Analysis: Alito Made Up To $2.9 Million From Fossil Fuel Assets While Serving on Top Court

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9 million from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows.

The analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group and judicial watchdog Court Accountability, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from his oil and gas interests since being tapped for the high court by George W. Bush in 2005.

The findings come as the Supreme Court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products.

“A reasonable person would think if you’re invested in the industry that could benefit from the outcome of a lawsuit, then you could personally stand to benefit .”

The Supreme Court said this month it will hear oral arguments in the case on 5 October, the opening day of its new term. The Trump administration, which is siding with the oil companies, has asked for 10 minutes of argument time. Court Accountability and other groups have called for a Senate committee to investigate Alito, the sole Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies, and said he should recuse himself.

He and the court rejected those calls.

Supreme Court ethics rules focus specifically on investments in companies named in court cases. In May, a Supreme Court spokesperson told NBC News that Alito is not required to recuse himself from the Suncor lawsuit as his holdings do not include the companies directly named in the case, Suncor and ExxonMobil.

But Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability who authored the new analysis, said Alito’s oil-tied wealth provides grounds to question whether Alito can impartially weigh in on cases affecting the entire fossil fuel sector.

“You might have real appreciation for how that industry has helped make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second home on the water, or live a [certain] lifestyle,” she said.

The Guardian has contacted the Supreme Court and Alito for comment.

Alito’s financial disclosures show his reported assets—excluding his home and other personal property—grew from about $1.1 million in 2005 to between $3.4 million and $8.4 million by 2024. Federal financial disclosures report assets in broad value ranges.

During that period, his oil and gas holdings made him between $390,000 and $2.9 million, Court Accountability’s review shows. Most of those gains came from a property in Grady county, Oklahoma, in which Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, holds a mineral interest.

Graves said Alito may have undervalued the worth of this property, because in 2017, a relative of the Alito family sold an adjacent plot for $800,000. “It’s reasonable to assume that means the value of the Alito property would have increased to around $800,000,” said Graves, but he continued to report its value at $100,000 to $250,000.

The justice reported two windfalls from rental income on the property in 2019 and 2022, with gains of between $100,000 and $1 million in both years.

The Supreme Court ethics code says justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” but recusal is voluntary.

Alito’s wife agreed to lease the plot of land to the private oil and gas company Citizen Energy in 2022, the Intercept first reported. In 2024, that company was acquired for more than $2 billion by Validus Energy, in which hedge fund Elliott Investment Management holds a majority stake. Elliott was founded by Paul Singer, who ProPublica found had paid for a private jet ride Alito took in 2008 that the justice did not disclose. Alito later defended the trip, saying ethics rules did not require its disclosure.

No reporting or public documents indicate that a well has been drilled on the property, but a lease agreement shows the owners would have received three-sixteenths of the money from any oil extracted from the land.

“It raises concerns because you have a sitting justice who is hoping to get richer based on oil exploration of this land,” said Graves.

Another large portion of Alito’s fossil fuel gains came through inheritance. In 2004, the justice disclosed that he obtained a bequest of ExxonMobil stock valued between $100,000 and $250,000.

The Exxon stock was the highest value of any single liquid investment listed by Alito “by a good margin,” Graves said.

Alito appears to have since sold his stock in ExxonMobil, as indicated by the Supreme Court’s May statement to NBC News. “But my view is that you shouldn’t be able to sell a stock just so you can sit on a case, even though that company’s profits have benefited you,” said Graves.

Alito is the only justice who has not yet submitted his 2025 disclosure document. The filing was due on 15 May. Justices can obtain a 90-day extension; if Alito received one, he should file the document this Thursday. Last year, he filed his disclosure in August.

Alito has had a variety of smaller investments in more than a dozen oil firms, including ConocoPhillips and its predecessor Phillips 66, Chevron and energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan.

“A reasonable person would think if you’re invested in the industry that could benefit from the outcome of a lawsuit, then you could personally stand to benefit from the outcome, even if you don’t hold the stock in the specific company that happens to be the named plaintiff,” said Graves.

Alito has a history of voting in favor of fossil fuel interests. In the landmark 2007 case Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he was one of four dissenting justices who argued greenhouse gas emissions could not be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Then in June 2022, when the Supreme Court decided West Virginia v EPA, Alito joined Neil Gorsuch’s majority in arguing that the EPA lacked broad authority under the Clean Air Act to mandate a shift away from fossil fuels.

More recently, he joined the majority in two2024 decisions that overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine and could make it harder for agencies to defend expansive environmental regulations.

Alito has recused himself from other environmental cases. In January, he stepped away from a lawsuit focused on whether energy companies could be held responsible for Louisiana coastal degradation because he owns stock in ConocoPhillips, the parent company of a defendant in proceedings tied to the litigation.

In 2023, Alito also recused himself from considering a petition in the Suncor lawsuit, brought by the company and ExxonMobil. That request was denied.

Later in 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever formal ethics code amid a slew of scandals involving senior rightwing justices. It states that justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” though it allows them to make that decision themselves.

Though Graves harshly critiqued that ethics code, saying it is “toothless” and “not worth the paper it’s written on,” she said it should in theory prevent Alito from weighing in on Suncor v Boulder in October.

“His impartiality may be reasonably questioned in terms of his affinity towards the industry that has helped build his nest egg,” she said.

Continue Reading…

Trump’s Mindless Rollback of Offshore Wind Has Screwed Over Thousands of Workers

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in Massachusetts, he immediately relished the consistency of the work, the good pay, and the novelty of laboring at sea.

“I thought it was the best thing in the world,” he said.

In his first eight weeks working offshore, Mullin made more money than he had saved in the previous five years.

But the industry was on shaky ground. Mullin had his bags packed for five weeks offshore with Empire Wind in New York when President Donald Trump’s stop-work order last year stranded him at home in Boston. Trump—who had railed against the industry in his 2024 election campaign—halted all future permitting last year and canceled 12 offshore wind leases this spring and summer.

Thousands of workers like Mullin who were promised steady, well-paying careers in offshore wind now find themselves racing to secure the few positions left or returning to their prior work. Meanwhile, the supply chain that emerged to support offshore development has been left adrift, including in towns in need of a promised economic boost.

“I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction.”

Those are less-discussed consequences of the political turmoil besetting the domestic industry, said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at Dartmouth College studying offshore wind. “All of the promises of economic development that offshore wind was supposed to help support have evaporated,” Wilson said.

For Mullin, the change was shocking.

“All of a sudden, the federal government is concerned with my work, and there’s nothing I can do to change how they view it,” Mullin said. “Now there are things completely outside of my control, changing how I make a living.”

Trump has long scorned offshore wind, calling the 2012 project he unsuccessfully opposed near one of his Scottish golf courses “disgusting and inappropriate.” His administration, which has inaccurately described renewables as costly and unreliable as it tries to block them in favor of climate-altering fossil fuels, said his offshore wind policies are good for the economy and workers.

“President Trump has delivered on his popular promise to reverse the Left’s costly Green New Scam to lower prices for families and businesses and strengthen our country’s energy security,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “By prioritizing the production of reliable, affordable, and secure energy sources, the President has restored US energy dominance—creating thousands of good-paying energy jobs across the country.”

Tim Sullivan, who was CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority until December, said he can’t comprehend the White House’s logic.

“It’s the strangest thing: I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction, particularly elected officials,” he said.

As a pile driver, a specialized structural laborer essential to offshore wind projects, Mullin lived and worked on a ship five weeks at a time, followed by five weeks at home with his family. It was a schedule that suited him well.

Mullin joined offshore wind projects across Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. His employer, an international contractor, even brought him and other members of his union across the Atlantic for a wind project off the coast of Scotland.

Now, Mullin is back to the same type of onshore construction work he did four years ago, before he started with wind. “The writing was on the wall that this idea that I’m going to go to the same ship, five weeks on, five weeks off, steady—that just isn’t the reality anymore,” Mullin said.

Joshua Grigsby, 42, took his son to Rio de Janeiro, Disney World, and SeaWorld. Natalie MacDonald, 26, stopped living paycheck to paycheck. Others bought homes and started families.

Inside Climate News spoke with over a dozen workers and union leaders who said the financial opportunities from the nascent US offshore wind industry had been unparalleled. They saw long-term careers ahead of them. They feel that opportunity slipping through their fingers.

Anthony Hibbard was on one of the first boats that carried ironworkers to Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts. What he found was “financial freedom,” he said, and he worked his way up to become a foreman on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.

After the Trump administration’s moves to scuttle the industry, Hibbard returned to local, onshore jobs in Portland, Maine, where he earns just one-fifth of what he did offshore.

“I make enough to get by, but I like to be smart with my money, and I don’t have the scope to continue being smart with it,” Hibbard said. “It’s definitely—you can feel the difference, that’s for sure.”

At the time Trump was elected, the US was projected to build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. By the end of his first year back in office, experts had reduced the estimate to 6 gigawatts.

The loss of offshore wind has had financial consequences for many union workers. While many were paid the same per hour as jobs they could find onshore, they could work more than double the hours, and the company covered many living expenses. Grigsby made double to triple what he did onshore.

When Zaheer Razi, 28, joined the Piledrivers Local 56 union as a commercial diver, he transitioned into offshore wind as soon as he could. The logic was that it could be the anchor for people’s careers, he said—union leaders told workers to “set your roots down,” expecting over a decade of steady work.

He’s still working on Revolution Wind near Rhode Island, but he knows it won’t last.

“I’m probably one of the few guys that’s probably going to be working till mid-August, I believe, and then it’s really going to be silent for the next two or three years,” Razi said. “It is very frustrating, but it’s out of our control. Nobody could have really predicted it, but at this point, we’re just riding it out for what we can.”

Razi’s project is one of the five major US wind farms that appear to remain on track despite the political backlash. But they are nearing completion and the permitting pipeline is all but blocked, meaning construction jobs will soon evaporate, according to multiple experts and union leaders.

Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a US policy think tank, attributed the lack of employment prospects to the political uncertainty that has stymied investor interest.

“We’ve trained them, we’ve given them this great experience, they’re building their futures for their families, and now they have no projects to work on,” Ohleth said of the offshore wind labor force, “and that’s because of the lack of market confidence.”

At the time of Trump’s election, the market research firm BloombergNEF forecast that the United States would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, enough electricity to power 13 million homes. By the end of last year, the firm had downgraded that prediction to just 6 gigawatts, according to Harrison Sholler, a wind analyst at BNEF.

For Garrison Biel, an offshore wind diver, the industry’s decline has meant there are close to no employment opportunities left. “They’re more gigs than jobs,” Biel said. “They’re like short hitches, trying to wrap things up, tidy everything up. So I know people that are still working, but it’s not like how it was the first couple of years when it started, where that’s all you needed to do.”

He switched back to commercial diving around eight months ago because “what was available left offshore was slim pickings,” he added.

Biel said the offshore wind industry was supposed to be reliable, with guaranteed time off to make up for the long periods away from home and the weeklong, 12-hour-per-day shifts.

Workers and officials discuss the Trump administration’s decision to stop construction on Revolution Wind at State Pier in New London, Connecticut on August 25, 2025.Tyler Russell/Connecticut Public via Getty

“Now, everybody that’s doing it, they get off the boat after working seven-twelves for a couple of weeks and they go right back to work, because they don’t know if they’re ever going to go back out on a boat again,” he said.

Grigsby was able to buy a house with his money from offshore wind. His union’s business manager, John Dunderdale, said at least a dozen other members of Piledrivers Local 56 did the same.

When these projects disappear, “you’re taking away their means of bringing back into the community,” Dunderdale said.

“Now you have a member sitting home, collecting unemployment, because there’s no work,” he added.

Benjamin Hawkins, who lives in Whitman, Massachusetts, said he made enough to upgrade his parents’ house and enjoy a new degree of “leverage” over his life.

“It’s heartbreaking, because you wonder about what’s going to happen in the future with your money,” Hawkins said.

He added: “Offshore wind was the reason I could improve that life, so to have the president affect my life, just as an average American—it was not on my bingo card.”

Offshore wind first began edging into the US energy market in 2011, decades after it had taken off in Europe. An Obama administration study that year predicted that a vibrant offshore wind industry could help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs while investing in infrastructure and creating “thousands of construction and operational jobs.”

The first US offshore wind farm, Block Island, came online near Rhode Island in 2016, and states began offering financial incentives to drive development. The Biden administration made offshore wind a central priority in 2021, and from there, state and federal agencies geared up for a boom. The federal government sold leases to major international energy companies that began to see the US as an attractive market, centered in the Northeast, Virginia, and California.

Construction and permitting began in force not long before Trump returned to office with a promise to kill offshore wind. “That’s like somebody working on skyscrapers, and then somebody saying, ‘We’re not allowed to build any skyscrapers,’” Biel said. “It’s just a kind of crazy thing.”

No comprehensive or exact estimate of offshore wind-related jobs exists, but New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority estimated in 2022 that a typical project creates around 1,000 construction jobs per year and 100 lifetime operational jobs.

Dunderdale said shutting down any project at that size and scale is a “huge hit,” both for the workers and their local economies.

“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work.”

Central to the fledgling domestic industry was the growth of training and certification programs, primarily through community colleges and unions.

Millwrights Local 1121, which operates across New England, met with developers in 2021 to start offshore wind job training, which would cost $10,000 to $20,000 per person. It was worth it, said the union’s vice president and business manager, Andy Benedetto, because they had heard there would be “years’ and years’ worth of work.”

“We invested millions of dollars in training, more or less, and lots of hours went into putting all this together, and now that work is dried up for the foreseeable future,” Benedetto said. “We hope not too long, but we built this whole workforce, and we sold this dream to our members that if they get involved and get the training and go on this first project, then they’re going to carry over for the next 10 years.”

His union wasn’t alone. Public and private investments poured in to develop the new workforce. New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts led the Northeast with millions of dollars in grants to training and research programs.

Ironworkers Local 7, which operates across the Northeast, received $300,000 from Massachusetts in 2022 “to be ready for when the work comes,” said Grant Provost, the union’s Maine business agent. “And the work never really came.”

Dunderdale helped build the only US-based school with heavy-lift training for Piledrivers Local 56. In total, offshore wind training cost the union about $30,000 per person, which he said was “an investment in the member.”

Esther Rosario, executive director of the labor coalition Climate Jobs New York, said unions that spent years preparing for the offshore wind economy have to reassess their plans.

“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work,” Rosario said. “You can’t apprentice somebody into a job that doesn’t exist.”

Offshore wind was billed as a boon not just for the building trades but for the entire economy. Manufacturing would move to the United States and locals would fill those jobs. For port cities like Massachusetts’ Salem and New Bedford, or New Jersey’s Paulsboro, the loss has threatened years of expected economic progress.

In August 2025, Trump canceled a $34 million grant to build an offshore wind terminal in Salem, which Frank Callahan Jr., president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions, said at the time put 800 construction workers out of a job.

“It means fewer jobs, fewer career opportunities,” Callahan said in a recent interview. As an example of this loss, he pointed to Prysmian Group, an Italian manufacturer, abandoning plans in January 2025 for an offshore wind cable plant near New Bedford.

At one point, Salem County, New Jersey—one of the state’s poorest counties—was poised to gain 1,500 new jobs for its population of 65,000.

“That’s a huge inflection point in that county’s economy that at this point is hard to see materializing any time soon,” said Sullivan, the former New Jersey official.

The thousands of offshore wind workers aren’t all suddenly unemployed. Most did some trade work before, and unions are used to moving members onto different projects when conditions shift.

Still, Provost, the Ironworkers business agent, said offshore wind is a huge dent in unions’ portfolio of opportunities.

“If we’re not building offshore wind, and we’re not building jobs like that, you got to get in on university- and state-funded projects, and that doesn’t keep everybody busy,” Provost said. “We’ve got a massive amount of unemployed people in Local 7 right now.”

The millwrights “did a good job, and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”

And just because workers can transition doesn’t mean they want to. If he had a choice, Hawkins said, “I’d never work on land again.”

In addition to the financial opportunity, Razi said offshore wind was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “We were meeting people from all over Europe, all over the world, and it was just a great environment to learn as somebody being in their mid-20s,” said Razi, who is finishing up an offshore diving job.

Living and working together consistently for weeks on end, crews became good friends, even vacationing together and learning each other’s languages. Hawkins joked that every rigger knew how to curse in at least three languages.

“It’s like being at the UN,” he said.

Benedetto said the millwrights he represents are eager to return to offshore wind, but they feel burned by political headwinds turning against them.

“They did a good job,” he said, “and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”

Last November, Mullin’s building in Boston caught on fire, and he lost everything he owned. Six weeks later, he said, he was able to buy a condo near the city. “That would not have been possible without offshore wind,” he said.

Mullin said he wishes others, especially young people entering the trades for the first time, could have the opportunity he did.

“It’s just too bad because they were good jobs and people were happy with them,” he said. “And it really was just a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”

Continue Reading…

A Tech Prophet Finally Gets Her Second Coming

The first thing to know about Cyberselfish, the chillingly prescient 2000 book about Silicon Valley that its author, Paulina Borsook, says “ruined my life” and caused a 25-year-long “curse” to befall her, is that it’s very, very funny. Cyberselfish, which Borsook cannot stand to name and instead calls “TDB” (short for “that damn book”), is a classic, fish-out-of-water tale of a journalist investigating a strange land. Except, in her case, as a California native, it’s the work of a fish regarding an invasive species that suddenly befouled the tank she’d been swimming in her whole life.

Her observations from the murky milieu of the dawning tech world are as hilarious as they are depressing; early in the book, for instance, Borsook recounts what happened after she wrote a satirical guide for the website Suck.com on dating men in tech. (Do profess Ayn Rand fandom, “don’t tell him about your best friend, the urban planner, who uses HUD money to develop low-income housing.”) After the piece was published, emails cascaded into her inbox.

