Preview: Wall Street trading and investment banking has helped the big banks this quarter, and Goldman Sachs results showed why they are a leader in those areas.

Preview: United Airlines said it authorized a $1.5 billion share buyback, its first share repurchase since before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Preview: Trading in Trump Media shares was briefly halted due to volatility, after the Truth Social owner's stock suddenly plunged in price.

Preview: Former President Donald Trump's launch of the token sale for his crypto project on Tuesday was plagued by problems.

Preview: The drugstore chain Walgreens said it plans to close roughly 1,200 stores over the next three years, which includes 500 closures in fiscal 2025 alone.

Preview: Bank of America benefited from its Wall Street trading and banking divisions in the third quarter, just as rival JPMorgan Chase did.

Preview: Tom Brady, the seven-time Super Bowl champion, will own 10% of the Las Vegas Raiders along with his business partner.

Preview: If you plan to buy a home, you need to take proper steps to prepare for the purchase. Here's how to get there and what to consider, according to experts.

Preview: U.S. homebuyers are looking into mortgage assumption as a way to secure a sub-3% mortgage rate.

Preview: The equity or debt raise of up to $25 billion would be over three years Boeing said.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: Trump's mental acuity questioned after bizarre music session... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: Breaks Down Onstage... VIDEO... He suddenly cancels CNBC interview... Declares the WALL STREET JOURNAL 'has been wrong about everything'... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: Breaks Down Onstage... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: Trump's mental acuity questioned after bizarre music session... VIDEO... He suddenly cancels CNBC interview... Declares the WALL STREET JOURNAL 'has been wrong about everything'...

Preview: VIDEO... (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: Trump's mental acuity questioned after bizarre music session... Breaks Down Onstage... He suddenly cancels CNBC interview... Declares the WALL STREET JOURNAL 'has been wrong about everything'...

Preview: He suddenly cancels CNBC interview... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: Trump's mental acuity questioned after bizarre music session... Breaks Down Onstage... VIDEO... Declares the WALL STREET JOURNAL 'has been wrong about everything'... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: Declares the WALL STREET JOURNAL 'has been wrong about everything'... (Top headline, 5th story, link) Related stories: Trump's mental acuity questioned after bizarre music session... Breaks Down Onstage... VIDEO... He suddenly cancels CNBC interview...

Preview: 'AMERICAN PSYCHO' (Main headline, 1st story, link)

Preview: Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre townhall episode... (First column, 1st story, link) Related stories: Tells people to vote on January 5... Crowd Leaves Early... ESPER: Take comments about using military against Americans 'seriously'... Kamala warns he is out for total power... Cultural signs point toward her victory? Independents Switch Towards Dems in 9-Point Swing... Georgia breaking records with early vote...

Preview: Tells people to vote on January 5... (First column, 2nd story, link) Related stories: Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre townhall episode... Crowd Leaves Early... ESPER: Take comments about using military against Americans 'seriously'... Kamala warns he is out for total power... Cultural signs point toward her victory? Independents Switch Towards Dems in 9-Point Swing... Georgia breaking records with early vote...

Preview: Crowd Leaves Early... (First column, 3rd story, link) Related stories: Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre townhall episode... Tells people to vote on January 5... ESPER: Take comments about using military against Americans 'seriously'... Kamala warns he is out for total power... Cultural signs point toward her victory? Independents Switch Towards Dems in 9-Point Swing... Georgia breaking records with early vote...

Preview: ESPER: Take comments about using military against Americans 'seriously'... (First column, 4th story, link) Related stories: Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre townhall episode... Tells people to vote on January 5... Crowd Leaves Early... Kamala warns he is out for total power... Cultural signs point toward her victory? Independents Switch Towards Dems in 9-Point Swing... Georgia breaking records with early vote...

Preview: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blasted French President Emmanuel Macron over his remarks to his cabinet about Israel's founding.

Preview: A second suspect has been arrested after two burglars impersonated utility workers to gain access to Hussein Murray's Detroit-area home, killing the man in the process.

Preview: Alicia Stemper, a public information officer for Avery County Emergency Operations Center, said high-priority donations include laundry detergent, heaters and mold removal products.

Preview: As the search for missing Texas mom of four Suzanne Simpson moves into its second week, authorities are reportedly searching a landfill after several other locations.

Preview: Rep. Greg Steube, a Republican from Florida, says fuel shortages are a challenge following recent hurricanes that have hammered the Sunshine State.

Preview: The family of murdered Maryland mom Rachel Morin, whose suspected killer entered the U.S. illegally, is commending former President Bill Clinton for Sunday's border admission.

Preview: A Hamilton College student has been charged for allegedly writing anti-Semitic remarks on campus, New York State Police say.

Preview: South Carolina Judge Daniel Hall has ordered disgraced attorney-turned-convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh to pay a $500,000 settlement to the family of Mallory Beach.

Preview: Lindsay Clancy allegedly used exercise ropes to strangle and kill her children before attempting suicide. As her trial approaches, her husband Patrick Clancy spoke out in her defense.

Preview: A family and their dogs were rescued from Hurricane Milton floodwaters in Florida, bodycamera footage from Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office shows.

Preview: US warns Israel to boost Gaza aid or risk losing military assistance  BBC.com Biden-Harris admin warns Israel over Gaza humanitarian aid, leaked letter reveals  Fox News Pentagon's private letter to Gallant, Dermer about possible arms embargo leaked to Israeli media  The Jerusalem Post U.S. warns Israel to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza or risk losing access to weapons  USA TODAY U.S. Warns Israel That Aid to Gaza Must Increase: Mideast Live Updates  The New York Times

Preview: Georgia judge rules election officials can't delay certification because of fraud concerns  CBS News Vote in Georgia: County boards must certify election results, superior court judge rules  WSB Atlanta Georgia counties are mandated to certify elections, judge rules  The Guardian US Local board members in Georgia can't refuse to certify election results, judge rules  NPR Election board officials can’t refuse to certify results over suspected voter fraud, Georgia judge rules  POLITICO

Preview: Trump dances for 40 minutes during campaign rally: ‘Let’s listen to music’  The Guardian US Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour  The New York Times Opinion | Songs and dance moves from Trump’s weird rally, reviewed  The Washington Post 'Hope he's OK': Kamala Harris mocks Donald Trump's odd behavior at town hall  USA TODAY Trump's town hall turns into impromptu concert after medical incidents  The Associated Press

Preview: 'That is just simple mathematics': Journalist presses Trump on his tariff plan  CNN Trump Says ’Growth’ and Tariffs Will Pay for $15 Trillion Agenda  The New York Times Five takeaways from Trump’s Bloomberg interview  The Hill Donald Trump in Chicago Tuesday to speak at Economic Club of Chicago in interview by Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait  ABC7 Chicago Trump vows to impose tariffs as experts warn of price hikes and angry allies  The Guardian US

Preview: A La Niña winter is coming. Here’s what that could mean for the US  CNN Video: Meteorologist breaks down what a ‘La Niña winter’ means  CNN October 2024 ENSO update: spooky season  Climate.gov NOAA's 2024-2025 winter forecast maps: What does La Niña mean for Texas?  Austin American-Statesman La Niña Will Likely Impact US Weather This Winter—Here’s What To Expect  Forbes

Preview: 92 people still missing in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, governor says  NBC News Worry grows as multiple agencies struggle to tally unaccounted individuals after storm  WLOS Nearly 100 People Are Still Missing in North Carolina After Hurricane Helene  The New York Times Hurricane Helene: More than 90 reported dead in North Carolina, 92 unaccounted for  Fox News Hurricane Helene destroyed Asheville’s flourishing arts community. Can they rebuild what was lost?  The Guardian US

Preview: Satellite images show how Hurricane Milton reshaped parts of Florida coastline  CBS News How many properties did Milton’s surge flood? Here’s what the data show.  Tampa Bay Times Families Rally Together to Rebuild After Hurricanes Wreak Havoc in Tampa  Newsweek Floridians return home to clean up from two hurricanes, with gas and power in short supply  CNN Come hurricane or high water, Florida island residents promise to stay  NPR

Preview: US governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over porn forum claims  Al Jazeera English Mark Robinson Sues CNN Over Report Linking Him to Lewd Comments on Porn Site  The New York Times North Carolina governor candidate Mark Robinson sues CNN over report about posts on porn site  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Mark Robinson Sues CNN Over Report About Antigay, Racist Posts on Porn Site  The Wall Street Journal NC Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson sues CNN  Axios

Preview: National Hurricane Center tracking 2 systems. Will Invest 94L become Nadine, impact Florida?  Daytona Beach News-Journal Monitoring Two Areas For Tropical Development  The Weather Channel Caribbean islands put on hurricane alert as experts say storm Nadine WILL hit this week - raising alarm for Fl  Daily Mail Storm tracker: All eyes on 2 systems in Atlantic; one could become a depression  USA TODAY Tracking the Tropics: Watching 2 disturbances that could develop into storms  WJXT News4JAX

Preview: U.S. raises concern with Israel as Gaza hospital strike appears to leave "displaced civilians burning alive"  CBS News Deadly Israeli airstrike targets hospital complex where thousands were sheltering  CNN 10 members of displaced family killed in Gaza  Al Jazeera English After Israeli strike on hospital sets tent camp ablaze in Gaza, US offers criticism  USA TODAY Tuesday Briefing  The New York Times

Preview: Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) is in battleground Pennsylvania, participating in a town hall Tuesday evening alongside conservative nonprofit Moms for America. The event in Philadelphia, labeled as MomVote, is centered on women voters — primarily mothers — and how Vance, and his running mate former President Trump, will tackle issues most important to them, including...

Preview: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s internal watchdog has opened an investigation into the agency’s handling of violations at a Boar’s Head plant that led to a multi-state listeria outbreak, according to a Democratic lawmaker. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said USDA Inspector General Phyllis Fong is looking into how the agency handled numerous reports of alleged unsanitary...

Preview: Vice President Harris is leaning into her time as a prosecutor and her law enforcement background in the final weeks of the presidential campaign. Harris has sought to appeal to undecided voters in key swing states by touting her prosecutorial chops. Last week, in an interview on CBS’s "60 Minutes," Harris discussed being a gun...

Preview: The Advocate, the nation’s oldest and largest LGBTQ-focused publication, on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Harris for president. “Harris, the Democratic nominee, is exponentially better on every issue than her Republican opponent, Donald Trump — issues including reproductive freedom, the economy, and climate change. But our endorsement focuses on her LGBTQ+ rights record, which is stellar, and what...

Preview: Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Harris's running mate, is campaigning Tuesday evening in Pittsburgh, as the White House race enters its final stretch. The vice presidential hopeful gave remarks focused on reaching rural voters from Valmont, Pa., earlier Tuesday. The trip marks Walz's third visit to the city — which is also where Harris...

Preview: A Georgia judge must decide whether to squash new state election rules, including a controversial change requiring hand-counted verification of ballots, in the final weeks before November’s election. Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney heard arguments Tuesday about six new rules instituted by Georgia’s State Election Board, which lawyers for Cobb County’s election board said could...

Preview: Forty-nine House Democrats signed an open letter to Fortune 1,000 chief executives asking them to affirm their commitment to their workplace equality initiatives, amid heightened backlash and legal challenges to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. “We write to call on you to reject division and continue supporting programs, policies, and initiatives that give everyone...

Preview: Former President Trump on Tuesday sat down with the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News for an expansive and at times confrontational interview. The former president clashed with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait over the impacts of tariffs, which Trump has pledged to use aggressively if elected in November, and over the events following the 2020 election. The interview...

Preview: CNN anchor Chris Wallace said he thinks Vice President Harris “scared” former President Trump during their presidential debate, which is why there won’t be another meeting before Election Day. On Tuesday, Wallace joined “The View,” where he was asked by Sara Haines what he thought about Trump backing out of a "60 Minutes" interview, the...

Preview: Former President Trump blasted the Wall Street Journal and other prognosticators in the financial sector who have predicted his economic plans will have a negative impact on the country's financial future. “You said, President Trump, at the moment there was a thing called the Trump trade in the markets. Do you know what that is?"...

Preview: Many people were amused to hear about the former president's fear of being tackled.

Preview: The tally comes more two weeks after flash floods and mudslides hit western parts of the state, with at least 95 people dead, officials said.

Preview: The musician said Trump's use of his Leonard Cohen cover "was the height of blasphemy."

Preview: "To be fair, he doesn't know yet which team his cellmate may be supporting," one fan joked.

Preview: The Biden administration has warned Israel that it must increase the amount of humanitarian aid it is allowing into Gaza within the next 30 days or it could risk losing access to U.S. weapons funding.

Preview: The Prince told reporters, "I try my hand at most (sports)” though “not very well.”

Preview: With the 2024 election bearing down in the contentious swing state, a judge just made the rules of certification more clear.

Preview: The North Carolina man was taken into custody near a FEMA vehicle while armed with a handgun and rifle, authorities said.

Preview: Travis Gienger's 2,471-pound pumpkin won him the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay for the second year in a row.

Preview: The former president referenced the Georgia congresswoman during an appearance in her home state.

