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Swedish election tests a blurred left-right divide

Recent polls show Sweden’s right closing the gap as the Social Democrats court conservative voters

Sep 7 • 10:00 PM EDT • Politics • euractiv.com

How the Eagles could divide carries behind RB Saquon Barkley

How the Eagles could divide carries behind Saquon Barkley with Tank Bigsby and Will Shipley offering different skill sets

Sep 7 • 12:44 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

How Baltimore could divide RB snaps behind Derrick Henry

Justice Hill and Rasheen Ali will compete for opportunities behind Derrick Henry

Sep 7 • 12:28 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Labor unions are growing, but where depends on state politics

Labor union membership continues to climb in the United States, though the increase remains sharply divided by the politics of individual states.

Sep 7 • 9:08 AM EDT • Politics • thedailynewsonline.com

Labor unions are growing nationwide, but where depends on state politics

Sept. 7, 2026 By Kevin Hardy, Wisconsin Examiner Labor union membership continues to climb in the United States, though the increase remains sharply divided by the politics of individual states. Last year, the nation added more than 411,000 union members — the largest annual growth since 2008, according to a study published just ahead of […]

Sep 7 • 9:03 AM EDT • Politics • vernonreporter.com

Dining across the divide: ‘He looked like a Green voter. As you get older you realise it’s unicorn politics’

A part-time musician and an office manager disagreed on benefits and work-life balance, but ​where did they stand on community responsibility?

Sep 6 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com

Trump’s ‘dumb’ story makes no sense

There are far more important issues to discuss. But in these divided times, surely we can all come together for a brief moment and agree that President Donald Trump’s “dumb” story makes no sense.

Sep 6 • 6:30 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Jim Cramer Says “Own It, Don’t Trade It” as CVS Health Gains Momentum

A caller on the September 2 episode of Mad Money noted that CVS Health Corporation (NYSE:CVS) is up 21% this year, sports a 3% dividend, and trades at a 28 valuation compared to its 54 average. Pointing to raised guidance, higher price targets, and a massive capital plan, they asked if it makes sense to […]

Sep 5 • 6:32 AM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com

Lindsay Clancy murder trial has divided US on whether she's victim or criminal

Some say the case shed light on the mental health struggles of mothers, while others argue it's no excuse for murder.

Sep 5 • 6:02 AM EDT • Health • bbc.com

National Values Show Generational Divide in WSJ-NORC Poll

Take our quiz, based on 1,862 survey responses, to find the new fault lines in U.S. values

Sep 5 • 5:30 AM EDT • Politics • wsj.com

Former SC governor launching effort to mend political divide in U.S.

A former South Carolina governor says he is launching an effort to mend the political divide in the U.S.

Sep 4 • 6:32 PM EDT • Politics • abccolumbia.com

15 discouraging hours with Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and 10 brilliant ones with He Who Watches