“Guys were positive that I had been writing about them,” Borsook wrote in Cyberselfish. “Or about someone they knew (I hadn’t written about anyone in particular). Guys wanted to meet me for coffee, as I was obviously their dream girl (it was a joke, guys, and no, thank you). At last! A woman who understands me! No, more modestly, I was just someone who had been paying attention.”

Cyberselfish “contains a warning that was largely ignored.”

Borsook, an author and poet, began working in Silicon Valley in 1981, first as a technical writer for software companies. As she freelanced for various tech outlets and from her perch as a contributing writer to Wired in its earliest years, she began to piece together, as she put it in Cyberselfish, “a picture of an emergent social and political subculture, one that can seem dangerously naive and, at its worst, downright scary.”

Today, just a glance around will confirm that said subculture is no longer “emergent,” but horribly, frighteningly, society-destroyingly dominant. Fittingly, Cyberselfish will be reissued on September 15 by Tin House, an imprint of the independent publisher Zando. The three-decade plus history of the book traces back through a piece she wrote for this very magazine where she began to lay out its thesis. That essay, also titled “Cyberselfish,” ran in our July/August 1996 issue below a crystal clear subhed: “Silicon Valley, one of the country’s biggest recipients of government largesse, would like to bite the hand that feeds it.”

“No sector of society has benefited more and suffered less from the government than these guys,” Borsook, now 72, told me on a recent video call, reflecting on the central question that animated the essay. “So why are they so hostile to it?”

On the strength of that Mother Jones piece, Borsook was able to get a book deal—and that, she will tell you candidly, is when her troubles began. The manuscript was meant for _Wired’_s publishing imprint, but the deal fell through. The work was rejected by a second publisher after they’d bought it and paid her advance. “They killed the book,” Borsook says. “They said it didn’t have sufficient literary quality and wanted all their money back.” She was forced to repay them with money from Public Affairs, the publisher that eventually brought it to market. “I ended up being $65,000 in debt,” she says.

The original and 2026 versions of _Cyberselfish_Zando

While Cyberselfish made a splash upon its release and earned critical acclaim, its stridency and withering thesis also proved hard for some to swallow. It got a nuanced and tough review at Salon by a former Wired editor, Brad Wieners, who argued that some of its critiques of tech, and of the magazine where they both had worked, were outdated. “Borsook has us spend too much time coloring in a map of yesterday that does not correspond to today’s territory,” he wrote. Even a friend of Borsook’s, Elizabeth Weise, noted in her own review for Time that the book could be exhausting. “She is a ranter, (many friends suggested that Cyberselfish should just be called ‘Rant’),” Weise wrote, “who talks a mile a minute in sentences so encrusted with obscure cultural references that it’s often necessary to interrupt and ask for footnotes.”

Her critics could not dispute her brilliance. But as Borsook sees it, the book was both the height of her public profile and also the end of her professional life. “I cannot complain about the media arc,” she says. But, she adds, “It didn’t turn into anything and then I was never able to get anything published ever again, on tech or not-tech. A magazine article or a book. It was like some curse had been laid down on me. It was the weirdest damn thing.”

Financially, things got even worse. Eventually, she was evicted and lost almost everything she owned when she could no longer make payments on her storage unit. For several years, she only got by through free rent as a live-in host at an Airbnb owned by friends. Borsook has a permanent moderate traumatic brain injury from being shot, as she has put it, “accidentally on purpose” in the head as a teenager by a friend. While doing research for My Life as a Ghost, a 2013 performance and art installation about the incident, clinicians told Borsook, who had always believed her injury was mild, that it was better classified as moderate. “It was sort of a shock,” she explained to me by email, “and one of those moments telling me how much I didn’t want to identity as/admit to being disabled.”

Borsook also has severe chemical and scent sensitivities which date to childhood, but that she says doctors told her were probably worsened by the TBI. These factors make it difficult to find a suitable place to live, especially in housing-strapped Santa Cruz, where she’s long been based, or to work traditional office jobs; today, one of the things keeping her afloat is an ongoing GoFundMe a friend launched in 2024.

“I felt ashamed for most of the last 25 years,” she says. The book, she came to believe, “was bad and I was ashamed. That’s how I walked around.”

Paulina Borsook speaks during a panel at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in 2000.John Anderson/Getty

But decades later, after this cascade of misfortunes and a deeply internalized if unearned sense of chagrin, something changed. Through a series of events—which Borsook hastens to point out she had nothing to do with—the curse was at least partly lifted. In the last year, Cyberselfish received a new and respectful round of attention, helped along by the advocacy of fellow journalist and Nerd Reich author Gil Duran, who was disturbed and angry by Borsook’s erasure from tech history. In September 2025, he wrote a viral Bluesky post about what he termed a “mush-brained” Wired essay about selfishness in Silicon Valley that entirely ignored Borsook. The next month, Duran interviewed Borsook on his podcast.

The book’s new moment also has a lot to do with, frankly, how spooky some of the predictions are, many years on. Borsook saw clearly how the tech world’s contempt for government could turn into a desire to destroy it, something that’s come true with the destruction wrought by DOGE. She clocked how debilitating selfishness and blindness to privilege could turn into hatred for one’s neighbor, especially poor people on the streets of San Francisco and Palo Alto that the new tech glitterati had to walk by on their way to work. She also saw an obvious and worrisome gender essentialism emerging, specifically how awkwardness with women and a lack of success romantically was morphing into what Borsook called, in our conversation, “creepy socio-biological stupidity” and rank sexism.

Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter ThielShawn Thew/Pool/CNP/ZUMA; Tim Wagner/ZUMA

Now that Borsook’s worst and most apocalyptic visions have come true tenfold, people are ready to listen. She was featured in the New York Times last year, and a new profile by her old employer Wired, with whom, she writes in Cyberselfish, she often had a fraught working relationship, is in the works. (Her time at Wired, she has written, began happily, but was marked by a dawning realization that the magazine’s leadership was, as she saw it, sexist, not in their treatment of her, but “in their values and treatment of others.”) Last month, she sat for an interview on CNN, where she was hailed as the journalist “who saw today’s tech titans coming.”

“Totally Rip van Winkle all the time here,” Borsook told me recently by email. “Just confusing, as you can imagine.”

In a foreword to the republished version, Duran writes that the 2000 book was “work of prophecy,” adding, “Like most products of that cursed genre, it contains a warning that was largely ignored at the time of its publication. The disastrous results of this oversight fill today’s headlines and pose an existential threat to freedom and democracy.”

But Duran points out that despite this new round of respect and recognition, Borsook is still not in a stable place financially. “Paulina is looking at years of struggle,” he says. “She’s elderly and frail. It’s great this has brought some attention to her, but we all know that books aren’t going to take care of your financial problems. I hope we can continue to build and find ways to honor her work by making sure that she doesn’t have to suffer. Maybe one of these podcast millionaires can break off the dividends for the journalist who got it right.”

Borsook does see another slim silver lining in what’s happened to her lately: “The reputational renaissance I’ve had, you usually get posthumously,” she says dryly. “At least I’m still alive.”

Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert is an annual draw for tech titans.Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post/Getty

The genesis for Cyberselfish was a kind of queasy fascination, “mongoose-to-cobra style,” as Borsook put it in the book, with Silicon Valley’s emerging cultural dynamics. It was a place full of “technolibertarians” (a word she popularized) who considered any and all government regulation to be oppressive, but at the same time happily took government funding—and lots of it. They went to Burning Man, they loved shooting guns, and they were likely to use some variant of the word “pagan” to describe their spiritual beliefs. They were often men who were very unskilled in dealing with women, and they were, as Borsook wrote, not deeply rooted in the places where they physically made their homes.

“Silicon Valley companies and executives and workers may identify themselves not with where they actually live and work and go to movies and send their kids to school but, more saliently, as members of a high tech archipelago,” the book explained. They were also—and here we feel the ground shake ominously, a slight shifting under our feet that presages a future, devastating earthquake—not very involved or very interested in politics: local, state, or federal.

The new Silicon Valley ruling class was so disconnected from government, in fact, that they didn’t seem to have a great understanding of why it existed at all, or how it might benefit them. Cyberselfish recounted a telling conversation Borsook had while spending a week at the “plushy Lake Tahoe getaway of a Silicon Valley guy who’s made it.”

“He complained,” Borsook wrote, “about how the local Tahoe building code wouldn’t let him alter the silhouette of his megachalet. I nodded sympathetically, yet pointed out that in Los Angeles, where there were no such planning guidelines until recently, plutocrats often tore down existing structures and rebuilt monstrosities that take up the entire lot, blocking their neighbors’ views.” In response, Borsook’s friend looked at her in puzzlement; the consequences of deregulation were quite literally something he never considered.

“He had never heard of the tragedy of the commons, where one sheep too many consuming more than its share of common resources destroys the whole,” Borsook wrote, “nor had he thought much about what participating in a community means.”

One of the unique strengths of Cyberselfish is that Borsook wasn’t just living and working among the emerging tech elite, but trying to date within it too. As Borsook experienced in spades, people often show themselves, unintentionally, in very revealing ways in romantic contexts. The book recounts a startling and depressing first date with a guy with a bungalow in Palo Alto and the world at his feet. It was a beautiful spring afternoon in the late ‘80s, and he picked her up in his BMW. She told him about living in Manhattan during the stock market crash of 1987 and seeing a young Black man panhandling with a sign that read “I need money to go home to North Carolina to get some food.” Borsook had been struck by this, a perfect distillation of how “hard and heartless” she’d found New York. In response, her date looked over from the steering wheel and sniped, “A long way to go for groceries, don’t you think?”

“I was stunned,” Borsook wrote in the book. “This from a guy who’d been a scholarship boy himself, who’d traveled all over the world in rough and not cruise-line conditions. His reaction was my first encounter with the strange lack of philos in high tech.”

“My mother used to give me no end of grief,” Borsook told me, over how she was unable to find a boyfriend even in such a male-dominated culture. “I used to say, ‘I can’t find anyone I relate to.’”

Paulina Borsook in Toronto in 2000.Colin McConnell/Toronto Star/Getty

Borsook is not the person to talk to if you are looking to feel better about today’s tech bigwigs. She has a visceral disgust for Elon Musk and calls Peter Thiel “the Antichrist, as far as I’m concerned.”

Some of the technolibertarians of early Silicon Valley were laced with cyberpunk ideas like a disdain for national borders, an interest in freedom in all its forms, and a love for drugs. “Many people agreed with decriminalizing psychedelics or had unusual dealings in their intimate lives,” Borsook recalls. (The book uses the term “nerverts” to talk about computer nerds who engaged in then-more-uncommon sexual practices like polyamory and BDSM.) But as such instincts combined with a love of the free market and reflexive disdain for government regulation, it cohered into something approaching a religious belief. Today the leadership class of modern-day Silicon Valley is simply dominated by cultural and religious conservatism.

DOGE under Musk created conditions that even Borsook couldn’t have dreamed of, along with what she calls “the appalling collusion of Trump with the big tech companies.” She’s particularly struck by the irony of DOGE stripping away funding and protection for national parks. “They live in California with all this great natural beauty,” she says, impatiently. “How do you think that got preserved?”

“I don’t celebrate Steve Jobs, but he’d be rolling in his grave,” she adds. She’s also disturbed by how transphobic the titans of the tech world have become, pointing out that trans people have always been present in Silicon Valley: “It’s really weird. They’re all obsessed with a stupid, kind of retrograde idea of gender and masculinity.”

Borsook is also worried by the tech world’s messianic vision in of AI, their conviction that it will solve every problem. “We’re living in the effects of the casino economy,” she says. “Until that changes, how are we going to change Silicon Valley? If there’s a big crash in AI, that may give us a real corrective. Because it’s all made of papier-mache and spit.” But in her reflexive drive to understand how people use tech, she is interested in how many ordinary people are using AI chatbots to confide in, as an alternative to therapy or human confidantes. She’s reminded of the ELIZA experiment in the 1960s, which simulated conversation with a psychotherapist using tools like pattern-matching.

“Some people are so much more comfortable with [AI]. But why would I rather talk to this than a friend, or a boyfriend, or a therapist?” Borsook asks. “AI bores me.”

It’s common with prophets to ask them to predict the future, or show us the way to a better tomorrow. In the closing moments of my conversation with Borsook, I can’t resist the impulse to do so. When I tell her that I’m struggling with a certain, say, overwhelming sense of pessimism and despair lately, she doesn’t disagree. “I tend to be a Debbie Downer,” she says, with a laugh. Because she’s a writer and not a tech activist, “I tend not to be prescriptive on how I think about the world.”

“There’s so much fear right now around making a living,” Borsook adds, including among people in the industry. “How do you channel the fear into something productive? I don’t have an answer for you, but I think there are a lot of people who could find common cause who wouldn’t have in the past.” In the end, and despite what the isolationists of the tech and politics world might have to tell us, and whether we like it or not, she adds, “We’re all in this together.”

Continue Reading…

Fore! Trump’s DC Golf Course Is Already in the Rough

When President Donald Trump takes flight on Marine One from the White House, he often gets a bird’s-eye view of a municipal golf course located at East Potomac Park, a national park better known to locals as Hains Point. Perhaps the flyovers inspired his recent ambitions to transform the beloved local links into a world-class golf course worthy of PGA tournaments.

Trump recently said construction on the new course will begin September 1. But his aerial view of this particular building site may obscure one of the park’s key features: Its water hazard.

Water from the Potomac River floods its sidewalks and drowned the city’s dreams of a modern swimming facility. Now, it threatens to wash out Trump’s golf fantasy and leave behind a disaster that will make the Lincoln MemorialReflecting Pool look like a minor embarrassment.

The “builder in chief” first publicly mused in May about remaking the East Potomac links. A month later, he toured the site with golf course designer Tom Fazio and announced on Truth Social that after “studying the dilapidated, worn out, and very dangerous and outdated Golf Course known as East Potomac Golf Links” he had concluded that “on this fantastic site, with water and unparalleled views of DC’s Monuments, we will build one of the Greatest Golf Courses anywhere in the World.”

In June, Fazio told Golf.com that Trump would move quickly to complete the course before he leaves office. “The president happens to be a guy of action,” Fazio said. “He wants to get it done now.”

“The president happens to be a guy of action. He wants to get it done now.”

Of course, any local with a fishing pole could have pointed out the glaringly obvious flaw in his plans. “Let’s be honest,” says Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, which has sued the Trump administration over its plans for the golf course. “The island is sinking.”

The US Army Corps of Engineers created the 330-acre East Potomac Park in the late 19th century from a hodgepodge of material dredged up from the bottom of the Potomac River to widen shipping channels around the city. In 1897, Congress declared the artificial island a public park that would be “forever held and used for recreation and the pleasure of the people.” In 1917, park officials hired the legendary architect Walter Travis to design a public golf course, which opened in 1920. It was wildly popular, and in 1973, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Unlike the excess of cost and amenities at Trump’s private courses, golf at the no-frills East Potomac is cheap—an 18-hole round on the blue course costs as little as $41, less for kids, veterans, and seniors. In 2025, people played more than 125,000 rounds of golf at the municipal facility. It’s not the sort of course Trump would ever actually play. But the park’s tantalizing views of Washington’s monuments and undeveloped riverfront must seem like so much wasted potential to the billionaire developer.

The environmental realities of East Potomac, however, present some major obstacles for fulfilling Trump’s vision. Ed Stierli, Vice President of Government Affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, says when he saw the early renderings of Trump’s course, “One of the first questions I had was: Are they completely ignoring the landscape here?”

The simple answer is yes. Much of East Potomac lies at sea level within a 100-year floodplain, and various studies have found that the artificial island has sunk at least five feet since its inception. Meanwhile, the water level around it has risen more than two feet thanks to climate change and other contributors. Today, it’s not uncommon for the river to top the seawall and come up 25 feet inland after a big storm or high tide, leaving picnic tables marooned like rafts on a small lake. (The National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“Good grief,” said Mark Mungeam, the president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, who is familiar with Trump’s plans but was unaware of the extent of the sinking. “That speaks to the folly of this project.”

In June, I biked down to East Potomac to meet DC resident Alex Rosen, who recently founded the community group Save East Po to fight Trump’s golf course. While we talked, the sidewalk flooded as the tide came in. “There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water,” Rosen said. “It’s a common occurrence.”

“There’ve been instances of where I’ve been cycling here, and you have to turn around right at the tip [of the peninsula] because there’s literally no way to get through the water.”

The regular flooding, along with years of underfunding and neglect by Congress, has taken its toll. The nearly 150-year-old seawall that surrounds East Potomac Park is crumbling. The sidewalk that runs around the perimeter of the 2-mile-long peninsula is in many places falling into the river and has been fenced off— unusable.

For years, Republicans in Congress have starved all national parks for funding, creating a backlog of more than $2 billion in needed repairs just in DC. But in 2020, it passed the Great American Outdoors Act to try to address the neglect. Even the $500 million the bill allocated for projects related to the National Mall ahead of America 250, though, wasn’t enough to save East Potomac Park from being swallowed up by the river.

In 2011, the National Park Service commissioned a geotechnical study to investigate repairing the East Potomac seawall. It concluded that the project would require sinking new footings down as much as 10 feet into the river and possibly more than 100 feet into the bedrock below all along the park’s more than three-mile-long perimeter. It was going to cost “millions of dollars per foot—not miles, per foot,” says Kym Hall, the former National Capitol Area director at the National Park Service who was involved in the discussions. “It is an astronomical amount of money.”

Instead, the Park Service used the new funding to shore up the seawall around the Tidal Basin to protect the Jefferson Memorial and the famous cherry trees, as well as part of nearby West Potomac Park. But Hall says that even with the new appropriation, NPS could afford to fix only part of the Tidal Basin, which is less than a third of the size of East Potomac Park. After years of careful planning the Tidal Basin restoration still cost $113 million and took two years of construction.

