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Forza Horizon 6 Nears 5 Million Sales, 42% on Xbox
Forza Horizon 6 recently launched on PC and Xbox Series consoles on May 19 to impressive player counts on Steam, and it has largely retained those concurrent player counts, returning to around 280,000 peak concurrent players daily throughout its launch week. It makes sense, then, that sales figures ...
3 Medical Routines That Older People May Not Need
Some screenings and treatments no longer make sense for patients as they age. Researchers have just added a few more to the list.
New Business Licenses: 5.22.26
Forty-four licenses for Henrico and Chesterfield, including a driving school, a peer coach, restaurants and more. (BizSense Pro required)
Scalise: Democrats' Politics of Hatred and Division Need to Stop
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) joined Fox Business Network’s Kudlow to call out Democrats’ increasingly dangerous rhetoric, failure to confront rising antisemitism on the left, and continued opposition to commonsense election integrity and border security measures.
Loma looks to live dangerously in return to the ring
Former Ukrainian pound-for-pound king Vasiliy Lomachenko hasn't officially announced his return to the ring, but the rumors about who will be his comeback fight opponent are already swirling. Gervonta "Tank" Davis was the first name mentioned. That makes sense, since fans of both fighters have ...
Even while courting moderates on voter ID, GOP leaders still push debunked fraud narrative
Republicans call their voter ID ballot measure ‘common sense’ to appeal to moderate voters, while alienating liberals with election conspiracy theories
Future-proof: Why demand for data science is on the rise
As companies gather mountains of information, they need business intelligence analysts working alongside AI to make sense of it all.
Inside the U’s baby science research lab, a look at how the world learns
The University of Minnesota Child Brain and Perception Lab explores how infants and toddlers make sense of the people around them. MPR News spent a day recently at the lab watching one of the “pilot babies” discover their world.
'Calculated' Salah has 'sensed an opportunity and taken it'
Not for the first time this season, Mohamed Salah seems to have taken a thinly veiled dig at the manager. You can't apportion blame when we don't know the full story and why Salah feels the way he does. It will now be interesting to see in that final game of the season at Anfield, his farewell to the supporters and the City, how Slot reacts in terms of team selection and how the fans react to a legend going out in unsavoury fashion.
Dodgers trade for Eric Lauer
With Blake Snell having elbow surgery on Tuesday, Tyler Glasnow on the injured list with back spasms, and River Ryan only one start back from a minor league injured list stint, the Dodgers had five starting pitchers for their six-man rotation. So it makes perfect sense that they acquired left-hander Eric Lauer from the Toronto […]
Now What? With Carbon Pricing Eroded and Pipeline Politics Advancing, Here Are the Pathways for Climate Success
At the end of a whirlwind week of news on carbon pricing and electricity strategy, capping a madcap year of pretty much non-stop, dramatic change, the word across much of Canada’s climate and energy transition community is that climate policy in this country has been shredded. Eviscerated. Hit with a sledgehammer by policy rollbacks that have pushed the country’s 2050 net zero target “well out of reach”. That means it’s never been more important to look for the rays of hope and glimmers of possibility. To glimpse the seeds of the next set of strategies to get Canada’s climate pollution under control and the country into the accelerating global dash away from fossil fuels. And then, once we’ve spotted those possibilities, get on with the hard, day-to-day slog of trying to make them a reality. Nothing takes away from the frustration and the deep disappointment so many climate and energy hawks are expressing, the sense of betrayal by the author of Value(s) and the former UN special envoy for climate action and finance. But we knew two things as the week drew to a close. We’re looking at the world as it most definitely is. And we don’t get to give up finding the pathways to confront climate change and deliver faster, deeper carbon cuts that leave no one else behind. So really, the first question we all have to ask ourselves is: What’s next? Subscribe All the Oxygen in the Room The outpouring of anger and grief over the carbon pricing deal between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been absolutely understandable. So much of the climate community poured years, more than a decade, into dragging the current federal pricing regime across the finish line, then defending it from a deluge of three-syllable rhymes after the Trudeau government proved utterly incapable of delivering its own message. The policy foisted on us by neo-classical economists took up all the oxygen in the room, burned through years of climate response time that we won’t get back, while cornering climate hawks into the position that the best response to the crisis of our lifetimes is a new tax…in an era of historic anti-tax sentiment. I mean, really—what could possibly have gone wrong? Against that history, let’s appreciate columnist Max Fawcett’s point that even a modest carbon pricing agreement with a government as off-the-wall libertarian/conspiracist as Danielle Smith’s—those adjectives are mine, not Max’s—is a win worth savouring (as long as Smith keeps her promises for a change). But part of living in the world as it is (no, I’m not letting that go) is to be clear-headed about what we can and can’t control. And one thing we get to decide, after seeing this week’s carbon price festivities take up all the oxygen yet again, is whether we want to keep letting that happen. Particularly when success down that road depends on a factor that no one with a climate agenda can control or influence—a provincial carbon pricing mechanism that has been manipulated and eroded beyond its lowest possible denominator. Thankfully, that’s not the way it has to go. Not when we have so many other powerful, practical tools at our disposal, including the ones still available to us through this abominable Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Canada and Alberta. Tools In Our Toolbox When I started roughing out this list, I didn’t expect it to grow to nearly a dozen bullet points. It’s probably still incomplete. Some of the greatest hits in today’s climate solutions toolbox include: • No Carbon Capture, No Pipeline: On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly stated that there’s been no change to the MOU provision that there will be no West Coast pipeline without an industry commitment to build its massive, $16.5-billion carbon capture and storage (CCUS) hub in Northern Alberta, and vice versa. The two megaprojects were joined at the hip when the MOU was signed Nov. 27, and the implementation agreement this week affirmed that they still are. A parade of independent analysts have spent years pointing to the economic and technical flaws in CCUS, while the industry kept postponing its investment decision until it could arm-twist the government for more “clarity” (by which it meant even more lavish taxpayer subsidies) on the project. Now the industry itself is running away from the CCUS hub and insisting the pipeline should proceed without it, but Carney doesn’t seem to be budging from a central tenet of the MOU to which Smith has signed on. • No Subsidies, No Investors: Climate analysts and advocates have quite rightly been hammering away at Carney and his team, insisting that any new capacity the industry wants to build must proceed without new subsidies. The government has responded with a growing collection of funding and financing mechanisms for the very wide menu of industrial development and nation-building projects they say they want to take on, and that menu always includes fossil fuel infrastructure. But it’s hard to see how even the combined fiscal clout of the federal and supportive provincial governments will deliver the financial backing private investors would need when the business case for new fossil fuel development is evaporating before their eyes. Particularly when… • No Market, No Demand, No Investors: As our friend Markham Hislop at Energi Media (our apparently sleepless friend, given the massive volume of great material he’s been churning out) points out this morning, the biggest vulnerability in any pipeline deal is the assumption that Asian buyers will want the oil or liquefied natural ga that our fossil industry is so keen to send them. Hislop writes in part: Ottawa and Alberta are effectively betting that countries like China and India will continue increasing oil imports for decades as their economies grow and energy consumption rises. That assumption underpins the entire economic rationale for expanding oil sands production and building billions of dollars in new export infrastructure. But Asian energy systems are changing rapidly… China, India, South Korea, and other major hydrocarbon importers are now investing hundreds of billions of dollars into electricity systems built around wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, hydro, and expanded transmission infrastructure. Domestic “energy sovereignty” is increasingly replacing the old energy-security model based on stable oil and gas imports. Those investments are expected to sharply slow oil demand growth and eventually reverse it, even as overall energy consumption continues rising. There are also refining constraints. Many Asian refineries and petrochemical complexes are already optimized to process discounted heavy crude from the Middle East and Latin America. That raises serious questions about how much additional Canadian bitumen Asian markets can absorb at profitable prices. Small wonder that there’s still no private sector investor for the project, despite Smith’s government desperately beating the bushes to put together a deal. For now, Alberta is acting as proponent and covering early start-up costs for a pitch to the federal Major Projects Office, which could actually turn into the next tough hurdle for Smith and her pipeline to jump. • Canada Day Looms: How ironic that Canada’s birthday this year could become a major chokepoint for the provincial premier who’s been working so diligently to tear the country apart! The July 1 target date for Alberta’s pipeline proposal is baked into the MOU, was reaffirmed by the implementation plan, but it hadn’t dawned on me that it cuts both ways. As one very smart colleague wrote in an email yesterday, “they’ve thrown the ball into Alberta’s court to get the project proposal on the table really quickly and to have to do a whole pile of work to put together a massive, complicated project that would typically take years to assemble, and they’ve given them weeks to do it.” That makes July 1 a looming deadline that Smith won’t be able to run away from politically, especially with the separatists in her party and her caucus breathing down her neck. (See previous ref to off-the-wall.) But if Alberta comes in with a sloppy, incomplete submission, even after Carney bent over backwards to simplify the application process and the rules that govern it, it may be harder for the province or the industry to blame Ottawa and insist on the faster process they claim their investors are