In the last few weeks, while playing some video games that I might review, I emailed two cries for help. I sent the first to a rep for Capcom, confessing that the company’s samurai game Onimusha Way of the Sword (out today for PC and console) was crushing me. “Feels like I’m playing ‘hard’ mode, not ‘normal,’” I wrote. “And I don’t want to have to knock it down to “story”. I’m exploring, trying to level my gear, but these two-phase boss fights with no mid-fight checkpoints are brutal.” I wagered I was only about halfway through the game, if that. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the steepening difficulty curve. Was I missing something? Then, on Monday, I took some photos of some puzzles that were baffling me in the mind-bending He Who Watches (out now on PC), wrote out lengthy descriptions of how I’d been trying to solve them and asked Bobby Vanden, the game’s solo developer, for a nudge in the right direction. I told Vanden I’d spent hours on these puzzles. “I’m stuck in triplicate,” I told him. Could he tell me if the solutions I was attempting were even on the right track? I didn’t mention that the puzzles—coupled with major time pressures from other work—were stressing me out so much that playing the game was giving me headaches. This double dose of panic was unusual. I’m used to managing a workload full of reporting and reviewing, used to a crowded schedule and the need to stay calm amid the bustle. But I was stressed about these games. No one was forcing me to review them, nor even play them. I’d simply found them interesting enough to start, hoped they’d be interesting enough to write about and I’d sunk hours into them assuming I’d made the right call. Suddenly, however, I felt trapped. I was emailing for a way out. Above: This guy took me about an hour to beat. The feedback I got from Capcom confirmed my fears. They didn’t say it, but I will: Onimusha Way of the Sword is not for me. It’s a brutally hard game in need of a normal difficulty level. It’s a game that spikes so severely during its abundant boss fights—yet offers such flawed ways to improve when outside of them—that it feels like a bait-and-switch. In the new Onimusha, you play as famed samurai Musashi Miyamoto, aided by a magical soul-absorbing gauntlet that is possessed by a lady who offers advice. (Way of the Sword is a continuation of Capcom’s long-dormant Onimusha series, but that set-up had me wondering if the company was cribbing from their ill-fated Bionic Commando reboot; read about “wife-arm” when you get a chance). Way of the Sword is partially set in 17th century Kyoto, an explorable city where Miyamoto can fight demons, help civilians and eventually rescue ghostly dogs. The city evolves over time, with new mini adventures and obtainable loot on offer, all feeding into systems that promise to upgrade your gear and sword-fighting skills. Upgrades, however, are so incremental as to be imperceptible, causing the exploration of Kyoto to feel like inconsequential busywork. From that hub, players can go on linear missions into forests and old temples, where they will encounter many of the game’s tough bosses. Combat in Way of the Sword is akin to many modern melee games. Players are asked to mix attacks with dodges and parries. They’re encouraged to deplete an enemy’s stamina bar in order to do greater damage to its health bar. The old Onimusha games’ signature move was the issen, a counter-attack so sudden it’s all but pre-emptive. You strike just as they begin to strike toward you, beating them to the cut. By definition, the issen is a high risk move, leaving you wide open to pain. It feels risky in the game, especially against bosses, who can maul you in just a few blows. A game might train you to perform an issen well by offering a variety of lesser enemies who are not as tough as the boss but get close. Or it might offer a toehold against bosses by saving or checkpointing the player’s progress when a boss’ first health bar has been destroyed and before the second health bar appears. It might offer the less skilled player a chance to over-level their character, should the player simply commit to playing through its optional sidequests. Way of the Sword does none of this. Fighting its trivially easy grunt enemies and then its ferociously adept bosses is like playing a game of chess where I’ve got a rook, while the opposing side is all pawns and five queens. Bosses simply don’t checkpoint. You may be able to clear a boss’ first phase without taking much damage. Good for you. Do it again, every time you fail the second phase. As for the the central Kyoto hub, I kept pace with all of its added side activities and never felt like I was overpowered. Bosses could still easily buckle me. The new Onimusha, I concluded, is just too discouraging to keep playing. The advice I got from Capcom had been well-intentioned. They reminded me of the game’s various systems. They alerted me to an optional assist that flashes recommended button inputs (basically: counter this move; dodge that move). It was a little helpful. So was dropping down to “story mode,” which I tried last night. Story mode turns on those button prompts by default. It makes countering and dodging way too easy, nearly automatic. I don’t consider myself a master of action games like these, but I’ve cleared the likes of God of War, Stellar Blade, Star Wars Jedi and others of sub-Sekiro difficulty and had a fun time doing so. Not here. Not yet. Unless they patch Onimusha: Way of the Sword and add a middle difficulty or just checkpoint the damn bosses when they’re between health bars, my streak of loving Capcom games released in 2026 will likely end at two. It’s a shame, because I was having a good time finding those ghostly dogs. And then there’s He Who Watches, a phenomenal first person puzzle game with Portal vibes, except instead of a portal gun you’ve got a magical bow that shoots one arrow that can activate switches or be used to drag blocks. The twist is an actual twist: you can also walk on walls and the ceiling, reorienting gravity as you do, thereby placing blocks onto those other surfaces. Walking on walls and ceilings to solve problems is really the best thing. Would that I could in reality. He Who Watches consists of locked-room challenges, each brief enough to only require about a minute to actually solving, though it will take five, 10, eventually 30 minutes to figure out said solutions. They are not obvious! It’s a game of layered mechanics and shocking solutions. For example, see if you can follow this: You can drag a block to a wall. Then you can walk on the wall, which now feels like the floor, and drag that block across the wall. Later, back on the floor, you might realize you can look up. The block is still on the wall, stuck to it. You can shoot your magic arrow to its underside. Doing so creates a tether, so that you can yank the block off the wall and carry it, as if it were a balloon, into the spot where you need it to be to solve the puzzle. Here, watch Vanden explain some of the game’s basics in this launch trailer: As with any great puzzle game, the solutions to He Who Watches’ puzzles elicit relief and amazement. Oh my god, that worked! I didn’t even think that could be possible! Learning to solve the game’s puzzles feels like learning magic. But, oh, does the game get hard. Its Steam reviews, mostly glowing, are full of players remarking how quickly He Who Watches made them sweat. Wrote one: “loving this one already although my brain is hurting!” Wrote another: “As you get further in the game it feels like you need an IQ level of at least 120+.” Vanden has shown some mercy. Each locked room puzzle includes