To do what Trump wants to do at East Potomac, “They would also have to address the seawall,” says Stierli, who notes that conservation and park advocates have long been in favor of fixing it. “Unfortunately, what’s moving forward here is almost a replica of the type of thinking we’re seeing with the Reflecting Pool: An administration ignoring climate, ignoring science, ignoring the Park Service’s own plans.” He notes that the administration has fired most of the scientists who’ve worked on East Potomac. Trump is just “charging ahead, completely detached from the reality of this site and its landscape.”

Excited to unveil the design for the East Potomac Golf Links renovation from Fazio Design.

Like iconic public courses of Bethpage Black & Torrey Pines, East Potomac will offer locals—of the National Capital Region—championship-quality golf at affordable, highly discounted… pic.twitter.com/foLZAAcsj3

— Secretary Doug Burgum (@SecretaryBurgum) May 14, 2026

It’s not just flooding that threatens Trump’s vision for East Potomac. “Hains Point is basically an artificial piece of land made up of dredgings and other waste soils, and with a very high water table,” says Peter Feldman, a hydrologist who did a stint at EPA working on the Superfund program. Putting a golf course there, he says, “would seem to be a poor idea generally.”

The DC government learned the hard way what sort of hazards lie below the surface of the artificial landmass. In 1936, East Potomac Park gained an outdoor swimming pool, with an attendant pool house that was renovated in the 1970s. Eventually, the National Park Service contracted with the DC government to take over its management. Former DC mayor Adrian Fenty even trained for triathlons in the only outdoor Olympic-size facility in the city. His administration famously installed a heater so that it could be used long after the rest of the city’s outdoor pools had closed for the season.

In 2014, the city decided that the time had come to upgrade the aging facility. Officials envisioned a state-of-the-art competitive aquatics facility that would include spectator seating and diving platforms, plus a renovated pool house. Preliminary engineering studies had warned that construction would be challenging. Just taking soil samples became an ordeal as boring holes quickly flooded.

“You can think of it like a sponge, or [like when] my wife gets out of the shower and leaves our bath mat completely soaked. It looks fine on the surface but once I start walking over it, the water all comes up,” Daniel Spielvogel, an engineer who co-authored a study on the site, would later explain at a contract dispute hearing. “It moves around. It squirts out on the floor. Those are the disturbance-sensitive soils that we want to avoid.”

Nonetheless, construction began in 2018, and almost immediately ran into trouble. Excavating the century-old site proved to be more like an archeological dig than a building project. Undocumented sewer, water, and electrical lines gummed up the works. An ancient pipe that flushed water from the pool into the Potomac River swamped the site along with groundwater that was not, as the contractor assumed, seven or 10 feet down, but just below the surface at roughly the same elevation as the river.

Workers installed sump pumps, only to see them swallowed up by the soupy soils that frequently caved in and threatened workers’ safety. When Spielvogel visited the site in September 2018, he found a “disgusting mess” of “muddy trenches and open excavations.” Things did not improve, and in 2020, the DC government cut its losses and, citing “significant flood risks,” abandoned the whole project. The site was filled in, and litigation ensued.

Ultimately, the city lost $14 million in taxpayer money, and residents lost an outdoor pool that had been in operation for almost 100 years. Today, all that’s left is a weedy lot, a monument to the risks of ignoring the realities of nature.

The former East Potomac Pool, pre-renovationNeill Williams/District of Columbia Aquatics Club

Groundwater flooding the excavation site of former East Potomac pool house in 2020AECOM/DC Department of General Services

The site of the old East Potomac Pool today.Stephanie Mencimer

If Trump has a vague understanding that water and soil problems might be an issue for his championship golf course plans, his solution is not reassuring.

In October 2025, Trump shocked the country by demolishing part of the White House to build a ballroom. While discussing the project with the president, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested using the East Wing debris to elevate the new golf course. “Trump told Burgum he thought the idea was brilliant,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The administration began depositing some 30,000 cubic yards of White House rubble full of rebar, plaster, lead paint and asbestos between the fourth and ninth holes of the existing East Potomac golf course. Aside from the obvious environmental concerns, as a practical matter, covering East Potomac Park in White House wreckage is unlikely to solve its flooding issues. “I think they’re going to need a lot more soil than that,” says Mungeam. “That’s just a tiny amount of what would be needed to build a championship golf course.”

Here’s why: East Potomac Park is built on “hydraulic fill,” which is both too soft and too weak to support much vertical construction, like for restaurants or clubhouses. If new fill is put down too quickly, or if it’s too heavy, it can cause the existing land to slide or settle, and the site can take years to stabilize.

High groundwater will likely exacerbate the problem, as will climate change. Like Washington, DC, itself, East Potomac faces extreme vulnerability to storm surges from hurricanes, particularly as the sea level rises. The US Army Corps of Engineers expects the Potomac River to rise more than three feet by 2080. Not even tearing down the rest of the White House would likely yield enough material to create a PGA-caliber playing surface on Hains Point.

The existing East Potomac golf course is basically flat, making it perfect for beginning and amateur players. But championship courses require such technical features as deep bunkers, water hazards, and dramatic slopes. Because of the park’s high water table, the only way Trump could create those sorts of enhancements is to bring in tons of new fill to pile on top of the existing land mass, which only will create more problems.

The result of all the earthmoving and extensive heavy truck traffic needed to bring in so much fill would compact the existing weak soil, and lay the foundation for future drainage issues, Mungeam says. And simply filling in the flood plain won’t end the course’s water wars. When golf course designers fill in a flood plain like the one at East Potomac, he says they’re required to create a new one to equalize the water.

If Trump’s hasty and ill-conceived construction fills in too much of East Potomac Park, the chronic flooding will simply move elsewhere—perhaps to nearby parts of the National Mall, such as the Jefferson Memorial, where taxpayers just spent more than $100 million rebuilding the seawall. The water, Mungeam explains, “has to go somewhere.”

Like so many of Trump’s monomaniacal plans to make over DC without anypublic input, much less expert guidance, his golf course takeover triggered a lawsuit. In February, local golfers and the DC Preservation League asked a judge to block the administration from pursuing any further action at East Potomac until it had complied with various environmental reviews and procedural requirements. In May, the plaintiffs went to court to request an emergency injunction after reports that the administration planned to close the course immediately and start renovations.

“I don’t want another demolished East Wing. I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”

US District Court Judge Ana Reyes declined to issue an injunction barring further work on the golf course. But she, too, was suspicious about Trump’s intentions. In early July, Reyes ordered the administration to come up with a plan to regularly update the court on its plans before “the bulldozers are starting. I don’t want another demolished East Wing,” she warned. “I don’t want another demolished Reflecting Pool.”

Even with court oversight, opponents of Trump’s golf course worry that if Trump is allowed to move forward with the golf course construction, the whole park will go the way of the old swimming pool.

“My fear,” says Save East Po’s Alex Rosen, is that “they will dig a bunch of plumbing, they will move a ton of earth, and they will make a bunch of changes before realizing ‘oh, the water table here is actually pretty high.’” If that happens, he predicts, the administration will “throw their hands up and say ‘oops, our bad’” and leave behind a big, expensive mess that renders East Potomac unusable long after Trump leaves office.

At the same time, Rosen and other park lovers acknowledge that Trump is right about one thing: As with the crumbling seawall, the existing East Potomac golf course has long needed some TLC. But careful upgrades were already in the works before Trump got involved.

In 2019, the National Park Service signed a 50-year lease with the nonprofit National Links Trust that included a plan to rehab East Potomac. Legendary course designer Tom Doak was working pro bono, with community input, to preserve the essential character of the municipal course originally conceived by Walter Travis back in 1917. But in December, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the lease.

“This is a municipal site,” says the DC Preservation League’s Miller. “This is not Pebble Beach, and it doesn’t need to be.”

Continue Reading…

What People With Eating Disorders Hear in the Ariana Grande Discourse

On July 31, in the final days of the North American leg of her tour, Ariana Grande released the music video for “Petal,” her newest single from an album of the same name. The video instantly reignited the years-long discourse over Grande’s body into something of a new low,with many presenting the video as irrefutable evidence that the singer is suffering from an eating disorder.

Reactions to those opinions, by turns emotional and censorious, have been intense. They revealedquestions about a public unable to cope collectively with a woman’s body. Are such comments inherently sexist? Do well-meaning instructions warning us to refrain from speculation ever have exceptions? What does it mean to express “concern” for someone in the public eye whom we don’t personally know? How does the frenzied discourse land for people with eating disorders?

I reached out to Dr. Rebecca Boswell, a director at Penn Medicine Princeton’s Center for Eating Disorders, to explain the complications of navigating these fraught conversations, and what patients with eating disorders often hear when a celebrity’s weight makes headlines.

There’s been intense debate about the politics of talking about people’s bodies. On one hand, such commentary is often sexist; we aren’t privy to larger dynamics that may be going on with someone. But do we have a responsibility to acknowledge that some appearances may not be healthy?

Many things can be true at the same time, and there’s truth in all sides of this debate. The media has a long history of idealizing and visually showcasing thin bodies in a way that can be extremely harmful to young, vulnerable people and to folks with eating disorder histories or active eating disorders. We know that media coverage and celebrity coverage can play a role in the development and maintenance of eating disorders, and that it’s a major risk factor for the development of body image concerns.

“Every time there’s a media story about someone losing weight or being on a GLP one, therapists hear about it.”

That context makes it important to have responsible reporting around other people’s bodies, especially because so much of this discourse centers around women and women’s bodies. It’s a bit of a Goldilocks phenomenon: What’s too hot? What’s too cold? What’s too big? What’s too small? That can leave folks feeling like there’s no right way to exist in a body. That being said, when there are really concerning things happening or something seems noticeably different, there are helpful and unhelpful ways to express concern.

What do you think when you read all the online diagnosing?

We can’t look at someone and assume things about their health or their mental status. That really is reserved for physicians and people who know someone well and can see changes in behavior or health status. Because someone can lose a lot of weight and have cancer, right? Or someone can be very malnourished in a larger body. There is no one-to-one correlation between thinness and health, and it’s doctors who can make good evaluations with physical exams to discern if someone is experiencing malnutrition or eating-related problems. So can family members.

When it comes to public messaging around concern, again, multiple things can be true. It can be true that it’s powerful when the public expresses concern about someone in the public eye, and that may help them and their teams to evaluate whether there’s a risk or a problem. But it can also be the case that expressing concern garners a lot of clicks, chatter, and a lot of revenue. It also tends to highlight surveillance around women’s bodies in a way that can still be really difficult for folks who have experienced that surveillance themselves, either from family members or from the world in general.

“It’s never a positive effect…They’ll say, ‘Can’t we just live and like not be evaluated based on our bodies?'”

How does that discourse typically affect someone with eating difficulties?

Every time there’s a media story about someone losing weight or being on a GLP-1, therapists hear about it. What we hear can range from “I’m so mad that I have to work on my recovery, and this person’s being glamorized for changing their body in such a profound way,” to “This makes it so much harder for me to stay committed to treatment.” There’s also “It’s so unfair that her people get to live in this like weight loss world, and I’m trying to live outside of it.”

I also hear a lot of sadness around the way that people’s bodies are judged and evaluated, not just in the context of media and culture. It can remind people of their private personal experiences of being judged or bullied or excluded because of the way that they look, and be really retraumatizing.

What about negative reactions to extreme weight loss? Can public concerns when someone famous looks so visibly [too?] thin ever help people with eating disorders?

It’s never a positive effect. What I hear is, “This is a really difficult thing to visually have to see, even when people are talking about how negative this is.” I often hear people saying that the conversations remind them of when they were really sick. They’ll say, “Can’t we just live and like not be evaluated based on our bodies?” They will also often bring up how they would have preferred people telling them that they were concerned about their weight.

I hear from people that it is hard when you’re very ill with an eating disorder to accept the possibility of needing care, and that expressions of concern from loved ones make a big difference—while public or group scrutiny is challenging.

What exactly happens to the body when an eating disorder is identified?

Different eating disorder symptoms affect the body differently. Intake restriction and prolonged malnutrition have profound effects on every body system. It affects bone density in a way that is often not reversible. It affects GI system function. It affects your kidneys, your liver, and causes cardiac stress. It can even shrink the size of your brain.

The way that the body adapts during malnutrition is incredibly survival-oriented. It slows everything down and shuts everything off to keep the machine running as long as possible. That is an enormous stressor on the body and requires really significant nutritional rehabilitation to repair tissue damage where it’s repairable, and bring your body back to a healthful state. The [real harm with malnutrition] is the speed and the amount of weight loss that really is most strongly correlated with those physical effects, regardless of the body size you started in.

GLP-1’s are everywhere. We have corners of the internet that outright promote anorexia. Is the discourse around body image worse than ever?

I do think that with the rise of GLP-1s, there’s been an increased focus on thinness in the media and the internet in a way that surveils and glamorizes thin bodies. I think that has a negative effect, not just on people with eating disorders, but on children and youth who are vulnerable to developing [eating difficulties].

You talked about the role of responsible reporting when writing about a public figure’s appearance. What does that look like?

That is where the nuance comes in. There have been studies that show, for example, articles that express concern in a kind and thoughtful way, but featuring really sensational pictures, can worsen people’s body image. There’s responsibility around the visualising of the story. There are kind ways to talk about concern that don’t involve [judgements] of like, “This person looks so bad or good” or “Go eat a burger.” Those kinds of comments are not useful.

Personally, I think there’s a lot of good, feminist intentions advising us against commenting on a woman’s body. But I also think that guidance can ignore the way that most of us, especially young people, discover images, which is on social media.

There’s a difference between observing and surveilling, between observing and judging. It is possible to observe variation in a non-judgemental way; that is a mindful, neutral practice. But once judgment comes in, that starts to bring up questions around what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s where I think the harm comes in, especially part of the narrative around women’s bodies. It’s very uncommon to hear neutral observations around women’s bodies without judgement or shame. That ultimately detracts from women’s achievements, internal talents, and their leadership.

One middle ground I’ve seen being tossed around is that anyone concerned about a celebrity’s weight should reserve this concern for private conversations. What advice do you have for navigating these conversations, especially when talking to our kids?

Private conversations are incredibly powerful when it comes to suspected eating disorders and malnutrition because they come from a place of known love, concern, and respect. Many people who are experiencing problems with nutrition and eating may have limited insight into the severity of their problem. So loving support matters. Typically, I recommend that people focus on behavior and not appearance, because appearance can be really difficult for people to feel like that’s the focus of their loved one’s concern. So instead of saying, “You look very thin,” say, “I’ve noticed that you’ve been skipping meals. I’m worried about your health. I care about you. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

[When it comes to talking about a celebrity,] start by emphasizing that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. That people can be healthy with any body shape and size. Sometimes people can look visibly sick, and we don’t know why. That’s why health is private. We don’t always get to know what’s going on with people, even when they’re public figures. I might also ask, “How does this image make you feel about your body?”

Continue Reading…

Building a Soft Landing for Haitians Heading Back to the Island

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how elder care services will be devastated by the end of the Temporary Protected Status program that has offered legal status to about 350,000 Haitians living in the US, many of them healthcare workers.

Since then, I’ve heard some harrowing anecdotes from sources following the Supreme Court decision to end the TPS program, and President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to target Haitian immigrants. Real estate agents report that many in the community are considering selling their properties or placing another relative on the title of their homes. The Haitian American Chamber of Commerce of Florida told me that employers are reluctantly letting go of employees now that their work permits are no longer valid.

As several immigration policy experts explained recently, Haitian TPS holders will either try to remain in the US as undocumented immigrants or find another pathway to legal status. Many will likely be deported.

But there’s another option many TPS holders are considering: voluntarily returning to the island. In recent years, the country has faced growing instability due to gang violence that has ravaged much of Haiti, including the capital of Port-au-Prince. The US Department of State has warned Americans to avoid travel to the country, citing armed conflict between these gangs, the risk of kidnappings and other violent crimes, and a ban on US commercial flights to the main airport in Port-au-Prince after several planes were struck by gunfire.

But in more rural communities, building a life is still possible, MarieGuerda Nicolas, a Haitian American psychology professor at the University of Miami and co-founder of Ayiti Community Trust, told me. For many Haitians, they may prefer to leave the US on their own terms instead of living under the growing fear of deportation.

MarieGuerda Nicolas, a psychologist, counsels Haitians returning to the island from the US. Photo courtesy of MarieGuerda Nicolas

Nicolas has been thinking about creating options for returning Haitians for years. When thousands of Haitians were deported during the Biden administration, Ayiti Community Trust partnered with several organizations in the US and Haiti to create a program that would assist them in safely and compassionately returning to the island. Called Ayiti Home Link, the program is basically a case management system that assists in accessing employment, housing, and other community resources. There’s also a resource guide that helps them navigate the nation’s bureaucracy—think driver’s licenses and passports—as well as listing available hospitals and health care clinics. Each region of the country also has a “hub,” as Nicolas calls it, a nonprofit on the ground that serves as the point of contact for someone just arriving in that area, should they need help settling in.

Ayiti Community Trust and its partner organizations have helped nearly 200 people return to Haiti. Now, with TPS protections gone, Nicolas anticipates many more will reach out for guidance. I talked to her on the phone last month about how this program works and what she’s hearing from the Haitian community during such a tumultuous time. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you tell me about the Ayiti Community Trust and the different ways the organization is helping TPS holders?

“What does resettlement of Haitians going back home look like? What are the models of resettlement across the globe so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel? “

Clearly, TPS and people really thinking about coming back home havebeen a central part of what the community foundation engages in. We’ve been really working around this idea of, what does resettlement of Haitians going back home look like? What are the models of resettlement across the globe so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel? One of the things we learned is how important it is to make sure that it doesn’t feel like a crisis response or humanitarian crisis response. There are about eight organizations that have been working on a resettlement plan and process for the country. And the first thing we put out was the resource guide in English and Creole that allows people to know: how do you get your identification card? Where do you go to get your passport? How do you enroll your kids in school? Where are the clinics? And so on.