demanding. (Oh, wait—which investors would those be??) • We’ll See You In Court (Then We’ll See You Again): If Carney did cave, that would be just one more reason for Indigenous and other affected communities to take the government and the process to court—Just as Alberta First Nations did, successfully, in response to Smith’s half-baked separation referendum. Veterans of the Harper era have been warning that a shoddy process around fossil fuel infrastructure or other major projects will be a recipe for the very delays that process seeks to avoid. And now more than ever, with renewable energy and energy storage eating fossil fuels’ lunch in import markets around the world, a delayed pipeline or LNG terminal may be as good as a cancelled one. • Charged Up, Ready to Go: With its goal of doubling Canada’s electricity supply to meet a doubling of demand by 2050, the national electricity strategy that Carney unveiled Thursday has a lot to like. With its explicit language about speeding the shift from fuels to more efficient and affordable electricity, global investment and deployment patterns that already favour that shift, an emerging bidirectional power grid, the role of front-line options like rooftop solar and heat pumps, the emergence of electric vehicles as behind-the-meter energy storage, and the domestic jobs and manufacturing to make it all happen, the document doubles down on the essential cornerstone of a faster shift off fossil fuels. The strategy envisions a more prominent role for gas and nuclear power. But some of those provisions were already in the Clean Electricity Regulations that climate hawks are now fighting so hard to defend, inserted as a compromise in a futile attempt to mollify the industry and its political representatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan. But once again, gas will be a tougher sell when it’s more expensive and now so much more unpredictable than the clean alternatives. The new nuclear technologies are still speculative and deeply vulnerable to cost overruns. Increasingly, utilities, developers, and investors know it. Carney declared Thursday that “it doesn’t do us good to be sitting in court all the time with provinces. It doesn’t do us good to be talking past each other. What does do us good is to come together with specific projects.” There are no guarantees, but so much of the language and narrative-building in the electricity strategy suggests the lion’s share of those projects will be renewable. • The Party Has Already Started: The electricity strategy only rarely digs down to specific projects, but provinces representing three-quarters of Canada’s population are already embracing a faster transition. Hydro-Québec is working on a 10-year, $185-billion renewable energy and grid buildout by 2035. Ontario recently brought 10 provinces and territories together in a National Energy Corridor Agreement to boost interprovincial and -territorial transmission infrastructure. And the MOU implementation agreement commits Alberta to facilitate investment in renewable energy projects, a big step back from its continuing, punitive restrictions on renewables development. The electricity strategy envisions much of the financing and infrastructure that will be needed to pull those advances together into an integrated whole. • Delivering on Affordability: The MOU implementation plan has little or nothing to say about affordability (are you surprised?), but the electricity strategy does, with a top-line pledge to reduce home energy costs for seven out of 10 Canadian households by 2050, a total saving of $15 billion across the board. It’s just a start, but it puts affordability on the government’s narrative map. If they’re serious and deliberate about patching together a least-cost energy strategy, it’ll have little if any room for oil, gas, or nuclear—not with powerful evidence, for example, that electricity prices are higher when those prices are set by gas. • Smith Proves that Canada Works: By signing a deal that makes it harder to claim the federal government is blocking a new pipeline, Smith has helped prove Carney’s constant anti-separatist refrain that “Canada works”—incurring the rage, no doubt, of her own political base. Canada also needs to work for anyone who depends on a clean environment, healthy and thriving ecosystems, and safe, stable climate. But with Smith and her separatist constituents setting up as a fifth column for annexation by Donald Trump’s United States, let’s set aside any notion that 51st state status for Canada is a recipe for anything other than climate disaster (and so much else). Resisting and withstanding Trump (just 170 more sleeps until mid-term elections, which is a damn sight better than the 730 we started with) doesn’t mean a free pass for a pipeline, but we can still appreciate it that keeping Canada whole and sovereign is still Carney’s Job One. • The Words Not Spoken: Apart from a commitment to export a million barrels of “low-emission” Alberta bitumen per day (memo to Smith and Carney: You realize that that’s less than the industry is already exporting??), the MOU implementation plan says nothing about the international trade and economic sovereignty deals that Carney has been travelling the world to negotiate. It didn’t have to. Carney doesn’t need permission from Danielle Smith, her American enablers, or her separatist allies to continue building the alliances that will ratchet down our economic dependency on our unstable, unreliable neighbour to the south. But every connection he builds with countries outside North America helps align our economy and our future with a faster shift off fossil fuels. Little if any of this was on our bingo cards a year or two ago. But it’s the pathway that has opened up to us. And if it gives Canada any climate or energy gains at all in an era still dominated by Trump and his increasingly ridiculous tariffs, his loutish trade negotiations and his continuing annexation threats, we have to take the wins. Not least because they’ll be the point of departure for what we can achieve in 2027, 2029, and beyond, as Trump’s grip and this era begin to loosen and then fade. What is Carney Doing? If this line of thought is right—and it’s a possibility, not a prediction—it means that Carney’s actions and decisions are largely about buying time. Time for Trump’s power to wane. Time for Alberta’s separatist/conspiracist virus to spread, mutate, die out, or at least die back, with help from a vaccine of federal steadiness and calm (appropriate enough, for a movement populated largely by vaccine deniers) that no conspiracy theory can dismiss. And time for the government’s trade and investment agenda to deliver results—even knowing that some of those results will bring impacts that front-line communities will not and should not accept. In the immediate moment, none of this changes the way the wider climate community has to respond, from campaigners to investors to front-line practitioners. All of our voices are still essential. But those voices will be stronger and more confident if we have a clearer sense of the brutal game we’ve been pulled into, and a plausible path (or two it three) for playing it to the win we need. This conversation also underscores our biggest task for the remaining years of what was supposed to be the “decisive” decade for climate response: if we can shift the energy narrative in Canada, make it a mainstream view that the country’s preoccupation with oil and gas has us falling farther behind a changing world, we’ll see far better results in the 2030s and beyond. For many veteran climate advocates, taking on that part of the fight will begin with recognizing that most of our friends and family, neighbours and colleagues already understand that climate change is real and right in front of us: they’re looking away and staying silent because they don’t have what climate communicator Katharine Hayhoe calls “efficacy”. As Hayhoe recently pointed out in a feature interview with The Energy Mix, it amounts to science denial to keep hammering away at the dire news about global warming without also helping audiences understand what they can do about it, with multiple studies telling us why that won’t work. Far better to open those conversations with the dominant crises like energy security, food security, emergency preparedness and business continuity, affordability, and financial security that have knocked climate change far lower on the list of public priorities, and will likely keep it there. We Knew This Would Happen Climate hawks have always known this day would come. For decades, we warned that everyone had to pay attention to climate change right now, because it would be much tougher to respond once the crisis itself started affecting our daily lives. We were right, and here we are. But now, thanks to decades of hard work, communities and countries have an alternative to doubling down on fossil fuels. “In 10 years everyone will have ‘always known’ that solar and batteries were going to win,” Morgan Solar Executive Chair Mike Andrade writes on LinkedIn. With the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz roiling energy priorities around the world, Canada and the United States are among the shrinking number of countries that are still very keen on fossil fuel development. Understanding that gap is a first, essential step in spotting the opportunities ahead, and averting the deep economic as well as environmental and social risk we face if we don’t seize them. Thanks for reading The Energy Mix Weekender! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix and The Energy Mix Weekender. Chart of the Week BYD Eyes 20 Dealership Locations After Canada Greenlights Chinese EV Imports ‘Sledgehammer’ Carbon Price Deal Boosts Emissions by 230Mt, Aims for Fall 2027 Pipeline Approval ‘Worse Than Harper’: Regulatory Rollback Would Stop Canada from Assessing Project Impacts, Critics Warn Electricity Strategy Aims for Doubling by 2050, Allows ‘Flexibility’ for Gas Power Plants Opposition Mounts as O’Leary’s Data Centre Approved in Drought-Stricken Utah Diluted Carbon Price Misses ‘Reality of the World We’re In’, Could Impede Diversified Trade: Climate Institute $200B in Clean Energy Investment Will Need On-Time Delivery, Reliable Policies, Trade Association Says ‘Sovereign Pipeline’: CEO Pitches to Keep Trans Mountain in Government Hands What a Supercharged El Niño Could Mean for Canada Canada’s future is electric, and here’s how a power grid superhighway would get us there (Toronto Star) The Perilous Waters of Hecate Strait (Globe and Mail) Saudi Aramco profits jump despite conflict in Middle East (The Guardian) Farmers confront rising cost of fertilizer and fuel as spring seeding under way (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Clarkson forecasts 24% decline in offshore oil, gas capital expenditures (Oil & Gas Journal) Pipe Dreams: How Oil and Gas Fail to Deliver Economic Development in Africa (Oil Change International) Developing countries must hold the pen to script the fossil fuel transition (Climate Home News) Iran war threatens the dream of a post-oil economy in the Gulf (Washington Post) U.S. Oil, Gas Work Force Hits Lowest Level Since 2022 (Rigzone) Why Polestar Is Doubling Down on Net Zero as Rivals Pull Back on EVs (Bloomberg) Why this Michigan utility plans to sell its hydro dams for $13 (E&E News/Politico) Levees can no longer save New Orleans (Vox)
Chartbook 449: Voldemort on Threadneedle street. The Bank of England and the "haunted house" of English politics.
