Preview: Netflix's ad-tier memberships jumped 35%. The company is on track to launch the service in Canada in the coming quarter and more broadly in 2025.

Preview: Google is replacing Prabhakar Raghavan, the company's search and ads boss since 2018, with longtime executive Nick Fox.

Preview: Sinwar assumed overall command of the Iran-backed Hamas in August, following the assassination of former political chief Ismail Haniyeh.

Preview: Consumer spending held up in September, underscoring a resilient economy.

Preview: Donald Trump's crypto project, World Liberty Financial, published a 13-page paper on Thursday laying out its mission and how tokens get allocated.

Preview: The kidnapping of a Connecticut couple has been linked to one of the biggest thefts of cryptocurrency from an individual in United States history.

Preview: The company plans to host a one-night special with live election results and analysis on its Prime Video streaming service.

Preview: As football stadiums are increasingly being used for concert venues, storm shelters and community events, the impact could be severe for the economy.

Preview: The NFL is itching for further growth and it's turning to Latino and Spanish-speaking audiences as a new audience.

Preview: The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it was forgiving another $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 borrowers.

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: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... Hunt for his drug dealer... Two mystery women in room... FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles... Something disturbing about Gen Z...

Preview: LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... Hunt for his drug dealer... Two mystery women in room... FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles... Something disturbing about Gen Z...

Preview: SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... Hunt for his drug dealer... Two mystery women in room... FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles... Something disturbing about Gen Z...

Preview: Hunt for his drug dealer... (Top headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... Two mystery women in room... FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles... Something disturbing about Gen Z...

Preview: Two mystery women in room... (Top headline, 5th story, link) Related stories: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... Hunt for his drug dealer... FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles... Something disturbing about Gen Z...

Preview: FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles... (Top headline, 6th story, link) Related stories: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... Hunt for his drug dealer... Two mystery women in room... Something disturbing about Gen Z...

Preview: Something disturbing about Gen Z... (Top headline, 7th story, link) Related stories: ONE DIRECTION: DOWN... LIAM PAYNE DEAD AT 31... SINGER JUMPS FROM HOTEL BALCONY IN ARGENTINA... Hunt for his drug dealer... Two mystery women in room... FINAL DAYS: Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles...

Preview: TRUMP DECLARES JAN 6 'DAY OF LOVE' (Main headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: STUNS UNIVISION TOWN HALL

Preview: STUNS UNIVISION TOWN HALL (Main headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: TRUMP DECLARES JAN 6 'DAY OF LOVE'

Preview: The Specter of Mike Pence... (First column, 1st story, link) Related stories: Last Republican to stand in MAGA's way is quietly haunting election... McConnell calls The Don 'stupid' and 'despicable human being' in private, new book says... MATTIS: Uniquely Dangerous Threat... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: A Barrow County grand jury indicted 14-year-old Colt Gray and his father, Colin Gray, on several counts in connection to the Apalachee High School mass shooting that left four people dead in Georgia.

Preview: Three construction company workers remain hospitalized and are in critical condition after a Mississippi bridge collapsed as it was being prepared for demolition.

Preview: With 4 major hurricanes hitting Florida in 4 years, insurance premiums have skyrocketed and insurers have pulled back on coverage; residents are worried about more exclusions and price hikes.

Preview: A trans serial killer had a sex change paid for by California taxpayers after Vice President Kamala Harris boasted of "behind the scenes" work on a policy change.

Preview: Video of an alleged hazing incident at Syracuse University went viral online this week. The school has since launched an investigation and suspended a fraternity.

Preview: While some western North Carolina towns are welcoming visitors, others are still trying to help their neighbors recover from the Hurricane Helene devastation.

Preview: Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., said the Bureau of Land Management's updated Western Solar Plan would have to be subsidized by American taxpayers to work.

Preview: Business owners in western North Carolina are calling for tourists to visit the area following the devastation Hurricane Helene left behind weeks ago.

Preview: Afghan national Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi will not enjoy pre-trial release following a preliminary hearing in Oklahoma on Thursday.

Preview: A Utah woman is accused of fatally shooting her National Guardsman husband in their bed. Jennifer Gledhill was allegedly having an extramarital affair at the time.

Preview: Statement from President Joe Biden on the Death of Yahya Sinwar  The White House Live updates: Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar killed in Gaza, Israel confirms  CNN Sinwar’s Death Gives Israel a Choice: To Pursue War or Peace  The Wall Street Journal Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar Killed in Gaza, Israeli Military Says: Live Updates  The New York Times Netanyahu, Biden agree on phone call that Sinwar's death presents opportunity for hostage deal  The Times of Israel

Preview: Donald Trump Gushes Over ‘Fair’ Bret Baier After Fox News’ Kamala Harris Interview  The Daily Beast How Bret Baier’s combative interview with Harris compared to his sit-down with Trump  CNN More than 7 million watched Harris Fox News interview  The Hill Five key moments from Kamala Harris’s heated Fox News interview  The Washington Post More than 7 million viewers tuned in to Fox News' Kamala Harris interview  Fox News

Preview: Former Canadian Olympic snowboarder charged with running drug trafficking organization, ordering killings  Los Angeles Times FBI raids multimillion-dollar Aventura mansion; ‘court-ordered’ raid related to investigation in Los Angeles, officials say  WSVN 7News | Miami News, Weather, Sports | Fort Lauderdale Aventura raid tied to ‘violent’ drug trafficking ring ran by ex-Olympian, feds say  WPLG Local 10 Aventura mansion raid part of transnational cocaine operation ran by ex-Olympian: FBI  Miami Herald FBI raids Aventura home of music executive accused in major drug trafficking case  NBC Miami

Preview: Texas set to execute Robert Roberson in 'shaken baby syndrome' case  NBC News Execution of Texas inmate scheduled for today now in question after he’s called to testify before state committee  CNN What is shaken baby syndrome, the controversial diagnosis for which Robert Roberson is set to die?  The Texas Tribune After Clemency Denial, Execution Moves Ahead in Shaken Baby Case  The New York Times Robert Roberson's execution looms amid last-minute legal efforts and claims of innocence  CBS News

Preview: Trump claims Haitian migrants are eating other things ‘that they’re not supposed to’ in Ohio  The Independent Pressed on lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio Trump’s newest answer is also his worst  MSNBC 5 takeaways from Trump’s Univision town hall  The Hill Donald Trump stays in form, mostly, at Univision town hall  POLITICO Trump stands by debunked claims immigrants are eating pets at event for Hispanic voters  The Guardian US

Preview: Biden cancels $4.5 bln in public workers' student loans  Reuters Biden forgives more student loans: 60,000 borrowers will get notices canceling $4.5 billion in debt  CNBC Georgia teachers benefit from new student debt forgiveness after a decade of payments  WTVC President Biden surprises Pawtucket teacher with news of her forgiven student loan debt  Turn to 10 Biden-Harris Administration Approves Additional $4.5 Billion in Student Debt Relief for 60,000 Public Service Workers, Bringing Total to Over 1 Million Public Servants  US Department of Education

Preview: Independent panel issues scathing report on Secret Service and recommends leadership overhaul after Trump shooting  CNN Secret Service chief warns of Trump shooting report's "impact on agency morale" in message to staff  CBS News US Secret Service has 'deep flaws', scathing report says  BBC.com Acting Secret Service Director responds to critical new report about security failures  NBC News There have been systemic issues for quite some time, former Secret Service agent says  Fox News

Preview: Archdiocese of Los Angeles agrees to $880m sex abuse payout  Al Jazeera English L.A. Catholic Church payouts for clergy abuse top $1.5 billion with new record settlement  Los Angeles Times Archdiocese of Los Angeles Agrees to Pay $880 Million to Settle Sex Abuse Claims  The New York Times Archdiocese Of Los Angeles Agrees To Pay $880 Million Settlement To Clergy Sex Abuse Victims  Forbes Archdiocese of L.A. reaches $880M child sex abuse settlement over hundreds of claims  NBC News

Preview: McConnell called Trump 'stupid' and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says  The Associated Press McConnell defends past Trump comments: ‘We are all on the same team now’  POLITICO McConnell called Trump ‘stupid,’ a ‘despicable human being,’ new book says  The Washington Post McConnell called Trump 'despicable' and a 'narcissist,' cried after Capitol riot, new book says  USA TODAY McConnell Says It Doesn't Matter He Called Trump 'Despicable Human Being'  Business Insider

Preview: Texas AG sues doctor who allegedly provided transgender care to 21 minors  NBC News Paxton accuses Texas doctor of providing gender-affirming care in violation of state law  The Hill Paxton sues Dallas doctor over giving gender-affirming treatments to minors  The Dallas Morning News Texas AG Accuses Doctor of Providing Illegal Sex-Change Treatments to Minors  National Review Texas Sues Doctor for Prescribing Testosterone to Transgender Minors  U.S. News & World Report

Preview: President Biden congratulated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Israel’s killing of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the Oct. 7 attack that triggered a year-long war and introduced new tensions between the the leaders. Biden made the call while traveling aboard Air Force One to Germany. A readout provided by the White House said...

Preview: Democratic lawmakers from both the House and Senate pressed President Biden to lower housing costs before he leaves the White House in a letter dated Wednesday. “We write today to thank you for your historic work to expand tenant protections and lower the cost of housing and to encourage you to take further action before...

Preview: Depending on where you live in the U.S., this winter could bring a mix of snow and rain or unseasonably warm weather, according to climate experts.

Preview: The world’s water cycle is out of balance ”for the first time in human history,” according to a new report. The Global Commission on the Economics of Water, which is made up of global experts, attributed the imbalance to “decades of collective mismanagement and undervaluation of water.” “We can no longer count on freshwater availability...

Preview: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Thursday sued a doctor in Dallas, accusing her of providing gender-affirming care to nearly two dozen minors in violation of the state’s law. Paxton accuses May Chi Lau of “blatantly violating Texas law” by providing hormone-replacement therapy to 21 minors in the period between last October and this...

Preview: Former President Trump has taken a narrow lead over Vice President Harris in pollster Nate Silver’s prediction model just weeks out from Election Day. While the race remains essentially a toss-up, Trump now leads Harris by just more than half a percentage point, 50.2 percent to 49.5 percent, in the model updated Thursday afternoon. “However...

Preview: The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is raising new questions over the course of the war and the fate of hostages still held by the terrorist group, with the U.S. calling on both sides to seize the opportunity to end the fighting, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warning a long road lies ahead. ...

Preview: Google announced it will block ads about the general election on Nov. 5 after the last polls close.  “As we’ve done in the past, we will temporarily pause ads related to U.S. elections after the last polls close on November 5,” Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told The Hill. “We’re implementing this policy out of an...

Preview: More than 7 million people tuned in to watch Vice President Harris's interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, according to Nielsen Media Research data. The less-than-half-hour sit-down between the anchor and Democratic nominee for president delivered 7.1 million viewers for the top-watched cable channel, including 882,000 in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 age demographic. Fox had...

Preview: The Treasury Department is taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) to prevent or recover check fraud and stopped more than $1 billion in fraudulent payments over the past year, the agency announced Thursday. Machine learning AI was used by the Treasury Department to recover about $1 billion in check fraud in fiscal 2024, the agency...

Preview: It looked as though the 14-year-old suspect was "transporting a school project,” a Georgia Bureau of Investigations agent said of the AR-15-style rifle.

Preview: In a last-ditch effort to halt Robert Roberson's execution, the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee issued a subpoena for him to testify before them on Oct. 21.

Preview: Louis Love Money, called Robinson's allegations against him “bizarre” and said the $50 million in damages he's requesting violates civil court rules

Preview: The filmmaker argued that Harris' "continued repetition of the party line" is simply not enough.

Preview: The 28-year-old defended told the Thessaloniki court that he was unable to explain his behavior, which, he said, had caused him great embarrassment.

Preview: The actor-dancer was among the last survivors of the so-called golden age of the Hollywood musical.

Preview: The outspoken billionaire also noted that the vice president "didn't make things up" during her Fox News interview Wednesday — unlike "her opponent."

Preview: Sarah Matthews also said it was "really important that Kamala Harris went into the lion's den."

Preview: The former president can't seem to get over Kamala Harris' college job at the fast-food joint.

Preview: The tabloid later removed the photos without acknowledging it had done so.

Preview: Shares of Intuitive Surgical Inc. jumped after hours on Thursday after the company reported third-quarter results that beat Wall Street’s expectations, helped by wider adoption of its robotic-surgery equipment.