There is a lot of instability and gang violence in Haiti that has been highlighted in the media as well as by human rights organizations. Despite these challenges, is it still possible to build a life in the country?

Port-au-Prince doesn’t represent the entire country. Whatever happens in Port-au-Prince permeates the narrative of the whole country, and that’s just not the case. So somebody who’s from Cap-Haïtien, of course they can go back home. They had homes there. They have communities there. The cost of living is not the same as it is in the US, in terms of being able to go back. Would people like to be in a country that feels sovereign, where the political situation is stable, where there are more economic opportunities? Absolutely. But I don’t think that the people who are back home are feeling like, “Oh my God, I’ve made the worst decision.” I haven’t seen that because I think the stress of being here and of being in a space where you don’t know what could happen to you…I think removing that stress has been a huge part of it as well.

“We never want anybody to come back to their home feeling like they’re going to hell. We want them to feel like they’re going home with dignity and a sense of humanity.”

We never want anybody to come back to their home feeling like they’re going to hell. We want them to feel like they’re going home with dignity and a sense of humanity. As part of this process, we have to recognize the sheer amount of struggle and difficulties and challenges for people to leave one country and go to another country, even if it’s their native country. We are supporting people through that process in a way that is dignified, considering that the experience that they just had in the United States is an undignified, inhumane experience.

In the last few weeks, what are some of the things that you’re hearing from people here with TPS who are just now assessing their options?

It’s incredibly stressful. I’m a psychologist, and I’ve seen 12 domestic violence cases and eight suicide attempts. People are stressed about this situation. So it’s incredibly difficult for people who are feeling the impact of all of this.

At the same time, not all TPS holders are the same or have the same options. I’m talking to a family where the mom is in the middle of chemotherapy right now. So that looks very different from this other person who I spoke to whose husband has TPS, and she’s a US citizen. They have two kids, but he went back to Haiti to situate himself and get things settled for the family to join him. It’s very different for different people in terms of figuring out what they need to do. How do I need to do it? Do I go back to Haiti or take my chances in Canada? Do I take my chances in the United States and live with the stresses of not being able to leave my house for fear that I might get picked up?

How are organizations in Haiti stepping up to help TPS holders?

They are thinking about welcoming them and making sure that people come back home in a really meaningful way. I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago, and one of the organization’s leaders said, “The Haitian diaspora has been incredibly good to Haiti. It’s our turn to return the favor and be good to them.” How powerful is that? I want people to know that it’s not like people in Haiti are not thinking about the need to support people coming back home. They are dedicating their time and energy to that.

Continue Reading…

An Infamous Attack Ad Just Got an AI Resurrection

In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s campaign ran a terrifying 60-second advertisement. It opens with a three-year-old girl in a field, pulling petals off a daisy while counting to ten. Then, a man’s voice begins a countdown, and a nuclear explosion fills the screen.

The advertisement only aired once, but roughly 100 million people saw it. The message was clear: Johnson’s opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a warmonger who would put American children in danger and bring nuclear armageddon. Johnson won in a landslide, and the daisy video became America’s most infamous attack ad.

Now, a Super PAC acting on behalf of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senatorial campaign is using an AI-generated, Frankensteined version of Johnson’s video to push a different message.

In this version, instead of being wiped out by a nuclear bomb, the daisy girl—resurrected via generative AI—lies on an operating table in front of an AI-generated version of Texas Representative James Talarico.

“She dreams of growing up, falling in love, becoming a mother,” a narrator intones. “The trans industry preys on confused children. Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries.” The Talarico campaign has stated that “James does not support gender reassignment surgery for minors,” and that “this AI deep fake ad is flat out lying.”

It’s not the only AI advertisement Paxton’s allies have produced this cycle, nor is it the first designed to attack Talarico’s support for transgender youth. Another advertisement, which ran in June, shows an AI-generated James Talarico dancing in a dress, singing a parody version of “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music” reworked to be about giving girls hormones “til they grow mustaches.” Paxton has built his brand on ridiculing trans youth and making it as difficult as possible for them to access medical care. In May, he even took time during his runoff victory speech to call Talarico’s defense of trans youth “weird.”

This $10 million ad buy, though, might be the Paxton campaign’s most egregious attack yet. The ad was developed by the American Principles Project, one of the earliest groups to push anti-trans laws. Their ultimate goal, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported, is to go beyond banning gender-affirming care for children and outlaw medical care for trans people of all ages. As the group’s president, Terry Schilling, admitted last year, he and his allies are starting with children because that’s “where the consensus is.”

The original “daisy girl” ad was effective because it was able to make people afraid. The campaign spot, which aired in the middle of a family television program, pushed parents to vote in the way they believed would protect their children from an unthinkable fate. Schilling and his allies hope to leverage parents’ fears of a supposed predatory medical establishment to push Paxton to victory.

But if previous attempts to remix the daisy video are anything to go by, the American Principles Project may not succeed. Bob Dole, in 1996, aired a version of the daisy video that concerned itself with teenage drug use. Audiences didn’t find that particularly compelling, and Dole lost. The Hillary Clinton campaign, in 2016, tracked down the actress who starred in the original video to shoot an ad for her presidential bid. Clinton lost, too. An atom bomb is terrifying because it is real, but an AI-generated three-year-old on an operating table is a manufactured threat.

This article has been updated to reflect a comment from James Talarico’s campaign.

Continue Reading…

Anti-AI Populism is Reshaping American Politics

Opposing data center construction is one of the most popular positions a candidate can possibly take right now—and those who fail to do so are starting to lose elections.

Will Lawrence, the Sunrise Movement cofounder who ran for Congress in Michigan’s Seventh District, won his primary on Tuesday. In his first major TV ad, Lawrence aimed at “tech billionaires” who he said want to turn Michigan’s farms into data centers that will “jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values.” Abdul El-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, used an under-construction OpenAI data center as the backdrop for a rally. “Until we protect local communities from the power of corrupting money and politics, we’re going to continue to see projects like this get pushed,” El-Sayed said.

Justin Pearson, a progressive candidate in Memphis who made fighting back against xAI’s data center construction a centerpiece of his campaign, just won his Congressional primary, too.

“Before data centers were all the news every single day, our community was fighting Elon Musk,” Pearson said at a recent press conference. Musk began building data centers in Memphis—and gas turbines to power them—in 2024. People like SpaceX’s billionaire owner, Pearson said, “view these communities as sacrifice zones.”

But the data center backlash isn’t strictly a Democratic-party issue. It draws on a current of populism—and suspicion of big companies, and fear of AI-prompted job loss—that goes beyond party boundaries. Opposition to data center buildout is nearly as high among Republicans as it is among Democrats.

That fact could be good news for Pearson. His Memphis-based district had a Democratic-voting, majority Black population, but the district was splintered and redrawn by Republican officials this year following a Supreme Court ruling that gutted the federal Voting Rights Act.

Pearson’s anti-data-center positions could play well with the rural, white, Republican-leaning voters who now make up part of his district. As the industry group Data Center Watch reported in 2025, 55 percent of politicians who have taken public anti-data-center stances are Republicans, who often raise concerns about tax incentives and energy grid strain, as opposed to focusing on environmental concerns. About seven in ten Americans now oppose the idea of a data center being built near them. Even in staunchly red states like Texas and Utah, politicians like Texas Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller are warning those who won’t act on data centers that they might just lose their races.

“Republicans should be on this issue and we’re not,” Miller told the Texas Tribune this week. “The Democrats are, and they’re right on the issue. I’m not endorsing any Democrats, but we’re going to lose some elections in the midterms because of this one subject.”

Some Republicans are getting that message. Zach Lahn, who won the Iowa Republican gubernatorial primary in June, called for a full data center construction moratorium. Nancy Mace, running for governor in South Carolina, announced that she supports a moratorium, too. Even Ron DeSantis has signed legislation ensuring that “local governments maintain the authority to reject data center development in their communities.” And they’re not the only ones: candidates for governor in at least 12 states are running on data center moratoria, per Newsweek.

Data centers “broke American politics,” as Molly Taft of WIRED recently put it. The New York Times, in May, ran a headline calling data centers “the most bipartisan issue since beer.” Left-wing populists, far-right podcasters, and even the pope have all weighed in. (Will Lawrence, at a press conference, quoted Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI and the dangers of irresponsible technology development.)

“We know this crosses the political spectrum,” Pearson said in late July. “But the reality is the billionaire class are building these data centers in an attempt to destroy our water, to destroy our air quality, to take our land, all so that they can make more money. And at the center of it, that’s what we’re up against.”

Continue Reading…

Good Luck Trying to Kill This Jellyfish

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Immortality is generally considered the realm of the gods or science fiction, a fantasy that’s actively pursued by tech entrepreneurs in macabre experiments that include injecting “young blood,” cryopreservation, or resurrection in an AI afterlife.

But one ethereal, thimble-shaped jellyfish has already cracked the code.

As associate professor Maria Pia Miglietta, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University, explains, _Turritopsis dohrnii_has an incredible ability to cheat death.

**“**Turritopsis is unique, because when faced with unfavourable conditions—and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it—when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”

“Theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button.”

Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.

But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again. The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then—like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar—it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says.

It’s one of “nature’s coolest tricks,” says reader Raquel López-Aragón, who took part in the Guardian‘s “Invertebrate of the Year” contest. “When this jellyfish gets old or gets hurt, instead of just dying like most animals, it transforms itself back into a baby jellyfish and grows up all over again. It can do this as many times as it wants, which means theoretically it never has to die from getting old, it just keeps hitting the reset button on its life.”

In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live forever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.

“It’s so hardwired in humans to not want to die…and the absurdity of that being in a jellyfish…just entertains me to no end.”

Globally, there are eight accepted species of Turritopsis—but (so far) only one holds the key to eternal life.

Immortal jellyfish are only a few millimetres in size. But, if you know what to look for, they can be found in many places, from the Mediterranean sea, to the Atlantic, from the coast of Japan to Panama and Brazil.

As another reader remarks, the immortal jellyfish does “exactly what it says on the tin…They have the very enviable ability to simply turn back into a juvenile at any sign of stress, which is something that I’m sure we all wish extended to humans.”

With their delicate bodies and veil of tentacles, Lisa-ann Gershwin, a biologist specializing in jellyfish, describes Turritopsis as “exquisite” and “the most beautiful little creature.” But what makes them remarkable is their capacity for reincarnation.

Since ancient times, humans have speculated about eternal life, Gershwin says, it’s one of the things that unites us all: “It’s so hardwired in humans to not want to die. And I think the drive that we have to survive, and the absurdity of that being in a jellyfish—the juxtaposition of those two just entertains me to no end.”

Continue Reading…

Trump’s Iran War Is Going Backward

On Saturday, a senior Iranian national security official issued a set of demands that the US must meet before a key waterway for oil shipping can be reopened—a statement that further suggests a lasting ceasefire will not be in the cards anytime soon.

Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, called for the US to lift its sanctions and naval blockade on Iran, “completely compensate” Iran for war damages, “unconditionally” release frozen Iranian assets, and end all attacks on Iran’s allies in the region.

According to multiple media outlets, the US government did not deliver an immediate response tothe demands. Many of them resemble those in the interim ceasefire deal signed by the US and Iran in June. Back then, the Trump administration said that it would only lift sanctions completely if the two countries came to an agreement on Iran’s nuclear development, a project that has become central to the country’s struggle for identity and sovereignty amid a long, violent history of foreign interference.While there was an initial ceasefire, it did not last. A couple of days later, Iran’s military closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical oil transit point,stating the US violated their agreement by allowing Israel to continue bombing Lebanon. Combat resumed and even expanded to Saudi Arabia and the Houthis in Yemen.

The prospect that the Strait of Hormuz may reopen arose with the news that Iran and Oman, which share territorial waters in the strait, are close to an agreement on a new transit route through the passageway. But Iran’s stipulations presented to the US indicate that an agreement with Oman means little without US concessions. “The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is contingent on other conditions, including the United States compensating for its violations of the Islamabad Memorandum,” Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said on Saturday, according to the New York Times, referring to the June interim deal.

So, once again, a needless war has killed thousands of people in Iran and 18 US service members, as well as injuring hundreds more US personnel. The war has also threatened thelong-term stability across the region by strikes on civilian infrastructure like water and energy facilities and food storage sites. The only certainty now appears to be that the conflict does not have a clear end in sight.

Continue Reading…

The Internet Has Been Very Interested in Trump’s New Hair

For many of us, news about the new presidential coiffeur first appeared in our podcast feeds this week. But listening instead of looking at YouTube deprived us of the real transformation, the summer glow-up, that our commander-in-chief has enjoyed, seemingly overnight.

Fortunately, the internet has not let us down. The simple version is that President Donald Trump’s storied strawberry-blond-comb-over was looking a little, um, sparse recently. The before and after pictures are not subtle.

Trump’s hair, 2 days apart pic.twitter.com/fEtg6mVjt4

— 𝐀𝐍𝐓𝐔𝐍𝐄𝐒 (@Antunes1) August 6, 2026

But something important has happened. A weave? Extensions? Maybe a toupee? Perhaps he has miraculous abilities to just grow more hair when he decides to. There are so many theories, so many rich interpretations.

Trump's hair, uh, has a lot more volume than normal

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-08-05T21:13:12.264Z

Well, of course, the internet has embraced this story enthusiastically. And offered its customary subtle appraisals of what might be going on with the president. Some might not be entirely accurate.

What is the big fuss about Trump’s hair? I don’t get it! pic.twitter.com/sPDFXlr0qK

— Truth Will Reign (@TruthWill_Reign) August 6, 2026

Others have obviously exaggerated his new look.

Trump’s new wig tomorrow—

— Stone Cold Jane Austen (@abbyhiggs.bsky.social) 2026-08-06T12:59:15.836Z

President Trump when he sees all of @MAGADevilDog viral big Trump hair memes https://t.co/URx4fYpUqI pic.twitter.com/3IiNnKfK4O

— Politi_Rican 𝕏 (@TheRicanMemes) August 6, 2026

But the myriad stresses of being POTUS—the economy, the construction headaches of the East Wing ballroom, the war in Iran, the stepped up deportations, his dismal approval ratings—could exact a cost. And self-care, no matter how old one is, clearly pays off.

Continue Reading…

Once More Cassidy Had the Deciding Vote. Once More He Folded.

Early Saturday morning, the Senate voted to confirm Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to the official role after Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) caved and publicly backed President DonaldTrump’s former personal lawyer the day before.

Blanche was confirmed on a narrow 50-49 vote, with almostall Republicans aligning with the president. Thetwo exceptions wereSens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). In other words, Cassidy, who initially withheld his approval overconcerns aboutBlanche helping Trump prosecute political enemies, pushing the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization slush fund, and exempting the president from IRS audits, capitulated—knowing that his was the deciding vote. He did so shortly after Murkowski announcedher opposition.

In his Friday remarks on the Senate floor, Cassidy raised several reasonable points on why Blanche should not be confirmed: “approving the anti-weaponization slush fund,” “exempting the president from IRS audits,” and the aforementioned “bringing suits against political enemies.”

But the senator—who recently lost his bid for reelection after being targeted as a “disloyal disaster” by Trump—summonedperplexing arguments from his familiar playbook: “Mr. Blanche has made commitments” to be better, Cassidy noted. “I have spoken to Mr. Blanche five or six times,” he assured his colleagues, and not approving Blanche “puts at risk the progress made fighting violent crime, human and drug trafficking, and fraud.” The Trump administration’s fight on crime and human and drug trafficking has led to significant increases in militarization domestically and abroad, while attacks on so-called widespread fraud have cut essential social programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

This isn’t Cassidy’s first rodeo in backing downfrom his principled opposition to a controversial or clearly unqualified candidate. He used similar logic to advance Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as health secretary as the deciding vote, putting naivetrust in his “assurances on vaccines.” And the senator did so again earlier this week—although his wasnot the sole deciding vote—to confirm Erica Schwartz, the physician and attorney who wasTrump’s pick for CDC director**.** Schwartz repeatedly dodged questions on whether she would carry out all of Kennedy’s policies, even if she believed it contradicted scientific evidence.

On Friday, Cassidy said that confirming Blanche would give the Trump loyalist more power.But he also absolved Blanche of any responsibility should Trump ignore any pushback he might offer once he has been confirmed. So why vote in favor? Doing so normalizes and legitimizes the Justice Department and makes no attempt to address the many issues with weaponization that Cassidy and many of his Democratic colleagues have mentioned.

On Saturday morning on X, Blanche thanked Trump, the Senate, and Justice Department staff. Trump, on the other hand, threatened Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the two Republican dissenters on the confirmation vote, calling her a “traitor.” He re-posted a 2022 video of former Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for the release of the Mar-a-Lago raid search warrant next to a photo of Murkowski on Truth Social.

“Lisa Murkowski will not vote for Todd Blanche,” the president wrote. “After having no trouble voting for Merrick Garland. Claiming Blanche will weaponize the DOJ and is too political. The same Garland that personally signed off on a raid of President Trump’s home.” He then concluded, “Lisa Murkowski is owned. Traitor.”

Continue Reading…

Trump’s EPA Is Using This Sneaky Tactic to Let Nasty Industries Foul Our Air

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Recently, millions of Americans have faced orange skies and air-quality alerts. The struggles many people had with the smoke are a sad reminder of the importance air quality has for our health. Yet the Trump administration has done everything in its power to make our air less clean. Now it is adopting new, stealthier strategies to weaken clean-air standards.

During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation. In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics. The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.

The agency is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution are too uncertain to quantify or value at all.

In the second year of this term, the Trump administration has shifted gears, taking another legally indefensible approach that is less visible but even more pernicious because it extends to all pollutants, not just greenhouse gases. The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking.

The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty. And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.