Preview: An ASML warning about the health of the semiconductor market is one factor weighing on AI chip stocks Tuesday — but one analyst says Nvidia investors shouldn’t be worried.

Preview: The bull market for stocks has been running for two years. Here’s what’s unusual about it, according to DataTrek Research.

Preview: Revenue from basic economy seats shot up 20% at United.

Preview: Walgreens’ stock has been hammered this year as consumer shopping patterns have changed, but its CEO says store closures “will realign our footprint to a healthier store base.”

Preview: At least one WNBA player wants a $1 million salary. Is that possible?

Preview: The brokerage said it is seeing increased inflows into its wealth-management offerings.

Preview: Investors remain nervous about upside risks to inflation, such as the outcome of the Nov. 5 presidential election, that haven’t been priced into the bond market — and which policymakers may not be able to do much about.

Preview: Long-term Treasury yields fell for a second day on Tuesday as traders reacted to a weaker-than-expected manufacturing reading from the New York Fed and new developments from the Middle East that pushed oil prices lower.

Preview: Oil futures dropped by more than 4% on Tuesday, with U.S. and global benchmark prices settling at their lowest in about two weeks after a report that Israel will not attack key oil facilities in Iran.

Preview: Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican rival Donald Trump have floated many tax plans as they compete for votes in the tight White House race.

Preview: Donald Trump lashed out at Fox News after it announced an upcoming interview with Kamala Harris, saying the network “has totally lost its way.”

Preview: If election board officials in Georgia are thinking about refusing to certify election results they don't like, a judge has now told them they can't.

Preview: Rachel Maddow introduces viewers to Tom Homan, a little-known ex-Trump official, who led the administration's family separation policy and warns of his return to the White House.

Preview: The last thing in the world the former Joint Chiefs chair wants to be is political. For him to take this step shows the gravity of the situation.

Preview: Happy Tuesday. Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, rounding up the week’s top stories at the intersection of politics and the all-inclusive world of technology.

Preview: The Supreme Court rejected Michael Avenatti’s attempt to get a review of his convictions stemming from his former representation of Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, who testified against Donald Trump in his New York criminal case earlier this year.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris’ swing-state blitz sees the likes of Barack Obama, Liz Cheney and others making a play for undecided voters.

Preview: As a rule, confident candidates on pace to prevail don’t look and sound like Republican Sen. Ted Cruz looks and sounds right now.

Preview: A Wall Street Journal poll of economists found that a huge majority of them think Harris will be better at controlling inflation than Trump. Here's why.

Preview: JD Vance has wrongly argued that Vice President Kamala Harris had the opportunity to implement her policy ideas. My civics lesson to Vance went viral.

Preview: The Rockettes’ training is in full swing as they gear up for this year’s 2024 Christmas Spectacular. Hear from members of the iconic ensemble as they prepare for their holiday show spectacle.

Preview: The US Space Force have announced the X-37B spaceship will begin executing a series of "novel maneuvers" called aerobraking.

Preview: An Apple Watch a day keeps the doctor away.

Preview: Jets’ fans aren’t buying it. Or if they are, they aren’t buying all of it.

Preview: Paul Mescal has learned to laugh off silly rumors about his dating life–especially ones about his one-night stands. After rumors went around on TikTok, the actor didn’t take it seriously, but his mom was fairly concerned. Watch the full video to learn more about his mother’s reaction.  Subscribe to our YouTube for the latest on...

Preview: Shannon Sharpe has had enough of Jerry Jones.

Preview: Though the rapper-turned-mogul is in jail awaiting trial, he made sure his Instagram account still posted in honor of his seventh and youngest child's birthday.

Preview: "I'm 39 now, and getting wrinkles here and there," she told Page Six Style backstage. "I gave up the fight!"

Preview: “New York City is in trouble," Ray Kelly, the city's longest serving NYPD commissioner, said. "'Save Our City' can help get it back on track with some of the best minds I know."

Preview: Spending on political advertisements is expected to exceed $12B this year.

Preview: In Michigan, Ohio, Arizona and elsewhere, progressive court candidates are hoping that the abortion issue that helped conservatives remake the federal judiciary will work for them this time.

Preview: With a frenzy of activity, the vice president and her allies are trying to strengthen her support with Black voters, whose growing alienation the party’s leaders had not confronted directly until now.

Preview: The ruling cuts at the heart of a key argument made by right-wing activists since the 2020 election, when Donald Trump sought to disrupt the certification process as part of his bid to subvert the results.

Preview: Amna Soliman says she can’t leave her mother, who is in a wheelchair, so she stays, despite heavy fighting and repeated warnings to leave.

Preview: A motorcade through the capital revived “panda diplomacy” between Washington and Beijing for the first time in nearly a year.

Preview: A leak in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the race to plug it revealed the fragility of New York City’s aging transportation network.

Preview: Michelle Bowman, a Trump-appointed Fed official recently cited by JD Vance, has been gaining prominence.

Preview: Mary C. Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said that the central bank shouldn’t act “out of fear.”

Preview: Despite shoppers’ election-year concerns and worries about the economy, retail executives predict sales to increase as much as 3.5 percent over last year’s holiday season.

Preview: The Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee filed suits in New York with new allegations of rape and sexual assault from 1995 to 2021. Mr. Combs denied the accusations.

Preview: Again, it’s all about the demographics of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Preview: At first cut, one might think that Trump judges wouldn’t be influential. That's wrong.

Preview: How did the Al Pacino of the 1970s become the Al Pacino of today? His new book provides an answer.

Preview: In 2020, we lost one of our funniest songwriters. A new Netflix special finds a way to do him justice.

Preview: My usual strategy here has backfired.

Preview: Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson’s brilliant show feels ripe for a rediscovery.

Preview: Peter Goodman on the pandemic shipping crisis

Preview: Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Oct. 15, 2024.

Preview: Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for Oct. 15, 2024.

Preview: A promise to protect domestic violence survivors who kill in self-defense is put to the test.

Preview: Plaintiff had argued that defendants' publicizing the religious court's statement "serves as a form of social pressure, calling on the community to shun or ostracize the individual until they comply with the court's demands."

Preview: Katherine Tai said tariffs were "leverage" against China, but now she admits that China hasn't made "any changes to its fundamental systemic structural policies."

Preview: The good news is that schools won't be forced to stock Trump-endorsed Bibles. The bad news is that they're still being forced to supply Bibles.

Preview: Although the framing is a transparent political ploy, it is reassuring to see that the vice president has not abandoned her opposition to the federal ban.

Preview: From People v. Stanley, decided Sept. 10 by the Office of Presiding Disciplinary Judge of the Supreme Court of Colorado… The post Colorado Elected District Attorney Disbarred for Litigation Misconduct appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: A new article from the Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Future of Free Speech Symposium.

Preview: Despite homelessness being on the rise, local governments keep cracking down on efforts to shelter those without permanent housing.

Preview: Mellor was cofounder and longtime president of the Institute for Justice, one of the nation's leading public-interest law firms.

Preview: Plus: FEMA threat-related arrest, incentives for babymaking, "men" for Harris/Walz, and more...

Preview: Our draft article shows that corpus linguistics delivers where LLM AI tools fall short—in producing nuanced linguistic data instead of bare, artificial conclusions.

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: Mike Bloomberg, as New York City mayor, takes the subway during his last week in office. In 2024, the billionaire is supporting a new project to help the world’s cities share good policies. Cities represent the future of humanity — and that means we must figure out how to make them more livable. The share of people who live in urbanized areas more than doubled in the US and across the world from 1900 to 2000. More than eight in 10 Americans live in cities today, as do the majority of people worldwide. These densely populated places have created tremendous opportunities for innovation, economic growth, more efficient infrastructure and transit, and the curation of arts and culture. But the density that gives cities their power also creates new challenges: Cities have struggled to build enough housing, pollution abounds, and diseases can spread more quickly. Cities must also manage the massive amounts of traffic — automobile, train, bike, and pedestrian — that can clash and result in deadly accidents. The world’s cities are constantly experimenting and generating new ideas about how to solve those problems. The difficulty for policymakers has long been: How do we get good ideas to spread? Municipal leaders sometimes labor under the mistaken belief that they have nothing to learn from their peers a few miles away or across the globe. How can we encourage more cross-pollination?  Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, has launched a $50 million global idea-sharing project to facilitate the migration of effective urban policies to allow cities around the world to address their biggest issues. It’s called the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange, a curated marketplace of policy ideas for municipal leaders with hands-on support to help cities implement them. On Tuesday, the project announced the first set of policies that would be added to the exchange, selected by its staff based on assessments of their effectiveness, their cost and complexity, and the perceived interest among city leaders. While ideas exchanges are not a new concept among policymakers, they risk functioning as little more than passive warehouses, where ideas are placed on a shelf and may never be picked up again if they cannot be easily adapted to a new setting.  The Bloomberg group believes that by including only proven interventions and providing technical support for implementation, their policy-sharing network can thrive. The new exchange will provide grants to support implementation, offer how-to guides from the officials who have already put these policies into place and technical advice from Bloomberg staff, and pay for city leaders to visit other jurisdictions and see the policies in action. The idea is “to take all of the lessons that have been learned from many experiments all over the globe,” said James Anderson, head of government innovation at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “To create an infrastructure that frankly does not exist in the world that takes good ideas, but marries them with the critical supports necessary to get them into the hands of people who want them when they want them and to help them stand them up so that they survive.” 11 proven policies that could help cities Urban development has long been one of Bloomberg’s top philanthropic priorities, the target of hundreds of millions of dollars in giving since 2011. He has supported a city leadership program at Harvard and various initiatives focused on US mayors, US cities, and cities around the world. He has paid particular attention to efforts to better adapt cities to climate change and to support public art projects.  It’s a natural fit for the former New York mayor, who has a deep interest and expertise in the challenges cities face. While in office, he traveled to Paris and decided to test out a bike share in New York like the one he saw there; he turned to Bogotá for inspiration on bus rapid transit, jumpstarting a new era of public transit improvements that continued beyond his term. Bloomberg Philanthropies is stocking the ideas exchange with 11 policy interventions to start, covering the breadth of issues that city leaders contend with, from transportation to air quality to public corruption to infectious diseases: Installing low-cost air quality sensors in schools and children’s health centers Renovating public buildings to be more energy-efficient Supplying school lunches with sustainably grown produce and meat Digitizing the process for business licenses and other permits to reduce corruption Providing cold storage units for local merchants who sell produce Offering more summer education programs for kids Connecting people in need with neighbors who can help them access aid Adopting smoking bans and other smoke-free policies in public places Converting shipping containers into temporary shelter for unhoused people Piloting reduced speed limits to prevent car crashes Incorporating people who informally pick up trash into the public workforce Some of these ideas aren’t particularly novel — NYC’s first smoking ban was instituted while Bloomberg was mayor in 2003 — but the policies themselves aren’t really the selling point of the exchange. Instead, the potential value is the knowledge that city officials have accumulated in trying to implement policy solutions and the ability to share those experiences with others who want to try them out. That is where the need truly lies, Yonah Freemark, principal research associate at the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, told me. He described attending a meeting that brought together leaders from seven neighboring jurisdictions in Minnesota; before that day, the officials said, they had never met collectively before. “My experience is that every city and the staff who work for that city think that their city is the most unique place in the world,” Freemark said. “That there is nothing they can fundamentally learn from other cities because their specific problems are problems unto themselves.” The Bloomberg project hopes to break down those silos. Freemark gave the example of low-cost air quality sensors in schools and other areas frequented by children. That policy has already been implemented in Lima, Peru, and has shown a 45-percent improvement in air quality, providing the empirical foundation for its inclusion in Bloomberg’s exchange. But the real opportunity, Freemark said, would be officials from Lima sharing with their peers in other countries how they found the manufacturer of the low-cost sensors, giving other cities the actionable information that officials are often looking for when they want to adapt policies to their own communities. “People in other cities may care about air pollution, but they don’t know who to contact about that. They don’t know who [Lima] got in touch with,” he said. “That person in Lima is going to tell them who their contact was at Microsoft or whatever company gave them the air sensor and is going to help to make that connection. That would never happen without this kind of direct communication.” Josh Humphries, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens’s top housing adviser, who has consulted with multiple cities on building homes for the unhoused, told me that the package offered by the Bloomberg exchange “probably solves 80 to 90 percent of the questions that we might get talking one-on-one with 25 different cities.”  The Bloomberg team has tried to anticipate the problems that could hamper such a project, studying the science of implementation and idea replication “to learn about why ideas do and don’t spread,” Anderson said. Every city must navigate its own administrative labyrinth of funding, procurement, rulemaking, and public comment, creating friction for getting any new idea off the ground.  Many ideas clearinghouses, Anderson said, are primarily focused on supplying the policy ideas. The Bloomberg project is equally focused on the demand side, on generating interest in policy ideas among the people who would actually implement them and then providing support for their efforts. The cities of the future face daunting challenges, from the planetary (climate change) to the painfully human (political polarization and corruption). We won’t know whether the Bloomberg exchange was a well-intentioned flop or a catalyst for real change until its own evaluation comes in — and that could be many years into the future, given the slow pace of urban policy. “We want to make sure every city that wants one of these ideas and wants to use it well, that we can support them and give them the dedicated resources and support that we think is so fundamental to successful idea replication,” Anderson told me. “We are going to be watching closely and figuring out how we meet the demand that exists.”