Preview: While TSMC issued upbeat commentary on the state of the AI market, Wall Street perhaps already had that confidence.

Preview: Winning managers share stock-market secrets and Big Tech powers the utilities sector.

Preview: Donald Trump’s most controversial economic-policy proposal is to institute a 10% tariff on all products and materials imported from abroad, a move that would upend decades of U.S. trade policy and potentially spark tit-for-tat trade wars with American allies and adversaries alike.

Preview: U.S. government debt sold off on Thursday, sending Treasury yields up from their lowest levels in almost two weeks, after data on retail sales and jobless claims pointed to ongoing strength in the U.S. economy.

Preview: Crude futures finished higher on Thursday for the first time in five sessions, supported in part by an unexpected decline in last week’s U.S. crude inventories, which followed sizeable back-to-back weekly gains.

Preview: “The probate attorney says I could ask the court to remove sister No. 3 as co-executor, since she has acted unethically and illegally.”

Preview: Luckily for Reese, her WNBA salary is not her only source of income.

Preview: ravelers’ stock surges toward another record after earnings beat expectations by a wide margin, amid a sharp improvement in underlying profitability.

Preview: Weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic, made by Denmark’s Novo Nordisk, can reduce rates of opioid and alcohol abuse by up to 50%, according to a new study that supports expectations the drugs can offer greater benefits than just weight and diabetes management.

Preview: The special counsel argued that the Supreme Court's narrowing of obstruction charges for Jan. 6 defendants doesn't help the Republican presidential nominee.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris interview with Fox News' Bret Baier was more combative than substantive.

Preview: If you watched Wednesday night’s episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” you likely saw Dave Bautista’s NSFW sketch attacking Donald Trump’s tough guy persona.

Preview: Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas and mastermind behind the October 7 attack on Israel, was killed during a "heavy gun battle" in Gaza, according to and Israeli official. NBC News' Richard Engel has details on the early reports and reaction to Sinwar's death.

Preview: NBC News' Richard Engel and The Washington Post's David Ignatius discuss what could come next in the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the impact on potential peace talks after Yahya Sinwar was killed in Gaza.

Preview: Former CIA Director John Brennan joins Chris Jansing to react to Israel confirming Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by the IDF and to discuss what may come next.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a statement after Israel announced that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind behind the Oct. 7 attack, had been killed in Gaza. Harris assured Israel has the right to defend itself and that the U.S. would continue to work towards finding an end to the conflict.

Preview: Ronen and Orna Neutra, parents of Omer Neutra who is still being held by Hamas, join Chris Jansing to react to the IDF confirming the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Preview: Ahead of Election Day 2016, Donald Trump tried to silence Stormy Daniels. Ahead of Election Day 2024, incredibly enough, the Republican did it again.

Preview: Multiple issues are being sorted out on appeal in the Georgia election interference case before any trial goes forward against Trump and his co-defendants.

Preview: Give us Liberty! And ticker tape. The New York Liberty will become the first New York City women’s sports team to parade through the Canyon of Heroes if they win the WNBA finals, said Mayor Adams. Adams made the promise of a ticker-tape for the Brooklyn women’s basketball stars to The Post during this week’s...

Preview: The prosecutor's office said the two women "had been with the musician in his room" at CasaSur Palermo Hotel in the "hours prior" to his death.

Preview: Here is the Sports+ hot-seat meter (1 is the coolest, 10 is the hottest) for head coaches, general managers and quarterbacks.

Preview: Who knew The Big Bang Theory was going to become a cinematic universe?

Preview: The death of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar could either clear a path for cease-fire negotiations to restart and free the hostages in Gaza, or force the terror group to retaliate and kill some of the captives, experts say.

Preview: The Carnegie Mellon freshman returned to New York City over the weekend to support her famous mother's Broadway debut in "Our Town."

Preview: Their expertly balayaged and blown-out manes became known as "Utah curls," named for the origin of the #MomTok troupe.

Preview: Sharp, dapper, and very much on point.

Preview: Davante Adams had his eyes on the AFC East before Tuesday's blockbuster trade to the Jets.

Preview: “You’ve definitely got it. Whatever it is, you’ve got it,” Cole told Payne during his audition. “And I thought your voice was really, really powerful.”

Preview: Mr. Sinwar climbed the ranks of the Palestinian militant group to plot the deadliest attack on Israel in its history.

Preview: The killing of Hamas’s leader may allow Israel to claim victory and agree to a cease-fire, and new Hamas leadership could be more open to compromise. But neither side is likely to immediately change course.

Preview: A unit from the Israeli military encountered Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, while on an operation in southern Gaza, Israeli defense officials said.

Preview: Some advisers and allies of former President Donald J. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script.

Preview: Former President Donald J. Trump’s costly tax agenda undermines the changes he signed into law in 2017. Some Republicans are wary.

Preview: The seemingly droll, breezy star is actually sentimental about his family and utterly serious about his work, including his villainous turn in “Heretic.”

Preview: Pentagon officials discuss whether the flow of assistance could be hurting the military’s ability to respond to a new conflict.

Preview: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made an urgent plea in Brussels, though it’s unclear to what extent the officials gathered there will go along with it.

Preview: New policies on surrogate births and the treatment of asylum seekers, while largely symbolic, are designed to shore up her right-wing flank in Italy, analysts say.

Preview: Barring a last-minute intervention, Robert Roberson was set to be executed on Thursday evening for the death of his 2-year-old child.

Preview: Will she win their votes?

Preview: The sexy, funny, wise Anora deserves to make at least two new household names.

Preview: My sister won’t do anything about the bitter bullying.

Preview: Her lewdness is destroying the neighborhood!

Preview: Bret Baier’s attacks said a lot more about Trump than Harris.

Preview: Plus: volume wars, dyed hair, and a fail at following through.

Preview: The chances of ending this yearlong war could be as great as they ever have been.

Preview: Ted Cruz’s challenger is polling at Beto-like levels. So ...?

Preview: What’s happening is simply bonkers.

Preview: To understand how incarcerated people are thinking about the two candidates, the Marshall Project posed three questions.

Preview: Unfortunately, in this instance, it's "Justices," not "Jews" (at least not mostly), which would have been funnier. The case is… The post 7 J——-S, 8 Opinions appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: As it stands, the program effectively redistributes money from younger and poorer people to richer people.

Preview: Some were surprised by the Supreme Court's action, but they should not have been.

Preview: British law allows local governments to enact absurdly censorious orders limiting "anti-social" behavior.

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

Preview: What's on your mind?

Preview: Now that Jane Bambauer and I are up to a dozen videos in the series, I thought I'd pass along… The post Free Speech Unmuted Videos appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: The government will prevent prisoners from getting TEXAS LETTERS, an anthology about experiences with solitary confinement.

Preview: Advocates unconvincingly argue that repealing California's limits on rent control will open up more housing for people with disabilities.

Preview: Jane and I discuss calls to restrict misinformation, from the Sedition Act of 1798 to Hurricane Helene.