an optional junior version of the puzzle, meant to teach you. Difficulty nevertheless ramps severely. By the time I was emailing Vanden for help, I was struggling to even clear one of the hint puzzles. When I messaged him, my stress was exacerbated by strange things I’d found in the game’s various hubs: suspicious passageways, odd blocks and some intriguing locked doors. These were hints of secrets, I realized, yet I sensed I needed to play further into the game to understand them. I was stuck, but I wanted to see the rest. Vanden offered to give me the exact solutions, to solve those three puzzles for me, but first he gave four nudges. Three were for the specific puzzles, but his best hint was for all and ultimately proved to be a terrific life lesson: go back a bit, he suggested. Do the puzzles right before those. They were teaching you something. Focus on what their lesson was. Don’t rush, in other words. Recognize what you’ve accomplished. Build off of that. I did so. I absorbed the lessons. I saw those three tough puzzles in a new light. I solved one the night after he wrote back, another the morning after. I left a third for another time. I didn’t need it and I wanted to plunge deeper into the game, closer to the moment when I was sure I could start unlocking those secret doors. My head stopped hurting, too. He Who Watches feels special. It’s got more challenges, and I’m undeterred. It’s also nice that its puzzles don’t have a surprise second health bar. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Item 2: In brief… 🎮 Ilari Kuittinen, co-founder of Helsinki-based Housemarque (Super Stardust HD, Resogun, Returnal) has stepped down from his studio, after a 31-year run, saying he’s “ taking a rare and well-deserved breather.” Sony purchased Housemarque in 2021, and the studio released its newest game, Saros, earlier this year. Trend-watch: Sony-owned Insomniac saw its founder Ted Price retire in early 2025, after a 30-year run. Sony-owned Sucker Punch saw its co-founder Brian Fleming step down in late 2025, after a 28-year run. 👀 Savvy Games Group chief Brian Ward is stepping down from the Saudi-government-backed games conglomerate, Bloomberg reports. No word on a long-term successor yet, nor if this augurs any closer integration between Savvy and Electronic Arts. EA was purchased by a consortium led by Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund, in early August. 💿 Square Enix has denied a Japanese media report that the company was planning to go private. In very different Square Enix news, the company revealed that the physical version of Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, the April 2027 finale of its radical remakes of FFVII, will include just one disc in its case, requiring a download for the rest. The first two FFVII remakes in the trilogy shipped on two discs apiece. While Square hasn’t commented on the reason why, a feature here in Game File last month broke down the processes and costs for physical games. The expense of a second disc comes out of the game publisher’s cut of each copy. Square could be saving in excess of a dollar a copy with this move. 🟥 Grand Theft Auto IV’s 26-minute ’‘extended look” gameplay showcase that premiered on Netflix last week—and was exclusive to the platform for six hours—drew 31.1 million views in its first four days, the streamer announced. (Netflix calculates views as total viewed hours divided by runtime; excludes replays). Compared to YouTube: The version that later premiered on Rockstar Games’ YouTube channel is sitting at 22.6 million views after seven days (YouTube’s more liberal counting system tallies anyone who viewed even just the first few second.) Compared to other Netflix mega-events: Last year, Stranger Things season 5’s first four episodes, which debuted together, drew a record 59.6 million views in their first few days on Netflix. For more of a live event type of comparison, in 2024, the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match drew 65 million concurrent streams as it happened; Netflix didn’t release live numbers for the GTA premiere. ☁️ Microsoft is changing the way it charges for cloud gaming, from an all-you-can-play offer for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, to caps for the subscription’s tiers (15 hours per month at the Ultimate tier), with the option to buy more hours in bulk beyond that. The company also said it will sell batches of cloud gaming time to non-Game Pass subscribers, details TBA. Microsoft does not release figures for cloud game usage, but said its changes would impact 4% of Game Pass subscribers. That implies a small portion of its subscribers exceed the 15-hour monthly mark. Cloud gaming offers the promise of playing games without the need for console or PC hardware, as the graphics, sound and controls are all transmitted via a streaming connection. Microsoft notes that its cloud gaming service can be used for a range of things, including Xbox One players using it to play newer-gen Xbox Series games via streaming; and people playing games via streaming, sans any console, “in markets where consoles are less available or affordable.” (That latter use case could even be relevant in Xbox’s home market soon, as console prices keep rising.) Take Two Interactive chairman Strauss Zelnick recently told investors he expects game-streaming tech, which has been only lightly adopted by gamers for over a decade, to be widely used within three years. 🇺🇸 The Trump administration has published multiple agenda-driven web video games to the White House’s website. One called Build The Wall partially clones Tetris as it asks players to build a wall to stop a “zombie border siege.” While actual Tetris involves clearing lines and basically not building a wall, the Trump-backed game omits the line-clearing aspect (and omits the fun as well). On Instagram, Tetris’ official license holders reacted by stating: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community. P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall.’ P.P.S.: We take copyright infringement very seriously.” Item 3: The week ahead: Tuesday, September 8 Game releases: Mewgenics (consoles; already out on PC) is an engrossing tactical combat game (with cats). It is getting its console port right after the release of a Star Wars tactics game and ahead of the late September launch of a Fire Emblem–a bumper crop for the genre. Wanderburg (PC) is an auto-shooting game like Vampire Survivors, but you’re a castle on wheels Event: Nintendo airs a 30-minute Nintendo Direct (10am ET) focused on The Legend of Zelda’s 40th Anniversary. A full unveiling of the upcoming remake of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is expected. Will they also show footage from next year’s live action movie? Tease the next big 3D Zelda? Add Link to Mario Kart World? Shadow-drop a new Tingle game? Wednesday, September 9 Event: Nintendo again! On this day, they’re planning to air a 45-minute Nintendo Direct (10am ET) focused on games heading to Switch 2 this winter. Followed by about an hour of gameplay demoed by the company’s Treehouse team. The September Nintendo Directs are always some of the year’s biggest. The 2025 edition included announcements of several major 2026 Switch/Switch 2 games: Pokémon Pokopia, Mario Tennis Fever, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave. Plus the return of the Virtual Boy. Friday, September 11 Game release: EA Sports NHL 27 (PlayStation, Xbox) is a hockey game. There are so few that an indie studio that had been making wacky sci-fi first-person shooters just announced that, hey, we’re going to fill a void and make a hockey game for PC.