Preview: Petitioners gather signatures for the Protect Our Rights campaign on Saturday, March 9, 2024, in Omaha, Nebraska. Voters in 10 states will weigh in on abortion-rights ballot measures this November, but only Nebraskans will cast ballots on two competing initiatives. Initiative 439 would establish a state constitutional right to abortion up to fetal viability or when necessary to protect the “health or life” of the pregnant patient. Initiative 434, however, would ban abortion in the second and third trimesters, with exceptions for sexual assault, incest, or medical emergencies. “We hear all the time how confusing the two measures are and folks are very afraid of accidentally checking the wrong one,” said Shelley Mann, the executive director of Nebraska Abortion Resources (NEAR), the only statewide abortion fund in Nebraska. Much of the confusion surrounding the competing proposals is intentional, and likely a preview of new tactics in the evolving anti-abortion playbook.  Since May 2023, abortion in Nebraska has been banned past the first trimester, and last fall reproductive choice advocates launched a ballot measure campaign to restore and expand access. Anti-abortion leaders introduced a competing measure four months later. (The proposed anti-abortion ballot measure wouldn’t expand current restrictions, but it would embed existing second- and third-trimester bans into Nebraska’s state constitution. This would make it significantly more difficult for the legislature or courts to roll back those restrictions later.) While collecting signatures, some canvassers from the Protect Women and Children campaign misrepresented themselves as being in favor of expanding abortion access, leading hundreds of Nebraskans to erroneously sign their petition.  Upon realizing their mistake, more than 300 of those voters signed affidavits to have their names removed from the anti-abortion petition, marking the highest number of removal requests in the state’s history. (Over 205,000 people signed the anti-abortion petition in total.)  More recently, Catherine Brooks — a neonatal pediatrician who filed legal objections to block the pro-abortion rights measure from appearing on Nebraska’s ballot — appeared in a TV ad in which she portrayed herself as an advocate for reproductive freedom fighting against government intrusion in medicine.  “As a doctor, I want compassionate, clear, scientific standards of care,” Brooks said in the ad. “As a mom, I want to keep the government out of the relationship between a woman and her physician. Initiative 439 pretends to protect our rights but it does the opposite. It lets government officials interfere in medical decisions and takes care out of the hands of licensed physicians, when women in crisis need them most.” There’s little doubt that Republicans in Nebraska hope to restrict abortion beyond the existing 12-week ban, which was passed shortly after lawmakers narrowly failed to impose a six-week limit. Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has publicly pledged to continue fighting until abortion is fully banned in his state.  The outcome of these dueling ballot proposals could affect not just those in Nebraska but pregnant people nationwide. Abortion rights activists have been sounding the alarm, warning that if Initiative 434 succeeds in November, anti-abortion leaders will export their winning strategy elsewhere — using the language of reproductive freedom to advance seemingly moderate measures that obscure long-term goals of deeper bans. Nebraska’s 12-week abortion ban is already causing harm The 12-week abortion ban Nebraska lawmakers passed in May 2023 included exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother. As in other states, these exceptions have proved ambiguous for doctors on the ground, and many patients who need abortion care have been unable to get it.  Kim Paseka, a 34-year-old woman based in Lincoln, Nebraska, was one of those patients. Paseka lives with her husband and their 3-year-old son, and though they wanted at least two children, they were unsure about pursuing that in Nebraska after Roe was overturned. “We knew it was probably inevitable that our state government was going to work on banning reproductive health care in some capacity and it definitely gave us pause, like should we move, do we stay and fight? Those were our dinner table conversations,” she told Vox. In the summer of 2023, just after Nebraska lawmakers passed their 12-week ban, Paseka learned she was pregnant again.  Initial blood tests looked fine, but following a routine ultrasound, Paseka was informed that her baby’s heartbeat was slower than expected. In subsequent appointments, the doctors determined the heartbeat was diminishing and that Paseka was carrying a nonviable pregnancy.  Because of the new ban and the fact that Paseka’s life was not immediately threatened, her doctors weren’t comfortable ending the pregnancy. They sent her home with instructions for “expectant management” — meaning to wait until she’d bleed out eventually with a miscarriage.  “I had to go back to the hospital for three more scans, where I had to see the heartbeat weaken further week by week, and during this whole time I’m so nauseous, I’m tired, I’m experiencing all the regular pregnancy symptoms, but I was carrying a nonviable pregnancy,” she said. It took roughly a month for Paseka to finally bleed out the pregnancy at home. “In Nebraska, we have these exceptions, but in my situation it wasn’t assault, it wasn’t incest, and my life wasn’t in immediate danger, so I automatically just lose health care,” she said. “They’re forgetting how detrimental that can be to mental health, that it’s not just about physical endangerment. … I felt like a walking coffin.”  Mann, the executive director of Nebraska’s statewide abortion fund, emphasized that the 12-week ban has had far-reaching consequences that most people underestimate.  “Not only are folks now restricted in how and when they can get the care they need, but it’s additionally problematic that these rules are designed to be confusing and were brought about during a time when confusion was at an all-time high,” she told Vox. “We talk to callers and members of the community all the time who have no idea when and if abortion is even legal here in Nebraska.” There are two remaining abortion clinics in the state, though both only perform abortions part-time, meaning there sometimes are not enough appointments to go around, including for patients traveling in from states with near-total bans like Iowa and South Dakota. “This means that not only are patients who are past the 12-week mark forced to flee the state for care, but even patients under that ban restriction are sometimes having to travel just to get an appointment in a timely manner,” Mann explained. “These patients are going to places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Denver … this travel is often expensive, inconvenient, and overall an enormous burden on pregnant people.” Anti-abortion leaders plan to push for further restrictions in Nebraska Initiative 434, also known as the Prohibit Abortions After the First Trimester Amendment, sounds almost like a measure to protect abortion access in the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy. The proposal, which is being primarily funded by Nebraska billionaire and US Sen. Pete Ricketts, does not in fact do that. On top of codifying the state’s existing ban on abortion past 12 weeks into Nebraska’s constitution, the measure allows lawmakers to pass further legislative bans on top. Put differently, it strengthens abortion bans but provides no meaningful increase in abortion access.  Marion Miner, the associate director for “pro-life and family policy” at the Nebraska Catholic Conference, emphasized in a video posted over the summer that he does not see Initiative 434 as “an acceptable final resolution” because it does “not protect all unborn children” including those born from sexual assault or incest. “It is an imperfect proposal … an incremental pro-life initiative that takes a small step to protect unborn life without restraining us from doing more,” Miner said, stressing Initiative 434 would “allow for additional protections to be passed in the future.”  Over a century ago, Nebraska lawmakers enacted a law stating that if two conflicting state constitutional ballot measures pass, the measure with the most votes will be adopted. According to Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen, if both Initiative 439 and Initiative 434 pass, it would mark the first time this 1912 law could be used. “It’s possible that one of the proposals could get approved and not be adopted,” Evnen told NPR in May. “It’ll come down to, whichever one receives the most votes is the one that would go into Nebraska’s constitution.” Even the existing 12-week ban, often described by conservatives as a moderate compromise, appears out of step with what Nebraskans want. The ACLU of Nebraska found in late 2022 that 59 percent of respondents opposed lawmakers enacting abortion bans, with opposition in both rural and urban areas and every congressional district. In the more than two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion rights ballot measures have succeeded in all seven states in which they’ve appeared, including red and purple states like Kentucky, Ohio, Kansas, Michigan, and Montana. This year, high-profile abortion rights measures are on the ballot in states like Florida, Arizona, and Missouri. Nebraska’s contests, relative to these other states, have received less attention.  “They know public opinion is on our side so they’re doing everything they can to muddy the waters,” said Allie Berry, the manager for the Protect Our Rights campaign, which is leading Nebraska’s ballot measure to expand abortion rights. While Berry feels cautiously optimistic, she understands her opponents are striving to trip up voters. “If they succeed here,” Berry predicts, “they’ll try this in every other state.”