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: A group of egrets at Qiandao Lake in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. | Yu Jianfeng/VCG via Getty Images If there’s one number worth paying attention to in the fight to protect nature, it’s this: $700 billion.  That’s the sum in US dollars that experts say we need each year — in addition to more than $100 billion the world is already spending — to stop the decline of animals and ecosystems and all the services they provide, from creating clean water to pollinating commercial crops. That money would go toward ramping up urgently needed conservation efforts including replanting forests and making farms more wildlife-friendly.  But how exactly countries can raise that money is still an open question, and one that’s central to the modern environmental movement. Beginning Monday, world leaders will meet in Cali, Colombia, for a major United Nations event known as COP16, the world’s most important conference concerned with protecting plant and animal life. Finalizing a plan to funnel more money into the environment is one of the event’s main goals and one of its most enduring sticking points.  The good news is that $700 billion is actually not that much. At least compared to global GDP, which amounts to more than $100 trillion. And it’s less than the US alone spends on its military each year.   Then again, most countries don’t prioritize conserving nature compared to things like health care and infrastructure, which tend to yield more obvious and immediate benefits. While people understand the problem of a crumbling freeway, it can be harder to perceive the loss of wildlife, which may occur over decades. Plus, it hasn’t been easy for companies or financial firms to invest in ecosystems in the same way they might back, say, a renewable energy project; the value of healthy ecosystems is still overlooked and grossly underpriced. So coming up with $700 billion will be a challenge, even though the return on that investment is priceless. Every basic human need, from food to water to shelter, depends on ecosystems and animals that compose them. This is about sustaining human existence.  The price of saving nature By most measures, populations of plants and animals are collapsing, and they have been for decades. Coral reefs are disappearing, as are tropical forests. Animals are going extinct. It’s bleak.  The world’s best defense against these alarming declines is a UN treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity, which aims to protect nature. Every two years, the convention hosts a conference with all of its members, or parties — which includes leaders from nearly every country, except the US — called COP. More stories on the biggest issues at COP16 Wrap your head around one of the most controversial topics that countries will debate: digital sequence information, or DSI. “DNA from wild organisms could save your life — but there’s a catch.” The US is the only country that is not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Why is that? Why the US won’t join the single most important treaty to protect nature (2021) A key topic at COP16 is how to measure progress toward protecting nature. Vox looked into one of the main metrics for wildlife declines. A new report reveals “catastrophic” declines of animals worldwide — but is it accurate? In late 2022, during COP15, countries met in Montreal and agreed on a groundbreaking new plan to stop the global decline of nature. The plan, known as the global biodiversity framework, lays out 23 targets that countries need to achieve by 2030, including a goal to conserve at least 30 percent of all land and water on the planet. It’s ambitious.  To meet those targets, countries — and especially poorer nations — need more money, to the tune of $700 billion per year, according to the framework. Experts say this number comes from an influential report published in 2020 by Cornell University and two nonprofits, the Nature Conservancy and the Paulson Institute. The report estimated that countries and companies currently spend about $133 billion a year on protecting wild animals and places, such as by restoring habitat. Yet in order to truly safeguard ecosystems, including conserving nearly a third of the planet’s land and water, they’ll need to spend more like $844 billion a year, the report found.  Rounded down, the gap in spending is $700 billion a year. This is often referred to as the biodiversity finance gap, and this number is used in the highest-stake negotiations to safeguard the natural world.  The biggest chunk of that $700 billion is meant to target agriculture through a suite of efforts that would make farms and ranches more sustainable. Agriculture, which drives about 90 percent of deforestation in the tropics, is by far the largest driver of animal declines globally — not hunting or poaching. Industrial farms not only replace native grasslands and forests with vast fields of crops but also often rely on pesticides and fertilizers that harm animal life. Making farms more sustainable, such as by using natural pest controls, can come at high upfront costs to the agriculture industry. Setting up new parks to protect land, restoring forests, and eradicating invasive plants like cheatgrass also costs many billions of dollars a year, the report found. Together these conservation efforts contribute to the $700 billion figure.  The 2022 plan to save nature laid out what are essentially four main ways to close that funding gap. The first is to ramp up money that wealthy countries and philanthropists give or loan to poorer nations for conservation, either directly or through big development banks like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This is foreign aid. The second is increasing the amount of money that national governments spend on protecting nature, such as through their environmental or agriculture ministries. The third avenue is encouraging the private sector, including corporations and investors, to spend more on conservation efforts. These three categories are meant to raise $200 billion a year by 2030, according to the plan.  The fourth way to close this gap is to shut off incentives that directly harm the natural world. Indeed, the remaining money — $500 billion a year — is meant to come from phasing out or repurposing harmful subsidies. Subsidy is a somewhat squishy term that refers to benefits that a government provides to commercial industries, such as the agriculture and oil and gas industries. Often this is in the form of direct payments but it can also include things like tax breaks and government research that ultimately benefits companies. The idea is to repurpose subsidies so that they incentivize efforts to safeguard nature. “Subsidy reform represents the single biggest opportunity to close the funding gap,” authors of the 2020 report wrote.  During this year’s UN negotiations in Colombia, world leaders will try and figure out how to make this happen. The funding strategies, explained Let’s start with foreign aid, the money that would go from rich countries to poor ones. While it’s ultimately a very small piece of the pie, these payments are politically fraught. Many low-income countries, such as those in central Africa, hold much of the world’s plant and animal life, yet they often lack the resources to protect it. Meanwhile, the industries threatening that natural abundance, such as metal mining, are often stoked by wealthy nations. So developing countries say it’s only fair that wealthy countries help foot the bill for conservation. In 2022, global leaders landed on a deal. According to the biodiversity framework, rich countries like Canada and Japan will pay developing nations at least $20 billion a year for conservation by 2025 and $30 billion a year by 2030. And this money has already been flowing: Aid for conservation in developing nations reached $15.4 billion in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which tracks spending. The bulk of this money comes from development banks and direct payments from wealthy to poor countries. That’s a big increase from 2021, when aid for conservation reached $11.1 billion. A flaw in the math The gap in funding needed to protect ecosystems and their key functions is $700 billion. That’s in addition to what the world is already spending. The global plan to save nature commits nearly all countries to raising $200 billion a year toward closing that gap, in addition to reforming subsidies worth at least $500 billion a year. But here’s the rub: Language in the plan doesn’t specify that this $200 billion is in addition to what countries are already spending. It’s a total. So even if world leaders achieve the ambitious plan to save nature, they may still be short in money. This is promising at face value: Rich countries are less than $5 billion from their aid goal. But the scale of biodiversity loss in the Global South — lower-income countries that are typically south of the equator — will almost certainly require a much larger increase in funding, said Brian O’Donnell, who leads the environmental group Campaign for Nature. The other problem is that much of that aid money is in the form of loans, “which is problematic, given the massive debt that we’re seeing in much of the Global South,” O’Donnell said. A much bigger portion of the $700 billion gap will need to come from national governments — what individual countries raise and spend within their borders. Environmental ministries, for example, will need to put more resources toward stopping cattle ranchers from razing the rainforest, whereas agriculture agencies might have to fund more sea patrols to prevent overfishing. A key question is where all that money will come from. Governments could redirect spending from other departments. They could impose new taxes on products like pesticides and close tax loopholes. They could also raise more money from their natural resources, such as by increasing entrance fees for national parks, said Onno van den Heuvel, who leads a UN nature finance project called BioFin. BioFin helps countries come up with money for conservation. “Protected area budgeting is one of the areas where there’s a lot more that countries can do,” he told Vox.  Then there’s the role of the private sector — which is where things get more complex. There’s a whole host of new projects designed by governments and NGOs to get companies and investment firms to fund conservation. An initiative called the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), for example, was created by the UN and nonprofit leaders to help companies and investors identify how their profits depend on healthy ecosystems. The thinking is that firms are more likely to protect nature as part of their business if they know how much they depend on it. For example, a company that grows chocolate might invest in protecting insects when they learn their cacao crops depend on them for pollination. A different project called the Tropical Forest Finance Facility (TFFF), which is still under development, would help direct money from wealthy countries and investors to countries that have successfully stemmed deforestation.  Yet another large effort, hotly debated among environmental leaders, aims to raise money for nature from something called digital sequence information (DSI). DSI is essentially the genetic material from living organisms, in digital form. All kinds of companies, such as pharmaceuticals and agriculture firms, rely on that data to create commercial products. A proposal on the table at COP16 would funnel money from industries that rely heavily on DSI into conservation, especially in the Global South. The last bucket of funding — which would pull money from subsidy reform — is even trickier. The subsidy elephant in the room We’ve established how important it is for world leaders to raise $700 billion to protect nature. Now consider this: Countries are collectively spending $1.25 trillion — yes, trillion — on subsidies for agriculture, fishing, fossil fuel development, industries that are known to erode biodiversity, according to a 2023 report by the World Bank. Other reports suggest that the value of harmful subsidies is much higher.  This means that countries are subsidizing environmental harm on an enormous scale.  Environmental leaders want to change this. In the 2022 biodiversity framework, they agreed to reduce subsidies that harm the environment by at least $500 billion a year by 2030. But the challenge they face is immense, and they’ve failed at it before. In 2009, leaders of the G20, which run the world’s largest economies, agreed to phase out fossil-fuel subsidies in the medium term, but such kickbacks have since ballooned. And in 2010, nearly all countries agreed to a set of environmental goals, known as the Aichi Targets, including phasing out subsidies that harm nature, by 2020. They didn’t meet that target (or any other one of the 20 Aichi Targets, for that matter). Experts say there’s really only one way to make this work: Instead of getting rid of subsidies, countries should redirect them toward commercial efforts that make companies more sustainable. In other words, subsidies should incentivize conservation, said Andrew Deutz, a policy and finance expert at the World Wildlife Fund. Governments could, for example, deepen tax breaks for farmers who restore pollinator habitat instead of subsidizing the cost of pesticides. “We don’t want to remove subsidies from the agriculture sector,” Deutz said. “We’re trying to change the behavior that’s incentivized by the money.” Some countries have made progress on subsidy reform, said the UN’s van den Heuvel. At least a dozen countries including Colombia have identified their subsidies that harm nature, which is the first step, he said. “There is better momentum than in the last decade,” he said. “Now countries are willing to investigate.” Yet policy experts still worry that it will take decades to reform these systems. Part of the problem is that most governments are siloed — the agriculture and environmental ministries don’t talk to each other — and they often work against each other, said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, the former minister of the environment and energy in Costa Rica. Environmental officials might be trying to protect pollinators while agricultural officials are subsidizing pollinator-killing pesticides. And while many companies want to reduce their environmental footprint, they often don’t even know what subsidies they’re receiving, said Eva Zabey, the CEO of Business for Nature, a group that helps align corporate and environmental goals. “It will be a messy topic,” Zabey said of trying to reform subsidies.  Nonetheless, world leaders agreed that the majority of money needed to close the finance gap — more than 70 percent — is meant to come from subsidy reform. O’Donnell says it’s “one of the biggest weaknesses in finance for the biodiversity framework.” Andrew Deutz of WWF echoed his concerns, saying that the number senior negotiators are most worried about is the $500 billion in subsidy reform. “It’s the biggest number,” Deutz said, “and perhaps the most politically difficult one to address.” Is more money enough?  Raising more money is a challenge, but there are also problems that money won’t fix. One has to do with how aid funding is managed. Much of the money that wealthy nations put toward conservation in developing countries is managed by an organization called the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). GEF disperses money to these low-income countries. Yet many of those countries say it’s burdensome to access GEF funds and argue that it’s controlled largely by wealthy nations. Developing countries want a new fund that gives lower-income countries more control.  “It’s not about developing countries begging for money,” said Lim Li Ching, a senior researcher at the Third World Network, which advocates for developing countries. “It really is about equity.” Manuel Rodríguez, who now runs the GEF, says that concerns about how GEF manages foreign aid are misplaced. He says that donor countries have more power in determining where money goes “for evident and obvious reasons.” Blaming GEF, he said, is a political tactic employed by large, biodiversity-rich countries to gain more control over how funds are dispersed. Policy experts also point out that building new funds distracts from the main objective: to raise more money. “We have created a global myth that creating a new funding mechanism therefore means more funds,” O’Donnell said. “Just because you create a mechanism to distribute funds doesn’t mean someone is going to fill up the coffers.”  Concerns about international aid tie into a much more fundamental problem of how global financial institutions are structured and the inequalities they perpetuate. Much of the current environmental destruction takes place in poorer regions of the world — the Global South, for the most part. Industries in places like Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are destroying acre upon acre of forests. These countries are often blamed for that destruction; it’s their weak policies or poor enforcement that’s failing to restrict harmful activities.  But some scholars argue that much of the responsibility lies with the world’s big aid institutions, including development banks. These organizations, which lend money to poor regions, especially in a time of fiscal crisis, are governed by wealthy, or donor, countries. And the support they provide — whether loans or a restructuring of debt — can fuel the very industries that destroy the environment, including industrial agriculture, according to a recent report by the University of British Columbia, Third World Network, and a progressive think tank called the Climate and Community Project.  For one, poor nations are, on the whole, in a huge amount of debt from these international lenders. The UN estimates that an eye-popping 3.3 billion people live in countries with governments that spend more on debt interest payments than on the education or health of their citizens.  Think about that statistic for a minute. It’s extreme: That’s about 40 percent of the world’s population. And all that debt they carry creates an incentive for countries to make tons of money quickly, which tends to fuel resource extraction. That’s partly because countries often need foreign currency to repay those debts, which they commonly earn through export commodities like soy that harm native landscapes. Frequently it also leads to countries loosening regulations on development in order to grow export industries. On top of all of that, loans often come with austerity measures that require countries to clamp down on public services. These cutbacks are often imposed on environmental agencies that enforce rules to safeguard nature. “The international financial architecture continues to supercharge extraction,” said Jessica Dempsey, a researcher at the University of British Columbia and one of the report authors. “That’s just making the problem worse and worse.” It’s hard to imagine solving environmental problems simply by raising more money. World leaders also need to upend deeply rooted systems that perpetuate wealth inequality and the harmful industries it fuels. There are a lot of ideas floating around about how to do this, from overhauling how lenders like the IMF and World Bank are governed to debt cancellation and closing tax loopholes. But that won’t happen overnight. “I mean, it’s a huge, huge task,” Lim said. “But then it’s also an imperative. If we don’t address it, we’ll just be [working] around the edges of making a difference.”