The EPA announced its new approach in January in a rule on emissions from gas turbines, stating that it would no longer value public-health benefits from reducing fine particulate matter and ozone—two of the most prevalent and damaging air pollutants. The agency referenced uncertainties in how different concentrations of pollutants translate into negative health impacts like premature deaths; uncertainties in mortality valuations, which assign a dollar value to these deaths; and uncertainties in growth and discount rates, which are used to translate future impacts to present values. But the EPA’s longstanding techniques already accounted for these uncertainties.

As a result of its new approach, the EPA no longer estimates the number of lives saved or diseases and hospitalizations averted. It is assigning no value whatsoever to these environmental benefits, thereby ignoring the very health concerns the agency was created to address.

Later, the EPA doubled down on its new approach when it repealed one vehicle emission rule and delayed another one. It similarly did not consider these adverse health consequences in an air pollution regulation for coal and oil power plants, another air pollution regulation for wood products, and, earlier this month, in relaxing emissions test procedures for heavy-duty vehicles.

When the EPA first announced its new approach in January, Zeldin insisted that even though the agency would not assign a dollar value to averted deaths, it would “still be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits.” The subsequent regulatory proceedings confirmed that Zeldin’s statement was false.

The EPA, whose actions here are plainly illegal, is basing some of its cost analyses on disputed industry claims.

Moreover, the EPA did not restrict its approach to particulate matter and ozone. The agency also refused to assign any benefits to the reduction of pollutants like nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide. And, similarly, in multiple proceedings, it ignored the benefits of reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons.

On the cost side of its regulatory analysis, the EPA’s approach is entirely different. The EPA is continuing to fully quantify and consider the compliance costs for affected industries, even though those costs are subject to many of the same uncertainties as the benefits. For instance, like health benefits, compliance costs are borne at different times and must be translated into present value (using the same discount rates that the EPA had found too uncertain to use for benefits).

The EPA is basing some of its cost analyses on disputed industry claims, as long as they align with the administration’s favored deregulatory narrative. To justify weakening requirements to reduce hydrofluorocarbons and other potent greenhouse gases in new refrigeration equipment, the agency relied on unverified assertions about costs from certain supermarkets and other regulated entities, even though major refrigeration trade associations opposed these claims and explained that the EPA action would in fact raise compliance costs.

Without any empirical evidence, Zeldin claimed that the EPA’s action _“_will be felt directly by American families in lower grocery prices.” But the refrigeration rule did not impose any costs on regulated entities until future replacements of refrigeration equipment may be needed. Recent increases in grocery prices have been driven largely by supply-chain disruptions and rising energy costs arising from the war in Iran. Any cost savings from this rule, therefore, were unlikely to be felt in the near term.

The EPA’s actions are plainly illegal. Agencies cannot put a thumb on the scale by taking account of a rule’s costs but not its benefits, particularly when there are established techniques for valuing the benefits.

Because there is no “big ticket” action like last year’s questioning of climate change, the EPA’s approach has largely gone under the radar.Zeldin appears to be following John Oliver’s adage that if you want to do something harmful, “put it inside something boring” to avoid public scrutiny. But the American people will suffer greatly as a result of these illegal actions, in the form of additional premature deaths, asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and other serious health consequences.

Continue Reading…

40 Acres and a Lie Part 1

Patricia Bailey’s four-bedroom home sits high among the trees in lush Edisto Island, South Carolina. It’s a peaceful place where her body healed from multiple sclerosis. It’s also the source of her generational wealth.

Bailey built this house on land that was passed down by her great-great-grandfather, Jim Hutchinson, who was enslaved on Edisto before he was freed and became a landowner.

“I know this is sacred land here,” Bailey says, “’cause it’s my ancestors and I feel it.”

Union General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15—better known as 40 acres and a mule—implied a better life in the waning days of the Civil War. Hutchinson is among the formerly enslaved people who received land through the field orders, which are often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But 40 acres and a mule was more than that.

It was real.

Over a more than two-year investigation, our partners at the Center for Public Integrity unearthed thousands of records once buried in the National Archives. In them, they found more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people who were given land by the federal government through the field orders—and then saw that land taken away.

None of the land Bailey lives on today is part of Hutchinson’s 40 acres. Instead, her family’s wealth is built on her ancestor’s determination to get and keep land of his own, after losing what he thought he had gained through the field orders.

This week on Reveal, with the Center for Public Integrity, we’re revisiting our three-part series in which we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program. We explore a reparation that wasn’t—and the wealth gap that remains.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in June 2024.

Continue Reading…

The US Lost 23,000 Jobs in July

The Labor Department reported Friday that American nonfarm employers cut 23,000 jobs in July, a drop some attribute to employers’ wariness to hire amidst tariffs and the costs of the war in Iran.

At the same time, the unemployment rate fell slightly, from 4.2 percent to 4.1 percent, a drop economists attributed not to more people being employed, but rather to fewer people entering the labor force.

“The rate dropped to 4.1 percent in large part because labor force growth has stalled, not because opportunity is expanding,” Angela Hanks, chief of policy programs at the Century Foundation think tank, told CBS News.

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, spoke to reporters this morning. He cited a burst in construction as a driver of American jobs. But experts have pointed to the boom in data centers as the primary driver of nonresidential construction growth this year—and the vast majority of those jobs are temporary.

On Fox Business, Hassett said this month’s job losses are seasonal, pointing to a “big decline in hospitality workers around the end of the World Cup.” He talked about construction, but did not bring up the healthcare sector, which has been the largest driver of job growth in the country for the past several years. Healthcare and education combined have accounted for more than 75 percent of all private-sector job gains since 2023, according to researchers for the ADP National Employment Report.

Administration officials are optimistic that this month’s numbers may be just a blip. “In the end, you know, the proof will be in the number that we get next month,” Hassett said, adding that the administration remains “very bullish.”

Don Beyer, the senior House Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, took a different view of the numbers. “Today’s jobs report is deeply alarming and offers some of the clearest evidence yet that President Trump’s policies are doing serious damage to the American economy,” Beyer wrote in a statement. “Job creation has effectively ground to a halt, and businesses simply are not hiring at the pace a healthy economy demands.”

Continue Reading…

Trump Keeps Spending US Tax Dollars to Kill Offshore Wind and Boost Oil and Gas

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The German energy company RWE has reached a $1.22 billion deal with the US government to relinquish its offshore wind leases and instead redirect funds towards fossil fuel investments.

The agreement marks the fifth deal the Donald Trump administration has struck with energy companies, offering payouts in exchange for abandoning renewable energy projects and redirecting investment towards fossil fuels.

This latest deal takes it to almost $4 billion of taxpayer money spent on killing offshore wind projects.

Announcing the deal with the US Interior Department on Thursday, RWE said it had agreed to give up its offshore wind leases off the coasts of New York, California, and Louisiana. “After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the US for the foreseeable future,” the company said, referring to the leases it initially secured with a “long-term commitment to develop offshore wind capacity.”

The administration has also spent up to $1.1 billion to boost coal, which critics say is “fattening the wallets of his cronies.”

RWE paid $1.1 billion for its New York lease in a 2022 auction held by the Biden administration, while its leases in Louisiana and California cost a combined $163 million, Reuters reports.

“The settlement resolves RWE US Offshore’s legal claims and provides $1.22 billion in settlement funds,” RWE continued, adding that the deal would allow it to “direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty.”

As part of the agreement, RWE will spend $900 million to acquire a 16 percent stake in an unnamed Louisiana liquified natural gas (LNG) project. The company said the settlement proceeds would be used to fund construction of the terminal.

RWE has also signed a $300 million turbine reservation agreement under which it will develop a pipeline of 15 natural gas peaker plants across the country.

The interior secretary, Doug Burgum, hailed the deal, saying on Thursday: “We welcome RWE’s agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation’s energy security, provide dependable baseload power, and help keep electricity affordable for hardworking Americans today while supporting our country’s long-term energy future.”

The RWE agreement appears to be the largest deal the Trump administration has struck with an energy company to kill clean energy projects. Earlier agreements with other companies, including TotalEnergies and Duke Energy, amounted to $2.7 billion in taxpayer money.

Following the Trump administration’s $928 million deal with French energy company TotalEnergies to cancel its offshore wind lease off the coast of New York, seven states, including New York, sued the administration over what the New York attorney general, Letitia James, described as a “sham deal” and “illegal agreement.”

The administration has also spent up to $1.1 billion to boost coal, a move critics argue is “fattening the wallets of his cronies” while raising working Americans’ energy bills, particularly as the US’s war on Iran drives up fuel prices.

At the same time, the federal government is seeking to slash public input periods for fossil fuel drilling on federal lands while shifting more of the financial risks of cleanup to taxpayers.

Meanwhile, a report released last fall by the Environmental Integrity Project found that every fully operational LNG facility in the US had violated federal pollution limits in recent years.

According to the nonprofit research organization, violations included the discharge of illegal amounts of bacteria, zinc, oil, and other pollutants into waterways, as well as failures of terminal managers to submit monitoring reports for waterway discharge.

Continue Reading…

The Quiet War on Immigrants, Round Two

In 2019, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) denounced a “stealth anti-immigration campaign” by the first Trump administration. Through a combination of high-profile policy changes like the travel ban on foreigners from Muslim-majority countries and less visible administrative tweaks, a report from the senator comprehensively documented that the Republican president “surreptitiously remade” the immigration system to fulfill a “perverse vision that erases the existence of immigrants in the United States.”

As it turns out, that was only the beginning. Now, seven years later, the second Trump administration has expanded those “under the radar” attacks against the entire US immigration system, as the senator again details in a follow-up report shared exclusively with Mother Jones. Those efforts, the report says, have “destabilized lawful presence, expanded enforcement, and reengineered adjudication to accelerate and prioritize removal.”

“This report shines a light on Trump’s cruel project to dismantle due process, strip immigrants of their lawful status, and turn our immigration courts into deportation machines,” Sen. Markey told Mother Jones. “The Trump administration must be held accountable for its attacks on our immigrant neighbors.”

The report revealsan administration that is pulling all levers to completely reorient the immigration system—including the elements that had been intended to support immigrants.The sweeping goal appears to bedestabilizing the lives of noncitizens in the United States and boosting deportations. “Refugee admissions have effectively stalled, humanitarian protections have been withdrawn or narrowed, work authorization has become more tenuous, and avenues to secure or retain lawful status have grown increasingly uncertain,” the report reads.

The Trump administration has not only stripped the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, but it has also made the process of seeking lawful status and even citizenship more burdensome and riskier. (Not to mention the ongoing crusade to undermine birthright citizenship.) For instance, last August, the Department of Homeland Security’s agency in charge of visas and immigration benefits rolled out a policy expanding the “good moral character” standard requirement for citizenship applicants, a requirement that introduced more subjectivity and unpredictability into the process.

Another approach with sweeping consequences with which the administration is changing the playing field can be seen in the politicization of the immigration courts, which are part of the Department of Justice. In addition to firing more than 100 immigration judges and replacing them with temporarily assigned military lawyers, the administration has transformed the make-up of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which reviews judges’ decisions.This body, in turn, has issued precedent-setting rulings that restrict immigrants’ access to due process and relief from deportation.

Even without formal legislative changes and while ostensibly keeping protections on the books, Sen. Markey concludes, President Donald Trump has nonetheless managed to create “not an openly dismantled immigration system, but one transformed from within, appearing legally intact” in which “individuals are not only more likely to become vulnerable to enforcement, but less able to avoid or defend against it.”

Continue Reading…

What Is the White House Hiding in Its Minerals Deals?

Today, the consumer protection watchdog group Public Citizen released a report detailing the Trump administration’s secretive web of critical minerals deals around the world. The report, exclusively shared with Mother Jones, shows that the number of deals the administration has publicly claimed to have does not match up with the number of countries known to have signed these agreements. The researchers also detail the many ways these deals can exploit countries experiencing violent conflict—and the ways they might enrich the President’s backers.

“This is now a huge web of deals that are being negotiated behind closed doors without any public scrutiny or oversight,” said Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch research group. “Even the things they are announcing, the numbers don’t add up.”

It’s clear that Donald Trump and his administration are fixated on critical minerals— things like cobalt, lithium, and graphite, used for purposes as wide-ranging as building batteries or building missiles. “It’s really striking just how much President Trump is personally involved in this,” St. Louis said. Trump has released 12 executive orders related to critical minerals since the start of his second term, and the country has signed on to a bevy of trade agreements related to critical minerals. But, according to Public Citizen’s research, there’s no publicly available database of what exactly all those agreements are, which countries are involved, or who might be profiting. And many of these moves, based on executive orders, don’t require congressional approval.

“The most complete information available is from a February 2026 State Department fact sheet that stated that at least 38 international critical minerals agreements have been completed or were pending at that time,” today’s report says. But that fact sheet only names eleven of the countries involved, meaning 27 are unaccounted for. Public Citizen’s review of available documents was only able to confirm the existence of some of those agreements. “Less than half of the memoranda of understanding announced have been made fully public, only two of which were released by the US government,” they wrote. The rest are only public because the other country involved publicized them.

The Biden administration prioritized trade deals for critical minerals—like one signed with Japan—with the justification that securing resources for the green transition was a priority. “Now of course under the Trump administration, even the pretext of a clean energy transition is not even part of this. It’s really to seize these minerals for AI, military dominance, et cetera,” St. Louis said. In particular, the president is interested in military dominance over China.

“Trump and his acolytes all use this very apocalyptic language, that it’s about our security, that it’s about the future of Western Civilization,” Nghia Nguyen, a lead author on the report, said. “I think that says a lot about why the government is throwing so much into it.” Report after report says that military contractors are being pressured to limit their reliance on trade with China for weapons components, and the US government is now seeking out those same minerals wherever they can find them.

Sometimes, Trump’s own family members might profit. A group of American investors including two of the president’s sons got access to a massive untapped reserve of Kazakhstan’s tungsten (a mineral widely used in missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips) through a government-brokered deal. And agreements with other countries are even more exploitative. The Trump administration’s “minerals for security” deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo sign over portions of those countries’ mining sectors to US actors as they experience active conflict.

The US deal with the Democratic Republic of the Congo may have even been a pretext to make the country amend its constitution. “In practice, the deal gives sweeping financial and regulatory incentives to U.S. mining companies and grants the U.S. government unprecedented control over Congolese mineral resources,” the Public Citizen report says. “These are binding agreements devoid of meaningful labor, human rights, or environmental safeguards.” And in Zambia, as the New York TImes reported, the State Department has considered making medical aid contingent on a $2 billion critical minerals deal.

“In seeking to encourage mining, the Trump administration is prioritizing speed over corporate accountability and ethical safeguards,” the researchers wrote.

Continue Reading…

Rep. Max Miller Has a History of Withholding His Daughter’s Blue Bunny

“Max, Can REDACTED please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house… Please don’t punish REDACTED if you’re upset with me,” Emily Moreno once wrote in an email to her ex-husband, Republican Congressman Max Miller.

Miller, the Ohio lawmaker who has recently been fighting for his political life over allegations that he physically assaulted Moreno and other women, posted screenshots on X last night that he said prove he didn’t withhold their toddler’s stuffed animal during an August custody exchange. Earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), Emily’s father, described the alleged incident to Congressional reporters.

“Max would not hand over the little blue bunny,” the Senator said when reporters in the Capitol asked about his ex-son-in-law. “Literally held it hostage for 48 hours. This girl is crying at night because she can’t sleep without her little blue bunny. And his answer is, ‘I’m just not going to give it to you.’ So finally, yesterday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, yesterday, he lets the little blue bunny go. This is the level of total and complete depravity.” Miller, in turn, told Sen. Moreno to “please stop the lies.”

“Max would not hand over the little blue bunny.”

But timestamps on the email from Miller’s former wife show the conflict over the bunny began earlier, back in March of 2025.

It’s one of several screenshots regarding the blue bunny that Mother Jones has obtained from a source familiar with the ongoing custody battle. Together, the screenshots of emails and text messages between Emily Moreno, Senator Moreno, Miller, a parent custody coordinator, and lawyers for the involved parties suggest that the alleged withholding of the stuffed animal was part of a pattern of behavior and not a single incident. Miller’s lawyers did not respond to Mother Jones’ request for comment.

Here’s what we know.

In March 2025, Emily Moreno asked Miller to return the blue bunny to their then-one-year-old daughter via email.

Emily Moreno

Can REDACTED please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house, and sees it at a source of comfort. You have always delivered it back to me when you drop her off. Please don’t punish REDACTED if you’re upset with me.

I am willing to pick it up from your house, your mailbox, you can drop it in my mailbox. Please.

Thank you,
Emily

The next day, Moreno emailed Miller again about the same subject.

Emily Moreno

Max if you lost it please let me know. If you’re choosing to not return our daughters favorite toy for another reason that’s just cruel.

More than a year later, in May 2026, Sen. Bernie Moreno texted Rep. Miller asking about the blue bunny, which he was apparently supposed to receive during a custody exchange. “Evidently I was supposed to get REDACTED’S blue bunny at pickup. She’s asking for it. Do you have it by any chance?” Sen. Moreno said.

To which, Rep. Miller replied: “You can go through the parent coordinator.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno

Evidently I was supposed to get REDACTED’S blue bunny at pick up. She’s asking for it. Do you have it by any chance?

Max Miller

You can go through the parent coordinator. I’m sure l’ll see this one at the next hearing.

If you need anything, have Emily call Dr. REDACTED.

I have no notes or record of what you’re referring to.

Sen. Bernie Moreno

It’s the blue bunny she sleeps with, but got it.

Regarding what appears to be a third dispute over the stuffed animal in August, Miller posted screenshots of messages that he says prove he was not purposely hindering the child from getting her blue bunny back.

“So Sorry to bother you about this/I guess REDACTED left her blue bunny at your house and Emily is saying REDACTED wants it back-apparently her dad is offering to come pick It up From You- please Just let me know your response,” wrote the parenting coordinator in a text to Miller.