Preview: Author Ta-Nehisi Coates during the Alight Align Arise: Advancing the Movement for Repair conference on June 7, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images for Decolonizing Wealth Project I’ve always believed that the world is complicated and that our desire for simplicity is understandable but dangerous.  But when does the impulse to embrace ambiguity become its own pathology? Sure, the world is complex, but sometimes we have to pass judgment. We have to be willing to say that something is true and something is false, that something is right and something is wrong. So how do we know when things really are that clear? And how do we avoid the impulse to lie to ourselves when we know they’re not? Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author, essayist, and one of our most celebrated living writers. He’s just published a new book called The Message that has stirred up quite a bit of controversy because the longest essay in it is about his trip to Palestine. If you know almost nothing about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the one thing you’d probably be comfortable saying is that it’s complicated. This is an assertion Coates challenges directly. For him, the moral arithmetic is simple and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian population is fundamentally wrong. So I invited Coates on The Gray Area to explore where he’s coming from and why he felt it was important to write this book. But the point wasn’t to have a debate or an argument. I invited Coates because I think he’s smart and sincere and doesn’t write anything without seriously thinking about it. This conversation is really about the role of the writer and the intellectual and what it means to describe the world with moral clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing What’s been the most surprising thing to you about the reaction to this book so far?  Ta-Nehisi Coates I’m surprised at the surprise. So, the CBS interview was the first live interview. I was not surprised by the aggression, tenacity, whatever you want to call it. Or, I should say, I knew that was going to happen eventually. I didn’t know it was going to happen there. So I was surprised in the sense that, “Oh, it’s right now.” And it took me a minute to catch up with it and realize that it’s actually happening right now, but this is what it is.  I’m surprised that people are like, “I can’t believe that happened.” I understand I am going to go into some arenas where you don’t usually say the state of Israel is practicing apartheid. That’s just not a thing that you usually hear people saying in places like that, and so I am going to say that. And what’s going to come out of that, I have no idea, but I hope people understand that this is what’s happening. Sean Illing You made a deliberate choice to write about Palestine, which, as you know, is an impossibly charged issue. Why wade into these waters? Why this conflict? Why now? Ta-Nehisi Coates I don’t think it’s impossibly charged. This is so clear. It was so clear. And when I saw that — and maybe this is naive, maybe you’re right, maybe it is impossibly charged — but I was just like, “Oh, this is easy.” Not easy like easy to do, easy to write, but the math is clear. You know what I mean?  The word I used at the time when I saw it was Jim Crow, because it was so obviously Jim Crow. You tell me you got one set of roads for one group of people, another set of roads for another group of people, and the roads you have for the other group of people are impossibly longer. They take more to get from point A to point B. Those roads have checkpoints, and the checkpoints sometimes materialize out of nowhere. This is all fact.  Whatever you think about it, maybe you think that’s the way it should be, but this is what it is. This is actually what it is. You’re telling me that one group of people has constant access to running water, and the other group of people don’t know when their water might be cut off?  You’re telling me that that other group of people, depending on where they live, if they’re in a particular area on the West Bank, it might be illegal for them even to collect rainwater? You’re telling me one group of people has access to a civil system of criminal justice, so that when they get arrested, they know their rights, they’re told why they’re arrested, lawyer, etc. You’re telling me the other group has no access to that? That they can be arrested, that no one needs to tell them why they’re being arrested? No one needs to tell their families that if they are killed, you don’t even have to return their bodies? What is that? Sean Illing So when you compare Palestine to the Jim Crow South, my reaction is that these are both moral obscenities, but they’re different. And I do think it’s complicated — Ta-Nehisi Coates Tell me why you think it’s complicated. Sean Illing I think it matters that many Palestinians still support the attacks on October 7. I think it matters that Black people in the Jim Crow South wanted to be treated as equal citizens in a fully democratic America.  I don’t think it’s generally true that Palestinians want equal rights in a fully democratic Israel. And if they had that they might vote to end its existence as a Jewish State. And you know what? If I was a Palestinian who was pulling my friends and my family out of the fucking rubble, I’d probably vote the same way. I understand that.  Personally, I hate the idea of a state based entirely on religious or ethnic identity. But I’m not Jewish and I don’t live in Israel and I understand why the people who do live there would have these concerns. And I also think it matters that Jews are indigenous to that land and have nowhere else to go. I just think that complicates the picture in other ways. Ta-Nehisi Coates I am of the mind that discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion is never acceptable. There is nothing in this world that will make separate and unequal okay, and there’s nothing — and I’ll use this word — that makes apartheid okay. That’s not complex for me. It’s like the death penalty is not really complex for me, because you cannot guarantee to me that the state will not execute an innocent person. You just can’t. So I’m against it, period. There aren’t any exceptions to that.  Sean Illing I haven’t been to Palestine but I know it’s bad and I know what you saw there is wrong. And I don’t believe there is any such thing as a moral occupation, because whatever the reasons for it, you cannot occupy a people without visiting cruelties upon them.  But for me, the main question isn’t necessarily the badness of the situation, which is incontestable. It’s how the hell do we end this? And all these complications that I was mentioning earlier, that’s the stuff that has to be accounted for if there’s any hope of a way forward.  Ta-Nehisi Coates We are sitting here asking ourselves why we don’t have a workable solution, while we exclude one of the two significant parties, and I guess my politics would say the most significant party, because that’s just where I come from in terms of the oppressed.  How can you decide what is going to be the solution when every night when I watch reports from the region, I can name only one person who is of Palestinian heritage, who I regularly see articulate a solution or an idea? How do we get to a solution when our journals, our newspapers, our literature that dominate the conversation is not just devoid of Palestinian perspectives, but it’s devoid of Palestinians themselves?  We are not having a conversation about solutions because we’ve basically prevented a whole group of people from entering into the frame. And so it’s like we’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re frustrated that we don’t have a solution, but we’re not actually talking to somebody.  Sean Illing I agree that our moral imagination needs to extend in both directions as far as possible. I understand writing this as a kind of corrective, feeling like there was a lack of empathy for the Palestinian experience because their story hasn’t been told enough, hasn’t been represented enough. I can understand that, I really can. And if I’m being honest, I think if I went there and saw the suffering firsthand, all of this would feel a whole lot less abstract to me and it would hit differently. And I don’t know how that would change how I think about it — Ta-Nehisi Coates So when are you going to go, Sean? Sean Illing It’s a fair question, and the only honest answer is I don’t know. Ta-Nehisi Coates You should go. I know it’s hard. And look, I’m putting you on the spot, but it was extremely hard. First of all, you are a journalist. That’s the first thing. That’s my first case for you going. The second case is this is being done in your name. And we’re going to pay for it. We’re going to pay for it one way or the other. We will pay for this. We will pay for this.  God, now I think it’s your responsibility to go. I’m sorry, but I really do believe that. I really do believe that because you are someone who is obviously curious, obviously wants to know things. And the reason why I’m pushing you is because that vague sense of injustice is exactly what I had. That is exactly how I felt, man. Sean Illing But I’ll push you a little on that because it runs in both directions. If I went to Israel and toured the villages that were plundered on October 7, I’d feel this same kind of indignation and rage. Ta-Nehisi Coates You should, though. You should see that, too. I don’t think those feelings are contrary. Sean Illing No, I don’t mean to say they’re contrary. I’m just saying I would still be left feeling the sense of hopelessness at the tragedy of it all. Ta-Nehisi Coates I think you would know more, though. I think you would know more. You sound like me. This is what I thought. Even on the eve of the trip, I was like, “Boy, this is going to be really complicated.” I thought the morality of it would be complicated. And there’s a reason why I began that chapter in [World Holocaust Remembrance Center] Yad Vashem, and it is because the fact of existential violence and industrial genocide brought to the Jewish people of this world is a very, very real thing.  And it’s like, how do you confront that and reconcile that with Israel? Because you want that group of people to be okay. You feel like maybe that group of people is entitled to certain things. And I mean that in the best kind of way. They’re entitled to a kind of safety, given what happened to them. You feel deep, deep sympathy. And so before I went, I was like, “Wow, this is going to be morally dicey.” I think you should go. I’m not even saying you’re going to agree with me. I’m not saying you’re going to end up where I ended up, but I think you should go. Sean Illing Do you think both sides of this conflict can tell a story about it that makes them right and the other side wrong? Because there are so many victims and perpetrators on both sides, because the cycle of violence and retaliation stretches back so far. Ta-Nehisi Coates I don’t think it stretches back that far. It’s 1948. It’s not even 100 years. I mean, I interviewed people that were very much alive in 1948, so I don’t even think it’s back that far. I think that when we say things like that, no disrespect, but I think we say things like that to make it harder than it actually is. It’s a lifetime that is not even over yet. And what I would say is my opposition to apartheid, to segregation, to oppression, does not emanate from a belief in the hypermorality of the oppressed or even the morality of the oppressed. The civil rights movement kind of fooled us with this because it was kind of a morality play and it was a very successful strategy. But whether Martin Luther King was nonviolent or not, segregation was wrong. Even when Malcolm X was yelling “by any means necessary,” segregation was still wrong. It was still wrong. So for me, it’s not even a matter of sides being right. The system that governs both sides is wrong. Sean Illing I remember once hearing you talk about the vulgarities of punditry. Pundits are not in the truth-seeking business. Pundits make pronouncements. That’s the whole stupid, mindless game. But you’re not like that. You have never been like that.  One reason I retreated into podcasting is that I don’t feel that pressure to pronounce in that way, and even doing it in a serious way for me felt futile. But I don’t have your stature and I don’t have your reach, so it’s different for you, I imagine. Do you think you can make a real difference here? Or is that not even part of the calculus?  Ta-Nehisi Coates I needed to write what I saw. This is uncomfortable to say, but I think this moment matters. I was talking to a good friend yesterday, a colleague, a very intelligent and sharp young writer. And we were actually sitting around a table. It was a Muslim woman and another writer there, and we were all in sympathy in terms of our politics. And she’s making the point that this thing that’s happening right now, it actually matters, it’s making a difference. And I was saying, I want out.  I’m doing this book tour and then I’m out of here, man. I’m going back to my French studies. I’m out. And I’m not out because I’m scared to say what I want to say. I’m not out because of the heat. I am out because it just feels unnatural. And part of it feels unnatural because I’m not Palestinian, but it also feels contrary to writing, which is always seeking, always trying to learn, always trying to figure it out, always asking questions. So when you’re making these pronouncements, as I admit I am now, you wonder, am I actually betraying the craft? Should I have just written a book, put it out, and be done with it? There’s always that voice in the back of your mind. But when I was over there, man, what they said to me over and over again was, “Tell them what you saw.” Sean Illing I come on this show every week and I praise the virtues of doubt and uncertainty and I believe in that. But refusing to describe things simply and clearly can become a kind of moral and intellectual crime. You’re right about that. And I still think sometimes things really are complicated and not so neat and maybe the challenge of being a writer and or just a human being is being honest and wise enough to know the difference. But it is hard sometimes, and I do think this situation is complicated, and it’s also true that sometimes withholding moral judgment can be its own kind of cowardice.  Ta-Nehisi Coates Yeah. And again, I just want to take it back. When that day comes, when the Palestinians are back in the frame, when they’re invited to tell their own stories, when they’re invited to take their place at the table, I have no doubt that what will come out of that will be quite complicated.  South Africa’s complicated. They defeated apartheid, but did they change the basic economic arrangements? My understanding is not as much as a lot of people would’ve wished. Better than apartheid, but it’s not done. It is indeed quite complicated. The victory is indeed quite complicated, but the morality of apartheid is not. What is hard for me is I’ve been on a couple of shows now where I’ve had some debate about this with people, and they never challenge the fact of what’s going on. So when I say half the population is enshrined at the highest level of citizenship and everyone else is something less, they don’t say, “Ta-Nehisi, that’s not true.” But perhaps this is just where I sit. It’s like when your parents grew up in Jim Crow, when they were born in the Jim Crow, that is an immediate no-go. I feel like I don’t know what comes after this, but that is wrong. That’s wrong. You know what I mean? What is after that might be quite complicated and quite hard, but that is not the answer at all.  I’m sitting in a cave in the South Hebron Hills [in the West Bank] with a group of people, and they’re telling me about their fears of being evicted out of a cave, man. When I look at — “Hey, that’s complicated” — when I know full well it’s not. What to do about it is probably complicated. But you begin from the basis that this is wrong and the very difficult work of figuring it out can proceed after that. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Preview: Jennifer Harris (left) and Elizabeth Warren (second from left) helped reshape Democrats’ economic thinking. Critics like Reid Hoffman (right) are pushing back. When Kamala Harris gave her campaign’s biggest economic speech yet in Pittsburgh last month, she tried to keep everyone in her party happy. She did not succeed. Attempting to strike a balance between progressive and pro-business themes, Harris said she’d hold corporations accountable if they didn’t play by the rules — but opined that “most companies are working hard to do the right thing.” She referenced the activist presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but in calling for “experimentation” rather than sweeping transformational change. Rather than being “constrained by ideology,” Harris said, she’d seek “practical solutions to problems” and “applying metrics to our analysis.” The speech had little populist fire to be found, and, coming amidst extensive courting of Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors by Harris’s team, it set off alarm bells among some on the left. “My God,” the progressive economist Hal Singer wrote on X afterward. “We lost Kamala.” The “we” is an alliance of advocates that has, over the past 10 years, come together in a surprisingly successful project to reshape the Democratic Party’s economic agenda. Some wanted to take on Big Tech and Big Business. Others wanted the government to revive US manufacturing, while ditching free trade and getting tougher on China. And others wanted big new spending on social policy. But these advocates joined to fight a common enemy: neoliberalism. They sought to discredit the pro-free market and government-skeptical assumptions — and some of the specific people — that they argue drove economic policy in the Clinton and Obama years. The status quo, they believed, had hurt the American people and backfired on Democrats electorally.  In both the inside game of Democratic Party politics and the outside “war of ideas,” these post-neoliberals triumphed during the Trump and early Biden years — converting many party elites to their cause, securing key appointments, and shaping what became known to some as the New Progressive Economics.  The reformers went from irrelevant underdogs to well-organized, well-funded practitioners of hardball power politics shaping national policy. “This was an astonishing success, a seizure of some of the commanding heights of policymaking,” the historian Quinn Slobodian wrote in 2022.  Harris’s ascent has thrown all this into question. Some are urging Harris to undo some of Biden’s changes and steer the party closer to where it was in the Obama years — for instance, by being less hostile to big business and big tech. These critics point to Biden’s unpopularity, arguing that the new agenda has been tried and failed. So far, Harris’s team has tried to keep both the reformers and their critics happy, sending signals to each camp suggesting she’s with them. But for now, winning is her top priority. “I don’t think she has an economic philosophy, and I don’t think she wants to have one until she wins the election,” one advocate in close contact with the campaign told me. (This article is based on conversations with policy experts, advocates, and former government officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely.) But Harris and her party will have to choose a path forward if she wins. And understanding the present crossroads requires reckoning with why Democrats adopted this agenda in the first place.  Did the New Progressive Economics rise due to fundamental political shifts — or was it something of a fluke in a historical moment that has now passed?  And, on both the politics and the substance: Did it succeed, or did it fail? “A credible threat and pain inflicted”: How Elizabeth Warren became impossible for the party establishment to ignore The transformation of the Democratic Party began during Barack Obama’s second term, when some progressive thinkers and activists’ disappointment and frustration with his administration boiled over. The country had recovered from the Great Recession, but slowly. Banks were now somewhat more regulated, but Obama hadn’t fundamentally transformed the finance sector or punished bankers with prosecutions. Progressive critics believed this was because Obama’s top appointees, like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, were too sympathetic to finance and too beholden to the old economic establishment’s thinking.  The critics argued that there were far deeper problems with the US economy that required far more sweeping change. But what change, exactly? Inspired in part by Occupy Wall Street and its “We are the 99 percent” slogan, “inequality” became a new funding priority of progressive donors and foundations. “There was an understanding starting to form that the economy wasn’t delivering,” Felicia Wong, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, told me. Much of the rethinking was happening in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s orbit. Warren, a Harvard law professor and consumer law expert, had come to Washington in late 2008 to help Congress oversee the bank bailouts; she soon won national fame with her tough questioning of both bankers and Obama officials like Geithner.  Warren’s pet idea for a new consumer protection agency made it into law, and Obama gave her a temporary gig setting that agency up. But when she asked Obama if he’d give her the job permanently, he declined, arguing — likely correctly — that she couldn’t be confirmed by the Senate. “I was disappointed, but not surprised,” Warren later wrote. The natural solution was to run for Senate herself; she won her Massachusetts seat in 2012. Yet, nearly two years into her term, and after dismal 2014 midterm results for Democrats, Warren was frustrated — Obama’s team, she thought, still seemed beholden to the old ways. So she started to pick fights. She sank Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss, an investment banker, for a Treasury Department position, and gave a fiery speech blasting a financial regulation rollback in Congress’s year-end spending bill. Warren believed “personnel is policy,” and that Obama was simply appointing and listening to too many of the wrong people. Warren also began to look beyond Wall Street in her desire to find what ailed the American economy. She embraced a theory, pushed by a small group of writers and advocates like Barry Lynn, Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, and David Dayen, that the problem wasn’t just finance but also Big Tech and big corporations generally.  Traditional antitrust policy had been that the government should intervene when corporate concentration raised prices for consumers. But these advocates wanted to rethink and expand the concept of antitrust — to make it about challenging the concentration of corporate power, even when the companies in question (like Amazon) offered low prices to consumers. This was the start of the new antitrust movement. Warren’s outspokenness caught Hillary Clinton’s attention. Wary of a primary challenge from the left, she arranged a sit-down with Warren, in which the Massachusetts senator made clear what she really cared about: She didn’t want Wall Street’s preferred appointees, and she had her own list of people she liked better. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign amped up the populist pressure on Clinton. Yet instead of endorsing Sanders, who few believed could win, Warren remained neutral during the primaries, preserving her chance to play an inside game with Clinton afterward. Talks between Warren’s and Clinton’s camps continued up to Election Day. The Roosevelt Institute established itself as a progressive competitor to Democrats’ favorite think tank, the Center for American Progress, and sent along Warren-friendly names: binders full of progressives. Warren had made herself someone that Democratic leaders couldn’t ignore. “In early 2014, nobody cared at all what our side thought because there was no credible threat and no pain inflicted,” a former Warren aide told me. “By 2016, they did care — because there was a credible threat and there was pain inflicted.”  A Clinton transition official backed up this assessment, telling Politico, “It was kind of a pain in the ass to be thinking about her all the time.” Still, though she and her allies had won a seat at the table, they weren’t at the head of the table just yet. “A semi-vast left-wing conspiracy”: How Democrats crafted a new agenda during the Trump years Trump’s 2016 victory came as a seismic shock to Democrats. Party elites were so stunned by Clinton’s defeat that they began to question their fundamental assumptions about how politics worked. The establishment was grappling for answers; some of them looked in the mirror and wondered: Was this our fault? A well-funded effort to convince them that it was indeed their fault soon materialized. Influential progressives who wanted to challenge the party’s consensus saw opportunity. Larry Kramer, the head of the Hewlett Foundation, launched a heavily-funded effort to discredit neoliberalism as an “intellectual paradigm.” The Ford Foundation, having already reoriented its giving around inequality in 2015, joined in. The Omidyar Network (funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar) began its own push to “reimagine capitalism.” So during the Trump years, money flowed into think tanks and advocacy groups old and new, in a project inspired by conservative donors’ decades-long project of building a right-wing counter-establishment. In his book The Middle Out, journalist Mike Tomasky dubbed this an “increasingly at least semi-vast left-wing conspiracy” — a “network of people and groups” that “helped change the economic conversation in dramatic ways.” Close ties developed among many of these thinkers and experts, many of whom had nonprofit posts but hoped to enter government or influence appointments later on. Hewlett and Omidyar grants also funded new centers at universities and projects at certain media outlets (including this one — the Omidyar Network funded two Vox reporting projects in 2019 and 2020, though they had no editorial oversight over these projects). A key figure in this grant-making effort was Jennifer Harris, who headed the Hewlett Foundation’s grantmaking on economic issues. Harris had come to progressive economics from an unusual direction: through foreign policy. She was a national security hawk who, while working at the State Department, came to believe that the US’s longtime approach to trade deals had been disastrously captured by big corporations — that it had hollowed out important domestic industries and posed serious strategic risks in a new era of great power competition with China.  Harris concluded that flawed and outdated neoliberal thinking was failing the country on many fronts. “Paradigms like neoliberalism function at a society level,” she told me. “Their power derives precisely from how many of their premises are taken for granted, and for how much consensus they enjoy, across the ideological spectrum.” The world, she continued, was at a “dangerous” juncture, due to “the return of great power competition and the urgency of climate change.”  With Hewlett’s grant-making, Harris wanted to help shape a new intellectual paradigm to more effectively grapple with these new challenges. She funded many left critiques of neoliberalism, as well as a few from the right. Funding the New Progressive Economics Between 2017 and 2024, the Hewlett Foundation spent tens of millions of dollars to develop alternatives to neoliberalism. Grantees included: Progressive think tanks: Hewlett funded policy work at the Roosevelt Institute ($5.8 million), Washington Center on Equitable Growth ($6.1 million), Economic Policy Institute ($1.4 million), Demos ($1.1 million), and the Center for Economic and Policy Research ($615,000). The new antitrust movement: Grants went to Open Markets ($750,000), the American Economic Liberties Project ($450,000), and the Economic Security Project’s Anti-Monopoly Fund ($1.3 million). Groups on the right: Hewlett funded the policy group American Compass ($2.9 million) and the journal American Affairs ($1.2 million), which challenged the right’s free-market thinking. Media: Hewlett funded coverage of and reporting projects about new economic thinking at the Atlantic ($1.3 million), Boston Review ($1.9 million), and the American Prospect ($665,000), though it did not have editorial oversight over such coverage. Academia: Hewlett funded new research initiatives or centers on the economy at Harvard ($7.5 million), Yale ($4 million), Johns Hopkins ($15 million), Howard ($10 million), UC Berkeley ($9.8 million), and MIT ($7.5 million). But what, exactly, would the new agenda entail? For one, many progressives embraced Warren and her allies’ antitrust push. So did Democratic leaders, who were seeking populist policies as their party was turning against Big Tech. After the leading new antitrust movement activists had been controversially ousted from the New America Foundation think tank, they formed new advocacy groups that won Hewlett and Omidyar funding.  Onetime blogger Matt Stoller became particularly influential on this topic — through his book Goliath, an email newsletter, and his pugnacious Twitter presence, he hammered home the message that Big Tech and big business were at the heart of the country’s woes. Warren, who has praised Stoller as “a brilliant thinker and writer,” released a plan to break up Big Tech companies in 2019, near the start of her own presidential campaign. But beyond aligning with the Warrenites, Jen Harris also began to help shape another pillar of Democrats’ agenda: a new industrial policy, in which the government would intervene in the economy by financially supporting key industries — with strings attached.  Good free-market neoliberals had historically disdained this idea, believing government attempts to meddle in the economy would have bad results. But industrial policy appealed to several important Democratic constituencies. Labor wanted more US union jobs. Climate change activists wanted money for the clean energy sector. National security hawks wanted to challenge China. Political operatives thought it might play well in the Rust Belt. Much of the business community might be happy about it too — after all, it involved giving US companies money. Democratic policy wunderkind Jake Sullivan liked what Jen Harris — and Elizabeth Warren — had to say. In line for a top policy job under Hillary Clinton, Sullivan had been one of those undergoing a dark night of the soul since 2016. He had considered a top lobbying job at Google, but instead chose to work at nonprofits rethinking the policy agenda. And by June 2018, he sounded excited about what he was seeing. “There’s something profound happening in American politics right now,” Sullivan wrote in Democracy. He asserted the country was at a “turning point,” disillusioned by free-market excesses and open to bold new policies. “Democrats should not blush too much, or pay too much heed, when political commentators arch their eyebrows about the party moving left,” he continued. “The center of gravity itself is moving, and this is a good thing.”  “I never thought I’d live to see a time when my allies were in charge”: How progressives won on personnel under Biden The left did not technically win the 2020 Democratic primary, as Joe Biden — the most old school of the major contenders — emerged triumphant over Sanders and Warren.  But Biden embraced the new agenda anyway. He had long been close to labor and skeptical of pointy-headed economists from elite universities. (“He’s so old,” Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute later said, “that it turns out he’s actually pre-neoliberal.”) Now, amid the deepening pandemic crisis, the idea of an “FDR-size presidency” sounded appealing. Key aides around him, like Ron Klain and Bruce Reed, agreed that bold progressive thinking was needed, and Sullivan became the campaign’s top policy adviser. Wong was named to the transition team. Other progressives wanted to hold Biden’s feet to the fire from the outside once he won. Warren’s chief of staff Dan Geldon departed her office, starting a firm pushing opposition research about potential appointees he deemed unreliable. Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project frequently disparaged potential nominees as corporate hacks and sellouts.  Such attacks often showed up in the American Prospect and the Intercept, two publications solidly aligned with the new agenda. Hewlett or Omidyar money helped fund the links in this chain — the semi-vast left-wing conspiracy was at work. (Its participants argued they were fighting against far greater corporate money and influence.) The good-cop, bad-cop approach succeeded. Champions of the new progressive economics such as Jen Harris and many Warren allies scored key White House and regulatory posts. Biden’s Cabinet secretaries were more traditional Democrats, but when they tried to staff their agencies, their picks were often overruled by the White House in favor of alternatives preferred by the Warrenites.  The new antitrust movement scored particularly big, though it took some hardball. Biden got Lina Khan confirmed by the Senate as an FTC commissioner and only afterward revealed he’d make her the commission’s chair; Republicans (and some Democrats) were shocked that the 32-year-old calling for a total rethink of antitrust policy would be in charge. Reformers also wanted attorney Jonathan Kanter, a longtime critic of Google, for the top Department of Justice antitrust job. Attorney General Merrick Garland initially seemed disinclined to follow their counsel — but when word leaked out that Garland was considering other contenders, articles slamming them appeared in the Prospect and the Intercept. Kanter got the gig. Quickly, Biden’s administration took on a different character from Obama’s. ”Economists and financiers are simply far less influential,” Ezra Klein reported. The nonprofit world and labor leaders rose in influence. So did elite progressive lawyers: the Biden administration was chock-full of Yale Law grads, including Sullivan, Khan, and Jen Harris. (Twenty-five of Harris’s Hewlett grantees got Biden administration jobs, according to Tomasky’s book The Middle Out.) (Some of) Biden’s progressive appointees Lina Khan: A leading intellectual of the new antitrust movement, Khan’s aggressive tenure atop the FTC has chilled corporate consolidation. Jonathan Kanter: A law partner who’d spent years suing Google in private practice, Kanter is now suing Google atop the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Rohit Chopra: He helped Elizabeth Warren set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) back when it was established — now he heads the bureau. Jennifer Harris: After steering millions in Hewlett Foundation grants to critique neoliberalism, Harris had a White House post on international economic issues from 2021 to 2023. Bharat Ramamurti and Jon Donenberg: Former Warren aide Ramamurti was deputy director of Biden’s National Economic Council; after he stepped down in 2023, Warren’s chief of staff, Donenberg, succeeded him. Gautam Raghavan: The former chief of staff to Rep. Pramila Jayapal heads the White House Presidential Personnel Office, giving progressives great influence over staff hiring. K. Sabeel Rahman: A law professor who was president of the think tank Demos, Rahman headed the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a powerful post with oversight over regulations, from 2021 to 2023. Progressives’ appointment success took on particular importance because Biden took a hands-off approach to economic policy. It was “very, very rare,” a former administration official told me, for a decision memo outlining different courses of action supported by different economic aides to be sent to the president. Biden would offer his feedback on policy plans during briefings; but staff would typically send “joint recommendation memos” that he’d then sign. In practice, that gave staff great freedom to shape policy, so long as they could agree with each other. When the Hewlett Foundation hosted a conference on the future of neoliberalism, several Biden administration officials attended. So did the American Prospect’s Bob Kuttner, a longtime, often-lonely critic of the economic policy establishment. Afterward, Kuttner marveled: “I never thought I’d live to see a time when my allies were in charge of the government.” The successes and struggles of Bidenomics With Democrats in control of Congress for the first time in a decade, the party wanted to make the most of their governing majority — and that meant going big.  They started off with a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill for pandemic recovery. Economists like Larry Summers complained that this was far too big — that its size seemed to go far beyond what economic analysis suggested was necessary, and that it could worsen inflation. Democrats in Congress and the administration dismissed these warnings, not wanting to repeat Obama’s mistake of spending too little. The rest of the Democrats’ big bold legislative agenda ran into the constraints of a 50-50 Senate. Republicans helped pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but for other progressive priorities, Democrats had to tailor their plans to the restrictions of the budget reconciliation process (which bypasses the filibuster). Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) then nixed the sweeping social spending in the Build Back Better plan. But in the summer of 2022, Manchin did approve massive new clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act.  Republicans also signed onto the CHIPS Act, a bill to award billions in grants to bolster a US semiconductor manufacturing industry. The bill was meant to address national security risks about the current Taiwan-centered supply chain, which was vulnerable to a future conflict with China. This was part of a broader Biden administration hardline toward Beijing that included tariffs and dramatic limits on semiconductor exports. The IRA and CHIPS Act meant the industrial policy agenda championed by Jen Harris had made it into law, and she helped steer its implementation in the administration. Meanwhile, Khan and Kanter swung into action on antitrust, suing Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Google, among other companies. Both became key to what the administration dubbed “Bidenomics” (and the New York Times would later dub Harris “The queen bee of Bidenomics”). But now that the new agenda was actually being implemented, its critics began to speak up — while its inherent tensions became more evident. Khan’s FTC tenure was cheered by progressives but controversial among agency staff and deeply loathed by business. She was criticized for bringing cases that seemed doomed in court — winning such cases would depend on persuading judges of new legal thinking, a project of years or decades. Khan and Kanter’s main impact was deterrence: fear of expensive investigations helped chill mergers and acquisitions. Democratic policy now appeared to be that big business shouldn’t get bigger. Meanwhile, the new industrial policy was sending billions in tax credits and grants to big US companies, which was a bit incongruous. Indeed, Warren and her allies increasingly looked askance at the CHIPS Act grants being made by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who they viewed as far too eager to send money out the door with insufficient oversight.  Progressives wanted to attach stringent labor, environmental, and social justice standards to such payouts. Others argued that demanding too much — the tendency Ezra Klein dubbed “everything-bagel liberalism” — could hamper the new industries from being built. (So far, spending on factory construction has doubled, but we are still years away from seeing whether these businesses will succeed.) The nitty-gritty of implementation also made clear that no one approach could make every constituency happy. Climate hawks complained about the administration’s tariffs on Chinese clean energy companies. Auto workers making gasoline-powered cars objected to a push toward electric vehicles. National security doves worried Biden’s China policy was too provocative. Unions’ interest in creating high-paying US jobs naturally clashed with corporate incentives to lower manufacturing costs. And did the administration really want to bolster US companies to help them compete globally — or did it want to take those companies down a peg? Yet in the public mind, the new economic agenda was largely overshadowed by a problem the reformers had not anticipated: the highest inflation in four decades. It was the neoliberals who had warned about this, while the progressives were caught flat-footed, as was the Biden administration. “People don’t like inflation and we got a lot of it,” economist Adam Ozimek told me. This was a global phenomenon and not primarily caused by Biden’s policies, but the administration was slow to adjust and made it somewhat worse. “The stimulus was way too large, it came out all at once, and they proceeded to follow it with a variety of spending packages,” Ozimek said. He added that the economy is now in a good place after hefty interest rate hikes, but that we took a “chaotic path” getting there. In the end, Biden’s economic policy ended up historically unpopular. That’s left a chasm between progressives who tout Biden’s presidency as one of the most productive and consequential in recent history, and a public deeply unsatisfied with his record. Perhaps the anti-Biden sentiment was more about his age, foreign crises, and inflation that mostly wasn’t his fault — but it’s hard to blame it on neoliberalism. “It’s hard to know what is real”: Reading the tea leaves about how Harris would govern Shortly after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, a factional contest for influence kicked off when billionaire Reid Hoffman — who had donated millions to elect Harris — publicly declared that she should replace Lina Khan at the FTC. Progressives responded with outrage, rallying to Khan’s defense and demanding Harris pledge to keep her in place. Harris has not yet taken a position on Khan’s future. Many believe Harris will be friendlier to business, and especially to Silicon Valley, than Biden was. These fears tend to center around Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, who is Uber’s chief legal officer and has become an important Harris campaign adviser. West has been cultivating Wall Street and Silicon Valley support for the campaign, sending the message that Harris would be an ally to the business community. More broadly, some center-left commentators argue the time has come for a rethink of Democrats’ rethink. Jonathan Chait proposed that Harris should revert to something more like the policy and politics of the Obama years (since Obama was a more popular and electorally successful president than Biden), while Matt Yglesias argued that the backlash against neoliberalism has “mostly served in practice as a way to tell people that it’s okay to do sloppy economic analysis.” Warren’s allies, meanwhile, were somewhat wrongfooted by Harris’s ascent, as they had not built much of a relationship with her. An incident last year where Warren sounded unsure on whether Harris should stay on the ticket as Biden’s running mate reportedly led to some tension between their respective camps.  Still, some early signs suggested Harris might continue the Biden-Warren approach. In August, her campaign announced that their economic advisory team would include Biden’s former National Economic Council director Brian Deese, and Bharat Ramamurti, a one-time Warren aide who had been Deese’s deputy. The reformers were initially encouraged when, in mid-August, Harris proposed a “federal ban on corporate price gouging” to combat high grocery costs. “I was really surprised and pleased that she pointed at big food corporations as a causal factor in higher food prices,” Matt Stoller told me shortly afterward. But centrist pundits criticized the idea, Republicans accused Harris of proposing socialistic price controls, and the campaign soon put out word that the policy would have limited impact. Later that month, Harris’s advisers said she supported a proposal to tax unrealized capital gains (stock that had appreciated but not yet been sold) for people worth more than $100 million. It was a way to raise revenue and hit the wealthy; in a CNBC appearance, Ramamurti defended the idea from skeptical anchors. But investors were furious. Soon afterward, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, a prominent supporter of Harris in close contact with the campaign, insisted that she wouldn’t actually go through with the idea, because it would “kill the stock market.” As the campaign has gone on, Harris’s economic line has appeared to some to grow more cautious. Her policy plan promises a lot of new and expanded tax credits, and would raise taxes on corporations and the very wealthy, but says relatively little about expanding the welfare state. She offered an olive branch to cryptocurrency companies — in contrast to top Biden appointees and Warren, who wanted to crack down on the industry. Harris has talked about cracking down on corporate “bad actors,” but emphasized that those are the exception. When I followed up with Stoller in late September after Harris’s Pittsburgh speech, his mood was one of deep pessimism. “I think she’s gonna do what rich people — billionaires — want,” he told me. The campaign’s economic proposals, Stoller said, were “a mishmash of nonsense.” The progressives who had joined the campaign’s economic team, he now believed, didn’t “have any real influence” and were only included to throw a bone to critics on the left. “I think this is the Tony West show,” he said. “And if she wants to make it clear that it’s not, she needs to say so.”  If Harris won and returned to neoliberal thinking, Stoller argued, the consequences would be “a failed presidency,” “intraparty war” and perhaps even “losing a war with China.” (After we spoke, Stoller called me back to say he was speaking for himself and not his employer, and that his views on Harris’s campaign changed day-to-day.) Others were more optimistic, or at least agnostic. Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project told me while he was “concerned” about Harris’s rhetoric and apparent friendliness to the cryptocurrency industry, he was cautiously optimistic that Harris would keep Khan and Kanter in place. “There isn’t really a meaningful policy apparatus and the transition is extremely barebones and noncommittal,” Hauser said. “So it’s hard to know what is real versus what will turn out to be smoke signals that are entirely irrelevant.” The antitrust agenda, reformers worry, could be dropped or seriously weakened. But for industrial policy, the question is less whether it will continue than what it will look like. Reformers fear it will become a corporate subsidy program in which the priorities of labor and other progressive interests take a backseat — that is, that it could start looking a lot more neoliberal.  Meanwhile, the world has changed from the Trump years. On a range of issues, the leftward movement of Democratic politicians and voters appears to have abated. Personnel changes and strategy shifts have occurred at the foundations and think tanks that pushed the new progressive economics. New topics, like AI, have risen to the top of the agenda, and need to be hashed out. For instance: should the US boost domestic AI development as part of security competition with China, or is any big AI company so dangerous that it should be regulated within an inch of its life?  The post-neoliberals’ level of influence in these debates will hinge on whether they’ve become an inextricable part of the Democratic coalition — or whether their rise under Biden was born of unusual circumstances that no longer exist. A critic of the reformers mused to me that their rise to power may have been largely due to “a lack of supervision” in the Biden White House: “And maybe once the president returns, the whole thing starts to implode.”