Preview: In 2009, someone going by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin — the world’s first cryptocurrency. | Getty Images/Janos Kummer Despite what a new HBO documentary suggests, the identity of one of the richest people in the world is still unknown. By now, the story is so famous that it’s taken on the aura of a creation myth: one day in early 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the inventor of bitcoin, released the world’s first cryptocurrency. Two years later, Nakamoto vanished seemingly forever. Since then, countless theories on who the real Nakamoto is have been advanced, with no single candidate coming out on top. Whether Nakamoto’s anonymity is merely an entertaining mystery, a necessity for privacy, or a worrisome concern depends on who you ask. For filmmaker Cullen Hoback, whose documentary Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery premiered on HBO last week, finding the mysterious bitcoin founder is a matter of public interest — and Hoback believes he has unmasked him as a 39-year-old Canadian bitcoin developer named Peter Todd. Since the film’s release, Todd and other prominent voices in the community have dismissed Hoback’s arguments. According to them, Nakamoto remains an enigma. Many bitcoin enthusiasts prefer it that way. But it’s obvious why the search has endured over the past 15 years. Bitcoin is far and away the most popular digital currency in the world, with a market cap of about $1.3 trillion at the time of writing. (For comparison, the second biggest, ethereum, has a market cap of $312 million.) For those who believe a decentralized alternative to government-issued currencies — like the US dollar — is crucial to protect individual privacy and freedom, Nakamoto is akin to Prometheus bringing the gift of fire from the gods. Then there’s this mind-boggling possibility: if reports that Nakamoto might hold as much as 1.1 million bitcoins are true, they could be sitting on a fortune of over $70 billion, making them one of the 25 wealthiest individuals on Earth, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaires ranking. But Nakamoto doesn’t seem to have spent any of it — at least, not anything in their confirmed bitcoin wallets.  What does it mean for the rest of us that such an enormous treasure chest remains in the hands of an unknown entity, whose true aims and intentions can’t be determined? Who benefits if Nakamoto remains in the shadows — and who benefits if they’re revealed? What we know about the bitcoin creator The internet user Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared in 2008, when they published a paper to a cryptographic technology mailing list laying out a system that they had dubbed bitcoin. It would function as a form of digital cash that people could use to send money back and forth without involving any kind of bank. In other words, one could reliably make and receive payments completely anonymously. There was a clear ideological aim: in Nakamoto’s view, the ability to keep your financial record out of the surveillance and reach of powerful authorities, whether it’s large private banks or the government, is an important personal freedom. Such institutions, after all, aren’t infallible. In one illuminating forum post in 2009, Nakamoto wrote that “the root problem with conventional currency” was “trust.” “Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve,” they continued. “We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.” When Nakamoto created the very first block that would become the bitcoin blockchain, they included a message referencing a headline in the British newspaper The Times that day: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.” The top suspects, and why Nakamoto’s identity is still up for debate Nakamoto’s writings indicate that they’re most likely someone with a strong understanding of economics, computer science, and modern cryptography — which involves methods and technologies for keeping information secure, like encrypting a message that can only be unlocked with a special key. Unsurprisingly, the commonly advanced candidates for who Nakamoto could be are self-identified “cypherpunks” — a community of mainly computer scientists who advocate for using cryptography to protect digital privacy. According to Hoback, director of Money Electric, Peter Todd fits the bill. Todd is a libertarian pro-privacy advocate who, among other things, is a huge proponent of using cash because it’s harder for governments and banks to track your spending. As a teenager, he was already communicating with older, respected cypherpunks and seemed unusually knowledgeable about bitcoin despite his youth. Todd would have been 23 years old when the bitcoin white paper was published. Hoback builds his case primarily on the fact that Todd joined the message board Bitcointalk.org in 2010 right before Nakamoto stopped posting. But the crux of Hoback’s argument hinges on an interaction between Todd and Nakamoto on Bitcointalk. Nakamoto had posted something technical about how bitcoin transactions work; about an hour and a half later, Todd replied with a small disagreement. Hoback contends that the reply actually reads more like someone finishing their previous thought — that Todd had signed into the wrong account to make an addendum to the original Nakamoto post. In the film, he also points to a chat log in which Todd calls himself a foremost authority on sacrificing bitcoin, which Hoback connects to the fact that Nakamoto hasn’t done anything with their coins in all these years (at least, that we know of). It’s an intriguing interpretation, but not exactly a smoking gun.  Hoback, both in interviews and within Money Electric, portrays Todd as someone who enjoys playing games over whether he could be the bitcoin founder, laughing on camera as the filmmaker explains why he believes Todd is Nakamoto — at one point saying with a smirking grin, “Well, yeah. I’m Satoshi Nakamoto.” On X, though, Todd has firmly denied that he’s Nakamoto. In an email to Vox, Hoback wrote that Todd stopped speaking to him after filming this scene. The other main person of interest in Money Electric is Adam Back, a British cypherpunk in his 50s whose work toward a functional digital currency was cited in Nakamoto’s original bitcoin paper. One reason Hoback finds Back suspicious is that he became more active in the bitcoin world — specifically concerned with how to make transactions completely anonymous — right after speculation emerged that Nakamoto controlled over 1 million bitcoins, more than previously thought. Unlike Todd, Back has stridently distanced himself from even joking suggestions that he could be Nakamoto. Other commonly floated contenders include prominent cypherpunk figures such as Hal Finney, who died in 2014 and was the recipient of the first test bitcoin transaction that Nakamoto sent, and Nick Szabo, who came up with the concept of “smart contracts,” a crucial function of many blockchains today. One wild suggestion claims that the Japanese etymology behind Satoshi Nakamoto can roughly translate to “central intelligence,” a sign that bitcoin was in fact invented by the CIA as some sort of trap. Another conspiracy theory — practically a meme at this point — posits that Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk is the real Nakamoto. (He denies it.) It isn’t clear whether Nakamoto is still alive, or even whether they’re one person rather than a group of people working together. Early this year, an unknown person sent 26.9 bitcoins (worth approximately $1.8 million today) to Nakamoto’s dormant wallet, firing up fresh excitement over where Nakamoto is and what they might be doing.  How do you track down a mystery like Nakamoto? Should you even try? Since 2011, Nakamoto hasn’t emailed or posted anywhere under their username. They also haven’t used the crypto wallets associated with that name. But even if someone is determined to remain in the shadows, and has left no obvious evidence giving them away, there are bound to be some breadcrumbs. Much of the theorizing around Nakamoto depends on analyzing their style of coding and writing. Hoback, at one point in the film, nods to the fact that Nakamoto and Todd both used slurs that could indicate immaturity. Another commonly noted marker is that Nakamoto often used British English spelling (such as “favour”), and Todd is Canadian. But other linguistic comparisons of commonly used words and phrases have been made that inconclusively point to other candidates. On the forum, Nakamoto often uses a double space at the start of a sentence, while Todd does not. Both Back and Todd pepper in dashes to break up clauses in a single sentence — Nakamoto doesn’t. Could the stylistic differences be a cunning, intentional misdirection? No one knows. Ultimately, none of these tics add up to definitive proof. Many in the bitcoin world conjecture that Nakamoto disappeared because WikiLeaks — the site where Julian Assange published many leaked documents — appeared poised to start accepting donations in bitcoin, which might lead to more attention on Nakamoto. In one of their last known communications, Nakamoto wrote to bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, “I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle.” In the last known email, sent in April 2011, Nakamoto claimed they were no longer involved with bitcoin. It’s clear that Nakamoto never intend to out themselves — and, indeed, they seem to argue that there’s no point. Bitcoin is now out of their hands. So how much does their identity matter? Hoback argues that it matters a lot due to how important bitcoin has become. “Bitcoin is already being baked into our financial system,” he told Vox, referring to its acceptance as legal tender in some countries and the fact that it could now be included in 401(k)s. Nakamoto potentially controls a significant portion of the total limited supply of bitcoin; if they one day decided to come forward and start moving (and spending) the coins in their possession, such an enormous sell-off could be destabilizing for the cryptocurrency. If they spend their riches, there’s also arguably a public interest in knowing where so much money is going, and whether it has any political impact. Acknowledging the possibility that Nakamoto could be multiple people, Hoback continued, “This group is making themselves super rich while saying no one should look into Satoshi. Isn’t that a little suspicious?” If you believe that holding the powerful to account is important, then Nakamoto’s insistence on anonymity stands against the transparency that such accountability requires. It’s no secret that many of the world’s richest people have historically cleaved to remaining as private as possible, using elaborate financial structures and tax havens to avoid scrutiny of what their money is funding. Then again, there’s no proof that Nakamoto has spent any of their fortune. Their known bitcoin hoard is a rough value of net worth, not yet used for anything — and we know this because all bitcoin transactions are part of a public ledger. If they started cashing in their bitcoin stockpile, that could make it easier for people to find their real-life identity, which is an incentive for Nakamoto to leave that stash untouched. (It is curious, though, that in late September about $13 million worth of bitcoin mined in the very early days of the cryptocurrency suddenly moved.) Perhaps there’s a better question than whether it matters who Nakamoto is: How important is it that the inventor of bitcoin remains a mystery? From the perspective of the cypherpunks, it’s crucial. There’s a financial motivation — the reveal of Nakamoto’s real identity could tank the price of bitcoin. But Nakamoto’s lasting anonymity is also an ideological resistance to government authority in an increasingly surveilled digital world. Many key figures in the bitcoin community unequivocally express a desire for Nakamoto’s identity to stay a secret – according to Hoback, Todd seemed displeased that people had found Nakamoto’s million-plus bitcoin stash, and told him to leave Nakamoto alone. There’s also the potential danger someone could be in if others think they’re Nakamoto. In a comment to the New Yorker, Todd told the publication that Hoback had put his safety at risk by accusing him of being a multi-billionaire, and that he would soon be doing “some unplanned travel.” (He has not responded to an email from Vox.) Todd isn’t wrong that prior attempts to unmask Nakamoto have disturbed people’s personal lives — take the case of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a former engineer and programmer in California who was the subject of a Newsweek report claiming he was the bitcoin God. Dorian Nakamoto has categorically denied even knowing what cryptocurrencies are, and has said the accusation and public scrutiny caused a “great deal of confusion and stress” for him and his family. In response, Hoback told Vox that other people long suspected of being Nakamoto — like Nick Szabo and Adam Back — are fine. Toward the end of the Money Electric, Todd says that the hunt for bitcoin’s Nakamoto is yet another example of “journalists really missing the point.” The point, he elaborates, is “to make bitcoin the global currency.” But if that came to fruition — and it isn’t close to becoming reality yet — then ironically, Hoback’s argument for hunting down the bitcoin mastermind would only become more compelling to both the general public and almost certainly to governments around the world. The surest way to protect Nakamoto’s anonymity seems to be for bitcoin to not become a widespread alternative threatening government-issued currencies — to not become too important.