Imagine the scene: In some Harry Potter version of 21st-century London, a group of deathless UK Treasury officials gathered from across the last century huddle over warm pints and glasses of Chardonnay. Around the table there are officials from the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1970s, 2022 and today. Inevitably, in May 2026, the subject of conversation is the disintegration of the current Labour government. Despite its huge majority in parliament, it has been reduced to tatters by catastrophic local election result. These exposed the fact that rather than having a government with a clear popular majority, the UK is like most other modern societies divided into 5 segments each of which commands between 26 and 16 percent of the vote. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the leadership at Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street - where the Prime Minister and the Chancellor (Treasury Secretary) work - seem paralyzed. They are caught between mounting discontent over unfairness and the cost of living, and tough fiscal strictures that push them into making unpopular spending decisions. In the London pub, the Treasury officials from across the ages, can barely hide their satisfaction at the latest display of democratic politics caught in the vice-grip of financial logic. “Remember the mur d’argent and the banker’s ramp?” “Just like yesterday!” There are smirks around the table. Then the representative of 2026 pipes up: “One thing you have to say about the current lot (referring to the latest hapless Labour government), you don’t have to teach them about the bond market!” There is a murmur of ascent from the Treasury Mandarins. The trauma of the fiscal crisis of September-October 2022 sits deep. Back then, in the final stages of Tory decay, a ‘mini budget’ that challenged fiscal orthodoxy led to a brief but fierce panic in one of the oldest government bond markets in the world (aka gilt market). Now all you have to do is to mention the “bond market” to hush debate. [ Paul Mason@paulmasonnews In the name of public service, and as ex-economics editor of BBC Newsnight, I offer to do a zoom call, tonight, with any Labour MP who wants to understand why bond markets do not "fall into line" with governments. 1/ 3:57 PM · May 12, 2026 · 466K Views 224 Replies · 674 Reposts · 3.93K Likes ](https://x.com/paulmasonnews/status/2054229532404519082?s=20) “And the funny thing is”, the young man in the huddle continues, “they don’t even want to talk about … ”. There is a sudden hush. Significant looks are exchanged around the table. About? One of the senior figures puts down his glass with a decisive “clink”. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has entered their thoughts. Meanwhile, a few miles away in a grubby pub in Bloomsbury, two conspirators from the camp of Critical Macrofinance huddle over cans of low-alcohol IPA. They look at each other and blurt out loud: “The Bank!” “Everyone in the bloody Labour party is talking about the bond market. But why aren’t they even mentioning … the Bank of England!?” “Why is no one talking about Voldemort?” In Paul Mason’s blogpost, after much chest-thumping about basic fiscal logic, the basic point about the Bank of England is buried in the fine print at #3 in his list of suggestions as to what a radical Labour government might actually be able to do! [ Conflict & Democracy Down with the bond market! Down with gravity! It may seem unfair to focus on Labour MP Paula Barker for her off-the-cuff assertion that the bond market would have to “fall in line” with Andy Burnham, should he replace Keir Starmer as prime minister. But Burnham himself told the New Statesman that Labour had to “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets… Read more 2 days ago · 100 likes · 3 comments · Paul Mason ](https://htsf.substack.com/p/down-with-the-bond-market-down-with?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) Back in Bloomsbury they shake their heads and ask: “Didn’t we learn anything from the Eurozone crisis?” Meanwhile, as if summoned to the conversation by some higher force, the “pink pages” announce: “The days of ultra-cheap government borrowing have come to an end” and Martin “Whizzard” Wolf publishes the graph of the season Look at the UK in 2026, perilously positioned on the upper edge of the pack. No wonder no one in London needs any lessons about the “bond market”. But, look again. Imagine how they feel in Rome. What is London’s nightmare in 2026? The nightmare is that you end up like Italy in the early 2010s during the Eurozone crisis. Once comfortably situated in the middle of the pack, watching with horror as your ten-year yields explode to 7 percent and “spreads” become a national nightmare. One of the largest economies in Europe, a founding member of the euro, stigmatized. But the message of the Italian experience is ambiguous. After all, the stigma didn’t last. In 2026, Italy borrows at rates lower not only than the UK but the US. The US, which, as everyone knows, enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of being the issuer of reserve, safe asets. What kind of magic is this? How did Italy, in the space of fifteen years, go from being good, to bad and back again? Which brings us back to our dissident friends in their Bloombury boozer and their memories of the Eurozone crisis. Italy never was Britain - with its ongoing fiscal deficits. Without interest payments, on primary balance, from 2000 to 2020 Italy ran a tight fiscal ship. Even in 2008 it barely went into deficit and when it was being put on the rack in the early 20210s its primary surplus matched that of austere Germany. So, what happened? How did it end up stigmatized? Of course Italian politics didn’t help. Berlusconi was at the helm and he had legal issues. But amongst friends in the Bloomsbury pub, Berlusconi is a sideshow, the name we whisper to each other is “Trichet”. From 2004 to 2011 the ECB was headed by Jean-Claude Trichet, ex of the French Treasury, more German than the Germans. After 2009 as the news of the Greek fiscal disaster broke, the European bond markets wento into panic mode and Trichet began a brutal game of cat and mouse. Between 2009 and 2011, Trichet intervened in the bond market to help, only when he thought he had compliance with austerity. When he thought they were uncooperative, he withdrew. In the summer of 2011, he even made direct suggestions to his Italian counterparts in Rome, as to how Italy should be governed. It was this cat and mouse game that drove the bond markets crazy and exposed Italy to a violent squeeze. When Mario Draghi took over the ECB at the end of 2011 and declared “whatever it takes”, the pressure on Italy, gradually eased. It is that starring role that has made Draghi into the towering figure in European politics that he remains today. So now you see why voices in London hush when it comes to the Bank of England. “The bond market” isn’t an irresistible objective force like the weather or an avalanche. It can appear like that. But that depends on the way it is being handled, or not handled by the central bank. Which is why the silence about the Bank of England in London right now is so significant. If you think this all sounds a bit fishy, coming from a left-liberal Keynesian like myself, well, let me introduce you to Robin Brooks, who, to put it mildly, plays on a different quidditch team to me. Here, from the position of a fiscal hawk is Robin’s celebratory account of the Bank of England’s role since 2022; In October 2022, at the height of the bond market blow-up in the UK, something incredible happened. Governor Andrew Bailey told British pension funds the Bank of England would end its support program for the country’s fragile gilt market, drawing a line under how much help the central bank was willing to give to exposed pension funds and - implicitly - the government. By the end of that week, Kwasi Kwarteng - the finance minister - had resigned. Prime Minister Liz Truss would soon follow. This episode is so incredible because it contrasts with what happened in the Euro zone earlier that year. Bond markets in Spain and Italy were under pressure amid high inflation and rising interest rates. In the middle of this, Mario Draghi - Italy’s Prime Minister - resigned, compounding pressure on bond markets of high-debt countries on the Euro periphery. Unlike the Bank of England, the ECB caved. It bought Italian and Spanish government bonds in an effort to cap yields and introduced a new tool that signaled to markets it might do such caps more frequently going forward. Faced with pressure on bond markets, the ECB capitulated to political pressure from high-debt countries like Italy and Spain. The Bank of England stood its ground and toppled the Truss government. This kind of thing has long-lasting consequences. It means markets price a higher probability of yield caps in the Euro zone, which keeps Italian and Spanish yields artificially low, while markets feel free to push up UK yields without fear of central bank intervention. As I flagged in yesterday’s post, this means you really can’t compare UK yields to those of other high-debt countries. The UK looks worse, but only because its central bank isn’t interfering with markets. There’s more to this than just that 2022 episode. The Bank of England has also been much more aggressive in its quantitative tightening (QT) than other central banks. If one motivation for quantitative easing (QE) is to lower bond yields - especially longer-dated ones - then it stands to reason QT pushes yields up. The left chart above shows a four-quarter moving average of UK government debt issuance (black line) in percent of GDP and which sectors absorb this issuance, including the Bank of England (blue bars). The right chart above compares the Bank of England’s accumulation or run-off of government bonds (blue line) with that of other central banks, where this blue line is the same as the blue bars in the left chart. The Bank of England was quicker and more aggressive than other central banks in downsizing its bond holdings, so UK yields will have risen more than elsewhere also for this reason, not just because of Governor Andrew Bailey’s remarks in October 2022. Back in October 2025, after a conversation in New York with friends in British politics, my sense of dysphoria was such that I raised the issue of the Bank of England openly in the FT Since 2008, the UK has slid into a deep economic and political