Preview: The Democratic Party is extraordinarily unified behind Vice President Kamala Harris — a cohesion born of a defeat-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs strategy in an election with deep consequences for the future of American democracy. But the truce is a fragile one that is likely to end with the presidential election, whether Harris wins or loses. If Harris is president, the progressive and centrist wings of the party will compete for control of her agenda. A Harris loss, meanwhile, would kick off a period of party-wide soul-searching and intense competition over the best ideological path forward. In a new series, Vox explains the current state of the American left: its transformation during the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, its coming internal debates and fractures, its power players and shifting constituencies, and its radically different trajectories, which hinge on what happens in November.  The series will include new pieces daily from October 14 to October 18. And please check out our September series: The present — and future — of the American right. CREDITS Reporters: Eric Levitz, Ian Millhiser, Nicole Narea, Christian Paz, Andrew Prokop  Editors: Sean Collins, Cameron Peters, Patrick Reis  Art Director: Paige Vickers Style & Standards: Elizabeth Crane, Anouck Dussaud, Kim Eggleston, Caity PenzeyMoog, Sarah Schweppe Audience: Shira Tarlo, Kelsi Trinidad Special thanks: Bill Carey, Elbert Ventura The rise — and fall? — of the New Progressive Economics Are Democrats really “losing” Latino voters? Read now The rise — and fall? — of the New Progressive Economics Are Democrats really “losing” Latino voters? The nightmare facing Democrats, even if Harris wins