Sep 4 • 6:23 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

75th Street parking ban divides businesses, city over safety and survival

A temporary overnight parking ban stretching across several miles of 75th Street is pitting business owners worried about their survival against a city alderman who says the police-led strategy is helping keep guns off the street.

Sep 4 • 5:42 PM EDT • Business • fox32chicago.com

Trump and GOP’s growing divide on midterms | Debate roundup

Sep 4 • 5:28 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Labor unions are growing, but where depends on state politics

Labor union membership continues to climb in the United States, though the increase remains sharply divided by the politics of individual states. Last year, the nation added more than 411,000 union members — the largest annual growth since 2008, according to a study published just ahead of the Labor Day holiday by the Illinois Economic […]

Sep 4 • 3:12 PM EDT • Politics • stateline.org

Science Applications (SAIC) Grew Revenue 6% but Posted a 0.6 Book-to-Bill Ratio. Is the $22B Backlog Enough?

Science Applications International Corporation (NASDAQ:SAIC) reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $1.88 billion, up 6.3% year over year. Net bookings, however, were approximately $1.2 billion. That produced a quarterly book-to-bill ratio of 0.6, calculated as net bookings divided by revenue, while the trailing 12-month ratio was 0.8. Total backlog stood at approximately $22.1 billion, including […]

Sep 4 • 1:16 PM EDT • Science • finance.yahoo.com

Law and Justice Is Weak... But the Right Can Rule in Poland

‘Law and Justice has always been a centre-right party, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists…a pro-American group supporting the Republican Party…and situated within the spectrum of the “traditional” political divide. In recent years, movements have emerged in Polish politics that have challenged Law and Justice’s hegemony on the right.’

Sep 4 • 10:30 AM EDT • Politics • hungarianconservative.com

Cramer Says the Snack Business Is Bad. Mondelez and Smucker Did Not Get the Message.

Jim Cramer called Campbell's snack quarter a nightmare and warned the whole category is broken, but two other packaged food giants reported something very different this week and raised their dividends to prove it.

Sep 4 • 8:40 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Beyond the 'Great Divide': What we really know about political polarization

Americans are deeply divided. At least that's what we've been told for years. But how divided are we really? A new review suggests the answer may depend on how researchers ask the question.

Sep 3 • 5:20 PM EDT • Politics • phys.org

With his eye on reelection, Israel's Netanyahu turns his focus to his divided base

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks reelection, his main concern these days isn’t his political rivals | WBBM Newsradio 780 AM & 105.9 FM

Sep 3 • 12:01 AM EDT • Politics • audacy.com

On Trump’s Ballroom, Chief Justice Finds Himself in an Unusual Spot: In Dissent

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has been in the majority in divided cases more times than any other chief since 1953. But not this time.

Sep 1 • 5:19 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Big Ideas Lab podcast takes on the science of scale-up

Rechargeable lithium batteries trace back to 1972, but they wouldn't reach consumer products until 1991. Solar photovoltaic cells existed in the 1950s, long before solar panels appeared on rooftops. And the MRI was demonstrated in the 1970s, years before the machines became hospital staples. In each case, the core scientific principles had been proven. The difficult part was scaling them into technologies people could reliably use. The average disruptive technology takes roughly 35 years to cross that divide. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are trying to compress

Sep 1 • 11:32 AM EDT • Science • llnl.gov

Can this unlikely pair reshape Israeli politics?

In Israel’s divided politics, an Islamist leader is teaming up with a former Israeli police officer. CNN’s Tal Shalev explains that the unlikely pairing hopes to break new ground as they reshape what’s possible and address the everyday issues that affect the country’s Arab population.

Aug 31 • 8:00 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Netflix’s #1 Movie Has Viewers Raving About the Cast—and Criticizing This One Thing

Netflix’s latest number one movie has viewers seriously divided. While the star-studded cast is earning plenty of praise, some viewers are calling out one major issue with the thriller.

Aug 31 • 12:53 PM EDT • Entertainment • purewow.com

In Massachusetts U.S. Senate race, challenger Moulton says Markey, 80, is too old for another term. Young Democrats are divided

The 2026 midterms have brought a number of generational challenges like the one Moulton is waging against Markey, with younger Democrats taking on — and in some cases unseating — longtime incumbents.

Aug 31 • 10:55 AM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Is Swansea City's attacking transfer business already paying off?

Swansea fans were keen to see signings on the wing, and on the evidence of the first three Championship games, the additions have paid dividends.

Aug 30 • 10:03 AM EDT • Business • bbc.com

Scientists discover a massive heat anomaly deep inside Mars

Mars has a hidden temperature divide, with its southern interior potentially hundreds of degrees hotter than the north and partially molten. The discovery could help explain several long-standing Martian mysteries, including unusual magnetism, seismic behavior, and clues to the planet’s ancient water history.

Aug 30 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Moulton says Sen. Markey, 80, is too old for another term. Young Massachusetts Democrats are divided

Young Massachusetts voters agree that 80-year-old U.S. Sen. Ed Markey stumbled when asked during a debate how he uses artificial intelligence

Aug 30 • 7:46 AM EDT • Politics • abcnews.com

Moulton says Sen. Markey, 80, is too old for another term. Young Massachusetts Democrats are divided

Young Massachusetts voters agree that 80-year-old U.S. Sen. Ed Markey stumbled when asked during a debate how he uses artificial intelligence.