predicament. Growth has stagnated to a degree far worse even than in the 1970s. The Tory leadership’s wager on the Brexit referendum spectacularly backfired, leaving the UK isolated from Europe and at the mercy of its special relationship with the US, many of whose political class regard the UK as a basket case. After years of austerity, the Labour party lurched to the left and then back to the centre. The Tory party has been eclipsed by the populist nationalism of Reform. Any British government should be worrying first and foremost about how to restart growth. Instead, Keir Starmer is beset by shades of the gilt market panic triggered by the Liz Truss government in 2022. The debt level is higher than in recent years, but there is no cause for panic. UK debt is at far from critical levels and of long duration. Whether you want to “take back control” or launch progressive economic policy, a democracy dogged by fear of bond market vigilantes is unhealthy. In a country that is a monetary sovereign, this climate points to one thing: a disconnect between the government and the central bank. Since 1997, the independence of the Bank of England has become a sacred cow. But independence is what you make of it. And in the wake of the gilt market crisis of September 2022, relations between the Bank of England and the UK government need a reset. In normal times, there is no doubt that an inflation-targeting independent central bank can serve a country well. But since 2008, the UK and other advanced economies have not had the luxury of such simple problems. To their credit, central bankers around the world have not stood on orthodoxy. After 2008, the US Federal Reserve rescued the global banking system and, through quantitative easing, it stabilised the Treasury market in the face of huge deficits. In Europe, things were trickier. Both the Bank of England under Mervyn King and Jean-Claude Trichet’s European Central Bank played cat and mouse with national governments. This was a high stakes wager that between 2010 and 2012 escalated bond market tension and triggered a disastrous turn to austerity. Shaken by the impact of those shocks, their successors, Mark Carney and Mario Draghi adopted a more protective stance (assuming you were not the government of Greece). Recall that Draghi’s legendary slogan, “Whatever it takes”, was uttered to face down the City of London’s bond vigilantes. In 2015, Draghi launched QE — financial repression by another name. In 2016, Carney used the authority of the Bank of England to stabilise markets following the vote for Brexit, an exemplary demonstration of how central banks can underpin democratic choice, even when those choices are wrong headed. All these were independent central bankers steeped in the best practice of the 1990s, who recognised that historic crises demanded radical action. It was the price surge of 2021-2023 that poisoned the atmosphere. Though the shock came mainly from the supply side, central banks ended up in the dock. Nowhere more so than in the UK. The Bank of England reacted with aggressive normalisation. Faced with a cost of living crisis, the governor called for workers to accept real wage cuts. In early 2022, as gas prices were at record levels and Russia’s army was poised to invade Ukraine, the Bank adopted a stringent programme of quantitative tightening, elevating interest rates. When the Truss government got itself in trouble, the Bank took almost a week to come to the rescue. Rather than enacting a charade of normality, it is time to recognise that in 2025 the UK faces a period of historic transition. To meet this challenge, what is needed is a new concordat with the Bank. This should not ignore inflationary pressures or the long-run trajectory of debt, but should affirm the priority of reviving investment-led growth. One could follow Donald Trump in demanding interest rate cuts. The Bank could shadow the ECB in its commitment to capping Eurozone yields. But the top priority should be to lay the ghost of September 2022. The Bank’s slowing of QT last month was a concession. An immediate and complete end would send the right signal. Such a concordat will not by itself restore sanity to politics, solve the housing problem or rebuild the NHS. But it would help to lift the fear of bond market crisis, which is paralysing the effort by democratic politicians to answer the fundamental questions facing the nation. Now, that call for a new concordat between government and Bank of Englands seems more urgent than ever. The problem is that in October 2025, Starmer still had some authority. Today the government is in tatters. And when you are the “under the harrow” - to echo a phrase of Montagu Norman’s from the 1920s - it is the worst possible time to consider institutional change. To make general arguments at a time of crisis can only seem like special pleading rather than a general argument for long-term change. The same, unfortunately, is also true for the other basic institutional reform that Britain urgently needs i.e. the abolition of the out-dated first past the post electoral system and its replacement by a moderated form of proportional representation. And thirdly - whilst we are saying the quiet parts out loud - Britain needs to reopen the question of EU membership. What the local election results of 2026 show is that this remains a key issue. And what they also show is that there is a clear majority that would favor a return. Until these basic features of Britain’s political economy are addressed the country will carry on its politics as though in a haunted house, governed by governments that lack actual majorities, conjuring up false constraints whilst ignoring the real ones. This one is for DG and MI. I love writing the newsletter. If you enjoy it too and fancy buying me a coffee once a month, you know what to do. Click below! Subscribe
New Business Licenses: 5.15.26
Chesterfield and Henrico report a bakery, antique shop, pet food company and more. (BizSense Pro required)
Opinion | Keir Starmer and the End of Britain’s Old Certainties
The decade since Brexit has been one long, painful process of trying — and failing — to make sense of this new reality.
AI-driven layoffs aren’t making business sense
Most large enterprises lay off workers after launching AI projects, but industry research says job cuts have no correlation to return on AI investment. Experts offer better routes to ROI.
YAS ISLAND TO BE HOME OF SPHERE ABU DHABI, A NEW GLOBAL ICON FOR IMMERSIVE ENTERTAINMENT
The Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi) and Sphere Entertainment Co. (NYSE: SPHR) today announced that Yas Island has been selected as the location for Sphere Abu Dhabi, a landmark project with a construction phase cost of USD 1.7 billion. Poised to become a global icon, the venue will attract tourists from around the world, boost economic diversification, and strengthen Abu Dhabi's sense of place for residents and visitors alike. Sphere Abu Dhabi, which will be the first Sphere venue outside the United States, will be built on a plot of land between Yas Mall and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, with lush green surroundings and proximity to other Yas Island theme parks and attractions. Construction on the venue is expected to be completed by the end of 2029. HE Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of DCT Abu Dhabi, said: "Abu Dhabi has always built for the long term, and Sphere Abu Dhabi is a powerful demonstration of that commitment. In a region where the appetite for
Health Services Administration Student Inspired by Family Experience to Improve Patient Care
When Amaya Allen graduates in May with her Bachelor of Science in Public Health (B.S.P.H.) in Health Services Administration, she will carry with her a clear sense of commitment to improving healthcare systems. A native of Suffolk, Virginia, and graduate of Kings Fork High School, Amaya’s path to healthcare administration wasn’t planned. Her Old Dominion University studies began in a different health sciences program, but a life-changing experience shifted her focus.
For Yale senior, a love of science and of languages opened up new worlds
Some classmates were confused by Audrey Aslani-Far’s interest in studying both science and Russian as a Yale student. But to her, the combination makes perfect sense: both disciplines help a person to better read the world.
Amazon exec downplays new Fire Phone rumors: "No clear path that makes sense"
We know what customers need right now.”...
Henrico power washing business opening its first out-of-state office
“It’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t make sense for us to drive 14 hours for these projects,” said owner Omar Elshami, who also owns an ice cream shop in Carytown.
Business owner warns Washington’s 'millionaires tax' could spur an exodus of top earners
A sense of frustration is growing among some of Washington state’s job creators.
UM students' wearable device targets overuse injuries in sports
By Robert C. Jones Jr. / University of Miami News
In Focus Maine: The state budget
Mayor Mark Dion highlights what makes Portland unique, emphasizing its vibrant waterfront, walkability, and strong sense of community
Game 40: Twins at Guardians
First Pitch: 1:10 pm CDTTV: Twins.TVRadio: TIBN / WCCO 830 / The Wolf 102.9 FM / Audacy Forty games of baseball is probably “enough” games of baseball to feel like you have a sense of the team you’re watching. After 40 games, my sense is roughly the same as it was after 34 games, when I remarked that […]
Multi-use clinic River City Health & Wellness finds its solo space in Scott's Addition
“People can do their workout, do their recovery aspect, and they’ve got their providers all on-site,” owner Helen Robertson said. “I do think this model’s going to really start taking off…I know we’re the first ones in Virginia doing all of the things under one roof.”
New Business Licenses: 5.8.26
Chesterfield reports an athletics club, skin care company, fire protection and more. (BizSense Pro required)
Harvard Scientists Reveal Secret Structure Behind How You Smell
Scientists have uncovered a hidden structure in one of our most mysterious senses.
Joe Senser, Vikings tight end and Twin Cities restaurateur, dies at 69
Mamdani's latest tax pledge 'makes no sense' and will only exacerbate Florida 'exodus': former mayor
Republican congressional candidate Scott Singer predicts continued business exodus from NYC to Florida amid Mayor Mamdani's tax-the-rich policies.