Preview: A prisoner’s hands inside a cell at Angola prison in Louisiana. | Giles Clarke/Getty Images For more than a year, Joseph Clifton Smith, a man who says he is intellectually disabled, has sat on death row, waiting to find out if the Supreme Court will greenlight his execution. Smith’s case, known as Hamm v. Smith, first arrived on the Court’s doorstep in August 2023. Since then, the justices have met more than two dozen times to decide what to do about the case, and each time they’ve put the decision off until a future meeting. No one outside of the Court can know for sure why the justices keep delaying, but if you follow the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases closely, it’s easy to see how the Hamm case could open up all kinds of internal rifts among the justices.  The Eighth Amendment, which has a vague ban on “cruel and unusual punishments,” is at the center of the Hamm case because, for decades, the Court has held this amendment forbids executions of intellectually disabled offenders (and offenders who commit a crime while they are juveniles). The idea is that both groups have diminished mental capacity, at least as compared to non-disabled adults, and thus bear less moral responsibility even for homicide crimes. That idea, however, has long been contested by the Court’s various ideological factions, and the Hamm case potentially reopens up all of the Court’s issues with the amendment at once. Indeed, in the worst-case scenario for criminal defendants, the justices could potentially overrule more than 60 years of precedents protecting against excessive punishments. This Supreme Court’s ongoing battles over the Eighth Amendment, briefly explained In two 2000s decisions, Atkins v. Virginia (2002) and Roper v. Simmons (2005), a coalition of Democratic and moderate Republican justices handed down decisions that barred youths and people who are intellectually disabled from being executed. Those majority decisions came down over bitter dissents from the Court’s right flank — the same right flank that has since gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court. At least some of the current Court’s Republicans seem eager to use their newfound supermajority to blow up those two cases (and pretty much everything the Court has said about the Eighth Amendment in the last six or seven decades). So it’s possible that the Court is fighting over what to do with the Hamm case because many of the justices want a wholesale revolution in Eighth Amendment law. Beginning in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court maintained that the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, as a particular method of punishment grew less common, the Court was increasingly likely to declare it cruel and unusual in violation of the Constitution. At least some members of the Court’s Republican majority, however, have suggested that this “evolving standards of decency” framework should be abandoned. In Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), the Court considered whether states could use execution methods that risked causing the dying inmate a great deal of pain. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion, which held that potentially painful methods of execution are allowed, seems to exist in a completely different universe than the Court’s Eighth Amendment cases that look to evolving standards. While the Court’s earlier opinions ask whether a particular form of punishment has fallen out of favor today, Gorsuch asked whether a method of punishment was out of favor at the time of the founding. Though his opinion does list some methods of execution, such as “disemboweling” and “burning alive” that violate the Eighth Amendment, Gorsuch wrote that these methods are unconstitutional because “by the time of the founding, these methods had long fallen out of use and so had become ‘unusual.’” What makes Bucklew confusing, however, is that it didn’t explicitly overrule any of the previous decisions applying the evolving standards framework. So it’s unclear whether all five of the justices who joined that opinion share a desire to blow up more than a half-century of law, or if the justices who joined the Bucklew majority simply failed to rein in an overly ambitious opinion by Gorsuch, the Court’s most intellectually sloppy justice. In any event, Hamm opens up at least two major potential divides within the Court. Smith says he is intellectually disabled; the state of Alabama wants to execute him anyway. So the case perfectly tees up a challenge to Atkins if a majority of the justices want to go there. Meanwhile, Bucklew looms like a vulture over any cruel and unusual punishment case heard by the Court, as it suggests that the Republican justices may hit the reset button on all of its Eighth Amendment precedents at any time. So what is the specific legal issue in Hamm? The Court receives thousands of petitions every year asking it to hear a particular appeal, and it typically only grants several dozen of these petitions. The vast majority of these cases are nominally discussed at one of the justices’ regular conferences, then promptly denied. In recent years, the Court often discusses a case in two different conferences before agreeing to hear it — for this reason, I and other Supreme Court reporters often watch the list of cases the Court “relisted” for a second conference to identify cases the justices are more likely to hear. Occasionally, a case may be relisted for several conferences in a row. But this is rare, and typically is a sign either that the justices are negotiating over which issues they wish to decide in a particular case — or, more often, that a justice is dissenting from the Court’s decision not to hear a case and the “relists” are really just buying that justice time to draft an opinion. Hamm, however, has now been relisted in every single conference since the justices first discussed it on October 27, 2023. That is, to say the least, highly unusual. And it suggests that some particularly bitter internal negotiations are ongoing. If someone were dissenting from the Court’s decision to turn the case away, they likely would have released that dissent last July, because the justices typically try to resolve loose ends before they go on their summer vacation. Hamm involves a question that would inevitably arise once the Court decided Atkins — though it is unconstitutional to execute intellectually disabled offenders, there will always be some offenders who are on the borderline of what mental health professionals consider an intellectual disability. The specific question before the Court is what to do with these borderline cases. As a general rule, someone must have an IQ of 70 or below to be considered intellectually disabled. But IQ tests aren’t particularly precise — as the Supreme Court acknowledged in Moore v. Texas (2017), the IQ of someone who scores 74 on a particular IQ test falls within “a range of 69 to 79.” So, if courts read IQ tests as if they can identify an offender’s IQ score exactly, an intellectually disabled person could be executed due to something as arbitrary as a measurement error. Accordingly, the Court held in Hall v. Florida (2014) that a capital offender with an IQ score slightly above 70 must be given “the opportunity to present evidence of his intellectual disability, including deficits in adaptive functioning over his lifetime.” That is, such an offender must be allowed to present additional evidence beyond their IQ score to show that they are, in fact, intellectually disabled. Hamm is such a case. Smith took five different IQ tests, four of which showed him with an IQ in the low to mid-70s. Accordingly, two lower courts looked at additional evidence of his disability, determined he is, in fact, intellectually disabled, and ruled that he must receive a sentence other than death. In asking to execute Smith, in other words, Alabama is asking, among other things, that the Supreme Court overrule Moore and Hall, both cases that were handed down before former President Donald Trump remade the Court in the Federalist Society’s image. If the Court agrees, that alone would be a very significant legal development, both because it could allow intellectually disabled inmates to be executed due to a testing error, and because it would be a severe blow to stare decisis — the idea that judicial precedents shouldn’t be tossed out simply because the members of a court change. Of course, this Court’s Republican majority has shown little regard for stare decisis, at least in cases that divide along partisan lines. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the Republican Party a supermajority on the Supreme Court in late 2020, the Court has behaved as if it was going down a checklist, overruling liberal victories such as the cases establishing a constitutional right to abortion or the line of cases permitting affirmative action in limited circumstances, and replacing them with whatever outcome the GOP prefers. Yet, while this process has been painful for Democrats and toxic for the Court’s approval rating, it hasn’t been comprehensive — occasionally, one or more of the Republican justices signal that they will allow a previous liberal victory to remain in effect. Concurring in the Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, for example, Justice Brett Kavanaugh identified the Court’s past decisions protecting a right to contraception, as well as the right to marry a person of your own choosing, as cases he did not intend to overrule. All of which is a long way of saying that there’s no good way to know if Atkins or Roper is on the Court’s checklist of past liberal decisions to be overruled. These justices’ approaches to specific cases are often idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and unbound by preexisting law — just look at the Republican justices’ recent decision holding that Trump was allowed to commit many crimes while he was in office. The question of whether Atkins survives or falls will turn on whether there are five justices who want intellectually disabled people to be executed, and nothing else. But the fact Hamm has been relisted so many times suggests, at the very least, that there is a vocal faction within the Supreme Court that wants to use this case to aggressively reshape the law. What can be made of Bucklew? The other uncertainty looming over Hamm is the Bucklew decision, which didn’t so much overrule the Court’s last six decades of Eighth Amendment precedents as pretend that they didn’t exist. Bucklew involved a death row inmate who claimed that the Eighth Amendment would not allow him to be executed using Missouri’s lethal injection protocol — he said he had an unusual medical condition that would cause him to experience extraordinary pain before his death. So the question was whether the Constitution allows a state to execute an inmate in a manner that may amount to torture. Gorsuch’s opinion denying relief to this inmate reads like the Court’s “evolving standards of decency” framework never existed. This phrase appears nowhere in Gorsuch’s opinion, and the only citation to Trop v. Dulles (1958), the first Supreme Court case to use that phrase, appears in Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent. Rather than follow longstanding law, Gorsuch asked whether capital offenders could be subjected to similar pain “at the time of the framing.” This is the Eighth Amendment rule long favored by the Court’s rightmost flank, including in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion in Atkins. Scalia’s Atkins dissent, moreover, doesn’t simply disagree with the Court’s past decisions. It lays out many examples of how the law would change — and how much easier it would be to subject even minor criminal offenders to outlandish punishments — under a framework that looks to how things worked in the 1790s. For starters, Scalia argues that only “severely or profoundly” intellectually disabled people enjoy some protection against execution (he argues these individuals were often “committed to civil confinement or made wards of the State” rather than being criminally punished). One of the sources Scalia cites suggests that only people with an IQ of 25 or below enjoy any constitutional protection. More significantly, Scalia also argues that the Eighth Amendment only forbids “always-and-everywhere ‘cruel’ punishments, such as the rack and the thumbscrew,” and that it does not prohibit the government from imposing excessive punishments for minor crimes. Under Scalia’s framework, if the death penalty can constitutionally be applied to murderers (and he believes it can) then it can also be applied to shoplifters. If a rapist can be sentenced to life in prison, so too can a jaywalker. Gorsuch’s Bucklew opinion elaborates on the sort of punishments that, under this originalist framework, are prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. He lists “dragging the prisoner to the place of execution, disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive” as examples. So there is a faction within the Supreme Court that would drastically shrink Americans’ constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. This faction would allow more people to be executed. They would apparently eliminate any concern that punishments must be proportionate to the crime. And the kinds of punishments they do offer up as examples of impermissible sanctions are the kinds of things normally depicted in torture scenes from movies set in the Middle Ages. Will five justices go there? It’s impossible to know. But that a total of five justices joined Gorsuch’s opinion in Bucklew suggests this faction could very well prevail — if and when the Court decides to take up Hamm.

Preview: Kamala Harris appears at a campaign rally at United Auto Workers Local 900 on August 8, 2024, in Wayne, Michigan. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images When Joe Biden took office, the Democratic Party had been bleeding support among working-class voters for decades.  At mid-century, America’s two parties were cleaved by class, with educated professionals backing the GOP and blue-collar workers voting Democratic. But starting in the 1960s, this class divide began narrowing gradually, as white voters with college diplomas drifted left while those without them shifted right, in a process political analysts have dubbed “education polarization.” By 2004, college graduates were more Democratic than working-class voters. And Donald Trump’s conquest of the GOP accelerated this realignment. In 2016, for the first time since at least 1948 when the American National Election Studies (ANES) survey began collecting data, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution voted for Democrats at a higher rate than those in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. This same pattern of support repeated in 2020, according to an analysis from Ohio State political scientist Tom Wood. In the latter election, Democrats also lost ground with nonwhite voters without college degrees, according to Catalist, a Democratic data firm.  The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions. After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former. Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws. The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis. In his presidency’s first major piece of legislation, Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to 350,000 of the union’s members. The president also appointed a staunchly pro-union federal labor board, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And although he failed to enact major changes to federal labor regulations, that was not for want of trying. In the estimation of labor historian Erik Loomis, Biden has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the political return on Democrats’ investment in organized labor has been disappointing.  Last month, the Teamsters declined to make a presidential endorsement, after an internal survey found 60 percent of its membership backed Trump over Kamala Harris. In early October, the International Association of Fire Fighters also announced that they would not be making a presidential endorsement, despite backing Biden four years earlier. These high-profile snubs — both driven by rank-and-file opposition to the Democratic nominee — may reflect a broader political trend. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, between 2012 and 2016, the Democratic presidential nominee’s share of union voters fell from 66 to 53 percent. Four years ago, Biden erased roughly half of that gap, claiming 60 percent of the union vote.  But contemporary polling indicates that Democrats have lost ground with unionized voters since then. In fact, according to an aggregation from CNN’s Harry Enten, Kamala Harris is on track to perform even worse with union households than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  Some on the left have a simple explanation for why a historically pro-union presidency hasn’t bought the Democrats many union votes: Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, and she lacks his credibility on labor issues. This theory is unsatisfying because Biden’s numbers with union voters early this year were roughly as bad as Harris’s are today. In February, NBC News found Biden winning only 50 percent of voters from union households. All this raises the possibility that organized labor’s capacity to prevent working-class voters from drifting out of the Democratic tent is more limited than progressives had hoped. None of this means that Democrats would derive no political benefit from a stronger labor movement. And it certainly does not undermine the substantive case for collective bargaining as a means of reducing inequality and safeguarding workers’ interests. But the trends outlined above suggest that delivering for unions and helping them expand may be insufficient to dramatically improve the party’s performance with working-class voters in general and white ones in particular.  Why unions don’t necessarily make their members more liberal  Progressives have long believed that organized labor is a liberalizing force, and the notion that unions influence their members’ political views — to Democrats’ benefit — is far from baseless. The party consistently performs better with unionized voters than nonunionized ones. Historically, this held true within demographic groups, with unionized white workers backing Democrats at higher rates than their nonunionized counterparts. Many unions also actively engage in politically educating their members. Theoretically, unions that represent diverse memberships should discourage racial prejudice, as solidarity is indispensable to successful organizing and labor actions. A 2021 paper by the political scientists Paul Frymer and Jacob Grumbach found that white voters who gained union membership between 2010 and 2016 tended to display lower levels of racial resentment after getting their union cards. But there is reason to think that unions’ capacity to liberalize the views of non-college-educated voters has declined in the Trump era. According to the Democratic data scientist David Shor, his party’s “union premium” — the degree to which Democrats perform better with union voters, when controlling for all other demographic variables — dropped nearly to zero in 2020. Democrats still did better with unionized workers than nonunionized ones that year. Extrapolating from Shor’s math, this was almost entirely attributable to the demographic traits of America’s unionized population, which is more highly educated and less Southern than the American electorate. More broadly, a recent study from Alan Yan, a political science graduate student at UC Berkeley, suggests that unions’ historical tendency to liberalize their members’ views has been widely exaggerated.  To evaluate the impact of union membership on voters’ political views, Yan examines 13 panel surveys — in other words, polls of the same group of voters across multiple election cycles — conducted between 1956 and 2020. He looks at voters’ preferred party and issue positions in the election year before they gained union membership and in subsequent elections, when they were unionized. Controlling for other variables, he finds that the typical voter’s views barely change at all upon joining a union.  Yan also offers some theoretical arguments for why this result makes sense. For one thing, political scientists generally believe that voters’ political identities tend to crystallize in early adulthood, much earlier than they usually gain union membership. By the time a given voter arrives in a unionized shop, therefore, their political views may be largely fixed. Furthermore, many unions make little effort to politicize their memberships. In the 2016 Cooperative Election Study — a large sample survey — only 20 percent of union members reported frequent political discussions with coworkers, according to Yan, while 39 percent could not remember ever being contacted by their union in the previous two years. Daniel Schlozman, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist whose work has focused on the relationship between organized labor and the Democratic Party, says that he finds Yan’s results unsurprising.  In many European countries in the early 20th century, unions often pervaded nearly every aspect of their members’ lives, not only mediating their workplace disputes, but providing gathering halls and clubs, mutual aid programs, and political parties. In that context, Schlozman would expect unions to shape the politics of their members more thoroughly. In the modern United States, by contrast — where unions have a light footprint outside the job site and myriad religious, ethnic, and ideological divisions inform voters’ politics — it makes sense that union leaders can’t dictate a party line to their members.  “In a big pluralistic country where we are not pillarized like Austria in the old days — where you join your union and then go to your social democratic stamp collecting club — union membership is just not going to be as powerful a force in determining political behavior” as other social attachments and identities, Schlozman said. Still, there’s some reason to think that Yan’s paper understates unions’ political influence on their members. In an interview with Vox, Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer noted that during many of the years Yan studies — particularly in the 1950s and ’60s — many unions were still profoundly racist institutions, which one would scarcely expect to liberalize their memberships. “If a lot of unions are fighting integration, fighting immigrants, fighting the inclusion of Black Americans, of women,” Frymer said, “then yeah, that’s just going to create a push the other way.” Yan and Frymer agree that some unions do successfully promote progressive political views among their members. But this requires both a leadership committed to evangelizing for liberal politics and a membership that’s open to such political messaging. To the extent that education polarization and culture wars render many working-class union members skeptical of progressive messaging, their union leaders will have an incentive to back away from internal political advocacy. After all, such leaders ultimately need to win reelection in order to retain their positions. This could theoretically create a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the less Democratic a union’s members become, the less their leaders try to sell members on progressive politics, which then leads members to become even less Democratic. As Yan notes, even teachers unions, whose members tend to be better educated than union members, often focus on compensation rather than partisan politics because the latter divides their memberships.  Further, in a 2020 survey experiment, researchers from Columbia and MIT measure how workers’ interest in joining a hypothetical labor organization changed as different characteristics of that union were emphasized. When told that this union would campaign for pro-worker politicians in elections, the surveyed workers became less likely to want to join. If this result is representative, then many union leaders have a structural incentive to focus narrowly on bread-and-butter issues and keep quiet about their Democratic sympathies (to the extent that they possess them). Why unions are still good for Democrats All this said, Democrats are still likely to benefit politically from delivering for labor unions and helping them grow. Even if such organizations can’t persuade their more culturally conservative members to vote for Democrats, they can help to mobilize the progressives within their ranks, since unions are effective at promoting higher voter turnout.  Separately, unions are major funders of Democratic campaigns, with almost 90 percent of organized labor’s political contributions going into Democrats’ coffers.  And it is possible that a larger and more self-confident labor movement would also be a more politically effective one. “As unions have retreated, even as they have put more efforts into politics and kept up their formal ties to the Democratic Party, their sociocultural imprint has declined,” Schlozman said. “It would not surprise me that union members feel less tied into the culture of unionism that would tie them into the Democrats.”  Were Democrats to successfully promote a wave of unionization through labor law reform, unions could become more culturally relevant. Perhaps most importantly, a more powerful labor movement could nudge the Democratic Party’s issue positions into closer alignment with those of American workers. As unions have declined, power in the Democratic coalition has shifted away from organizations that represent mass working-class memberships and toward nonprofits that are accountable primarily to their wealthy, ideologically motivated donors.  Labor alone can’t build a more working-class Democratic Party  Nevertheless, the Biden era should temper expectations of what organized labor can politically achieve, at least by itself. Perhaps, Biden’s historically pro-union policies would have paid more dividends if he had not also presided over inflation and the expiration of various social welfare benefits established during the Covid crisis. The president’s advanced age surely did not help matters.  But it remains the case that, under Biden, Democrats have seen their poll numbers with union voters decline at the presidential level, even as their support for organized labor’s interests increased. All the while, education polarization has continued apace. In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, Trump wins non-college-educated white voters by 30 points, while Harris wins college-educated ones by 23. And although the Democrat wins working-class nonwhite voters overwhelmingly, her margin among them is 8 points narrower than her margin among nonwhite Americans with college degrees. Democrats should not lessen their support for organized labor in light of these disappointing trends. But they should lower their expectations for what they’re likely to gain from delivering for individual unions with politically diverse memberships. For now, education polarization does not look all that calamitous for the Democratic Party. The share of voters with college degrees is growing over time. In part because she is winning a historically large share of college graduates, Harris is currently competitive with Trump in enough states to win an Electoral College majority, according to Nate Silver’s polling averages. But in order to win comfortable Senate majorities and prevent figures like Donald Trump from remaining competitive in national elections, Democrats will need to improve their standing with working-class voters. Delivering for unions may be necessary for achieving that goal. But if the past four years are any guide, it will not be sufficient.  Correction, October 17, 4:00 pm: A previous version of this story misquoted Daniel Schlozman as saying, “In a big pluralistic country where we are not polarized like Austria in the old days.” He actually said “pillarized.”