Miller replied, “Sure.”

According to the messages Miller posted on X, and the screenshots obtained by Mother Jones, the Morenos tried to send a friend of the family to pick up the bunny. “Sending Jared over to my home as a conduit was a bad idea,” Miller wrote on August 3, according to his own screenshot.

Around the time Miller refused to coordinate with the family friend, Emily Moreno’s lawyer, Andrew Zashin, sent Miller’s lawyers a note. “This is totally ridiculous,” Zashin wrote in an Aug. 3 email. “Please have Max return the bunny forthwith.”

Moreno’s lawyer, Andrew Zashin

Pam:
For no apparent reason, Max is not returning REDACTED’S blue bunny to Emily. Dr. REDACTED tried to get the blue bunny back. Dr. K made clear that despite her recommendation that the blue bunny stay with Emily, Max refuses to return it.

Why must this be a controversy?

This is totally ridiculous.

Please have Max return the bunny forthwith.

Thank you
Andrew

Throughout the fraught impasse, messages obtained by Mother Jones suggest that Moreno and Miller’s parenting coordinator played the referee.

“I advised him to Let your dad get the bunny from Preferably from The mailbox but he adamantly refuses,” the coordinator wrote, according to a screenshot of the erratically composed text reviewed by Mother Jones.

Miller and Moreno’s Parenting coordinator

I’m not coddling him I advised him to
Let your dad get the bunny from
Preferably from The mailbox but he adamantly refuses but l’ve suggested you keep the bunny at your house to Avoid these situations because unfortunately in a high conflict divorce these situations blow up
Often

Miller continues to defy calls for him to drop out of his campaign for reelection. August 10 is the deadline for him to withdraw and offer Republicans an opportunity to replace him with a less embattled candidate. Thus far, he shows no signs of doing so.

Continue Reading…

A Commission Monitoring Human Rights Violations Is Concerned About the US

On Tuesday afternoon, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights convened in Washington, DC, to hear complaints about excessive use of force and suppression of freedom of expression during protests against immigration enforcement in American cities. One of those who attended and testified at the public hearing was Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago-based civil rights litigation lawyer representing the family of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis in January.

He began by thanking the commission for hosting a forum to examine “human rights atrocities” in the United States. “What we saw with Renee,” Romanucci said, “was a federal agent clearly using deadly force without any legal justification, in an extreme manner, shocking the conscience of our country.” Romanucci, who previously secured a settlement in a wrongful death civil rights case on behalf of George Floyd’s family, said “zero federal investigation” resulted in no accountability in Minneapolis, or elsewhere. “I have not seen these atrocities in my 41 years of practice,” he added.

The IACHR, an autonomous body of the Organization of American States, monitors human rights conditions in the hemisphere and hears complaints from civil society about alleged violations. Romanucci, along with Thomas Becker of the University Network for Human Rights, appealed to the commission, requesting a hearing on the US government’s actions against protesters, journalists, and bystanders at demonstrations opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“As Donald Trump attacks the courts, weaponizes the Department of Justice, and targets attorneys who challenge his administration,” Romanucci and Becker explained in an opinion piece published in the Guardian previewing the hearing, “we have been forced to seek justice beyond our borders.” They added: “Never before had the commission granted such a hearing, but the extraordinary nature of the Trump administration’s actions…warrants international scrutiny.”

“For years, the Commission has heard testimony about the attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships. Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses.”

A press release said this marked the first time the IACHR, which doesn’t have enforcement authority, held such a thematic hearing on freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly in the United States. “For years, the Commission has heard testimony about the attacks on protesters carried out by some of the region’s most repressive dictatorships,” James Cavallaro, former president of the IACHR, said in a statement. “Now, it is the United States that will be called to answer for these abuses.”

Rev. David Black, a pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was one of the speakers. He recounted how in September 2025, he was wearing his clerical collar when hejoined a protest outside the ICE detention facility in Broadview to say a prayer and stand in solidarity with the immigrant detainees. “My words were confrontational,” Rev. Black told the commission. “They were also peaceful.”

He said federal agents fired pepper-balls at him at least seven times, hitting his head, face, torso, arms, and legs. Other protesters tried to cover him, he said, but agents in full armor forced him down and sprayed the pastor with a chemical irritant. Rev. Black, who was part of a federal lawsuit against the US government last year decrying a “pattern of extreme brutality” by federal agents, recalled struggling to breathe. “What happened to me was not an isolated incident,” he said, stating that clergy have been “repeatedly assaulted” outside detention centers and prevented from ministering inside.

The delegation also condemned the Trump administration’s efforts to label protesters as domestic terrorists. Boston University law professor Susan Akram called the policies “blatantly illegal and draconian” and part of a “campaign to criminalize dissent, free expression, and ideologies that this administration dislikes.” Akram said the measures violated international law and “are frankly reviving McCarthyism in the United States.”

Andrea Pochak, one of the IACHR commissioners, said priests, journalists, human rights lawyers, and immigrants are not terrorists. She also inquired about cases in which federal agents engaged in excessive use of force had been disciplined or criminally charged. “The system of accountability is broken,” said Locke Bowman, an attorney representing Rev. Black and two other Chicago residents who have filed claims against the Department of Homeland Security.

The US government provided little in the way of response. Acting Deputy Chief of Mission to the OAS Julianna Aynes-Neville declined to answer questions, citing ongoing litigation. “I am circumscribed in what I am able to say today,” she said. “The United States must once again register dissatisfaction with the decision to convene this hearing on these matters.” She urged the commission to redirect its attention to backlogged cases and countries with “weak or nonexistent protections” for freedom of expression.

Cavallaro, the former president of IACHR, urged the commission to visit the United States to observe the human rights situation in the country. “If there’s nothing to hide, if the system is working, if cases are investigated, if abuses are addressed,” he said, addressing the US representatives, “please show that to the commission.”

“Without any transparent investigation there will never be any discipline,” Romanucci, the lawyer for Renee Good’s family, said, “there will never be any accountability.” After the hearing, Romanucci told Mother Jones the government’s evasiveness at the hearing mirrored its handling of Good’s killing. “Not only do we hear common design in justifying the narrative when there is deadly force or excessive force used,” he said, “this also, to me, is a common design of not answering questions or releasing information in order to make this process more transparent.”

Asked about the investigation into the fatal shooting of Good, Romanucci said, “the status today is the same as it was in January.” He added: “There has been no exchange of information with regard to the evidence of the case and we just hope to be able to get some answers very soon.” As for the IACHR’s hearing, Romanucci called for concrete action. “This was a good start,” he said, “but all that was exchanged today were words. We need to see much more.”

Continue Reading…

What AI Regulation and Ownership Could Be

As an ordinary internet user, I am skeptical about AI. My colleagues and I have reported on several harmful aspects of the technology in the US: threats to democracy, its impact on the environment, mental health, the workforce, military intervention—the list goes on.

While researching the gaps in conversations around enforceable government regulation of AI startups, both big and small, eager to innovate and launch new products, I came across AI researchers, policy experts, and even “ordinary internet users” like me trying to reimagine how the industry could work. If AI is unstoppable, can we build it in a way where the public has more of a say in how the technology is made, used, and who it benefits?

To answer these questions, I spoke with B Cavello, the director of emerging technologies at the Aspen Institute. Cavello wants to make sure that ordinary users like you and me have some say in how this powerful technology is developed and regulated. I talked to Cavelloabout the gap between the recent proposals among tech executives and lawmakers to give Americans financial ownership stakes in major AI companies and what actually ensuringpublic safety could look like.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I’ve heard a lot of coverage on proposals of public ownership of AI from folks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Are there other prominent proposals being discussed?

Ownership is complicated. I’m a big proponent of the movement for public AI. Public AI is open source, centering public access, accountability, and sustainable public goods. That means making sure that not only do people have free access to things, but also access to build models in their own local context.

When we say accountability, we don’t just mean regulation on harms we’re trying to prevent. We also mean the capabilities that we want to get built in the world. When we talk about AI leading to a new age of human flourishing, we often aren’t talking about the basics, and that’s an important place to start when we think about public accountability and then sustainable public goods.

When we build products within this framing, we want them to be essentially treated like public infrastructure.A lot of work in the public AI community has been on open source because that’s one of the spaces where people are able to continue to build on top of each other. CurrentAI [a public-private partnership of governments, companies, and organizations to fund public interest tech] announced in the last couple of weeks their AIPotluck initiative, which is bringing together different open-source AI builders to build a full open stack [meaning making the entire AI development process accessible to the public].

It’s less about trying to take the market share or revenues of big AI [companies, similar to Altman’s and Sanders’ proposals], but more that we’re going to distribute these capabilities, such that now they aren’t the only players in town—and we’re distributing [electrical] power that way.

Who are the types of people and communities that are participating in public AI discussions?

There’s a big movement around AI sovereignty across the African continent and Europe about trying to disentangle from American AI providers. To that end, ownership is about local representation and empowering a local tech community. There’s a conversation in the US, especially around a potential AI bubble, whether or not it might burst, and how we might have public ownership or public uptake of these technologies.

“I would like our AI future to look more like electricity: a reliable, publicly accountable utility that has universal service requirements to make sure that everyone can be connected. “

As you alluded to, there are folks like Sen. Sanders who are responding to the concerns around AI safety and power concentration, who are trying to look for interesting and creative avenues for trying to have some sort of power over these companies through partial ownership of them, but I think is like ultimately not where I would focus, especially per some of the conversations around the uncertainty of the [economic] future of these systems. It is sort of accepting defeat on other forms of regulation to say we’re just going to be passengers on this ride. I think Sanders’ team and a lot of people working in Congress don’t want that to be the only strategy going forward.

Windfall Trust, [a network of independent AI researchers and strategists], has been working on how to encourage people before a crisis happens [like mass unemployment] while the pressure is low, and get some pre-commitments on trigger conditions for different [ameliorating] policies.

Considering all the discussions around reimagining AI, how would these ideas become policy?

The thing I parallel it to is the renewable energy transition, where on one hand, we needed the tech to be there. We needed solar panels to get super good and cheap. But we also needed rebates on the policy side that enable us to leverage those technologies.

Congress and, broadly, governments tend to be reactive institutions.

The public is also becoming more aware and engaged on issues around AI. So some of these things will be showcased at a more local level before they make it into larger policy.

As a regular internet user, what are things that I should be thinking or concerned about?

How do we establish public accountability in how data centers are operated? For the last 20 years, there have been people demanding transparency in technology companies and basically being told we can’t do that because of the First Amendment. We have adopted this mentality that tech companies can be secretive—we can’t ask them anything, and they don’t divulge anything. We can absolutely require reporting about some of the ways data centers are operating.

I would love to see people pushing on public access to data centers. Let’s demand that we have set-asides that 20 percent of a data center is allocated toward publicly accessible, accountable, and sustainable public goods.

We already have the tools. We’ve seen a vast hollowing out of the apparatus that is meant to hold these entities accountable. Federal agencies are meant to do this work—the IRS. If somebody in the public cares about holding big AI companies to account, part of [the public effort] means championing the people who can do that work and encouraging the election of people who are interested in that.

I would encourage people in their own use of AI technologies to think about how to use open systems and run things locally. There are some folks who are engaging with public libraries across the country, where people can access these tools for trying things out. OpenAI and Anthropic don’t monopolize what is possible [with AI].

Is there something analogous to conversations that happened previously on how to think about what AI could be?

I would like our AI future to look more like electricity: a reliable, publicly accountable utility that has universal service requirements to make sure that everyone can be connected. And at the same time, we have batteries and home generators [as individuals].

It’s not to say that there can’t be interesting innovations on top of existing infrastructure. In many ways, I think of AI as the cool thing we can do with electricity. Here we are having a Zoom call—what an innovation in electricity! We should have public utilities, and we should have a thriving market of all different kinds of community solar and private companies that’ll build innovative batteries, but recognizing that we all deserve access, we all deserve accountability. We deserve, if we want, to have an innovation ecosystem. We need a sustainable infrastructure layer that people can count on and build on top of, and not be worried that [Anthropic] Mythos-style, suddenly everything is revoked.

There are things that are not great about our public utilities. People are having fights about data centers in part because of the way our electrical grid is run [such as prioritizing data centers over local residents]. So I don’t think that it is a perfect one-to-one.

Continue Reading…

She Followed ICE’s Advice to Self-Deport. Five Weeks Later, She Was Dead.

When 25-year-old Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz took her three daughters and boarded a plane from St. Louis to Guatemala City on June 17, her friends begged her not to go. But Glendy had no other option: Her husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, who worked as a roofer and was the family’s breadwinner, had been deported a year earlier.

On July 22, just weeks after Glendy reunited with Nixon in rural Guatemala, neighbors found the couple bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Their 14-month-old daughter Giovanni was crying, dehydrated, next to their bodies. Two communities—one in Missouri, the other in the western Guatemalan region of Retalhuleu—are left to pick up the pieces.

In Guatemala, that includes Nixon’s older brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, who was deported alongside Nixon in 2025. Now, Rolando and his wife are caring for his three nieces. He can’t help but wonder what could have been.

“If my brother hadn’t been deported, he might—well, only God knows—but he might still be alive,” Rolando told me in Spanish from his home in Retalhuleu. “Both of them might still be alive.”

“If my brother hadn’t been deported…he might still be alive. Both of them might still be alive.”

News of the couple’s deaths slowly got back to St. Louis. Glendy’s friend Laura, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear that she, too, might be targeted by ICE, got a call from another friend: “Glendy is gone.” An email circulated within the Fuerza organizing committee, a local immigrant workers rights group for which Glendy rarely missed a meeting. By the time St. Louis Public Radio picked up the story, Glendy and Nixon’s friends were already planning a vigil.

Asked about Nixon and Rolando’s deportations, an ICE spokesperson wrote that Nixon had two convictions for driving while intoxicated. Mother Jones was able to corroborate only one of those charges, and there are no court records under Rolando’s name.

To Alicia Hernandez, an organizer with the legal aid group MICA Project, the story was familiar: a husband taken in a traffic stop and sent away and a wife forced to leave the United States to reunite with him.Their deaths are part of a broader story of revenue-seeking policing in a region that once withstood intense federal scrutiny and has now become part of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.

The St. Louis area is home to 54 separate police departments. Some have fewer than 10 officers and serve townships with a thousand or so residents. Those municipalities—sometimes no larger than one or two subdivisions—rely on their police departments as a major source of local government revenue, extracting money through traffic stops and municipal court fines. ICE’s deportation surge presents a new financial opportunity.

“I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and he said no.”

After the 2014 police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the St. Louis area’s patchwork law enforcement apparatus came under national scrutiny. Some departments consolidated; others, under pressure from the federal government, enacted rules meant to limit racial profiling and profit-motivated traffic stops. But now, instead of pushing the region’s police toward reform, the federal government is offering financial incentives to target immigrants like Nixon and Rolando. ICE is paying six St. Louis–area police departments to deputize officers as federal immigration enforcers under what’s known as a 287(g) agreement.

“It’s quite a bit of money,” Scott Robinson, chief of police for Breckenridge Hills, a small municipality bordering Overland, told a local TV station earlier this year. ICE has promised some participating departments money for equipment, salary and benefits reimbursements, and $100,000 for new vehicles. For Breckenridge Hills, which employs just over a dozen officers, that’s a substantial sum. “They sign these 287(g) agreements to supplement their budgets,” Hernandez said.

About 60 percent of ICE arrests in St. Louis start as traffic stops. “We see situation after situation where someone is pulled over for rolling a red light, driving without a driver’s license, having a broken tail light,” Hernandez told me. “And then from there, they are put on an ICE hold.”

Locally, immigrants know where the “hot spots” are, Hernandez said. They issue warnings like “Don’t drive through Overland.” About a quarter of all ICE arrests in the St. Louis area during President Donald Trump’s second term so far have happened in Overland, a suburb of small midcentury brick homes. Glendy and Nixon settled there around 2020.

According to a statement from ICE, Nixon and Rolando were picked up by federal agents on April 15, 2025. “They got us at 5 in the morning—we were maybe 50 meters or so from our house when they grabbed us,” Rolando said. First, they spoke with Nixon, who was in his 40s, then they questioned his older brother. They shackled their hands and their feet. “I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and [the officer] said no,” Rolando said.

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case.”

The two brothers were held in downtown St. Louis, Rolando said, then moved to Phelps County Jail, a small rural jail operated by a sheriff’s department that entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE this year. (The Phelps County Sheriff’s Department refused to answer a Freedom of Information Act request, instead deferring to ICE.)

As the month dragged on, Rolando said, the Pérez brothers were moved to yet another rural Missouri jail, then to Louisiana. By the middle of May, Nixon and Rolando were back in rural Guatemala. There, Rolando was reunited with his wife, but Nixon’s family was left thousands of miles away.

Glendy, then 24 and nine months pregnant with her third child, was left to fend for herself. “Her world completely collapsed,” her friend Yohana, who asked to use a pseudonym, told me in Spanish, “because she was left all alone.”

She tried for a year to make it work without her husband, all while worried that she would be deported herself. The Department of Homeland Security had its own solution: self-deportation.

“Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE threatened in a September 2025 social media flyer. “Avoid the jail cell. Avoid the humiliation.” Last year, then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent over $200 million on advertisements pushing that same message. US Customs and Border Protection has even launched a “self-deportation app,” CBP Home.

But self-deportation, researcher Austin Kocher explained, is a marketing tactic meant to appeal to Trump’s base by declaring that if people would only follow the law and immigrate the “right” way, they could be safe. “It’s trying to develop legitimacy for a deportation program that is not always particularly popular if people understood the normalcy of the people who are wrapped up in it,” Kocher said.

Representatives with Fuerza, the immigrant rights group, said Glendy had an open asylum case with a hearing set for 2027. She came to the United States as a teen mother fleeing violence and poverty in Guatemala six years ago. But that likely would not have stopped her from being criminalized and deported, as the vast majority of asylum claims in Missouri are rejected.