Is the FDA Really Suppressing Science? Plus. . .
It’s Thursday, May 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Aaron MacLean says Trump is poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Iran war. Joe Klein on the life of CNN founder Ted Turner. Jillian Lederman on why cruise ships are here to stay. And much more. But first: Is the FDA suppressing science? On Tuesday, The New York Times published a story with an alarming takeaway. “FDA Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe,” read the headline. It is the latest in a string of stories that all have the same message: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other agencies, are engaged in a cover-up—and silencing scientists trying to get the word out about the Covid vaccine. What all these stories suggest—some more subtly than others—is that the outsiders now running the public health establishment, officials such as Marty Makary at the FDA and Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health, are on a revenge tour. That they are doing harm to the country to get back at the scientists and bureaucrats who ostracized them for deviating from the public-health consensus during the pandemic. It’s a seductive narrative. But is it true? That’s the question we address in our latest editorial. —The Editors Read [ Marty Makary's FDA Has All the Right Enemies ](https://www.thefp.com/p/marty-makary-vaccine-study-fda) [ Trump Blinks First ](https://www.thefp.com/p/iran-peace-deal-pakistan-trump-strait-of-hormuz) Aaron MacLean In return for no detectable concessions, President Trump this week gave up on forcing open the Strait of Hormuz. Now, the Trump administration looks desperate for a deal to end the war with Iran. It’s easy to understand the desire to end the war, but are they blowing the chance at victory? Aaron MacLean makes sense of the administration’s latest moves—and Iran’s response—in his column today. Read full story Aaron MacLean and Niall Ferguson: Live in New York City Join Aaron MacLean and Niall Ferguson on May 19 for a live recording of School of War at the iconic New York Historical. In a conversation as timely as it is wide-ranging, Aaron and Niall will explore the strategic stakes of the moment, including the Middle East, China, and the future of American leadership on the global stage. Get Tickets Now [ Ted Turner, the Optimist Who Built CNN ](https://www.thefp.com/p/ted-turner-cnn-tribute) Joe Klein The man who gave us CNN and the 24-hour news cycle, Ted Turner, died Wednesday at the age of 87. Today, political writer Joe Klein—who almost ghostwrote Turner’s autobiography—remembers his friend, the American media mogul who stood out for his idealism and lack of a filter—something that got Turner in trouble more than once. “His was not a traditional intelligence, but one of horizon: Ted saw things before other people did,” Joe writes. Read full story [ Nothing Can Sink the Cruise Ship ](https://www.thefp.com/p/cruise-ship-hantavirus) Jillian Lederman A viral outbreak on a cruise ship that left three passengers dead has left some people wondering: Are cruise ships on the way out? Not so fast, says Jillian Lederman, who has been on many a cruise herself. Read her piece on why 38 million people a year take a cruise—and aren’t about to stop. Read full story [ The Great Writers Who Were Terrible People ](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-great-writers-who-were-terrible) Shilo Brooks Throughout history, some of the greatest literary geniuses have also been immoral bigots. In the latest episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks is joined by Eli Lake for a conversation about those geniuses, from Voltaire to Norman Mailer and Roald Dahl—and why we should read their work despite their odious prejudices. Listen on MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS [ Inside the Digital Intifada ](https://www.thefp.com/p/digital-intifada-social-media-hamas-terror) Warren Kinsella Read full story [ This Week in American History: Trump’s Over-Arching Problem ](https://www.thefp.com/p/this-week-in-american-history-trumps-over-arching-problem) Jonathan Horn Read full story [ Humanity Is Still Evolving—and Fast ](https://www.thefp.com/p/humanity-is-still-evolvingand-fast) Razib Khan Read full story THE NEWS Thirteen D.C. Metropolitan Police officers have been placed on administrative leave and could face termination after an internal investigation found evidence that crime statistics were manipulated to make the city look safer. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee previously alleged that former D.C. police chief Pamela Smith pressured officers to skew data. Tennessee Republicans unveiled a redrawn U.S. House map yesterday that would split up Memphis’s black-majority Democratic district, the latest move in a nationwide push to redraw congressional boundaries ahead of the midterms. The effort follows a Supreme Court ruling last week on Louisiana’s districts, which Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton said gave states the green light to redraw maps along partisan lines. Israel struck Beirut for the first time since a ceasefire with Hezbollah took effect last month, saying it targeted a commander of the militant group’s elite Radwan force in the city’s southern suburbs. The strikes risk destabilizing that truce at a delicate moment, as Iran and the U.S. report progress toward a deal to resolve their own standoff. The U.S. Air Force is aiming for a Fourth of July delivery of a Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar, hoping to add it to the Air Force One fleet in time for the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, Reuters reported. (For more on the controversy surrounding the aircraft, read Jed Rubenfeld’s piece “It’s a Terrible Idea, but Trump Probably Can Accept a Free Jet from Qatar.”) Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified privately before Congress that he has no memory of why he and his family dined on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012, according to Reuters. The admission contradicts Lutnick’s earlier claim that he had cut ties with the convicted sex offender well before that visit. Weeks before a former JPMorgan investment banker filed a lawsuit packed with explosive allegations, the bank reportedly offered him $1 million to settle his sexual assault and harassment claims, according to The Wall Street Journal. The suit, filed by Chirayu Rana, alleges he was sexually assaulted by a female colleague, subjected to racial discrimination, and forced into a degrading dynamic at work. JPMorgan says the claims lack merit, and the female colleague’s lawyers call the accusations fabricated. A new report from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research shows that, for the first time in roughly 20 years, church attendance is trending upward, with more people volunteering and clergy expressing renewed optimism. The study’s authors described the findings, based on a survey of more than 7,400 congregations, as showing signs of widespread recovery from low attendance numbers.
BioShock, game prices, GTA, the disappearing NFL deal and more: An interview with Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick
In 20 years of covering the video game beat, I’d probably not spoken more than 20 words with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, who’s been running the company behind NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, BioShock and Red Dead Redemption for, you guessed it, nearly 20 years. Last week, though, ahead of a panel I was hosting at the iicon event in Las Vegas, I had about 20 minutes to interview Zelnick. I could ask one question for each year, I joked, as we settled into our seats on opposite sides of a conference table. Take Two’s longtime head of corporate communications, Alan Lewis, was seated at Zelnick’s side. I didn’t quite conduct our chat that way, but we wound up going through a lot, including… The state of BioShock The ramifications of the rising costs of game development The fate of Take Two’s recent multi-game deal with the NFL Some hints about Take Two’s mobile plans Whether Zelnick’s answer to me about Civ VII was a good one The do’s and don’t’s of NBA 2K microtransactions Take Two’s take on the Switch 2 Oh, and GTA VI (Spoiler: if Zelnick had spilled the beans on the price of the game or a release date for a PC version or whether there will be a polka radio station, that would have been this article’s headline). Before all of that, I would learn what it’s like to interview Strauss Zelnick, who is confident, calm and focused on delivering precise answers. To wit, I thought I’d start our chat with something fun, a bit insidery but maybe safe for him to share. The team at Take Two’s Rockstar label delays their games a lot, I noted. Of course, those delays, however painful, tend to be worth it. So, I was wondering how Zelnick finds out about them. Take the most recent postponement back in November 2025, when Rockstar said that GTA VI would not hit its May 26, 2026 release date (just 20 days from now!) and would instead come out on November 19, 2026. Was that news delivered via a call? An email? How does it work? “I work super closely with my team,” Zelnick said. “It's a very thin team at Take Two. The entire senior management team is six executives who sit in one hallway and share two assistants. And then, basically, there are two people who head up each of our labels.” They meet weekly to discuss their business, he said. So no one emails him about a delay? Nothing like that? Zelnick craned his neck to look at my left hand. He asked if I was married. I am, I said. “Does your partner email you to give you information?” he asked. Fair enough. I didn’t get the sense Zelnick was going to read me the minutes of the management meeting where the GTA VI delay was discussed. Slight pivot, maybe I could get some personality insights about one of the most successful gaming execs of the last 20 years, before getting to my big list of questions about specific Take Two games, franchises and policies. I asked: How do you deal with delay news like that? Go for a run? Meditate? “I tend to default to being very calm,” he said. “I’m not a person who freaks out easily.” He noted that he has a daughter with special needs due to an illness, and he shared that that situation had gotten him worked up. It was a personal, family emergency. “But, you know, business is not that,” he said. “I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency.” He turned to his left to ask Lewis, his colleague of 17 years, a question. “Have you ever seen me freak out?” “Never,” Lewis replied. “You’ve seen me upset,” Zelnick told Lewis. “Have you seen me raise my voice? Maybe how many times? Be honest, because we might as well be.”