Aug 30 • 7:46 AM EDT • Politics • click2houston.com

Business Class Is Being Subdivided Into Different Categories

Leading airlines such as American, British Airways, and United are competing with new super suites positioned among regular business-class suites.

Aug 28 • 10:00 AM EDT • Business • robbreport.com

The long afterlife of QAnon conspiracy theories haunting American politics

Ideas from QAnon’s conspiracy theory have appeared on government social media sites during Trump’s second term and continue to divide America amid social and economic crises.

Aug 27 • 5:02 PM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Vin Diesel divides fans with cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ after her death

First, there was Whitney Houston. Now, there’s Vin Diesel, whose tribute cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’ divided fans in the wake of Dolly Parton’s death.

Aug 27 • 10:06 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

Greenland research institutions halt new US collaborations citing mistrust

Although US President Donald Trump still harbours ambitions to take over Greenland, for US researchers his actions seem to have had the opposite effect. Over the summer, Greenland’s two largest research institutions, the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and the University of Greenland, both announced policies of not starting new research projects with US researchers.Both institutions cite a mistrust of the US as a motivation for the decision. At the University of Greenland, the change of policy has already led to the rejection of specific proposals for new collaborations, rector Mari Kleist told Science|Business. “The reason is the changed political situation between the US and Kalaallit Nunaat [Greenland], and the uncertainty that the American interest in Kalaallit Nunaat has created,” she said.For the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, a partially state-funded environmental research institution, the decision was also prompted by a lack of trust in US intentions. In a July interview with local broadcaster KNR, director Josephine Nymand cited concerns about data ownership, US “influence operatives” and social media monitoring of researchers entering the US.The Greenland Institute of Natural Resources has long collaborated with the US National Science Foundation (NSF). The policy change will not affect these existing partnerships but will apply to collaborations with new, “unknown” partners, Nymand said. At the University of Greenland, the policy is the same.The changes come amid proposals of severe cuts to the NSF, which would likely also see the US research presence in Greenland reduced. In spite of this, when asked about the Greenlandic policy change, the NSF remained optimistic of its continued presence in Greenland.“We are grateful to our partners in Greenland for their collaboration in advancing scientific knowledge and training the next generation of researchers. NSF remains committed to the long-term collaborations with Greenland that enable scientific research near communities and on Greenland’s ice sheet,” an NSF spokesperson told Science|Business.Fewer US researchers in GreenlandMost research published on Greenland is on natural science topics such as the cryosphere, ice dynamics, permafrost and climate change. In recent years, US researchers have been the most prolific publishers on Greenland.The US research presence in Greenland goes far beyond the capital of Nuuk, where the two research institutions are located. It includes the Pituffik Space Base in northwest Greenland, various projects in settlements and research stations along the coast, as well as research stations on the Greenland ice sheet itself.The largest of these sites, Summit Station, is located at the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet, about 3,200 metres above sea level, and since the 1980s it has been used for drilling cores out of the ice sheet. These ice cores provide valuable information on the global climate going back at least 100,000 years. About 30 kilometres from Summit Station, the Danish-led Greenland Ice-core Project (Grip), funded by the European Research Council, is also drilling ice cores. Although they initially competed, the relationship between the two research teams has “long been amiable,” Jørgen Peder Steffensen, a Danish researcher who has been part of Grip for more than 40 years, told Science|Business.However, since Trump took office in early 2025, Steffensen has noticed a reduction in US research in the country. “Several of our American partners did not make it into the field this year. Their field seasons were cancelled because they lacked the budget,” he said.He ascribed part of the reduction in US researchers to a renovation of Summit Station. “A very large share of NSF funding has gone into renewing the station. Money has been taken from research and allocated to rebuilding it,” he said.A report published in August by Arctic Hub confirms Steffensen's observations of fewer US researchers. It shows that US research publications on Greenland took a dip towards the end of the period spanning 2015 to 2024. In 2024, before Trump took office, the number of publications had fallen from an average of about 250 articles a year, to just 164, second behind Canada at 169.Data from the NSF logistics provider Battelle also shows a reduction in US research presence in Greenland in recent years. In 2023, Battelle counted 48 projects across 78 locations, but in 2025 that number had fallen to 40 projects across 38 locations. And while relations with US personnel in Greenland have remained strong, some tensions have arisen since Trump took office. “On a personal level, there is nothing. But it’s hanging in the air. It hangs unspoken,” Steffensen said.Cutting ties with US researchers entirely would come at a higher cost for the ice core researchers than the Nuuk-based institutions. To get cargo to and from their bases, both Grip and Summit Station rely on unique, ski-equipped Hercules LC-130 aircraft operated by the New York Air National Guard. Without these, maintaining a research base on the Greenland ice sheet would not be viable on current budgets, Steffensen said. “[If the Hercules planes were not available], we would have to think outside of the box. We would have to use smaller planes, and we would have to build a base closer to the coast. But staying in our current location would be too expensive and it would create a huge carbon footprint,” he said.Suspicious people in NuukIn her explanation of the severed US ties, Greenland Institute of Natural Resources director Josephine Nymand compared the decision to past situations when the institute had to cut ties with China and Russia, the latter due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And although the current situation is less severe, the comparison reflects the seriousness with which Nuuk sees the US threats. “From Greenland’s perspective, the US may not look so different from Russia right now: a much larger neighbouring power threatening to invade,” Lin Alexandra Mortensgaard, a researcher of international politics in the Arctic at the Danish Institute for International Studies, told Science|Business. “From a European perspective, it is not a comparable situation, because we are entangled with the US on all possible fronts and do not want to destroy more than is absolutely necessary. But from Greenland’s side, there may well be a need to send a clear signal to the US,” she went on. Suspicions have been fuelled by instances of Trump-affiliated people in Greenland trying to persuade Greenlandic citizens to support a US takeover. The most prolific among them is Tom Dans, a former venture capitalist and pecan farmer who was appointed by Trump as the chair of the United States Arctic Research Commission. Observers fear that he is now using research to achieve a US takeover.“Greenland is a small society with a small population, so when Americans with unclear affiliations wander around, trying to be good friends with people, and you don't know what they want, that creates mistrust. This probably played into the research institutions taking these drastic steps,” Mortensgaard said.Related articles:The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEU polar research melts into the backgroundAnchor Greenlanders in Arctic climate research, experts tell EU ahead of policy updateAnd although Greenland’s population is small at just 57,000, for Mortensgaard, it serves as a microcosm for the geopolitical situation as a whole: global powers fighting for their interests to the detriment of the common interest. Arctic research already suffered when collaborations with Russia broke down in 2022, she said, so a split with the US would be a serious hit to climate science.“The Arctic climate system does not respect borders or geopolitical divides. When collaboration across those lines suddenly becomes impossible, it is a huge problem for knowledge production,” she said. European alternatives?The Greenland Institute of Natural Resources is funded partly by research grants from external sources like the NSF. To replace the US funding, the institute will have to look for alternative revenue sources, and Nymand said that she is looking to Europe for those. Aside from Denmark, of which Greenland is formally a part, she also noted increased interest in research collaborations from the UK, France and Switzerland. Kleist of the University of Greenland told Science|Business that it was too early to say if the severed US ties would lead to more collaborations with Europe. Meanwhile, Mortensgaard believed that the tensions in Arctic research could well leave room for closer European partnerships, or stronger links with Canada. “I spoke to Canadian researchers who had long-standing relationships with American colleagues and who collaborated with the US Navy, but who had gotten worried that their data on sea ice could be used if Trump suddenly decided to follow through on his threats of invading,” she said. “Like Canada, I think Greenland is considering creating closer ties to Europe and I think European capitals will be open to this,” she said.