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case,” Kocher said. According to UN data, 32,000 people have been deported to Guatemala in the first half of 2026 alone. “This is a consequence of having a whole system that is so bent towards deportation that it can’t even listen to the legitimate claims of legitimate asylum seekers.”

“I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?”

Records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that there are 49,576 backlogged cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the state of Missouri. In the first half of 2026, over 95 percent of asylum applications processed by that court were denied. The same week Glendy and Nixon were killed, the Trump administration launched a new plan to expedite deportations of asylum seekers.

After her husband’s deportation, Glendy took on two jobs, working in a factory during the day and cleaning offices at night. Sometimes, Laura watched the kids while Glendy worked. Laura and Glendy’s daughters—girls so close they had their first communion together and saw each other nearly every day—had sleepovers that stretched from one night into the next. Laura and Glendy took turns driving them to school. Whenever Glendy made tamales, she shared some with Laura’s family. They helped each other out wherever they could.

But Glendy couldn’t stop worrying. She gave Laura and another friend power of attorney to help her children in case she was taken. “I won’t let that happen,” Laura said.

On June 17, Glendy and her daughters got on a plane to Guatemala at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Courtesy Missouri Workers Center

This past April, police officers working with ICE arrived at Glendy’s local middle school, asking questions about three students there. District Superintendent Chris Kilbride rushed to the scene and “got the officers away from the school as quickly as possible,” he told me. Although no students were detained, parents in Overland were terrified.

A few weeks after Glendy gave birth to her youngest daughter, Giovanni, she started bringing Laura to monthly meetings held by the local immigrant advocacy group Fuerza. “She was like, ‘Hey, let’s go! You can get informed about what’s going on in the community,’” Laura remembered. There, they commiserated, shared meals, and got reports of the latest ICE arrests. At every meeting, there was childcare. “We would take our daughters for them to know what’s going on as well.”

As members of Fuerza, the women went door-knocking, asking neighbors to join their cause. They met with local officials to ask them not to sign 287(g) agreements. Organizing for their rights helped them feel less alone, but Glendy still feared leaving the house to go to work.

“For those of us without children, it’s a bit easier to manage,” said Yohana, a Nicaraguan Fuerza member who works in construction. “But if you have children at home, you can’t just tell them ‘there’s no food today.’” Glendy had no reliable transportation and worked irregular hours; the bills kept piling up. “I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?”

Teachers from the Ritenour School District, which two of Glendy’s daughters attended, reached out to help; friends offered rides and childcare. But a year after Nixon’s deportation, it still wasn’t enough. By May 2026, Glendy was telling her friends she planned to return to Guatemala.

“I didn’t want her to leave. And she told me she didn’t want to leave but she was obligated to,” Laura said. “It’s just getting hard,” Glendy told her, shortly before getting on the plane. The last time the two saw each other was the first time Laura saw Glendy cry.

“They should never have gone back, but the laws of this country made them go,” Yohana said.In a photo taken June 17, the day Glendy returned to Guatemala, she grins alongside her daughters outside St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The two older girls carry large stuffed bears. Glendy’s youngest daughter is in a carrier strapped to her chest, smiling at the camera in pigtails. It’s a warm and sunny day in St. Louis, but they’re all wearing jackets in case it gets chilly on the plane.

A memorial from an August 3 vigil in Overland, where hundreds of people gathered to remember Glendy and Nixon. Courtesy Missouri Workers Center

Nixon and Glendy’s family buried the couple side by side after a procession through the Guatemalan countryside. The Guatemalan National Civil Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating the killing, but they have not publicly identified a suspect or motive. At an early August vigil for the couple outside Overland City Hall, the town’s mayor said Overland will not sign a 287(g) agreement—though two municipal police departments bordering Overland have already done so.

Laura and Yohana are fundraising for Nixon and Glendy’s three daughters and talking to the press. But neither was willing to use their real names in this article, out of fear that they, too, would be targeted. In late July, Laura tried to tell her 10-year-old daughter what happened to her best friend’s family.

“Why are people so mean?” Laura’s daughter asked. “She literally just left, and now she has no mom or dad, and I don’t get to see her anymore?”

Continue Reading…

This Judge Figures Using the Misleading Recycling Symbol is Probably Free Speech

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued last month, US District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging, and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud.”

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling—not collected and thrown away—could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “We see this exact playbook every time the plastics industry is asked to stop misleading the public—they suddenly hide behind the Constitution.”

In his decision, Hayes applied a standard four-part test to determine whether SB 343 would unduly restrict companies’ speech rights. The law passed the first two tests handily, as it regulates “potentially misleading” speech and was intended to serve California’s legitimate interests in reducing consumer confusion and improving recycling rates.

The next tests are where the law ran into trouble. Hayes, siding with the industry trade groups, argued that the legislation would not advance those “legitimate interests.” Rather than encouraging companies to redesign their products and packaging to comply with California’s real-world recyclability criteria, he said the law would prompt them to remove the recycling symbol altogether. Products recycled at a rate below the 60 percent threshold that the law requires would no longer make it into recycling bins, which could in theory leave more of them bound for the landfill.

Hayes said a less stringent regulation could have better advanced California’s goals. For instance, the state could have passed a law requiring more descriptive qualifiers alongside the recycling symbol. He offered a hypothetical example of a label explaining that an item is “accepted by recyclers in the greater Los Angeles area but nowhere else in California.” Such a label would provide consumers with more and better information, he argued, but would not be allowed under SB 343.

Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the nonprofit National Stewardship Action Council, said the judge’s reasoning reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems facing California recycling systems. People are throwing too much stuff into their blue bins, she said. In addition to not actually being recyclable, much of this refuse—including plastic bags and other plastic films—can gum up sorting machines, causing operational delays and creating safety risks.

Polluters regularly cite the First Amendment to fight regulations that require them to disclose information to the public.

“People are wish-cycling, they’re so desperate to recycle,” Sanborn told Grist. “We have to pull all this [contamination] out, which is very labor-intensive, and then everybody wants to know why their bills go up.”

Industry groups welcomed the injunction, saying it would prevent California from “censoring truthful information on packaging.”

Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said he’s seen free speech challenges to environmental rules many times before. Big polluters have frequently invoked the First Amendment to oppose regulations that require them to disclose information—like their greenhouse gas emissions—or tone down statements about their sustainability.

“What’s relatively new and concerning is when these arguments succeed and states are blocked from implementing common-sense initiatives to protect their residents,” he said.

A lawsuit Hochberg’s organization is pursuing against Coca-Cola illustrates the same debate. It alleges the company presents itself as a “sustainable and environmentally friendly company” despite its outsize contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola argued that statements about its sustainability efforts—including plastics recycling—were protected political speech rather than commercial advertising. A federal judge rejected that argument in 2024.

The companies that sued California didn’t make that same distinction; their suit is more like one filed in 1992 that sought to block a California law restricting the use of terms like “biodegradable,” “ozone-friendly,” and “recyclable.” A judge upheld the law, ruling that it would not stifle free speech because corporations could still use a restricted word or phrase as long as they included qualifiers explaining how, where, or under what conditions it applied.

The injunction against SB 343 leaves California with few easy options. Hayes’ ruling suggests the state faces a difficult road if the case proceeds to trial. Lawmakers could amend the law to address some of the judge’s concerns, though that may be unlikely given the politics surrounding the issue. California could also appeal the injunction, but the lower court would still have to decide the case on its merits.

Earth Island Institute and Californians Against Waste announced on July 27 that they are joining California as defendants. Hochberg said he hoped to provide the court with more information “about how the recycling system actually works.” Losing the lawsuit will make it harder for other states to pursue similar labeling regulations, he said.

It could also jeopardize California’s nation-leading extended producer responsibility law, which shifts responsibility for collecting, recycling, and reducing plastic packaging from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce it. It relies on the same definition of recycling and is currently being challenged by a separate lawsuit.

Whatever happens next, Sanborn said she’s ready to work with industry to come up with other solutions—including legislation to clarify labeling rules at the national level. “We can and should work together to solve this,” she said. “But you should not have the right to lie to people.”

Continue Reading…

The Lost Hiroshima Memoir

At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a minister who presided over a Methodist church in Hiroshima, was two miles outside the city, when a tremendous flash occurred in the sky. Uninjured by the blast, he rushed toward his home and his family, passing hordes of the dead and the gravely wounded—people severely burnt, some holding their eyeballs in their hands—and scenes of horrific devastation, as an immense conflagration consumed his city. He didn’t know what had happened. No one did. This level of destruction was incomprehensible. Tanimoto also couldn’t know at that moment, as he feared for his wife, young daughter, and his parishioners, that he would become one of the best-known survivors of this first act of nuclear warfare and devote the rest of his life to preventing a recurrence of such a hellish catastrophe.

Though I never met Tanimoto, I feel as if I know him. That’s because about two years ago, I was asked to edit his poignant and gripping memoir of that horrible day and the weeks and months that followed, an account that had been lost for decades. Today, the book is being published by Random House’s Modern Library under the title Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir. It’s a harrowing tale of the atomic bombing from ground zero and details the heroic action—though Tanimoto never called it that—he took to ferry the wounded across a river, using a small boat he found and only a pole to push it along, so these victims might find medical attention. As the city burned and he tended to survivors who had lost much of their flesh—many would not live long—he kept repeating to himself, “These are human beings.” The horror was numbing. An eyewitness later called Tanimoto a “rescuing angel.”

Kai Bird, a co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, praises Tanimoto’s work as a “stunning historical discovery and a heartrending testimony of human suffering.” Tanimoto bore witness to one of the most significant days in human history, and his remembrances—as gruesome and disturbing as they are—ought to be read by all.

My involvement in bringing his memoir to the public began with a trip I took to Japan two years ago. Early in my journalism career, I focused on arms control and nuclear proliferation issues—and then moved on to other topics after a year or two of having nightmares about nuclear attacks. In Japan, I felt compelled to visit Hiroshima, where I was moved by how the city had rebuilt, creating a Peace Park at its center, and dedicating itself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. The memorials to the estimated 140,000 killed by the atomic bomb were inspiring because they were free of bitterness and promoted a never-again message.

Upon my return to the United States, I wrote an essay for this newsletter, in which I observed, “Hiroshima is certainly a reminder that we live in a world imperiled by nuclear arsenals and that we have yet to fully address that danger—and that human cruelty can be excessive and that the total annihilation of human civilization remains a possibility. But the city’s commemoration of the tragedy has a beautiful side.”

A few months later, I was contacted by Donald Rosenfeld, a veteran film producer who as a young man was president of Merchant Ivory Productions (Howards End, A Room with a View, Jefferson in Paris, The Remains of the Day). He informed me he was currently developing a feature film dramatizing one of the greatest journalistic feats of the 20th century: John Hersey’s article on Hiroshima published by the New Yorker a year after the bomb was dropped.

This 30,000-word account—written after Hersey visited the devastated city—consumed a full issue of the magazine and was the first comprehensive depiction in Western media of what happened to the residents of Hiroshima that day, as well as how they were affected by radiation poisoning in the months afterward. For a year, the media had generally shied away from fully describing what had befallen the people of Hiroshima, and the military had downplayed—even dismissed—the injuries and deaths resulting from the bomb’s radiation. The American public had mostly been exposed to images of rubble, not photographs or accounts that showed the pain and suffering of the civilian victims.

The coverage was incomplete—or sanitized—for a variety of reasons. The US military, then occupying Japan, controlled access to the city and was not keen to have reports on the gruesome effects of the bomb, and anti-Japanese racism and antipathy toward a WWII enemy inhibited sympathy for those vaporized, crushed, or wounded in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hersey changed all this. His article, which would soon be a bestselling book, told the separate stories of six Hiroshima residents who had survived. The piece recreated the day from each of their vantages—a just-the-facts recounting of the horror, no adjectives. His intent was to let readers envision what would happen to them and their loved ones if their city or town were hit by an atomic bomb. One of the six witnesses was Tanimoto.

Hersey’s work was an instant phenomenon. The issue sold out. His article prompted stories in newspapers and magazines around the globe. It was serialized on the radio. Albert Einstein asked the New Yorker for a thousand copies that he could distribute. But no copies were left. Hersey made the world see—and understand—what an atomic blast truly did. It was one of the most consequential acts of journalism in modern history. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and much-acclaimed war correspondent—he was only 32—Hersey went on to a long and illustrious career as a journalist and writer. He died in 1993.

Rosenfeld was looking to make a movie covering Hersey’s pursuit of the Hiroshima story—there are twists and turns to the tale—and he asked if I wanted to be part of the project. Of course, I did. While we were figuring out my role in this endeavor—I read an early script and gave notes—he informed me that among Hersey’s papers stored at Yale University was a 221-page manuscript in English that Tanimoto had written in 1947 chronicling his experiences in Hiroshima. It was a more detailed accounting than what had appeared in Hersey’s article, told from the Japanese minister’s distinct perspective. At some point, Tanimoto, who passed away in 1986, had sent the typewritten manuscript to Hersey, and for years it had sat in a folder in a box. Tanimoto’s own family did not know it existed. Only a few researchers and scholars had come across it, and then Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, spotted the manuscript in late 2022.

As a side project to the Hersey film, Rosenfeld hoped to publish Tanimoto’s memoir. He asked if I would edit it and compose an introduction. I immediately said yes. What an honor it would be to help bring Tanimoto’s story to the public. Rosenfeld’s aim was to try to find a publisher for the memoir, but if that failed, he had a small publishing company of his own that could publish the work. I didn’t foresee huge market potential for the memoir but believed it would be a good deed to turn this forgotten manuscript into a book, no matter what happened after that.

So as the second Trump administration began, I found an escape from that chaos in editing Tanimoto’s terrifying reminiscences of August 6, 1945, and the months afterward, during which he contended with severe health problems, strove to rebuild his church, and headed toward what would be a decades-long career as an international peace activist.

Tanimoto had studied at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta prior to World War II and knew English. But passages in the memoir were written in a stiff English, some tough to understand. The manuscript included loads of details about routine church affairs. My goal was to make his memoir readable so this act of witnessing would have a chance to reach a wide audience. I dug up old maps of Hiroshima to check the names of streets, neighborhoods, rivers, and other geographic features. (In the memoir, Tanimoto notes his spelling skills were lacking.) I had to make sense of sections with confusing chronologies.

I did what editors do—and preserved Tanimoto’s straightforward recounting of the apocalyptic scenes he experienced, his rescue efforts, the many tragedies he saw, and the hardships he and other Hiroshima residents endured long after the bombing. In his memoir, he contemplated the morality of the nuclear attack—without bearing any ill will against the Americans—and its impact on human society. He described how he came to see his duty to spread the Christian faith as intertwined with his mission to prevent any more atomic bombings. As I note in an introduction to the book—which serves as a biography of Tanimoto and covers his long-lasting relationship with Hersey—Tanimoto encountered many travails as an antinuclear campaigner. His projects did not always pan out. But he stayed true to this cause until his last days.

Tanimoto’s memoir is more than a historical document. It’s a warning that the existential threat posed by the nuclear arsenals held by nine nations remains. We all live in peril, and human extinction—and global destruction—is only a few bad decisions away. That prospect is hard to grasp and absorb into our daily lives. As did Hersey, Tanimoto shows us the ghastly and inescapable reality of nuclear war—an alert that cannot be sounded often enough. The editors at Modern Library agreed. They acquired the memoir and are now enthusiastically promoting it widely.

As for the Hersey movie, the project is moving forward. Director Phil Joanou has written a script, and Rosenfeld is lining up financing. Tanimoto is a main character in the film, which, if it comes to be made, will further spread his crucial testimony. Until then, this book will share the simple but profound message to which he devoted his life: Do not forget.

In a moving foreword, his 81-year-old daughter, Koko Tanimoto Kondo, who as an infant survived the bombing because her mother managed to push her through an opening in the burning wreckage of their home that had collapsed on them, writes, “Human memory is fragile. It’s so convenient to forget unpleasant things, much easier than facing them. But if nuclear weapons are never used again, it will only be because of the memory of what happened to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. My father was one of the first to understand this clearly.” Tanimoto spent decades prodding people and governments throughout the world to not permit the memory of Hiroshima to fade. With this book, he is still reminding us.

Here’s an excerpt from the book.

Continue Reading…

Trump-Endorsed Candidate Loses Michigan Primary to a Man Who Suspended His Campaign

A candidate who suspended his campaign a month ago, spent no money, and endorsed his own rival won Michigan’s 8th Congressional District GOP primary on Tuesday, handily defeating Amir Hassan, the candidate President Donald Trump endorsed.

The victor, Thomas J. Smith, won 50 percent of the vote in the state’s 8th Congressional District, according to theNew York Times, while Amir Hassan only had about 33 percent. That’s a difference of over 10,000 votes. Smith suspended his campaign in mid-July—too late to get his name off the ballot.In a July 16 video, he formally endorsed Al Lemmo, donning an “Al Lemmo for Congress” hat. Lemmo ended up with 16 percent of the vote on Tuesday.

Trump endorsed Hassan on Truth Social in June, but supporters opposed the move, some with significant anti-Islamic sentiment. Hassan’s campaign website says the congressional candidate “recently reaffirmed his commitment to Christ” and stated that “Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior.” Hassan also received support from House Republicans’ campaign committee, which highlighted his service in the Navy and as a former federal law enforcement officer.

According to FEC campaign filings, Hassan spent over $600,000, while Smith has no FEC filings.

According to the Detroit News, Smith spoke for about 13 seconds at a Wednesday Republican event at a restaurant in Warren, Michigan: “I’m running for the 8th Congressional District to unseat communist comrade Rivet.”

In a statement to Politico earlier on Wednesday, Smith said: “I look forward to working with Speaker [Mike] Johnson and the entire Republican team to expand our House majority and advance President Trump’s America First agenda to lower costs for working families and make America affordable again.”

