circling back to familiar obsessions. He recounted conversations that sometimes sounded improbable. At one point, Trump claimed the Secret Service had wanted to tear down the Oval Office and rebuild it, only for him to intervene. “I said, ‘My ass, you can’t build a new one. This is a special place.’”

Whatever happens in November, people close to Trump expect him to devote more of his remaining presidency to foreign affairs, as second-term Presidents often do, with particular attention to the western hemisphere, where ideologically sympathetic governments have given him opportunities to expand American influence. At home, they expect another emphasis altogether: Trump’s campaign against what he calls “lawfare” and his effort to reshape cultural institutions, including the nation’s museums, in his battle against what he calls “woke” ideology.

Looking ahead to the midterms, Trump dismisses unfavorable polls as fake and insists Republicans can prevail. “I think we’ll do OK if I campaign, and I intend to,” he says. So far, he has done little beyond a two-day midterm convention and a few fundraisers, but top advisers say the President is preparing a campaign sprint to help Republicans stave off disaster in the midterms: visiting 32 competitive districts in the next month, with the MAGA-style rallies that powered his political rise. 

Inside the White House, advisers are already contemplating what a divided Washington would mean. “I think if the worst happens in the midterms, we’ll be forced to think more bipartisan,” one top official says. “I would hope that if we win, we can still do that, because for two years we’ve run a completely partisan play. When you’re looking back on your time, I don’t think that’s what you should be proud of, even if it was successful.”

Trump’s political operation boasts a $400 million war chest, but he has only recently begun opening his checkbook. Aides say he has been reluctant to spend because he wants to preserve cash for future elections as a means of keeping his grip on his party. “He wants to have as much money in his account as possible when he’s no longer able to raise the kind of money he can now,” a Trump aide told TIME this fall. “He doesn’t seem to care that much about the midterms, thinks they’re a lost cause anyway, and wants to preserve future possibilities.”

Aides are bracing for turnover after the midterms as Trump sheds officials who have frustrated him. A source close to the President says he has openly mused about firing the FBI Director Kash Patel and has expressed frustration with Hegseth. Trump says he intends to protect those who remain. When TIME asks whether he plans to issue pre-emptive pardons to aides and associates before Democrats—or a future Administration—can pursue them, he suggests he will, offering a familiar justification: “Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody.”

As the conversation moves between war and peace, his own grip on power, and the possibility of impeachment, Trump keeps returning to the trappings of the office. He asks Natalie Harp, his ever present aide, to bring in photographs of earlier White House construction projects, including renovations from the 1930s and the Truman-era reconstruction. He studies the pictures as evidence for his case, lamenting the judges and injunctions now complicating his own efforts. Holding up a photograph of work being performed on the State Dining Room in 1950, Trump complains about a judge he says accused him of destroying the White House. “It’s the sh-t I have to go through,” he says. 

Toward the end of our interview, I ask what he will miss most when his presidency is over. This time there is no digression, no grievance, no story. Trump does not need a moment to think: “This beautiful room.”

—With reporting by Leslie Dickstein, Simmone Shah, and Olivia B. Waxman