CEA Retail + Hospitality Winner: Biggers blends produce, entertainment
Biggers Market’s roots run deep, tracing back to the 1940s when founder and partner Sven Wallin’s grandfather, alongside his brothers, opened Biggers Brothers, a family-run produce business in Charlotte. Decades later, the family’s reputation for farm-fresh fruits and vegetables lives on. In 2010, Wallin opened Biggers Market, building on a reputation that endured for the past 16 years. “I learned a lot about my grandfather, who passed away when my mother was young, through my uncle. The one thing that is ingrained in me is my grandfather’s willingness to go the extra mile for a better product, not settling for what’s easy, but finding what is better,” said Wallin. “He taught me the importance of name and reputation. If your name was on it, it had better be right. Word-of-mouth was always very important to gain a good reputation.” So was hard work. Entrepreneurialism has always been central to Biggers Market’s identity, Wallin said. In high school, Wallin worked at a produce stand in Charlotte, an experience that shaped how he thought about food. “I realized all produce was not created equal, and we could focus on freshness, seasonality and flavor. Grocery stores were convenient, but the produce often didn’t have the same taste or quality,” he said. As a college graduate without a paying job, Wallin took a leap and opened a 20-by-30-foot roadside stand with just three employees. “It was so small we had to put tables with umbrellas out in the yard to accommodate everything. We didn’t have pallet jacks or forklifts to unload the trucks. We would form a line and toss watermelons to get them to where they needed to go,” he recalled. In year two, Wallin opened a market on Carolina Beach Road, still in operation today but larger, and later on Market Street, setting up tents for extra space. In 2019, the sale of the land forced a hunt for a new property, and Wallin landed on his current location at 6250 Market St. “We had ambitions beyond produce,” he said. “We wanted this market to be a place that felt different from a typical grocery store.” In 2024, Wallin added his kitchen to the Biggers brand. “I’ve blurred the lines of a market and a grocery store,” Wallin said. “It’s a place where you can shop, eat, have a drink and listen to live music with friends and family. It’s a mix of retail and social experiences cultivated over time.” What hasn’t changed, however, is Wallin’s Southern hospitality, a strong sense of pride, purpose and responsibility and a commitment to seasonality. Spring brings the garden center to life with herbs, veggie plants and jumbo ferns. Summer leans heavily into produce. Fall brings the pumpkin patch, and winter hosts a Christmas market. “It means a lot to have what we’ve built recognized, especially in Wilmington. There’s a lot that goes into the business from our team. And that’s something we’re genuinely grateful for,” Wallin said. With plans underway for a new larger Carolina Beach Road location, Wallin continues to look ahead. “It’s an opportunity to build another market from the ground up and continue growing what we’ve been doing,” he said. “We’ve been through development before, so we understand what it takes.”
The Supreme Court broke democracy by saying the quiet part out loud
SCOTUS has lost its sense of when to shut up.
The Supreme Court broke democracy by saying the quiet part out loud
SCOTUS has lost its sense of when to STFU.
Stevens: Politics and vulgarity not a good mix
If you have sensed that our politicians are using more vulgarity in public discourse in the last 10 years, you are right. In the past, politicians have only occasionally used
Are Democrats growing more accepting of political violence? Here's a closer look
We looked through recent polling to get a sense of how broad the support for political violence is among Democrats and other Americans.
Course on science museums travels to the United Kingdom
Every child can recall their first trip to a museum and the sense of wonder and excitement that comes from laying eyes on the real-life remnants of a dinosaur or the preserved artifacts of our ancestors. For a group of students taking a course on the impacts of colonization on science museums, that spark was ignited by all the work that went into the completion of those museum exhibits.
Why the Lions declined fifth-year option of All-Pro linebacker Jack Campbell, and what happens next
It actually made sense for Detroit to decline his option
AI lets chemists design molecules by simply describing them
Creating complex molecules usually requires years of experience and countless decisions, but a new AI system is changing that. Synthegy lets chemists guide synthesis and reaction planning using simple language, while powerful algorithms generate and evaluate possible solutions. The AI doesn’t just compute—it reasons, scoring pathways and explaining which ones make the most sense.
GameStop’s pursuit of eBay has analysts scratching their heads
It’s not just in your head: GameStop’s pursuit of eBay doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Hisense’s new RGB Mini-LED TV is now available with Google TV for less than TCL can offer
Hisense has a new Google TV-powered RGB mini-LED TV series available at nearly half the price of direct competitors, like...
Hisense aggressively cuts the price of its RGB LED TV on release day
The TV just came out and is already over 40 percent off.
Borderlands Studio Head Responds After Fans Rip Him For "AI Slop" Selfie
"The idea of an AI even having an identity is nonsense."
The obvious solution to the global oil shock finally makes sense
If oil is in such short supply, why can’t we simply drill more of it?
Bournemouth 3-0 Crystal Palace: What Glasner said
It was just really overwhelming for us, this match and the win against Shakhtar Donetsk. Overall, Bournemouth were much better. Against a team that presses like Bournemouth, playing square passes around their box doesn't make sense - but that's what we did.
Tillis: If the case against Comey is based on a picture in the sand, it ‘makes no sense to me.’
The creepy feeling in old buildings might have a surprising cause
A hidden force may be quietly shaping how you feel—and you’d never even know it. Infrasound, an ultra-low-frequency vibration below the range of human hearing, is everywhere from traffic to old buildings. In a small experiment, people exposed to it became more irritable, less engaged, and even showed higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol—despite having no idea it was present. The findings suggest our bodies can “sense” these vibrations without conscious awareness, potentially explaining eerie sensations in places like basements or supposedly haunted buildings.
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field ‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field A field that once seemed like a direct path to stable, lucrative work is becoming less certain under AI, students and faculty told Spectator. By Ria Vasishtha and Arjun Menon May 3, 2026 Shanying Liu / Deputy Illustrations Editor Asia Genawi, SEAS ’29, first encountered artificial intelligence during her sophomore year at her high school in Indiana. Back in 2023, policies on AI varied widely—even within the same district—and some schools had no guidance at all. As Genawi began to see the effects of AI trickle into her classroom, she turned to guidance from her home state’s Department of Education, which she said she found “outdated and inaccessible.” Genawi spent the rest of her high school career dedicated to the issue, including writing a 15-page memo exploring varying AI policies across Indiana schools, which she sent to every Indiana state senator and representative whose contact information she was able to find. She later helped draft a bill that would have required public high schools to establish and share their own AI policies with students in an accessible format. But with so many other bills already awaiting referral, hers never made it to committee. When Genawi arrived at Columbia to study computer science, she found that the gaps she had spent years trying to address in Indiana had followed her there. Many students and professors were also grappling with what AI meant for the field. Across Columbia’s undergraduate schools, computer science has become the most popular major—accounting for around 11 percent of degrees awarded in Columbia College, 32 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and 12 percent in the School of General Studies in 2024. While the number of computer science majors in SEAS grew from 166 to 173 during the 2024-25 academic year, the total number across the three schools fell around 4.5 percent from 393 to 375, driven by declines at Columbia College and General Studies. At Barnard, it has grown to become the second most popular major as of 2025, up from third the year prior. The number of degrees awarded have grown fivefold since 2016. Faculty members and students in the department told Spectator that the surge in the major’s popularity has been driven in large part by its apparent promise of a secure, well-paid career path. However, they noted that the recent rise of generative AI has compromised the sense of stability that once defined the field, even as interest in technical skills among students persists. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2024, out of 74 majors tracked, computer science had the fifth highest unemployment rate among majors at 7 percent, while computer engineering had the second highest at 7.8 percent. “Anecdotally, people are moving away from CS as a major,” Daniel Bauer, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, said. “They’re still taking some of our classes, right, because they think they need that, but they’re instead majoring in other things.” Bauer described a field that had shifted from what he called a “nerdy outlier discipline” to one that “everyone needs,” a sign that technical skills have become a baseline expectation across industries with the emergence of AI. “A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, it’s a guaranteed path to a stable income. You get a six-figure job right out of your undergrad,’” Bauer said. Now, companies may see AI as a way to reduce demand for entry-level programmers, especially in what he calls “code monkey jobs,” roles where a large number of employees are “just writing out code nine-to-five.” Chris Murphy, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, described the current moment as the convergence of two forces: the downturn of the job market and generative AI coming onto the scene. “Things kind of started to really pick up in 2014, 16,” he said, recalling the years after the weaker 2010 market. Murphy added that this was also a period where “students were getting more experience outside of class than they were inside of class” through internships, jobs, and side projects. Murphy suggested that the earlier momentum helped make computer science feel like both an academic program and a reliable pathway into work. That feeling is harder to sustain now as the industry reconfigures, which is a shift that students are seeing firsthand. Rebecca Yu, SEAS ’27, said that during a recent internship in Big Tech, she saw that “every single tech company was racing to integrate” large language models. She added that her manager said her intern class was the first to complete their assigned projects, which she attributed to the increased efficiency that comes with AI. Frank Liu, SEAS ’29, said that with AI lowering the barrier to coding, companies now expect everyone to write code. “A lot of companies outright say if you’re not using coding in your job, you might get fired for not being productive