Aug 27 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

You don’t have to agree with AOC’s politics to support the public conversation she started for American women

Her politics may divide Americans, but the doctors argue the fertility conversation she started shouldn’t.

Aug 27 • 8:00 AM EDT • Politics • fortune.com

Lindsay Clancy case: Closing arguments begin as experts divided over mental health

Closing arguments begin in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial as the jury prepares to weigh her mental state. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Bober joins 'Fox & Friends First' to weigh in on the case.

Aug 27 • 6:23 AM EDT • Health • foxnews.com

GOP's Singer 'very prepared' to oust Dem Moskowitz in toss-up Florida race that could determine House majority

Scott Singer says Florida's redrawn 25th Congressional District gives Republicans a path to flip Jared Moskowitz's seat in a narrowly divided House.

Aug 25 • 1:56 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

Zoetis Earnings Reveal a Divided Business, But Can its Pipeline Restore Growth?

Zoetis Inc. (NYSE:ZTS) entered 2026 as a leader in animal health, but its latest earnings show that even a strong market position cannot fully insulate the company from weaker consumer demand. Fiscal Q2 2026 revenue remained flat at $2.5 billion and declined 1% on an organic operational basis, as pressure in the U.S. companion-animal market […]

Aug 23 • 3:49 PM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

The Lindsay Clancy Trial Is Sparking a Political Divide in the Right

After Matt Walsh dismissed postpartum depression as women acting "selfish," many of them jumped in to correct him.

Aug 23 • 10:30 AM EDT • Politics • rollingstone.com

Do other animals call each other by name?

Research in dolphins, elephants, parrots and primates suggests animals may call each other by name, but scientists are divided on how to define the behavior.

Aug 23 • 5:00 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com

Focal therapy for localized prostate cancer has divided physicians. Will new data change minds?

Urologic oncologists who treat prostate cancer are split over the benefits of focal therapy compared to traditional surgery or radiation.

Aug 21 • 4:30 AM EDT • Science • statnews.com

Searching for Answers From the Man Accused of Sabotaging Alaska’s Senate Race

Dan Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from tiny Petersburg, Alaska, shares a name with the incumbent senator he hopes to defeat. Is he a spoiler trying to divide the Republican vote? We traveled to Alaska to find out.