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris visits the US-Mexico border with US Border Patrol Tucson Sector Chief John Modlin in Douglas, Arizona, on September 27, 2024. | Rebecca Noble / AFP via Getty Images Fox News was never going to be a friendly venue for Vice President Kamala Harris. In an appearance on Special Report With Bret Baier, she was asked about some of the American right’s top fascinations and talking points: gender-affirming surgeries, Joe Biden’s mental acuity, the prospect of war with Iran. And — of course — she got tough questions about immigration policy and the southern border. It was in answering those questions that Harris demonstrated how much the Democratic Party is moving right — toward the ideological center on immigration — under the banner of her candidacy. She chose not to defend the virtue of immigration, or of immigrants themselves, and continued to cede the playing field to the right. There were no references to the nation’s immigrant roots or the value of those immigrants (here legally or not) that Baier kept asking about. And there was no condemnation of Donald Trump’s stated plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. She didn’t mention it, even as he pitches invoking archaic laws to round up and deport millions of people living in the United States. Instead, Harris used the interview to further distance herself from her past and her party’s left flank on immigration. Did she regret the immigrant-friendly positions she took in 2019 to allow undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses, qualify for free tuition at some universities, or obtain public health insurance under a universal plan? Not no. “Listen, that was five years ago, and I’m very clear that I will follow the law. I have made that statement over and over again,” Harris responded. If so, Baier followed up, why did she select a running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who signed some of those same proposals into state law in Minnesota? Harris paused before saying that her ticket is “very clear that we must support and enforce federal law and that is exactly what we will do.” And so the pattern repeated itself: Given opportunities to defend migrants in the face of classic right-wing fearmongering (as when she was asked about “single adult men who went on to commit heinous crimes”), Harris would cede the premise and pivot to the bipartisan border bill Biden proposed earlier this year that Trump helped tank. She did the same when asked if she regretted the Biden administration’s repeal of Trump-era executive orders restricting immigration — citing a bill the White House proposed that she said would’ve “fixed our immigration system.” But she omitted that it also would have provided a pathway to citizenship for certain undocumented immigrants already living in the US. This all continues a trend for Harris. Just last week, at a town hall hosted by the Spanish-language media network Univision, Harris was twice presented with opportunities to invoke and condemn Trump’s mass deportation plans when speaking to attendees who had family who were deported or unable to get health care because they lacked legal status. She passed on that chance, instead referencing her past support for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipients before pivoting to talk about reviving the bipartisan border bill. And since becoming the nominee and headlining a national party convention that tended to reference immigration in the context of needing more hardline border policies, she’s continued to push for a bipartisan border bill that many progressive and liberal immigration advocacy groups and members of her own party don’t support. Those critics are still biting their tongues — pointing out the need to unite to win the election and keep a roundly anti-immigrant Trump from controlling the executive branch — but that truce will only hold as far as November 5.

Preview: A Vox reader writes: “Why are car dealers so shady? How do consumers avoid them? Is it frustrating for everyone?” Americans have long hated the car-buying experience. It’s not uncommon to spend hours (or even the whole day) at a dealership, finally reaching a deal and still walking away feeling vaguely hoodwinked. “It’s a process that generally stinks, and it’s designed that way,” says Tom McParland, founder of Automatch Consulting, a service that helps car buyers find the best price on the vehicle they want. A lot of the distaste comes down to the uncertainty of what you’ll end up paying. In an age when you can buy almost anything online without interacting with another human being, where you can easily shop around for the best deal, cars remain one of the few purchases where your personal negotiation skills — as well as, sometimes, your race, gender, and income — can determine the price.  Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. Sometimes, the tactics car salespeople use go beyond just the hard sell to the downright deceptive. One common trap is bait and switch prices, where a car is initially advertised as one price (usually achieved by piling on discounts that you may not qualify for). When you run to the dealership to snag the deal, you’re told the vehicle has already been sold but there’s a similar one that’s more expensive. Or take yo-yo sales, in which you drive your new car home only to be told a few days later that the financing fell through so you’ll have to accept a higher interest rate or make a bigger down payment. A dealer might also try to sneak unneeded add-ons — like extended warranties or protective coatings — onto the total price of the car. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 184,000 auto-related consumer complaints, making it the third most common category after complaints about credit bureaus, as well as banks and lenders. While there are some fair dealers, the car marketplace has “a lot of sharp and unethical business practices, and consumers are hurt by it,” says Chuck Bell, programs director of advocacy at Consumer Reports. “By the time that the consumer gets out the door, they feel like they’ve been doing battle.” Why is shopping for cars done this way? The first hint that you’re on unequal footing with a car salesperson comes when they’re cagey about giving a price quote even over the phone, let alone in writing. McParland says that the dealers he calls around to for clients often tell him that he has to come to the dealership for a price. “They’re basically just telling us to go pound sand,” he says. Dealers want you to come in because it’s much easier to upsell you that way. You’ve invested some effort into the process, and the salesperson can get a better read on how impatient you are to buy a car, how inexperienced you are with car shopping, and plenty of other factors to wield to their advantage. On the other hand, if they offer you an out-the-door price — which includes all extras and fees — before you ever meet in person, you could easily take the price to a competing dealer and ask if they can do better. While online used car dealers like CarMax and Carvana did make “no haggle” car prices more popular, they often come at a premium, according to McParland. Some traditional car dealers now offer fixed prices too, but it’s probably to your benefit to try to negotiate down. How did the system get to be like this? The general practice of negotiating car prices instead of paying a fixed price may actually stem from horse trading, in which sellers and buyers also haggled and buyers would even trade in their old horse to offset the price of the new one, much as we do with cars today.  The model has endured for so long, though, in part thanks to state franchise laws that ensure these middlemen car dealerships can’t be easily cut out. Most states ban carmakers from selling directly to consumers. Tesla is the rare exception of a car company that sells directly, and it has battled with car dealers for the right to do so. Car dealer trade groups have considerable political power, and they’re organized enough and deep-pocketed enough to lobby against reforms that would threaten the status quo, such as changing franchise laws that give them exclusive rights to sell a certain car brand in a particular territory. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), for its part, argues that franchise laws in fact increase competitiveness and benefit the consumer, all the while creating local jobs. “They’re an enormously powerful lobby,” says Bell. Just look at how the industry pushed back against enforcement curtailing auto lending discrimination. Car dealers often arrange financing for customers, but they add a mark-up to the interest rate offered by banks because they can pocket that extra money for themselves. How much of a mark-up is applied is at the dealer’s discretion, and unlike mortgage lenders, they’re not required to collect data on the race of their customers, making it much harder to see if they’re complying with fair lending laws. Research shows that car dealers often charge higher interest rates to people of color. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau started cracking down on this practice in 2013, the industry fought back and won. Is there any hope for making the car-buying process better? Still, there’s reason to be optimistic about the future of shopping for cars. Late last year, the FTC announced new regulation that takes aim at the most rampant deceptive practices used by car dealers. It would, for one, require dealers to disclose the full, out-the-door price of a car, including all add-ons, before a customer visits the dealership. The price and other terms related to purchase of the car also have to be expressed in simple language. Dealers also wouldn’t be allowed to charge customers for useless add-ons. The FTC estimates the rule will save customers $3.4 billion and cut down the time spent shopping for cars by 72 million hours. The rule was supposed to go into effect this summer but was delayed after two car dealer trade groups, including NADA, filed a challenge. The association told Vox that the rule would make the car-buying experience worse. “Consumers will have to spend an additional 60-80 minutes at the dealership, complete up to five new, untested forms, and will lose at least $1.3 billion a year in time as a result of this rule,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. But Bell is confident that the rule will ultimately go into effect, and if you’re looking for a car, you should behave as though these protections already apply. McParland advises asking dealers to provide, over email, an “itemized out-the-door price” on the vehicle you’re interested in. If they refuse, “that’s usually a red flag, so move on to somebody else,” he says. This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Preview: Personal finance is hard no matter what stage of life you’re in. But for Zoomers just entering the workforce, the challenges are also coupled with a lot of uncertainty. And that combination is what brought Carolina to us with her question on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s go-to hotline for all your questions. Carolina is fresh out of college and already stressing about retirement. The older people in her life give her the same advice that generations before her have gotten: start saving immediately, contribute to your 401(k), and don’t touch it for decades until you’re ready to stop working. It’s sound advice, but Carolina wonders if it applies to her and the rest of her cohort. She knows the havoc the Great Recession wreaked on everyday people and the economy at large. “I think people assume the stock market is always safe,” she says. “But then it keeps crashing.” It’s understandable why someone might be hesitant to put their trust in a financial system that had a scare as recently as this summer.  To answer this question, we enlisted Vivian Tu, a.k.a. Your Rich BFF. Vivian is a former Wall Street day trader and currently hosts Networth and Chill (Explain It to Me and Networth and Chill are both part of the Vox Media Podcast Network). Can you enjoy today while preparing for the future? “You’ve got the folks who say ‘I’m going to blow all my cash today. I’m going to go on a shopping spree, because who knows if I get to retire in however many years.’” Tu says. “Then there are folks on the opposite side of the spectrum that say, ‘I need to prepare. I need to only think about retirement…I will have the worst life today so I can have a better future.’” We sat down with Tu to discuss how to plan for the future while enjoying the now, how to protect yourself from financial uncertainty, and how younger generations can adjust to a changing financial landscape.  Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. How should we think about balancing living in the now and preparing for the future? I ask folks to find the middle of that barbell. You are allowed to enjoy your life today. I promise you, you are not put on this big green earth to work a 9 to 5 to hate your life. That is not your ultimate purpose. You are allowed to have the little treat. You are allowed to take that trip. You are allowed to go and grab a manicure with a friend because it is fun.  You do not want to have so much fun today at the expense of future you. You want to be able to have fun today and tomorrow.  Practically, what tips do you have for young people who are thinking about retirement? I always tell everyone, there is a special Your Rich BFF method: you need to STRIP. Everyone says, “Oh, did I pick the wrong career?” No, STRIP is an acronym. S stands for savings. First and foremost you want to set aside an emergency fund. In particular, I recommend putting your emergency fund into a high-yield savings account so that your money waiting for that rainy day earns interest in the meantime. If you are a singleton, three to six months of living expenses is a good bet. If you are head of household, you have dependents, I would say closer to 6 to 12.  T is total debt. A lot of us have debt — that is not a bad word. It is just a tool. What I say is rank it from highest to lowest interest rate. Make the minimum payment across everything to keep your credit score high. But then any additional funds you have for debt paydown goes towards the interest rate that is the highest. Up next R: retirement. Take advantage of tax-advantaged accounts through your job. You can also open up an IRA or a Roth IRA.  And then I. This is important; it’s not enough to just open those accounts, you actually have to invest. Take the cash that you’re putting into those accounts and make investments that make sense based on your risk profile. Target date retirement funds or index funds often make sense.  And the last step is so critically important: P — plan. You don’t get to have happily ever after, you don’t get to ride off into the sunset if you do not have a plan. Write down what your goals are, what those milestones are, what you’d like to accomplish, the amount of money it’s going to take to get you there, and then back into what you need to do to get there. How do you protect yourself and those investments from another financial crisis?  It’s really important that your portfolio makes sense for how far you are away from retirement.  So when you’re 20, yeah, you can be 100 percent or 90 percent in the stock market and have 0 percent or 10 percent in bonds. When you’re 50, it should look almost flipped.  But it really depends on how much you’re making and how much you already have. Every single person is a little different.  What about people who are just getting by? How should they prioritize retirement savings?  If they are just getting by, first and foremost we want to try and maximize that income. People always balk when I say this: You need to be asking for a raise somewhere between 10 percent to 15 percent every single year.  Ooof.  I’m not saying you’re getting it  But if you ask for 10 to 15 and you get eight, that’s good, because eight is still going to help keep you above the inflation rate.  Retirement and savings in general are often presented as this sacrifice. You’re going without your fancy groceries now so that future you can go on cruises and golf and do whatever it is that people do when they’re retired. JQ’s moving to Naples in her retirement!  But how do you find that balance? How do you prioritize those things?  I think it’s about providing yourself with a life that you are happy with today while also thinking, “Hey, it’s not like saving for retirement means this money goes into a black hole.” You still get to spend it just later. You’re not just setting this money aside and then getting that same number back in retirement. When you start investing your money, when it has a little bit of room and time to grow, that money gets to work really hard for you. And so you might put in $100,000. That $100,000 could be a couple million dollars in retirement.