Preview: In recent years, there’s been a growing appreciation for Indigenous land stewardship and traditional knowledge. But what gets overlooked is that successfully managing those lands means that Indigenous people have already survived severe climate events and extreme weather. Now, Indigenous communities are leading the way in climate adaptations — from living alongside rapidly melting ice to confronting rising seas and creating community support networks. Indigenous knowledge does not mean going back to “traditional” methods; it means evolving, a characteristic that has always been a part of Indigenous life. There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge. Recently we launched Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. This summer and fall, we’ll be publishing five features that center an Indigenous community confronting extreme weather on the front lines. This series has not set out to mythologize Indigenous communities with bespoke, unapproachable, or mystic traditional practices and solutions — but instead underscores humility as a throughline. Indigenous people realize we cannot bend the world to our human will. We’re far better and more resilient when we tune in and lean into changes when possible. By showing the connections between storms, climate disasters, and issues of tribal sovereignty, Changing With Our Climate will explore what it really means when we say that climate change is an existential threat — and how we can work together to find a way out. Colonial solutions to climate change aren’t working What Indigenous knowledge could mean in the fight to curb global warming. The tiny potato at the heart of one tribe’s fight against climate change Wetlands absorb carbon from the atmosphere. The Coeur d’Alene’s restoration would do more than just that. This coastal tribe has a radical vision for fighting sea-level rise in the Hamptons Next to some of the priciest real estate in the world, the Shinnecock Nation refuses to merely retreat from its vulnerable shoreline. We’re in a deadly cycle of mega fires. The way out is to burn more. How one Karuk fire crew leader is decolonizing our relationship to fire. What 6 degrees of warming means for a community built on ice Alaska is warming far faster than most of the world. For Indigenous people on the front lines, adaptation can be surprisingly simple. Our most meaningful solutions to the climate crisis are hidden in plain sight There’s no easy fix for the planet. But Indigenous people have simple solutions rooted in the depth of their knowledge.