Aug 18 • 5:02 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Tracy Rietzke Inducted Into Kansas Sports Hall of Fame

Former Kansas Wesleyan standout player and coach Tracy Rietzke ’77 was inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame Sunday in Kansas City, Kansas. Rietzke was part of a KSHOF record 32-person class inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2026. KSHOF officials divided the inductions into three separate ceremonies concluding on Sunday at Sporting Park. Rietzke retired from coaching volleyball at Rockhurst University following the 2019 season, leading the Hawks for 32 seasons, amassing a 1105-229 record (.828 win percentage). He also coached eight seasons in women’s basketball at Rockhurst from 1988 to 1996, leading the Hawks to a 206-45 record and five NAIA National Championship appearances. Before heading to Kansas City and Rockhurst, Rietzke coached at Kansas Wesleyan after a stellar playing career for the Coyotes. Rietzke coached volleyball, women’s basketball and softball at KWU. In volleyball, Rietzke coached six seasons leading the Coyotes to a 172-56 record. He never won less than 25 games in a season and had three 30-win seasons, the only three in program history, culminating with a 34-9 season in his final year in 1987. He still ranks second in all-time coaching wins at KWU. In women’s basketball, he coached six seasons, leading the Coyotes to a 94-60 record. His career culminated with a 25-5 season in 1987-88, earning the program’s first KCAC Championship that season and the program’s only conference title until 2009. He ranks third all-time in career wins at KWU in the sport. In softball, Rietzke started the dynasty of KWU softball in the 1980’s and 1990’s, leading the program for six seasons, amassing a 126-40 record, ranking third in all-time wins in program history. Rietzke’s teams never finished worse than third place in the KCAC and won or shared four straight conference championships from 1985 through 1988. The Kensington, Kansas native brought his basketball talents to Kansas Wesleyan after two seasons at York College (now University) in York, Nebraska after starring at Kensington High School. In two seasons with the Coyotes, he was a two-time All-KCAC honoree and was an Honorable Mention NAIA All-American in 1976. He continues to hold the KWU school records for season field goal percentage (.771) in 1976, and the career field goal percentage record (.692 (423/611)). His .771 field goal percentage in 1976 led the NAIA. Rietzke is also a member of the Jerry Jones Kansas Wesleyan University Coyote Athletic Hall of Fame (a 1986 charter member), the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, the American Volleyball Coaches Association Hall of Fame and the Rockhurst University Athletic Hall of Fame. KWU will sponsor Smoky Hills PBS’ presentation of the induction, which will be presented on tape-delay later this fall. Stay tuned to university social media outlets for the announcement of a date and time. Release Courtesy of KWU Athletics

Aug 17 • 5:54 PM EDT • Sports • kwu.edu

Beyond Access: Rethinking the Digital Health Divide

A new framework highlights five drivers of meaningful digital health inclusion and equity.

Aug 17 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • docwirenews.com

Insurance premiums, copays top Americans’ list of healthcare gripes

A new survey from the nonprofit research group the Commonwealth Fund found that the cost to access healthcare was the top concern across political divides. Americans do disagree, however, on how to solve the problem.

Aug 17 • 7:47 AM EDT • Health • healthexec.com

A school for political education in Argentina – Offering hope for the future of democracy

Amid an increasingly polarized and divided world, Argentinian Jesuits envisioned an institute dedicated to training politicians inspired by Gospel values, intercultural understanding, and democracy.

Aug 17 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • jesuits.global

Germany rethinks law protecting politicians from insults

Criminal investigations of people who have referred to Merz as “Pinocchio” and “Lying Fritz” have prompted calls for reform across the political divide.

Aug 16 • 10:00 PM EDT • Politics • politico.eu

California's biggest political split is where people live

A new PPIC report finds California's political divide is largely geographic, with a sharp coastal-inland split.

Aug 14 • 2:48 PM EDT • Politics • desertsun.com

Underrated 49ers Signing Could Pay Huge Dividends in 2026

The San Francisco 49ers' wide receiver has seen some big changes this offseason. Mike Evans was brought in to be the No. 1 receiver, and old favorite Deebo Samuel was brought back into the fold. Fellow receiver Ricky Pearsall went down for the year, which was a big blow.

Aug 13 • 10:19 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

One Year In, Pope Leo XIV Reveals Political Divides Among U.S. Catholics

In his first year as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV has taken clear stances on many issues, including the U.S. immigration system and the war in Iran.

Aug 12 • 3:51 PM EDT • Politics • prri.org

Forget left vs. center. Democratic voters are making clear they just want change

Results in Democratic primaries in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Connecticut have reiterated that Democratic voters are hungry for change, even as they remain divided over the party’s ideological future

Aug 12 • 11:39 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

Consumer Debt Data Shows ‘Overall’ Health Amid Persisting Divides

Homeowners with low fixed-rate mortgages lead a resilient picture of the economy. But many consumers are frustrated with declining real wages and other loans.

Aug 12 • 11:23 AM EDT • Health • nytimes.com

Galaxy Entertainment Group Q2 & Interim Results 2026

Leading Macau’s Non-Gaming Diversification Through MICE, Entertainment and Sporting Events Gaming and Entertainment Division on a Normalized Basis,Q2 2026 Net Revenue Grew 6%, Adjusted Property EBITDA Grew 9% and Adjusted Property EBITDA Margin Expanded From 30.5% to 31.4% YoY Announced Interim Dividend of $0.90 per Share Continued to Ramp up Capella at Galaxy Macau HONG KONG, Aug. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Galaxy Entertainment Group (“GEG”, “Company” or the “Group”) (HKEx stock code: 27) tod

Aug 12 • 4:23 AM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com

How polarised is European politics? Here’s how your generation, gender and where you live affect what you believe

Discussions in the media about the generational divide in politics only capture part of what is happening.