Preview: University of Chicago professor Friedrich Hayek. | Getty Images There are few more influential right-wing scholars than the economist Friedrich Hayek — and few whose work is less compatible with the right’s ascendant Trumpian strain. Born in Austria in 1899, Hayek spent his career developing a wide-ranging libertarian social theory. Societies, for Hayek, emerge from the interplay of countless different systems and logics — creating an order so complex that no single entity, not even a government, can fully understand how it all operates. He believed that any attempt to transform such a thing by policy would invariably break part of this system, leading to unintended and often disastrous consequences. This isn’t a good argument against all government interference in the marketplace (as a shallow read of Hayek might suggest). But it is a powerful insight into how societies work, one that provides an especially clear explanation for why planned economies failed so badly during Hayek’s lifetime. It also helps us understand why there’s an authentic strain of right-wing resistance to Trump’s “tariffs and deportations” economic agenda — one that attentive liberals could learn from. Hayek’s “spontaneous order” and the case against regulation For Hayek, there were basically two different types of system or order. The first is an organization, meaning a top-down planned effort where one person or entity lays out the rules for everyone to follow. The second is a “spontaneous order,” a bottom-up system in which the rules are determined over time by enormous numbers of micro-interactions. Take, for example, the ecosystem of the American West. No one person set the rules by which bison, wolves, moose, prairie dogs, and the like breed and interact; in fact, no one dictated that this particular place needed to have those particular species at all. Instead, a system emerged out of thousands of years of interactions between flora and fauna, prey and predator. It has predictable rules and outcomes, but no hand at the tiller. Hayek believed that humanity operated in a similar, but even more complex, fashion.  Our own social order, according to Hayek, reflects centuries of interactions between hundreds of millions of different people and an impossibly diverse set of institutions, ranging from organized religion to different economic sectors to artist collectives. What we call “society” is the spontaneous order that emerges from individuals and organizations interacting and developing oft-unwritten rules that govern those interactions.  “The structure of human activities constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody,” he wrote in Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume 1. Government, Hayek argued, plays a special role in spontaneous order: It “becomes indispensable in order to assure that [social] rules are obeyed.” The state both protects people’s rights to participate in their corner of the spontaneous order and, at times, can even guide the order toward adopting a different (and perhaps better) set of rules. What the state cannot do well, in Hayek’s eyes, is interfere with discrete and specific interactions inside the spontaneous order.  When the government issues “commands” telling people where and for how much they can sell their goods, for example, it is engaging in an enterprise that bureaucrats and politicians cannot and never will have sufficient knowledge to do adequately. Most economic regulation, for Hayek, is akin to the mass slaughter of wolves in the American West — a shortsighted move with destabilizing long-term consequences. (Recent efforts to reintroduce wolves have been an extraordinary success.)  “The spontaneous order arises from each element balancing all the various factors operating on it and by adjusting all its various actions to each other, a balance which will be destroyed if some of the actions are determined by another agency on the basis of different knowledge and in the service of different ends,” Hayek wrote. Hayek versus Trump It is very easy to take this pro-market line of thinking too far.  We know that certain elements of the economy, like the money supply, can in fact be effectively managed by governments. Hayek’s skepticism of government could bleed over into paranoia, as with his argument in The Road to Serfdom asserting that social democracy would invariably bleed into authoritarianism. In fact, he even went so far as to endorse Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile on grounds that its free-market policies were worth the loss of political liberty. Yet Hayek’s argument is essential to understanding why some government projects, like Soviet-style command economies, tend to fail so spectacularly. When an economic policy aims at fundamental transformation, one in which humans are put in charge of managing a vast swath of ordinary economic activity, the potential for the state to exceed the bounds of its knowledge is obvious.  Hayek did not believe that this was only a problem for socialists. In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argued that conservatives’ emphasis on preserving tradition and the nation inclined them toward dangerous forms of state control over society. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of ‘our’ industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest,” he wrote. So despite unquestionably being a man of the right, Hayek rejected the label “conservative” for his politics (he preferred “liberal” on grounds that “libertarian” was too clunky). Conservatives, he argued, were dogmatic and nationalistic — useful allies against the left, but skeptical enough of liberty that they posed their own set of collectivist dangers. Were Hayek still alive, he would see the vindication of his concerns in the person of Donald Trump. The former president’s two most consistent policy proposals — deporting millions of migrants and imposing a 10-percent tariff on all foreign-made goods — are far more aggressive efforts at reshaping America’s spontaneous order than any tax-and-spend proposals offered by the Harris campaign. Each, in its own way, amounts to a fundamental revision of how the American state and economy operate. Indeed, there’s a reason that some of the most effective critics of Trump’s trade and immigration policies work for the libertarian Cato Institute. Hayek’s heirs, at least those who take his ideas seriously, understand that Trump represents something anathema to their tradition. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

Preview: Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to the media before boarding Air Force Two after assessing the Hurricane Helene recovery response in North Carolina on October 5, 2024, in Charlotte, North Carolina. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Over the course of its last few terms, the Supreme Court has effectively placed itself in charge of the executive branch.  It’s given itself an extra-constitutional veto power over virtually any policy decision made by a federal agency. Even when it ultimately rules in favor of President Joe Biden’s policies, it often sits on those cases for months, allowing a lower court order to suspend Biden’s programs for as much as a year.  Meanwhile, the Court has done extraordinary favors for America’s only recent Republican president. Just look at the Republican justices’ decision to immunize former President Donald Trump from prosecution for criminal actions he committed while in office. The president, in other words, is increasingly subordinate to the courts. Yet, as the judiciary seizes more and more power, the battle over who gets to shape it grows increasingly lopsided.  Republicans enjoy an advantage in the Electoral College. Just how much is up for debate, but that advantage does mean that even if the American people hand Vice President Kamala Harris a modest victory in the popular vote this November, Donald Trump could still become president. He’d then get to nominate loyal Republican judges eager to implement his party’s agenda from the bench, much as he did during his first term. Even if Harris wins by a large enough margin to overcome the Electoral College’s Republican bias, she still may not get to have much of an impact on the judiciary. Her presidency — and specifically her ability to name judges — is likely to be restricted by a Republican Senate. For Democrats to control even a tied 50-50 Senate, one in which Vice President Tim Walz would hold the deciding vote if Harris prevails, they must not just win in every single blue and swing state Senate race this year, but also Senate races in at least two of the red states of Ohio, Florida, Montana, and Texas.  That could happen, but it would require the kind of unusually triumphant Democratic election year that the party hasn’t seen since at least 2008 and possibly not since President Bill Clinton’s landslide reelection victory in 1996. And that seems quite unlikely. A Harris victory could halt America’s slide into a MAGA-dominated future but it is unlikely to give her the power to reshape the judiciary in the way Trump was able to during his first term. The Electoral College and Senate malapportionment has completely warped the judiciary  During the Biden administration, the Republican Supreme Court wielded its power aggressively. It greenlit abortion bans in numerous red states. It abolished affirmative action at nearly all universities. It has turned itself into a printing press for court orders benefiting the Christian right. It’s given itself sweeping veto power over literally anything done by a federal agency that should be controlled by the president. And then there was that whole affair where the Republican justices said that Donald Trump was allowed to commit crimes while he was in office. Along the way, the Court has pulled new legal rules out of thin air, then used these newly invented rules to nullify many of Biden’s most ambitious programs. If the American people had voted for this agenda then it would be difficult to criticize the Republican Party for pushing it. But the electorate did nothing of the sort. After 2016, Trump was in a position to nominate three Supreme Court justices not because most Americans wanted him to be president but because enough Americans in the right places did. The Electoral College system means each American’s vote is not equal: Hillary Clinton, after all, won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, but still lost the presidency. Trump had a Republican Senate willing to put his choices on the bench because Republicans have an enduring advantage in the upper chamber, one that makes it more difficult for Democrats to control the Senate. Each state, regardless of population, gets two senators.  These antidemocratic features of the US Constitution have been with the United States almost from the beginning, but they have an increasingly pronounced effect today, largely because the parties have sorted based on population density. People in cities and other densely populated areas tend to vote for Democrats, while outlying areas become more and more Republican as they become less dense.  That means that a system that effectively gives extra representation to the most sparsely populated states will unfairly favor the Republican Party. In 2021, for example, when the Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the Democratic “half” represented nearly 42 million more people than the Republican “half.”  Though the trend appears to be accelerating, this antidemocratic skew long predates the Trump presidency. Senate malapportionment has been one of the most consequential factors shaping US politics for decades. By some counts, if senators were distributed equally according to how the majority of Americans voted, Democrats would have controlled the Senate in every single year since the late 1990s. In that world, Democrats not only may have enacted more significant legislation, they would also almost certainly control the courts. Obama would have confirmed a justice to fill the vacancy created when Justice Antonin Scalia died in Obama’s last year in office, and none of Trump’s nominees would have likely been confirmed. Similarly, while Republicans probably would have still filled some Supreme Court seats during the 1990s and 2000s, it’s unlikely that they would have successfully confirmed an ideologue like Justice Clarence Thomas or an unapologetic GOP partisan like Justice Samuel Alito if Senate seats were distributed fairly by population. In a fair Senate, Republican presidents would have to negotiate with Democrats to choose moderate nominees in the vein of, say, Justices Lewis Powell and Sandra Day O’Connor. That is to say, the impact of recent population sorting is felt acutely in the courts. In all of US history, only three justices were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the nation’s populace. All three of them currently sit on the Supreme Court; they are Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s three appointees to the Court. What a broken Senate means for a potential Harris administration  In the event that Harris wins the presidency but Republicans capture the Senate, we only need to turn the clock back less than a decade to predict what is likely to happen. Obama’s final two years in office were the only two when Republicans controlled the Senate. And shortly after Scalia’s death in February 2016, Senate Republicans announced that they would confirm no one Obama nominated to fill that seat.  “This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced at the time. (Four years later, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death allowed Trump to fill a vacancy in the final months of his presidency, Republicans abandoned the position they adopted in 2016 and swiftly confirmed Trump’s nominee.) The GOP’s blockade on Supreme Court confirmations should have surprised no one who watched the Senate closely because Senate Republicans had already imposed a near-total halt on all confirmations to federal appellate courts, powerful bodies that hand down precedential decisions that determine what the law is in multiple states at a time. In Obama’s last two years in office, he successfully appointed only two judges to the appellate bench, and one of these judges was confirmed to a highly specialized, relatively nonpolitical court that primarily deals with patent law. By contrast, President George W. Bush confirmed 10 appellate judges during his last two terms in office, during a period when Democrats controlled the Senate. Similarly, during Obama’s last two years in office, he appointed only 18 judges to federal district courts, the lowest rank of federal judge who enjoys a lifetime appointment. That compares to 58 judges during Bush’s final two years in office, according to data from the Federal Judicial Center. In Trump’s final two years in office, when Republicans controlled both the White House and the Senate, an astonishing 121 district judges were confirmed, including some infamously partisan judges like Aileen Cannon and Matthew Kacsmaryk.  President Biden, for what it’s worth, has confirmed more than 200 judges thanks to Democrats’ narrow majority in the Senate, including a total of 116 since the current Congress took office. Over his entire presidency, he’s filled 44 appellate seats. Without the power to confirm judges, Harris will have no way to dilute the influence of judges like Cannon or Kacsmaryk, and Republicans could easily refuse to confirm anyone to any judicial vacancy that comes open until the GOP regains the White House. Alternatively, Harris may be able to strike deals with Republicans to confirm a few of her preferred judges, but the GOP has a history of demanding a very high price to confirm even a single Democratic judge.  In 2014, for example, thanks in part to a now-weakened Senate process that allowed senators to veto anyone nominated to a federal judgeship in their state, Georgia’s Republican senators convinced Obama to nominate four Republican judicial choices — including a Republican appellate judge — in return for confirming only two Democrats. One of the Republican nominees was eventually dropped because his views on abortion, marriage equality, and the Confederate Flag offended Democrats, but Republicans still walked away with more confirmed judges than Obama did. Harris could very well find herself in a similar situation.  The problems for Harris likely wouldn’t stop there. Because Republicans continue to dominate the judiciary, Harris would likely spend her presidency watching her policies get struck down on dubious legal theories invented by GOP judges, much as the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy despite the fact that it was unambiguously authorized by an act of Congress. Democrats are starting to awaken to the threat of a Republican judiciary, but they haven’t yet found a solution to their constitutional problem Absent constitutional reform, Democrats have good reason to fear a Republican judiciary for decades to come. A malapportioned Senate means that Democrats are increasingly defenseless against the GOP’s efforts to control the bench. In recent years, however, Democrats have become more aware of a GOP judiciary’s power to thwart their agenda and have started to try to explore ways around it.  Historically, elected Republicans have viewed the courts as a favorable issue that rallies their base, while Democrats have behaved much more cautiously. Many Republicans credit Trump’s decision to delegate judicial selection to the Federalist Society, a bar association for right-wing lawyers, and to release a list of potential Supreme Court nominees during his 2016 candidacy, for giving him enough support to prevail in that year’s election. Biden, by contrast, began his presidency very reluctant to take on the courts. After many Democrats called for Supreme Court reform in the wake of the Senate’s disparate treatment of the Scalia and Ginsburg vacancies, Biden tried to take the wind out of the sails of reform by promising to appoint a commission to study the issue — and then filling the commission with Republicans and scholars who historically have not supported reform. But, as the Supreme Court’s polling numbers collapsed and as the Court outraged elected Democrats with opinions like its Trump immunity decision, Democrats have grown more aggressive. Biden proposed term-limiting the justices and imposing a binding ethics code on the Court, proposals also supported by Harris. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has a bill that would strip the Court of jurisdiction to enforce its immunity decision. One of the most ambitious recent Supreme Court reform proposals, from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), includes a number of very aggressive reforms. Wyden’s proposal would make every justice submit to a tax audit each year, require a two-thirds supermajority for the Court to overrule an act of Congress, and gradually expand the size of the Court to 15 seats. Yet, while these proposals show that Democrats are moving in a more court-skeptical direction than they were four years ago, they would not solve the structural problems with US democracy that gave us the courts we have today. And they have virtually no chance of passing, especially in a world where it is increasingly difficult for Democrats to win the Senate even when they convincingly win the national popular vote. Realistically, turning the United States into a nation where every vote counts equally — and where each voter is actually able to shape the judiciary — would require rewriting its Constitution. Until that happens, Democrats like Harris will struggle to win elections even when most Americans support them. And Democratic presidents will increasingly be at the mercy of Republicans in both the Senate and the courts.