Preview: In the world of neuroscience research, the mouse reigns supreme: in the US alone, tens of millions of mice are studied as a proxy for the human brain in labs. They’re small, they breed quickly, and they’re relatively easy to genetically manipulate, making mice ubiquitous in biomedical science. When studying something fundamental to biology, like how individual cells work, the leap from mouse to human doesn’t feel egregious. But when mice are used to study distinctly human conditions like autism, the parallels start to break down. Fifteen years ago, researchers introduced the first two mouse models of autism, each carrying a genetic mutation linked to autism in humans. They claimed that these mice behaved like autistic humans, unusually preferring solitude over meeting new mice, and squeaking only around half as often as their non-autistic littermates.  Their results made major waves, inspiring researchers to experiment with other autism-related genes. Since the late 2000s, neuroscientists have bred over 20 types of mouse models with motor problems, sensory sensitivities, and repetitive behaviors. These each capture some hallmark of human autism — provided you buy that a mouse burying marbles is the same as, for example, an autistic child insisting on eating the same food every day.  As a freshly minted PhD working at the National Institute of Mental Health in the late 2000s, Jill Silverman ran experiments on mice missing part of their SHANK3 gene, a mutation found in about 1 in 100 autistic people. These SHANK3 mice seemed to show “autistic-like behaviors” like social discomfort and compulsive grooming, similar to the repetitive body movements, or stimming, seen in some humans with autism. Silverman, now a principal investigator at the UC Davis Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (MIND) Institute, still gets compliments on these mice — even though many of her original findings couldn’t be reproduced in future experiments. “They’ll say all this amazing stuff praising it,” she said. “And I’m like, that is the biggest mistake this field has ever made.” Billions of dollars have been poured into autism research over the last decade, funding a staggering number of experiments — including over 1,500 studies in the US in 2020 alone. Many of these studies use animal models, especially mice.  Whether or not you believe that animal testing is ethical (many don’t), scientists in numerous research fields — especially neuroscience, genetics, and other areas of biology — run experiments on animals. To understand how cells in the brain communicate to form thoughts and guide behavior, you need a living brain connected to a living body. Millions of rodents are used — and nearly all killed — for science experiments every year, many of which are preclinical tests of new drugs and other treatments with potential public health benefits, including for autism.  And yet, all attempts to make drugs that help people manage some of the more challenging effects of autism, like sensory sensitivity or self-harm, have failed. When I asked senior scientist Brigitta Gundersen, who manages Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) funding for autism studies involving rodents, for an example of a tangible quality of life improvement that this line of research has given us, she paused. “I struggle to think of examples across all of psychiatry, frankly.” “There’s this overall idea that understanding biology and understanding mechanisms will lead to better interventions,” she said. “But that hasn’t totally panned out.” In theory, figuring out how autism manifests in the brain and body should help scientists develop better treatments for some of its more debilitating symptoms, like seizures, mobility challenges, and self-harm. Given how much we still have to learn about how the brain works, autistic or otherwise, this kind of research is “a really long game,” Gundersen said.  Mouse models of autism-related gene mutations may help uncover the underlying biology of autism in the long run. But autistic people understandably want tangible support now, and research serving that need is hugely underfunded. “It barely matters to us what a mouse model says,” said Sam Crane, an advocate for people with disabilities and a public member of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), a group that helps policymakers decide what types of autism research to pay for.  Others, including the parents of autistic children with very high support needs, fear that deprioritizing biological research will leave their loved ones behind, turning attention away from developing potentially lifesaving treatments. Massive funding agencies like the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are also wary of those trying to shift autism research away from genetics and neuroscience, arguing that scientific breakthroughs often come from long-term studies of fundamental biology — even when those studies don’t seem to offer real-world benefits in the short term.  Looking at the numbers, though, research exploring how to help autistic people navigate everyday life — the research many autistic people say they’d like to see — is still only getting about a quarter of the money allocated for autism research in the US. At a moment when autism diagnoses are on the rise — for reasons scientists still don’t fully understand — why are we spending so much on mice that might help humans eventually, and so little on services that could help humans now?  The history of autism research, briefly explained Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as defined by the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), is usually characterized by communication challenges, trouble navigating social interactions, and a high sensitivity to change.  It’s also defined by how different the roughly 5.4 million people diagnosed with autism in the US are from each other. The wide umbrella of ASD includes people who live independently, have fulfilling careers and relationships, and can advocate for their own needs. It also includes people who don’t speak much (or at all), use a wheelchair, and may require full-time support from a caregiver for the entirety of their lives. Biologically speaking, autism — like the brain in general — is still poorly understood. In the 1950s and 1960s, medical professionals embraced the now-discredited “refrigerator mother” theory linking autism to cold, distant parenting, blaming mothers for their children’s condition. Later, psychologist Bernie Rimland presented evidence that autism is rooted in biology. Then, former physician Andrew Wakefield published a paper in 1998 incorrectly linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, fueling the modern anti-vaccination movement.  Today, most researchers believe that autism is strongly influenced by genetics. However, when symptoms can include everything from difficulty reading social cues to seizures to constipation, it’s hard to figure out what genes might be causing what — after all, over several decades of work, scientists have compiled a list of 100 or so genes that might be linked to autism.  To leaders at private funding agencies like SFARI, Autism Speaks, and the Autism Science Foundation (ASF), that complexity is precisely why we need basic research to explore the underlying biology and genetics of autism. The ultimate goal of these funders, several of whom have autistic children, is to find treatments for autism. Historically, some of these institutions even wanted to find “cures.” But digging into the genetics of autism in the early aughts raised more questions than answers, forcing researchers to reconsider what autism even is. Meanwhile, in the absence of meaningful medical progress, some desperate parents turned to extreme DIY “cures” like making their autistic kids drink bleach. “Despite the fact that they’re pointing in diametrically opposed directions, there’s a common theme with the refrigerator mother approach and the anti-vaccine approach,” said Ari Ne’eman, assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-founder of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN). “Namely, they both really emphasize the idea of causation as central to the business of autism advocacy.” Framing autism as a disease that “happens” to otherwise-healthy children as a consequence of their parenting, genetics, or environment makes it feel like something that science can fix, or even prevent in the first place. For many diseases — think deadly cancers — this wouldn’t be controversial.  But many autistic adults believe the “causation” framing is hugely misguided. Efforts to pinpoint genetic markers of autism have raised serious concerns about eugenics — namely, that if parents could get a prenatal test for autism, many of them would choose not to have those children.  Prenatal tests for many diseases, like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, already exist, and the fears of autism advocates are not unfounded. In Iceland, for example, nearly 100 percent of parents who get prenatal tests for Down syndrome — a chromosomal condition affecting as many as 6 million people worldwide, many of whom live long, healthy, fulfilling lives — choose to abort their pregnancy if the results are positive, causing the population of Down syndrome children to almost completely disappear there. Even in the US, where abortion is politically fraught, over two-thirds of parents choose not to give birth after finding out their child will have Down syndrome. Should it also be acceptable for parents to abort a pregnancy if they learn that their child will be autistic? “Autism research was really built with the assumption that the goal is a world without autism,” Ne’eman said. But a growing number of people embrace the neurodiversity movement, proposing that autism is simply another way to move through the world. To them, the condition is not something to cure with medication or prevent with prenatal testing. This shift has led to significant controversy in the world of autism research. Autism Speaks came under fire in the mid-2010s for portraying autism as a devastating disease that ought to be stamped out, before denouncing that rhetoric in 2016. For now, an effective prenatal test is not widely available — while autism does seem to be strongly influenced by genetics, there isn’t a single gene that flags autism. Prenatal tests and emerging gene-editing tools like CRISPR seem to work best for conditions caused by a single genetic mutation, like sickle cell disease.  However, scientists have listed about 100 genes that all seem related to someone’s likelihood of being diagnosed with autism, making a target for potential screenings, drugs, or other therapies much harder to pin down. Mutations in any one gene don’t necessarily mean that a person will be autistic, or shape what autism will look like for them. While some single-gene mutations cause specific neurodevelopmental disorders that fall under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder, like fragile X syndrome, they are relatively rare. All considered, autism isn’t currently something that can be addressed by traditional drug development pipelines. Yet, funding for projects studying the biology of autism more than quadrupled since 2008, while funding for projects finding better ways to help autistic people in day-to-day life fell or remained stagnant. Under the Combating Autism Act, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2006, Congress established the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee. As the name suggests, the Combating Autism Act was focused on finding treatments to prevent or “cure” autism.  At the time, the vast majority of IACC members were not autistic — and their funding priorities were oriented accordingly. Their first set of recommendations, published in 2009, heavily skewed toward funding the search for causes and cures of autism. For example, they proposed spending $75 million on developing animal models of autism — nearly 50 times more than they suggested spending on studying everyday support services for autistic people. Can biologists breed autistic mice? (Not really.) In the world of biomedical research, where there are genetic risk factors, there are genetically altered mouse models. But by continuing to fall back on the rodents that they are so accustomed to studying, researchers are holding themselves back from fully understanding how autism manifests in humans.  Mice are small, reproduce quickly, and share about 85 percent of their functional genes with humans, making them desirable to geneticists hoping to study diseases outside of the human body. While non-animal models are slowly replacing animal testing in many areas of science, “you need a live animal to study a disorder that’s solely behavioral,” Silverman said. “Cells don’t behave.” Mice behave, but their behavior is very different from ours. So, neuroscientists have had to stretch to draw parallels between the behavior of mice and autistic humans. If a mouse buries marbles with unusual fervor or over-grooms themselves, a study may qualify it as “repetitive behavior.” If a mouse prefers being alone to hanging out with a stranger mouse in its cage, it’s displaying “social deficits.” Studies have even measured changes in ultrasonic vocalizations in mice to try to understand speech problems in autistic humans, and recorded electrical activity from the brains of dogs with autism-related gene mutations to see whether LSD could improve their social interactions. Animal behavior is finicky, though — especially when those animals are living in tiny laboratory cages, far from their natural habitat. The same mouse in the same marble-burying setup, for example, may bury fewer marbles than usual one day because it got distracted by the smell of whatever shampoo the experimenter used that morning.  Human error can play a role, too. An exhausted grad student may miscount the number of times two mice bump noses. Researchers in different labs may not even agree what that nose-bumping behavior means, or how to classify it in their papers. It “just lends itself to a lack of reproducibility,” Gundersen said.  It also makes preclinical trials for new treatments, which are often conducted in animals, challenging to translate to humans. Many symptoms, especially those related to social interactions and communication, are distinctly human — so much so that they’re nearly impossible to reproduce in mice. “You know,” Gundersen said, “no mice talk.” Today, more scientists are rejecting the idea that mice can actually exhibit autistic-like behaviors. “Nobody thinks that mice are people,” Gundersen told me. “Nobody thinks that mice are modeling autism.” But the number of publications featuring “mouse model(s) of autism” in the title has steadily increased since they were first introduced in the mid-2000s. A cynic might wonder why scientists are continuing to pursue this line of research, when both autistic self-advocates and a growing number of leaders in biomedicine are saying that it doesn’t make any sense. Ne’eman said that some people in the autistic community jokingly refer to autism research as a “geneticist’s Full Employment Act” — a parallel to the proposed Autism Full Employment Act, which would create incentives for workplaces to hire autistic people. The grant application system is really competitive. To boost their chances of getting research funding, applicants increasingly have to twist their research proposals to align with whoever will give them money. A lab interested in studying how gene expression guides brain cells to form connections with each other, for example, could pitch it as an autism study to open up additional funding opportunities. So, Ne’eman suspects that some scientists are “looking at the autism research agenda as exclusively or primarily a vehicle for a relatively small number of abstract questions of basic science,” which aims to expand knowledge without necessarily translating to new drugs or other practical applications. Just look at the mice: it’s been clear for years that they’re a bad proxy for autistic people, but many biomedical researchers have built their careers around using them. Moving away from dysfunctional models requires time, money, and critically evaluating old, imperfect findings — something scientists aren’t really incentivized to do.  People like Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, worry that self-advocates like Ne’eman are too dismissive of basic science. But it isn’t that autistic people don’t value science. Rather, many of them think the somewhat futile search for a “cure” to autism shouldn’t receive as much funding as it does, relative to other areas of research. A more promising path for biomedical researchers could be studying rare neurodevelopmental disorders, like Angelman syndrome and Rett syndrome, caused by mutations in a single gene that exists in both mice and humans. People with disorders like these often have symptoms experienced by others with autism, like seizures, gastrointestinal issues, and insomnia — which are more easily quantifiable in mice than, say, language. Silverman moved her lab in this direction entirely, after losing faith in models of other “autism-like behaviors.” She hopes that a clearer understanding of these specific genetic mutations will lay the foundation for things like better epilepsy medications down the line — not only for those with Angelman syndrome, but for anyone who experiences seizures alongside autism. I asked Halladay what research she wanted to see, as the mother of an autistic daughter. She agreed that more investigations of conditions related to autism, like sensory sensitivity, would be incredibly helpful to families like her own. Halladay, like many other parents, doesn’t want her daughter’s autism to go away; she just wants more support — and possibly medicine — to help her child live the best life possible. Autism research is torn between different visions In general, Ne’eman thinks that “the average autistic person, as well as the average family member, doesn’t wake up in the morning thinking, ‘Have they found a better mouse model?’” They do think about whether they’ll be able to find a full-time caretaker who is covered by insurance, or what the newest adaptive communication devices will be capable of. When autistic self-advocates were largely excluded from the decision-making process, funding for things that would help them immediately, like communication assistance or housing support, fell by the wayside.  That’s since changed — today, the IACC includes 23 non-autistic government employees and 22 public members, seven of whom are autistic themselves. Their budget priorities have shifted accordingly, centering research questions like “What services and supports are needed to maximize health and well-being?” in addition to basic biology studies. At the same time, the gap between the committee’s proposed budget and how much funders actually spend has also grown. And while funding for services and support doubled between 2019 and 2020, it still only accounted for 8.4 percent of the money spent that year.  One big thing standing in the way of the IACC’s recommendations and reality: the biggest sources of science funding, public and private, weren’t really built to fund things other than biology research. Of the 28 organizations listed as funding autism-related projects between 2019 and 2020, the National Institutes of Health and SFARI — which only award grants for basic science and clinical research — together paid for over 80 percent of research.  Agencies like the Department of Education and the Administration for Community Living pay for projects studying interventions like how to help autistic adults avoid institutionalization and live as independently as possible — major priorities for autistic self-advocates. However, they only fund a tiny portion of autism research. Solving this problem will likely require a major redistribution of funding, or a big overall increase in the pool of money available to everyone. “I’m not sure that you can totally fix it by just yelling at the NIH,” Crane said. In fact, she suspects that the Office of National Autism Coordination, housed within the NIH, knows that they’re supposed to be funding more studies about how to support autistic people — they’re just not receiving grant applications for them. The NIH did not respond to Vox’s requests for comment by the time of publication. One solution the IACC recommended involves growing the overall pool of money set aside for autism research to $685 million by next year. They specifically highlighted three research areas that need the most additional resources: lifespan issues, evidence-based interventions and services, and the development of culturally responsive services. By “lifespan issues,” the IACC means anything related to big life transitions: access to higher education and employment, opportunities to live as independently as possible alongside non-autistic community members, and health care. Figuring out how to help autistic adults — including those with the most severe disabilities — find fulfilling jobs that they’re good at, stay out of harmful psychiatric institutions, and form healthy relationships doesn’t require mouse models. It requires piloting initiatives like new housing programs, building better assistive communication devices, and other community-oriented research. Studying existing interventions to make sure they’re helping autistic people — not just making them appear non-autistic in public — is also crucial, Crane said. For example, applied behavioral analysis (ABA) therapy, which rewards “goal behaviors” like making eye contact or saying hello to people, is controversial in the autistic community because it can be experienced as abusive and coercive. Most existing studies on the effectiveness of ABA measured things like whether recipients behaved better in the classroom, rather than long-term outcomes like overall academic achievement or quality of life. With more money, Crane hopes this can change. “We need to be funding research that actually tracks the outcomes that matter to people.” The bottom line is that we don’t need more mouse models of autism or of autism-like behaviors. Biomedical science has a role to play, especially in helping people manage symptoms of other autism-related health issues like epilepsy and sleep disorders — but it has claimed a disproportionately large chunk of autism research funding for too long.  Some people, especially the parents of children with intellectual and physical disabilities related to autism, argue that autistic self-advocates who push back against the biomedical research agenda are acting out of self-interest, leaving those with the most severe disabilities behind. People with different experiences of autism, Autism Science Foundation president Alison Singer argues, need different things. Specifically, she believes that people with the most severe disabilities need the kinds of pharmaceutical interventions that biomedical research aims to find — and that many autistic self-advocates want to deprioritize. Ne’eman believes the opposite is true. “Those with the most severe impairments are especially poorly served by research that does not relate back to their needs,” he said. In its statement on genetic research, the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network emphasizes, “Autistic people with the highest support needs are some of the most vulnerable members of our community. They deserve good lives with the right to make their own decisions, not yet another round of ‘cures’ that will not work.” Neuroscience still has a lot to offer the autism community, but neuroscientists need to listen to the people they’re claiming to serve. Ditching outdated behavioral tests on mouse models of “autism-like behavior” might be a great place to start.