Aug 11 • 6:36 AM EDT • Politics • theconversation.com

Cardinal Health Board of Directors Approves Quarterly Dividend

Cardinal Health (NYSE: CAH) announced today that its Board of Directors approved its quarterly dividend of $0.5158 per share, out of the Company's capital surplus. The dividend will be payable on...

Aug 10 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • newsroom.cardinalhealth.com

Gencom Divides Into Two Business Lines With Leadership Promotions

Real estate investment firm Gencom is reorganizing into two different business lines, with new hires and promotions to match.

Aug 10 • 2:20 PM EDT • Business • commercialobserver.com

Italy-Spain fallout: united by geography, divided by politics

Italy and Spain's Schengen border spat over Ceuta has exposed a deeper migration rift, as domestic politics and rising far-right rivals harden both sides' positions.

Aug 10 • 8:40 AM EDT • Politics • euronews.com

The Guardian view on the two cultures: bridge the divide, starting with A-levels

Editorial: Seventy years after CP Snow warned of estrangement between the sciences and arts, breadth in education should be encouraged

Aug 9 • 12:30 PM EDT • Science • theguardian.com

Wine, beer, or spirits? Massive study finds a surprising health divide

A study tracking more than 340,000 adults for over a decade found that heavy drinking increased the risk of death regardless of beverage type. At lower levels, however, the picture became more surprising: beer, cider, and spirits were linked to higher mortality, while wine was associated with lower risk. Moderate wine drinkers had a 21% lower risk of cardiovascular death compared with people who rarely or never drank.

Aug 8 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • sciencedaily.com

What happens when progressives stop reproducing?

A research finding indicates that a significant demographic divide is emerging in America, where lower birth rates among progressive, highly educated populations contrast with the stable fertility …

Aug 8 • 11:00 AM EDT • Politics • thehill.com

Taiwan’s push to dissolve pro-Beijing party triggers political censorship debate

Politicians divided over proposal to ban Chinese Unification Promotion Party after ministry says it jeopardises free and democratic constitutional order.

Aug 7 • 9:00 PM EDT • Politics • scmp.com

Appeals court says Trump is unlawfully constructing White House ballroom

A divided federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Donald Trump is unlawfully constructing a massive new ballroom at the White House, possibly teeing up a high-stakes showdown over the issue before the Supreme Court.

Aug 7 • 10:33 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Papa John’s Cuts Sales Forecast and Suspends Dividend

Papa John’s cut its outlook for the year and suspended its dividend, as the pizza chain’s North American business continues to face a soft consumer environment.

Aug 6 • 8:31 AM EDT • Business • wsj.com

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

Aug 6 • 5:04 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

‘It just means more’: Black college gymnasts in a divided South

Nyla Aquino’s rise at Georgia reveals the tensions facing Black athletes as the SEC thrives while DEI programs and voting rights come under attack

Aug 6 • 5:00 AM EDT • Sports • theguardian.com

Politics in the Park: Ballot access divides Republicans vying for Wyoming secretary of state

CASPER, Wyo. — Four Republicans running to be Wyoming’s next secretary of state took the stage at Washington Park on Wednesday, agreeing on much of what the office does and dividing mainly over how easy it should be to vote. The seat is open because Secretary of State Chuck Gray is running for Congress. The […]

Aug 5 • 11:36 PM EDT • Politics • county17.com

Politics in the Park: Ballot access divides Republicans vying for Wyoming secretary of state

CASPER, Wyo. — Four Republicans running to be Wyoming's next secretary of state took the stage at Washington Park on Wednesday, agreeing on much of what

Aug 5 • 11:36 PM EDT • Politics • capcity.news

Progressive Victory in Michigan Senate Primary Deepens Democratic Divide

Abdul El-Sayed showed the far left can win a battleground state, but the fight for control of the party is far from over.

Aug 5 • 4:56 PM EDT • Politics • wsj.com

The Beauty Of Settled Science

Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.

Aug 4 • 5:33 PM EDT • Science • astralcodexten.com

4 questions about the high-stakes Michigan Democratic primary

For two days last week, I lived inside the hottest political race in the country — the Michigan U.S. Senate Democratic primary between the more centrist congresswoman Haley Stevens and progressive former public health director Abdul El-Sayed. Producer Sam Weber and I flew into Detroit with some questions. How do these candidates stack up in real life? What actually matters to Michigan? Will this divide be a problem for Democrats in November? Does this race

Aug 4 • 3:27 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org

Bridging the Political Divides: Rural Women Running

Rural women running for political office this year gathered in a park near the Mississippi River in central Minnesota. Here is some of what they said. "It is going to be fast, and it is going to be hard, but we can get this done. I am done hearing that women cannot win, because look at us here.”

Aug 4 • 10:36 AM EDT • Politics • womenspress.com

If Not AOC, Then Who?

What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵

Aug 3 • 12:50 PM EDT • Politics • laborpolitics.com

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Jul 23 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • kff.org