Smith is set to face Kristen McDonald Rivet, the Democratic incumbent who has served as the representative for the district since 2025.

Continue Reading…

Police Footage Shows Rep. Max Miller Downplaying His Daughter’s Broken Collarbone

On July 18, Mother Jones published an exhaustive article on a number of assault and domestic abuse allegations swirling around Ohio Republican Rep. Max Miller.

The report was based on more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police records, including a 48-page investigatory file relating to possible child abuse after their toddler experienced a broken collarbone. This file included numerous troubling allegations from Emily Moreno—Miller’s ex-wife and the daughter of US Sen. Bernie Moreno—who accused Miller of throwing scalding water at her, shoving her against a wall during a heated custody exchange, and holding a gun to her head while she was trying to change their daughter’s diaper. Other public records accused Miller of drug abuse and threatening behavior.

Today, we’re publishing a video that includes select clips from seven hours of police interviews and bodycam footage related to the child abuse probe. This adds to interview footage CNN published in June relating to the same investigation.

Police ultimately concluded that a finding of child abuse was “unsubstantiated.” That means there was not sufficient evidence to prove abuse or neglect occurred.

Nonetheless, the clips we are publishing show a child protection specialist indicating the collarbone injury was accompanied by a bruise resembling a handprint. Emily Moreno also tells police that their daughter expressed fear of her father.

This week, Sen. Moreno weighed in on the personal drama roiling his family, calling it the “seventh circle of hell.”

“My daughter lives in constant fear of this man,” Sen. Moreno continued.

Continue Reading…

This Data Center Foe Just Won His Democratic House Primary in Michigan

_This story was originally published b_y the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

William Lawrence, a prominent environmental organizer who foregrounded his support for a data center moratorium, has won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s seventh congressional district in a victory for progressives.

Lawrence was a co-founder of the youth-led climate justice organization the Sunrise Movement, the group that in 2018 mainstreamed calls for a Green New Deal to battle economic injustice while rapidly phasing out planet-warming fossil fuels. The 36-year-old defeated Bridget Brink, a former US ambassador to Ukraine and Slovakia, and Matt Maasdam, a former US Navy Seal and military aide to Barack Obama.

In the November general election, Lawrence will face off with incumbentRepublican Tom Barrett. Lawrencesecured endorsements from Senator Bernie Sanders, as well as Representative Rashida Tlaib and progressive US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. On the campaign trail, he highlighted his support for universal healthcare, boosting taxes on billionaires, and ending the war in Iran and arms sales to Israel.

A recent poll suggests roughly two-thirds of voters, and nearly half of Republicans, likely favor candidates who call for pausing data center construction.

But his biggest focus may have been his opposition to the unchecked build-out of AI data centers; he focused on the issue in his first television ad.

“Will made opposing data center development a core part of this campaign and it helped power him to victory all across the district, including massive margins in small towns where DC insiders didn’t expect him to compete,” Stevie O’Hanlon, Lawrence’s campaign manager, said. “In Mason, where one data center is being proposed, Will won with 49 percent of the vote in a three-way race.”

In May, Lawrence said “data centers put a tremendous, unprecedented and unexpected burden on the grid to increase overall demand” and that there is “no plan to do that in a clean way.”

Survey research conducted by the left-learning polling firm Data for Progress found that 63 percent of US voters, including 66 percent of independents and 47 percent of Republicans, were more likely to support a candidate calling for pausing data center construction.

“Tonight the people of Michigan’s 7th district sent a clear message: They are tired of Silicon Valley billionaires and DC insiders determining the future of our towns and our country,” he said in a Tuesday night statement. “They want an unbought representative who isn’t afraid to stand up to leaders of both parties and fight for working people.”

Lawrence’s district in central Michigan is one of just 18 House seats that the Cook Political Report called “toss-ups.” Barrett has often voted with Trump.

“Tom Barrett may have the high-powered DC consultants and corporate CEOs in his corner, but our movement is made up of real Michiganders, coming together across political differences,” Lawrence said in his election night statement.

Continue Reading…

Michigan’s Primary Reckoning for the Democrats

No congressional candidate in Democratic history ever had as much outside money dumped on them in one primary as Abdul El-Sayed. But El-Sayed has now survived the onslaught in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Barely. The Bernie Sanders-endorsed champion of Medicare for All defeated Rep. Haley Stevens by about a one-point margin on Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

The dynamics of the election in Michigan were not new. Like in other recent primaries spanning from Manhattan to California’s Central Valley, a populist outsider ran against an establishment Democrat backed by millions of dollars of super PAC money—much of it from AIPAC allies that aim to keep critics of Israel out of Congress. What sets El-Sayed’s victory apart are the stakes and the scale of the effort to defeat him.

Democrats need to keep the Michigan seat that Sen. Gary Peters is retiring from if they hope to take back the Senate. To do that, they now have to defeat former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a swing state that has gone for Donald Trump twice, and where Rogers barely lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024. It is far from certain that El-Sayed will prevail in November—just as there were no guarantees that Stevens would have won.

After a polarizing primary, El-Sayed has just three months to consolidate Democratic support and make his case to independent voters. El-Sayed began that work in an election-night speech before the race was called. “However much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us,” he told supporters. “Tomorrow, we begin to mend fences.” In a Wednesday speech after the race was called, El-Sayed said he had a “great conversation” with Stevens, and called his former opponent “one of the most committed public servants that you’ll ever meet.”

El-Sayed’s margin of victory was much smaller than expected heading into Tuesday: Polls tracked by the New York Times showed El-Sayed leading by double digits in eight surveys in a row. Instead, the results closely resembled Michighan’s 2016 presidential primary, when Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton by 1.4 points. As of Wednesday morning, El-Sayed is leading Stevens by an even smaller margin.

Stevens, who was endorsed by Peters and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was the favorite of much of the Democratic establishment including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But the results on Tuesday were yet another reminder this primary season that much of the Democratic base wants to go in a different direction than party leadership.

The general election will provide a rare chance to help answer a question that is often litigated online but rarely tested offline: Can progressive populists win a swing state like Michigan? A loss by El-Sayed, on the other hand, would likely lead to many warnings from moderate Democrats about what kind of candidate the party should nominate for president in 2028. Republicans have not won a US Senate election in Michigan in more than three decades; the seat El-Sayed is running for has been held by Democrats since 1979—five years before the 41-year-old candidate was born.

El-Sayed’s victory was not the only win for the left wing of the Democratic party in Michigan on Tuesday. In Michigan’s 7th congressional district, which is centered around Lansing, Will Lawrence pulled off a shocking win. The 7th district is a tossup seat held by Republican Rep. Tom Barrett that Democrats hope to flip in November. To do that, Democratic primary voters had two traditionally safe picks: Bridget Brink, who resigned as the US Ambassador to Ukraine soon after Trump returned to office, and Matt Maasdam, a former Navy SEAL who carried the so-called nuclear football for Barack Obama.

Brink and Maaasdam ended up roughly tied with each getting about 28 percent of votes on Tuesday. That may have allowed Lawrence, a millennial founder of the Sunrise Movement who capitalized on local opposition to AI data centers, to prevail with only about 43 percent of the vote. Many Democratic strategists like David Axelrod believe the seat will now be harder to flip in November.

In the Detroit area, Rep. Shri Thanedar narrowly lost his primary to state Rep. Donavan McKinney, who was endorsed by Sanders, El-Sayed, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Thanedar was a notably weak incumbent who has irritated fellow Democrats in Congress. As a largely self-funding Indian American multimillionaire, he was also an unusual fit in a district where more than 40 percent of residents are Black and more than 40 percent of children live in poverty.

The race between El-Sayed and Stevens was one of the most closely watched primaries this year, but it did not attract record spending because super PACs wanted Democrats to control the Senate. About half of the roughly $60 million spent by outside groups came from the AIPAC-backed United Democracy Project, which has worked to elect pro-Israel members of both parties. The Michigan race was UDP’s top priority; the group spent twice as much as it ever had in a single race. (Overall, super PACS favored Stevens by a more than 10-to-1 margin.)

The total amount put into the race by pro-Israel groups may be even higher: A recently formed dark money group called the Center for Democratic Priorities spent a reported $6.5 million backing Stevens, whose views on Israel are captured by her claim that the country “comes to me in my dreams.” As I reported last week, little is known about the Center for Democratic Priorities beyond the fact that its low-profile director apparently served in a similar role for an AIPAC-backed super PAC in Michigan in 2024.

El-Sayed, a doctor and public health expert who served as the health director for Wayne County, is an unapologetic critic of Israel who has accused the nation of committing genocide in Gaza. If elected, he could quickly become Israel’s most vocal opponent in the Senate—as well as one of its most charismatic members. He would also be the first Muslim senator in US history and one of the youngest members of the chamber. (El-Sayed is younger than all but two sitting senators.)

El-Sayed’s victory—along with those of House candidates like Daniel Biss earlier this year in Illinois—is a clear sign to people running for Congress across the country that pro-Israel spending can be successfully resisted. As El-Sayed told my colleague Najib Aminy before the primary, “ If I prove that you can win statewide, taking on AIPAC and winning, that is catastrophic because of what it says about the future of the party. It is existential to oppose it. I think this race is going to change a lot of minds, and it’s going to scramble a lot of expectations.”

On the campaign trail, El-Sayed was highly effective at depicting AIPAC and the corporations spending against him as villains trying to buy the Senate race. He returned to that theme repeatedly in ads, speeches, and his campaign’s call and response slogan: “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for All.” The tens of millions of dollars in television ads super PACs spent against him presumably cost him the support of some voters, but it also gave him one of his most powerful talking points.

In Illinois this March, AIPAC-backed groups spent about $7 million trying to defeat Biss, the mayor of Evanston. (Biss, who is Jewish, is the descendant of Holocaust survivors and has noted that some of his relatives live in Israel.) Like El-Sayed, Biss capitalized on the spending by AIPAC, which has supported many election deniers and Trump supporters. He won narrowly, while Kat Abughazaleh—who is further left than Biss—who came in second. (Abughazaleh is a former Mother Jones contributor.) AIPAC’s pick, Laura Fine, came in third with only 20 percent of the vote. After he won, Biss wrote an op-ed for The Nation under the headline: “I Was AIPAC’s Number 1 Target—and I Beat Them. Here’s How to Do It.”

Still, AIPAC has not yet suffered a total defeat in Michigan. Two-thirds of the money UDP spent in the primary went to attacking El-Sayed—who it misleadingly accused in one ad of “sexist attacks” against women—rather than promoting Stevens. That spending, along with whatever UDP and its allies may put in for the general election, could make it easier for Rogers to defeat El-Sayed in November. If that happens, AIPAC will almost certainly try to take some of the credit.

But for now El-Sayed can claim victory. In his Wednesday speech, El-Sayed pointed out that he and his supporters had taken on a “machine” and record-breaking outside spending. “You’re not supposed to be able to beat that,” he said. “What we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”

Continue Reading…

Heat Is Killing Texas Prisoners, and State Leaders Won’t Shell Out for AC

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Bernhardt Tiede has diabetes and hypertension, and is obese. In the summer of 2023, he suffered a stroke in a Texas prison cell that court documents say regularly exceeded 110 degrees. If there were ever a person the state should flag as vulnerable to extreme heat, it’s him.

He is also the reason Texas has spent the past two years fighting a federal lawsuit, brought by Tiede, over air conditioning in its prisons. And this spring, right before trial, the state’s own heat-tracking system did for him what it’s done for tens of thousands of other people: nothing. Officials removed him from the case, successfully arguing before the court that a policy update meant he’d now get priority for a cool bed on account of his current age: 67. They got that result due to a state formula for determining who gets air conditioning. Not the diabetes. Not the hypertension. A number.

No score means no priority placement, no restriction list, no AC. You’re in the same building as everyone else, whether or not your body can handle it.

That number is the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “heat-sensitivity score,” a rating a computer assigns based on medical conditions and medications that could make someone more susceptible to heat. It’s supposed to identify who’s medically at risk in a cell with no air conditioning. In practice, according to the federal judge who’s spent two years staring at how it works, it identifies almost nobody. Only about 10 percent of Texas prisoners have a score at all, even though the roughly 134,500 people the state incarcerates all face what Judge Robert Pitman called a substantial risk of serious harm from the heat.

Pitman found the system “in practice, arbitrary, inadequate, and ineffective,” and gave an example that should embarrass the agency more than it apparently has: A 90-year-old with hypertension could still fail to qualify for a score at all. Have the condition without whatever else the formula is looking for, and as far as the algorithm is concerned, you’re fine.

A two-week trial over this system, and over the state’s broader refusal to air-condition its prisons, wrapped up on April 9 in Pitman’s Austin courtroom. As of this week, he still hasn’t ruled. Texas is in the middle of another heat dome. And Tiede, whose stroke started this whole thing, was dropped from his own case before trial after TDCJ pointed to the policy update prioritizing inmates 65 and older.

Here’s what the heat score is actually supposed to do: It’s a legacy of Cole v. Collier, the litigation over conditions at the Wallace Pack Unit that settled in 2018. In that case, Judge Keith Ellison defined “heat-sensitive” broadly, covering people taking antipsychotic, anticholinergic, or diuretic drugs, along with anyone diagnosed with psychiatric conditions, obesity, diabetes, or hypertension, among other things. In August 2017, he ordered TDCJ to move everyone who fit that description into cooled housing.

Rather than treat that definition as a floor, TDCJ turned it into a gate, giving people who fit a certain description a score based on the judge’s demands. A score gets you “priority placement” for one of the prison system’s roughly 52,000 air-conditioned “cool beds.” That total is barely enough for a third of the people the state holds. Placement gets you onto restriction lists for wellness checks that they say may result in an AC bed. No score means no priority placement, no restriction list, no AC. You’re in the same building as everyone else, whether or not your body can handle it.

The gap between whom the score covers and who actually gets hurt is the whole story. The Texas Newsroom obtained autopsies for prisoners named in the litigation, and three of those reports named heat as a contributing factor in the deaths. John Castillo had a seizure disorder and went to the water cooler 23 times in the day before he was found unresponsive at the Hughes Unit; his core body temperature was 107.5 and his autopsy called high environmental temperature an important contributory factor.

Politicians are leaning on a scoring system that lets state officials describe the problem as smaller than it really is.

Patrick Womack was found at the Coffield Unit with a core temperature of 106.9 in a cell registering 96.6 degrees, hours after anyone had checked on him, long enough that rigor mortis had begun to set in. Elizabeth Hagerty told prison doctors she had heat rash covering her body and couldn’t keep fluids down; they sent her back to her cell, and she died two days later, a month short of release. Her autopsy listed obesity, diabetes, and elevated environmental temperature as possible contributors.

TDCJ’s position on all three is that heat wasn’t the real cause of death. Underlying conditions were. The agency does not count a death as heat-related unless heat was the primary or sole cause, which is a strange standard for a system whose entire heat-protection apparatus is built around identifying people with underlying conditions.

A 2022 study in JAMA Network Open put a number on the pattern: Researchers estimated that 13 percent of deaths in un-air-conditioned Texas prisons between 2001 and 2019, roughly 271 people, were attributable to extreme heat, an average of 14 a year. Lead author Julianne Skarha described it as a 30-fold increase over heat-related mortality estimates for the general US population. Not a single heat death occurred in the climate-controlled facilities. TDCJ’s own count is far lower, and it almost always is, because the score, the death classifications, and the agency’s institutional incentive all point the same direction: Fewer people counted as vulnerable means fewer people the state has to protect, and fewer deaths to attribute to a problem it says it can’t yet afford to fix.

And to be fair to Texas, the fix is genuinely expensive. TDCJ initially said it needs at least $1.1 billion to fully air-condition its 101 prison facilities, an estimate that by this year’s trial had climbed to $1.5 billion, with officials suggesting a complete build-out might not finish until 2033. Lawmakers did put money toward new cool beds in the last supplemental appropriations bill. But House Bill 3006, which would have required climate control in phases by the end of 2032, passed the House and then died when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick never assigned it to a Senate committee. It was the third consecutive session in which a prison-cooling bill failed to clear the Senate. Nobody in Austin is pretending this is easy or cheap. What they’re doing instead is leaning on a scoring system that lets them describe the problem as smaller than it is.

That’s the real function of the heat score. It isn’t a medical tool. It’s a legal one. It gives the state a number to point to, a process it can hold up in filings and hearings as proof that vulnerable people are being found and protected. Pitman’s finding that the process is arbitrary is really a finding that the number doesn’t mean what the state says it means. Bernhardt Tiede can have a stroke in a cell recorded to be above 110 degrees, sue over it, and still not carry a score by the time his own case reaches trial.

Plaintiffs have asked Pitman to order the entire system air-conditioned by the end of 2029, a deadline the state would then have to explain to a Legislature that has spent three sessions declining to mandate exactly that. Whatever he decides, the underlying design problem doesn’t go away on its own. A state can build all the cool beds it wants; if the formula deciding who gets one keeps failing the people standing in front of it, the beds don’t matter much.

Continue Reading…

How Elon Musk Is Re-Engineering the World

Elon Musk is an avatar of digital capitalism: He both embodies and defines it. In “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” co-author Quinn Slobodian examines how Musk’s actions have altered American capitalism by changing its relationship with the federal government while ushering in a new, technologically driven political economy that’s upending our lives.

On this week’s More To The Story, Slobodian talks with host Al Letson about how the world’s richest person exploits government investment to his own financial benefit and the many ways this intersects with his views on race and technology. It’s nothing less than a futuristic vision of a frightening new world order.

“What is the social contract of Muskism?” Slobodian asks. “You will be locked into a kind of cult of Elon and so ideologically bolted onto him that you’d never question his decisions.”

Slobodian also touches on the ways Musk fused himself to the American economy—and our imagination—and how growing up in South Africa shaped Musk’s white supremacist worldview.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Continue Reading…