Preview: Alaska’s glaciers are melting at a record rate due to global warming. | Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Hi, I’m Paige Vega, Vox’s climate editor. Over the past few months, I’ve been working with Joseph Lee, a New York City-based journalist and member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe, on a series exploring Indigenous solutions that address extreme weather and climate change. And today, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’ve published the project’s latest feature, a story that takes us to Idaho, where the Coeur d’Alene Tribe is undergoing a sweeping, multi-decade effort to restore an important wetland on the reservation. Their restoration, guided by the return of ancestral food sources, could serve as a model for the rest of the country. You can read it here.   Stories like the Coeur d’Alene’s highlight the value of Indigenous solutions as we face increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters and navigate the brutal effects of the climate crisis.   Around the world, Indigenous people have the smallest carbon footprint, according to the United Nations, but are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change because they disproportionately live in geographically high-risk areas.  At the same time, these communities are also key sources of knowledge and understanding on climate change impacts, responses, and adaptation. Their traditional knowledge — focused on sustainability and resilience, from forecasting weather patterns to improving agricultural practices and management of natural resources — has increasingly gained recognition at the international level as a vital way to tackle climate change. I talked with Lee about the process of exploring several tribes’ climate dilemmas, and why the alternative posture they’re taking can offer us uniquely humble, approachable, and nature-first holistic approaches — something we could all take to heart.  Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Paige Vega: Let’s talk about the project Changing With Our Climate and how it came to be. What were some of the goals you had — things you really wanted to hit home through these stories? Joseph Lee: We wanted to look at different ways Indigenous people are adapting to climate change and extreme weather. For years, I’ve been hearing a lot about how Indigenous people are on the front lines of climate change and that Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship are good for the environment, so we wanted to explore in depth what that actually looks like in different Indigenous communities. In each story, we really wanted to focus on a specific community, to show the diversity of Indian Country, the challenges tribes are facing, but also the range of creative solutions they’re working on.  How do you draw on your own perspective and life experiences as well as your professional experiences reporting on Indigenous communities?   Writing this series gave me a lot of opportunities to think about my own tribe, the Aquinnah Wampanoag. For example, in writing about the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s water potato harvest, in our story that published on Vox today, I was reminded of my tribe’s annual cranberry harvest, which I just attended. Or when I visited the Shinnecock Nation in August, I couldn’t help but see the similarities between their tension with their wealthy Hamptons neighbors and my tribe’s experience on Martha’s Vineyard. I think my personal experience can help me think about what questions to ask, but my background doesn’t give me any sort of secret code to understanding other tribes. Every tribe is different, and my goal for this series was to show the specific situations facing each featured community.  What is the value of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous solutions? What can all communities learn from the distinct way that tribes grapple with extreme weather and climate change? Indigenous traditional ecological knowledge is based on generations of experience with land and environment. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe, for example, relied on a beloved elder’s memory when they began reconnecting old stream channels in their wetlands restoration project. And in our first piece [about how an Alaskan tribe dependent on sea ice is adapting to rapid warming], Roberta Tuurraq Glenn-Borade, an Iñupiaq researcher, told me how she is gathering local observations about the climate in the Alaskan Arctic to help leave a detailed record for the future. That’s what Indigenous knowledge is, she said — an understanding developed over years and years. All of these stories show how it’s about constant evolution and looking forward. Indigenous knowledge has never been set in stone, and in the face of climate change, Indigenous people are adapting more than ever.  What were some of the highlights or unexpected insights that blew you away? One of the things that struck me is that Indigenous people have been saying and doing these things for years, so the question becomes what’s been stopping them [now]. Sometimes colonialism can seem abstract, but there are so many clear examples, whether that’s systemic racism in the Hamptons against the Shinnecock Nation or the legacy of allotment policies on the Coeur d’Alene reservation. Government policies have made it that much harder for tribes to adapt to climate change. Threats to tribal sovereignty can also be seen as threats to climate adaptation.  On the other hand, despite the legacy of colonialism, some of these solutions are really straightforward ideas, like bringing good fire [also known as controlled burns] back to the land after decades of fire suppression policies. There’s a lesson here that we don’t have to overcomplicate these ideas, we just have to not just listen to people who have been doing the work for generations, but support them or get out of their way.  What’s one lesson or takeaway that you’d like to leave readers with? There are two things that I kept hearing while reporting these stories. The first is that we can’t control nature, that trying to impose our will on the environment has never worked. For the Shinnecock Nation on Long Island, for example, they understand that no matter what they do, they can’t stop the water from rising. So they are working with that knowledge to find a solution that will work for their community.  The second is that we need to be thinking more long-term. The real change is going to take generations. A number of the Indigenous people I spoke to for this series talked about how they don’t expect to see the results of their work in their lifetimes, but they believe in it anyway. People in the Coeur d’Alene Tribe talked about how the previous generation of tribal leaders fought for legal justice but never saw the fruits of their labor, and now this generation understands they may not be around to see the salmon fully return, or their wetland restoration completed.  I think that kind of commitment to an effort that you may never see completed is something we could all learn from.

Preview: This story is the fourth feature in a Vox special project, Changing With Our Climate, a limited-run series exploring Indigenous solutions to extreme weather rooted in history — and the future. Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.  The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered. James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.  “I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’” After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging thatback persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.  Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.  All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.  To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.  The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato. “We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.” Bring back the water potato, help the climate Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.  For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the lynchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the US the combined size of Rhode Island disappeared.  There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.  The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.  Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.  James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.  “We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.” An environmental restoration — and a cultural one, too On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.   In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.  For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.  Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.  This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.” While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.  The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.  The tribe has used beaver dam analogs — man-made approximations — to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.  Trees, beavers, salmon, water — they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.” These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.  By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.  “The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.” Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.  Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said. Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”  So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”

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Preview: The Supreme Court grappled Tuesday with whether a trucker fired for failing a drug test after ingesting a cannabis product can collect damages in a challenge centering on a law that usually targets organized crime and racketeering.

Preview: Seven cownose stingrays made it safely to a habitat at The Florida Aquarium after riding out Hurricane Milton in a touch tank at Tropicana Field, home of MLB's Tampa Bay Rays.

Preview: The New York Times sent a cease and desist letter to the Jeff Bezos-backed artificial intelligence platform Perplexity this week, alleging the company is illegally accessing paywalled content to train its model.

Preview: Rep. Byron Donalds disputed former President Donald Trump's claim that the military might be used to handle "radical left lunatics" if chaos ensues after the election.

Preview: House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday said any attempt from Iran to assassinate former President Donald Trump would be an act of war.

Preview: The largest retail trade group in the United States said Tuesday that it expects consumers to spend more during the upcoming holiday shopping season but the growth in sales to be slower than last year due to concerns over persistent inflation and prices.

Preview: The Fairfax County Police Department has released footage from an officer's body camera showing a knife-wielding woman slashing the officer several times before he shot and killed her in the hallway of her Reston apartment building last month.

Preview: More than 6 in 10 adults say the belligerent presidential race has damaged their mental health, according to a Forbes survey that finds the strain has severed some relationships.

Preview: WEST PALM BEACH, FL — Multiple unnerved sources recently confirmed a potentially worrisome bit of news: Barron Trump has apparently tamed a sandworm.

Preview: HOUSTON, TX — As the world still celebrated the astonishing accomplishment of SpaceX catching its returning Starship, NASA officials were baffled at how Elon Musk managed to succeed without as many gay non-binary Muslim dwarfs of color as they have.

Preview: U.S. — A groundbreaking new study revealed a shocking insight into the masculine psyche, showing that 100% of men fantasize about launching their car off of every auto transport trailer they see while driving.

Preview: RESTON, VA — A local law enforcement officer found himself on the receiving end of fierce public backlash and allegations of racism for stubbornly refusing to allow a black woman to murder him with a knife.

Preview: Another Columbus Day has come and gone, along with the annual tradition of different groups of people debating Christopher Columbus's place in history and whether he was a hero to be celebrated or the perpetrator of horrible acts. You may have heard allegations that Columbus did bad things, but you haven't heard the half of it.

Preview: SAINT PAUL, MN — Minnesota Governor Tim Walz canceled his campaign events today after spotting a spider on the wall of the living room and immediately jumping up on a chair to safety, where he spent the rest of the day waiting for his wife to get home.

Preview: U.S. — Hoping to round out her presidential campaign on a strong note, Vice President Kamala Harris announced the upcoming release of her all-new, completely original book titled The Art of the Deal just in time for election day.

Preview: Like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay. Last week's unveiling of Elon Musk's Optimus bot, a humanoid machine designed to perform virtually any task, is proof of that. But are there downsides?

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — Alejandro Mayorkas recently fell under suspicion of using Jedi mind tricks after the Secretary of Homeland Security started desperately waving his hands around while claiming that the Biden-Harris administration has not intentionally allowed millions of illegals to cross the US border to vote.

Preview: The Babylon Bee recognizes that we occupy land originally inhabited and cared for by Morton & Mayfield Accounting LLC. We honor and pay respect to their company presidents and subordinates — past, present, and future — as they continue their accounting practices in another office — a place they were relocated to against their will because they couldn't pay their space rent. We acknowledge that buying office space resulted in them moving to another office, as well as possibly genocide and multigenerational trauma.

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Preview: Gen Z voters ages 18 to 27 could tip the scale in a tight race for the White House. The Onion shares the issues that are most important to the nation’s youngest eligible voters heading into the 2024 election. Economy: Like generations before them, Gen Z seems to prefer a good economy to a lousy […] The post What Issues Are Most Important To Gen Z Voters? appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: CHICAGO—Observing the 300-pound captive ape from the other side of his enclosure, Lincoln Park Zoo guests expressed empathy this week for western lowland gorilla Nzinga, who looked bored out of his mind reading Wuthering Heights.  Concerned visitors reported seeing the 26-year-old silverback resting his head on his hairy fist as he stared down at the […] The post Zoo Gorilla Looks Bored Out Of Mind Reading ‘Wuthering Heights’ appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: An incident report found that a pilot who died after crashing a helicopter into a hotel in Australia had “significant blood alcohol content” during the unauthorized flight, causing hundreds of guests and staff to be evacuated from the DoubleTree when the aircraft hit the top floor and burst into flames. What do you think? The post Helicopter Pilot Who Crashed Into Hotel Revealed To Be Drunk appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: NEW YORK—Following months of soul searching and a protracted home sale negotiation, the New York Yankees reportedly moved to Southport, CT this week to settle down and raise their kids. “We really love this city and have had some of the best nights of our lives here, but we decided it was time to prioritize what’s […] The post Yankees Move To Connecticut To Raise Kids appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Mayor Explains Why He Changed City Named After Slave-Owning Founder To Salami Town appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Pop star Taylor Swift donated $5 million to Feeding America to support relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the contribution helping to provide essential food, clean water, and supplies to people affected by these devastating storms. What do you think? The post Taylor Swift Donates $5 Million To Hurricane Relief Efforts appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The 2024 presidential election is on track to be the most expensive race in U.S. history. The Onion takes a look at the key facts and figures behind the spending.  3: People wealthy enough to just straight-up decide election $2.5 million: Cost of poll showing rural voters leaning red 14: Homeless people that could be […] The post 2024 Election Spending By The Numbers appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Despite polls that show the American public overwhelmingly supports keeping the ancient burial chamber sealed, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Friday to pry open the evil tomb of Batibat, a vengeful spirit who haunts the dream space of her victims and suffocates them in their sleep. The ruling, which overturns a 1972 decision by the […] The post Supreme Court Rules 6-3 To Open Evil Tomb Of Batibat appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: SPARTANBURG, SC—Opting not to choose sides, sources told reporters today that neither member of separating couple Max Kiely and Jennifer Rush kept their friends after the breakup. “After hearing both perspectives on how this breakup went down, it has become clear to all of us that we have to side with neither of them,” said […] The post Neither Ex Keeps Friends After Breakup appeared first on The Onion.