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: The fashion concern said its performance improved in both its retail and wholesale channels, with increased revenue across all its markets, in particular in the Americas.

Preview: The Franco-Italian eyewear group’s revenue rose 4% in the third quarter, helped by sales of smart glasses.

Preview: Find insight on Mondi, BHP, International Paper and more in the latest Market Talks covering Basic Materials.

Preview: Find insight on Woodside Energy, Mercury NZ, Contact Energy and more in the latest Market Talks covering Energy and Utilities.

Preview: Find insight on Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing, St. James’s Place, Man Group and more in the latest Market Talks covering Financial Services.

Preview: Find insight on Uber, CSX and more in the latest Market Talks covering the Auto and Transport sector.

Preview: The one-night special marks the streaming service’s first foray into original live-news programming.

Preview: The company’s earnings missed expectations, the latest sign of how medical expenses are squeezing insurers’ government businesses.

Preview: PPG agreed to sell its architectural-coatings business in the U.S. and Canada to private-equity firm American Industrial Partners for $550 million, and outlined cost and job cuts.

Preview: Sea-Doo and Ski-Doo maker BRP said it intends to sell off the majority of its marine businesses, which have been weighed down by softer consumer demand, to focus on powersports products such as snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles.

Preview: A Denver woman was sentenced to a year and a day in prison followed by three years of supervised release and ordered to pay restitution after defrauding her employer Amazon.

Preview: With just 19 days to go until Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris has adopted a frantic, discombobulated strategy of throwing everything she can find at Donald Trump to see if anything sticks.

Preview: Crime-fighting initiatives that targeted Virginia's most violent cities were celebrated Thursday by Gov. Glenn Youngkin for driving a statewide decline in killings and crime.

Preview: The next director of the Secret Service should come from outside the agency to inject "fresh thinking" into an organization that has "become bureaucratic, complacent, and static," according to an independent panel that investigated the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Preview: A pilot program will bring "noise cameras" to Montgomery County roads after the Montgomery County Council approved it in a vote Tuesday.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday addressed Israel's killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by saying he was a terrorist whose actions killed Americans and threatened stability in the Middle East.

Preview: National Security Editor Guy Taylor speaks with renowned journalist and author Peter Bergen on how America's position in the world can be expected to shift in 2025, the foreign policy differences between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and the extent to the so-called "deep state" will have a role in what's coming.

Preview: Last month, the CIA posted instructions on social media sites on a secure means of contact via the internet for Iranians interested in sharing sensitive information with the U.S. government.

Preview: Seven Philadelphia-area workers won their case against United Auto Workers officials this week after the union threatened the members if they refused to strike last year.

Preview: I recall Otto Penzler, the owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, telling me that mystery, crime fiction, and thrillers were the best-selling genres of books today--and that business was good.

Preview: MOUNT CARMEL — As the prophets of Baal were being executed at the brook of Kishon, a sheepish Baal finally arrived on Mount Carmel, hours after the prophet Elijah had mocked him for having to relieve himself, admitting that he actually was on the toilet the whole time.

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — In response to her testy interview last night, presidential candidate Kamala Harris has stepped forward to accuse Fox News of journalistic malpractice, claiming that the media company never informed her the interview would include questions.

Preview: As Election Day continues to draw nigh, the entire country is waiting for the answer to one simple question: who's gonna be the next president of the United States?

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — Teary-eyed sources at the Washington Post have just confirmed that the paper's entire staff has just been given the day off to mourn the loss of the Hamas leader who masterminded the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023.

Preview: U.S. — Immediately after leaving her interview with Fox News, Kamala Harris called up McDonald's to see if she could by chance have her old job back.

Preview: U.S. — After watching Kamala self-immolate on national television, Democrats have begun wondering if it's too late to just go back to Joe Biden.

Preview: There have (apparently) been some pretty heated disagreements between Catholics and Protestants over the years. However, these two opposing camps of Christ-followers may be surprised to find out just how much they have in common!

Preview: U.S. — In an effort to make up for serving incredibly lousy coffee, Starbucks has rolled out a new plan to heat all drinks to one million degrees Celsius.

Preview: PITTSBURGH, PA — An apparent miracle occurred today as President Donald Trump, cooking up a McDonald's burger for the people of Pennsylvania, suddenly spotted the visage of President Ronald Reagan in his Big Mac Bun.

Preview: U.S. — In surprising results following years of extensive research, a new study confirmed that an astonishing 9 out of 10 serial killers were made to wear matching pajamas for childhood family photos.

Preview: Italy criminalized citizens going abroad to have children through surrogacy, a measure slammed by opponents as “medieval” and discriminatory to same-sex couples. What do you think? The post Italy Bans Overseas Surrogacy appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: DORADO, PUERTO RICO—In response to concerns about the health effects of his popular line of drinks, YouTuber and entrepreneur Logan Paul claimed Thursday that Prime is perfectly healthy for the average 9-foot-tall, 400-pound child. “If Prime is consumed as recommended, there’s no reason that an ordinary 450-pound 8-year-old who’s nearly 10 feet tall should experience […] The post Logan Paul Claims Prime Perfectly Healthy For Average 9-Foot-Tall, 400-Pound Child appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: PALM BEACH, FL—Outlining his ambitious plans for a potential second presidential term, Republican candidate Donald Trump reportedly made a pledge Thursday to use an obscure 18th-century law to marry his daughter. “We’re moving full steam ahead with ‘Operation Ivanka,’” said Trump, who credited his policy advisors with working around-the-clock for months to discover the loophole […] The post Trump Pledges To Use Obscure 18th-Century Law To Marry Daughter appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: The post Kamala Harris Appears On White Noise Podcast In Appeal To Sleepy Voters appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Due to the high volume of votes flushed down the toilet in the past elections, officials are now warning that ballots sent in via the nation’s sewage system will no longer be counted.   The post Voters Warned Ballots Flushed Down Toilet Will No Longer Be Counted appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Trunk-or-treat events, an alternative to traditional door-to-door trick-or-treating, have increased in popularity as parents grow wary of letting their children stray. Here are tips for organizing your own community trunk-or-treat event.  The post Tips For Organizing A Trunk-Or-Treat appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: Ava Barden, 14, imagined dying Thursday evening. In her head, she was survived by her crush Ethan Loughran, whom she imagined weeping as he laid a single white rose on her gravestone. Ava’s family members request that she come down from her room and set the table for dinner.  The post Ava Barden appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: BOSTON—Describing the behavior as an avoidance strategy used to ignore difficult subjects, local woman Sophia McKabe told reporters Thursday that her emotionally distant husband Doug seemed to prefer watching Stargate SG-1 to having an honest conversation about Stargate SG-1. “It’s like every time I try to ask Doug how he really feels about Colonel O’Neill […] The post Emotionally Distant Husband Would Rather Watch ‘Stargate SG-1’ Than Have Honest Conversation About ‘Stargate SG-1’ appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: PROVIDENCE, RI—Feeling too overwhelmed by the myriad options to make a decision, area hostage-taker Jason Harmon reportedly asked negotiators Thursday what people usually demand. “I thought a demand would just come to me after I pulled out my gun and ordered everybody to get on the fucking ground, but truth be told, I’m still feeling […] The post Indecisive Hostage-Taker Asks What People Usually Demand appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: NEW YORK—The site of just two home losses in the past millennium due to the incredibly hostile atmosphere of the malevolent venue, Hades’ Inferno Stadium was once again ranked first on ESPN’s list of toughest arenas to play in this week.  Situated in the newly redeveloped sports and entertainment district on the banks of the […] The post Hades’ Inferno Stadium Once Again Ranked Toughest Arena To Play In appeared first on The Onion.