enough,” Liu said. Yu similarly expressed that students increasingly have to accept AI being a part of industry workflow, adding that many also “make use of it to maximize their productivity.” Richard Li, CC ’28, described a “franticness” among his peers as the pace of change accelerates. He explained how “some new tool” is released regularly, noting that tools rise and fall in prominence within weeks. He has come to believe that he doesn’t need to “match that speed all the time” and keep up with every development. Li has learned that AI tools allow him to “take a breath” and “get back into the loop much easier than before” when he needs to. While some companies specifically target Columbia when hiring, sending representatives to campus career fairs and recruiting large numbers from Columbia, a computer science degree cannot be treated as a static credential, Yu described. “You can’t just get your degree and stop learning after that. You have to always be learning,” Yu said. “That is something you basically have to expect for your job.” AI has not only affected students’ decisions to major in computer science, but also reshaped how the subject is taught. Across departments, faculty members no longer treat work done outside the classroom as a reliable measure of understanding, shifting instead toward in-person exams, quizzes, and attendance checks. While homework once made up as much as 60 to 70 percent of a student’s grade in computer science classes, Murphy said that breakdown has since flipped, with exams and quizzes now accounting for the majority. “The assumption—especially among pessimists—is that they’re using it to do their homework,” Murphy said. “They take the homework assignment. They put it into generative AI. Out comes the solution. Submit solution. The end.” Murphy said that faculty members ranged in their responses from fully prohibiting AI use to actively teaching students how to effectively work with AI. He said he shifted his approach this year after his teaching assistants called his belief that students weren’t using the technology “naïve,” and now permits students to use AI on assignments. His surveys of students in his introductory classes have told a more complicated story than the one so-called pessimists offer: Around 60 to 70 percent of students who reported using AI said they used it to have concepts explained to them, to clarify assignment instructions, to generate test cases, or to create practice questions. “Those are all ways that you might have had a tutor in the past to do that, and now you have this AI essentially as your tutor,” he said. Bauer has taken a different approach, teaching students how to use AI productively without sacrificing the core principles of the discipline. “People who are trained to actually use AI tools productively, while being in charge of designing the overall project, will be very much in demand in the next couple of years,” he said. Over the past year, a working group of computer science faculty has been redesigning the introductory and intermediate programming sequence to integrate generative AI as both a subject and a tool, representatives from SEAS wrote in a statement to Spectator. The effort is “coordinated” across the department, “not course-by-course,” with a systematic assessment of how AI integration is affecting student outcomes underway to shape the next round of changes. The goal, the department explained, is for students to be able to “read, verify, and reason about code, whether they or a model wrote it.” Tony Dear, senior lecturer in the computer science department, is piloting individualized AI feedback in a discrete mathematics course, while a machine learning course is also testing a Socratic AI dialogue system designed to “guide inquiry rather than supply answers,” the statement reads. Beyond individual courses, SEAS funded seven cross-departmental faculty projects in generative AI this past academic year, spanning biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, industrial engineering, and computer science, according to the statement. This phenomenon extends beyond the computer science department. SEAS’ new AI minor, which it announced in November 2025, reflects the University’s attempt to adapt. The minor is specifically designed for noncomputer science majors and aims to provide “essential AI knowledge” while emphasizing practical and responsible use across disciplines, according to the SEAS website. At the center of the minor is AI in Context, a course taught by a team of faculty from the departments of computer science, applied mathematics, philosophy, music, literature, and the Writing Center, the representatives told Spectator. Bauer described it as targeted at students who want to bring AI into fields like economics or biology, rather than as a path into software engineering itself. At the graduate level, SEAS announced a new Master of Science in artificial intelligence in February, with the inaugural cohort starting in the fall. While recognizing how AI has helped them navigate coursework, students also described its rise as isolating, even among members of the Application Development Initiative, one of Columbia’s largest computer science clubs. “As people start to ask AI for questions that they would normally ask students and members, it starts to isolate people” Li said. Alexa Kafka, BC ’27, echoed Li’s sentiment, pointing out that computer science has always been a collaborative discipline with code reviews and pull requests, even as AI makes independent work easier. Despite this, Kafka noted that she hasn’t been to office hours “in at least a year.” Bauer added that faculty are exploring long-term solutions to the assessment problem. “One of the things that we’re trying to do at the department or school level is to maybe move towards computerized testing facilities,” Bauer said, referring to ideas in the department to revitalize computer labs as an alternative to pen-and-paper exams. “We have to accept that this is the reality, for better or worse.” But more exams, students say, does not mean better learning, nor does it reflect how computer science is actually done. “Code is so variable and can be approached in so many directions, there’s never just going to be one correct answer. There can be multiple optimal solutions,” Kafka said. Students also expressed concern that the shift toward exam-heavy grading pulls focus away from the applied, project-based work that better reflects both discipline and industry expectations. ADI has tried to respond more quickly than the curriculum can. Through a vibe coding workshop this past semester, club members said they wanted to help students understand not just that AI exists, but how to use it deliberately. “Vibe coding” refers to the practice of prompting AI to write code for a task or project, and has become widespread enough that ADI felt the gap in formal instruction was worth addressing, according to Sophia Huang, BC ’29. The workshop introduced students to the concept of context engineering, which Shaina Sahu, SEAS ’27, described as not just writing a prompt, but optimizing “the rest of the relevant information that you would feed into the model.” Without that, students said that AI-generated code can fail at scale or introduce difficult-to-detect bugs. Genawi said the shift toward AI has changed what it means to be good at computer science. “I think the shift has kind of gone towards what can you create and what can you do, instead of, what do you know,” she said. Indeed, during ADI DevFest, its annual hackathon, Li said more teams are trying to complete their projects than in years past. While sign-ups have historically outpaced submissions, Li said this is beginning to change because teams “have a tool that completes the vision for them.” While many students see AI as an equalizer that lowers the barrier to entry for coding and technical work, Murphy said it also creates new equity concerns inside the classroom around who can afford stronger tools and who already knows how to use them. “The equity issues I worry about are students who have access to paid versions of things versus free versions of things,” he said. Although popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude have free versions available, both have paid models that can reach over $100 per month, which output different qualities of code. Murphy also pointed to differences in prior exposure to AI literacy itself. “Students who go to high schools or K-12 education, where they’re taught AI literacy, prompt engineering, context engineering, they understand how to do this, as opposed to students who go to schools who don’t teach that,” he said. “Then they come in, and then they’re somehow expected to know how to use these tools.” For Genawi, those disparities begin long before students arrive on campus. “It’s very interesting to consider how lucky you were geographically,” she said. “To be born where you were is influencing your ability to get access to these spaces.” Students like Yu, though broadly apprehensive about the future of computer science, are not without hope. “I’m optimistic, because I think if you’re truly passionate about CS, there will definitely be a place in the field to do something you want to do,” she said. Senior Staff Writer Ria Vasishtha can be contacted at ria.vasishtha@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Staff Writer Arjun Menon can be contacted at arjun.menon@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter and like Spectator on Facebook. Produced with Spectate by Emily Ta
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The politics of Trump's ballroom
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — President Trump was about a half-hour into his second speech of the day, musing about the danger he faced last week at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Saturday night, it was good for one thing. People are loving my ballroom now,” Trump told a crowd last night. “That’s the only thing. They love my ballroom.” Ever since he was hustled off stage at the Washington Hilton last week, after an attempted shooter breached the dinner’s security perimeter and sent guests diving to the floor, the president has argued that the incident is proof for why his White House ballroom is needed. Only his planned $400 million, 90,000-square-foot project, Trump has reasoned, can keep a president truly safe at major events. It’s true that a bunch of GOP lawmakers have jumped on board with new legislation and words of support for Trump’s project. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Rand Paul and other prominent Republicans went on TV to talk about the need for a ballroom. But as we reported at The Washington Post this week, “people” aren’t really changing their minds on Trump’s ballroom. A new Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that most Americans still oppose the ballroom project: 56 percent against it versus 28 percent in favor. The numbers are the same as a poll from last year, the Post’s polling whiz Scott Clement found. Other new polls have found similar margins, too. “I’m just not a giant fan, especially of extravagance,” one independent voter told me. “I mean, in the era we’re in right now, given how much people are struggling, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to spend $400 million on a ballroom.” How we got here The Washington Post has followed Trump’s ballroom project very closely. (My colleague Jonathan Edwards may have written the most total words of any reporter about the project; I may be second.) The project exploded as a national issue after Trump tore down the White House’s East Wing after initially promising not to touch it.1 Historic preservationists sued, and about a month ago, a federal judge ordered a halt to ballroom construction.2 The only way the ballroom could proceed, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled, was if Congress explicitly authorized Trump’s plans. (An appeals court has stayed Leon’s order for now.) The judge’s ruling raised an obvious question: would Congress authorize the project? Keep in mind, “authorization” doesn’t mean that Congress needs to necessarily fund the planned $400 million project; they could just sign off on the private donations that Trump has solicited to pay for the ballroom.3 But GOP lawmakers really didn’t want to talk about the ballroom, we reported at The Post just a few weeks ago. One major reason was the ballroom’s bad polling — not a small detail with many of their own midterm elections looming. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner incident, and Trump’s advocacy, may have changed the political conversation around the ballroom. As this week’s polling shows, it doesn’t seem to have affected the fundamental questions surrounding the project. To put it another way, voters still say that cost-of-living concerns are top-of-mind heading into the midterms. Some Republican and independent voters have told me that they see the ballroom as a vanity project that will help Trump but do nothing for their own lives. It might not help Republicans that Trump has dismissed some of the cost-of-living concerns. He’s described “affordability” as a buzzword manufactured by Democrats whose policies helped cause inflation. “They’ve got one good line of bullshit,” Trump said in his first speech yesterday, delivered at a Florida retirement community known as The Villages. Thanks for reading Dan Diamond's newsletter! Subscribe for free to stay up-to-date on my work. Subscribe Speaking of Trump’s speeches… I’m down in Florida because it’s my “duty week” as a White House reporter — basically, I follow the president wherever he goes. (And then hand the baton off to one of my Washington Post colleagues next week.) As part of my duty week, I’ve spent a few days covering the White House’s reaction to Saturday’s attempted shooting, including officials’ review of the security protocols to protect the president. Trump was restrained in the wake of the incident, addressing the nation from the White House briefing room about the need for peaceful dialogue and trying to lower the temperature. But he’s clearly been itching to get back out of the White House, and I was curious to hear how his Florida speeches would go. And — to my ears — it was an unburdened Trump. Not the one we saw Saturday night in the White House briefing room, but the one we witnessed on the campaign trail in 2024. Loose, dropping profanities, mocking everyone, including members of his team. “We have a man here who knows more about Medicaid, Medicare, medical crap than any human being. Where’s Dr. Oz? Where the hell are you, stand up,” Trump said, referring to Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “It’s the most boring trip I’ve ever made. He’s telling me about Medicare, Medicaid. All I want to do is take care of you, I don’t care. I said, ‘You work out the details.’” I wrote up the speech, as Trump headed to West Palm Beach to deliver more remarks a few hours later. The White House didn’t like my story. Their rapid-response team called it the work of a “total loser”4 and “a miserable TDS-ridden moron.” You can be the judge of whether it’s a fair story or the product of someone afflicted with “TDS.” (The White House’s shorthand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”) I’ve pasted the story below with a gift link, meaning that you don’t need to be a Washington Post subscriber to read it. It might prompt you for an email address, though. Meanwhile, I’ll be down in Florida for the rest of the weekend, covering the president. It’s TBD whether those stories will be deemed TDS-afflicted, too. 1 Jonathan details the past six months of ballroom fallout, reactions and the implications for executive authority here. I also had a great time talking about Trump’s ballroom and other projects with Australia’s ABC News Daily on a podcast this week. 2 The judge allowed underground construction and national security-related work to continue. But that hasn’t been enough for Trump, who says the ballroom itself is essential for his protection. 3 The ballroom donors include companies like Palantir, Google and Amazon. For transparency, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, where I work. No one has ever interfered with our team’s coverage of the ballroom or our mentions of Amazon or Bezos, and if that changed, I’d speak out. 4 To be fair, I’ve spent the morning working on stories and writing this Substack post rather than enjoying the beautiful Florida weather. So they may be onto something about who’s winning and who’s losing.
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Viewpoint: A career in science is possible, and worth it
Starting a career in science is exciting, but also demanding, with researchers often faced with intense competition, long working hours and high levels of stress. A pioneer in the field of mass spectrometry, Carol Robinson has been there. She speaks with Science|Business on the importance of creating a supportive environment, particularly for women.Robinson did not wake up one day thinking that she would become a scientist. It was only late in school that she developed an interest in chemistry. “The more you work at something, the more you think, actually, this is fascinating. So, I went much further and deeper than I ever needed to pass the exam. And then I loved it,” she says. “I thought, I’m going to give it my all. I’m going to enjoy it while I’m here. But I didn’t think this would be my career for 50 odd years.”She left school at 16 to become a lab technician with the drug company Pfizer, which is where she first worked with mass spectrometry. Fascinated, she was encouraged to take a part-time degree and then a PhD. She went on to do pioneering work in native mass spectrometry, a technique that is used to study protein structures in their natural state, paving the way for breakthroughs in drug discovery. She also broke new ground by becoming the first female professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge, and then the first female professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, her current home.She now wants to show young researchers that a career in science is worth it. “Sometimes, I believe the culture isn’t very encouraging, and that’s something I have worked on,” Robinson says.In 2021, she launched the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery at Oxford, whose acronym gives a sense of what she hopes it will achieve. “Maybe it is corny,” she says. “It’s just a reminder that I would like it if we could all be kind to each other and supportive, especially for early-career researchers of either gender, because there’s quite a big attrition rate in science, and maybe it just doesn’t feel like a very friendly place to work.”And yet, a career in science comes with a lot of flexibility. “There are few careers where you have that amount of freedom, to go to conferences, to the library. Just because you didn’t see me didn’t mean I wasn’t working,” she says. “And I’m excited to come in every day. So, I don’t want people to think it’s a terrible place.”Gender equality is also important when it comes to the quality of science as a career. “The more women we have, the better it becomes,” Robinson adds.Imposter syndromeAccording to EU data, women outnumber men in university education but account for just about a third of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem). And while the number of women working as scientists and engineers in the 27-member bloc is on the rise, their representation remains below that of men, at 41%. This discrepancy is even more pronounced in top-tier functions across these fields, where women fill just 20% of positions.Having supervised many young scientists, Robinson sees that women continue to have a greater propensity than men to doubt their abilities, a feeling she once shared. “When I was doing my PhD at the University at Cambridge, I really felt like an imposter,” she says. “I don’t think I ever felt I deserved to be there or owned it and was proud. I just thought I was lucky.” Later on, she adds, “I was always that person who said, I can’t apply yet because my CV is not strong enough.”She has now made it her job to encourage women to break with this imposter syndrome. For example, rather than calling for volunteers to give a lecture in the groups that she mentors or teaches, which nearly always results in men stepping forward, she goes straight to the women, “because I know they won’t push themselves forward.”But the gender gap in science is not just down to imposter syndrome. The “obvious” reason, Robinson says, and the reason that is on everybody’s mind when discussing workplace gender equality, is the balance between work and raising a family. Her own path was to choose between the two, taking an eight-year break after completing a postdoctoral training fellowship to bring up three children. And she continues to advise women not to work part-time while they raise a family. “You’ll just get half the pay and continue to work full-time because you are not able to fit everything in,” she says. “You should be able to have a family and come back to have the career that you want.”The solution is for men to also take career breaks. “That kind of evens it up, so that it’s not such a big thing for women,” Robinson says. “I always encourage men in my groups to do that. I think it’s important to take your share of the duties.”Support produces resultsAccording to the Women in Stem Network, a UK advocacy group, countries with strong childcare systems and equal pay policies retain more women in technical careers. In Europe, these are primarily found in the Nordic region and parts of central Europe.At the EU level, the European Commission asks all Horizon Europe applicant organisations to have a gender action plan in place. Since this criterion was introduced in 2021, the share of women leading consortia has increased to 31%, against 23% in Horizon 2020. Their overall participation, however, has risen just 1%, to 38%. After trying to weaken the requirement for gender action plans in 2025, the Commission now intends to adopt a plan for supporting women in research and innovation.Related articlesCommission scraps plan to water down gender requirements in HorizonHow gender balance can swing who wins Horizon Europe fundingRobinson herself has benefited from three Advanced Grants from the European Research Council. “I was extremely honoured and privileged to get those, because they really allowed me to fuel my passion,” she says. “Without that, it would have been a much harder slog.”Beyond applying gender rules, she says that more work is needed on translational enterprise, where women are, once again, largely underrepresented. The European Patent Office found that only 13.8% of applications were filed by women in 2022. “We have so many more women doing amazing science; why do they feel it’s not a thing to have a company?” she asks.She founded her own spin-out company, OMass Technologies, in 2016, and remains chair of its scientific advisory board now that it trades as OMass Therapeutics. As for research, Robinson is now studying how changes in the brain may be linked to depression, using port-mortem tissue. “We’re hoping to publish soon,” she says. “We had to consult with a lot of people who knew a lot more about the brain than we did. So, we’ve learnt a lot, and that’s always a lot of fun to learn a new thing. That’s what keeps you going.”
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