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Is This Air Safe to Breathe? How Wildfire Smoke Impacts Your Health
Hazy skies and irritated eyes are both hallmark indicators of wildfire smoke in the air. But even if skies are clear, can nearby wildfires still impact health? According to a recent advisory from the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH), smoke...
Hometown entertainment: Weekend events Aug. 15-16
Sara Evans performs in Rocky Mount Friday night — plus a car show, heritage festival, free art event and meteor shower watch this weekend
My Cup of IT: AI Protests, Plugs, & Politics
AI is moving from pilot project to procurement problem. The Army is already facing a protest over a $450 million contract award that allegedly relied on AI in the acquisition process. Translation: AI may be helping agencies buy technology — and soon it may be helping lawyers protest those purchases. Meanwhile, NIST wants to put […]
Out for Business at the Heritage Hotel presented by the Southbury Chamber
The Southbury Chamber, an affiliate of the Waterbury Regional Chamber, will host its next Out for Business networking event on Thursday, August 20, 2026, from 5 to 7 p.m. at […]
How Saving Western Civilization Became the New MAGA
Elon Musk and the right are increasingly stressing the need to protect Western civilization, a fixation that boils down to wanting an authoritarian.
Possible gas leak leads to evacuation of Mercy Health
Mercy Health St. Rita's evacuated its 770 building because of a possible gas leak Thursday morning.
EJ Swift wins the 2026 Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction
The writer – who was also shortlisted in 2023 – has won the prize for her book When There Are Wolves Again, a speculative work of eco-fiction set in near-future Britain
Health Gorilla lawsuits consolidated into multidistrict litigation
Nine class action privacy suits have been consolidated in federal court, and it could signal that judges are scrutinizing accountability for healthcare data in motion, say privacy experts.
Family Entertainment Group LLC Celebrates 100th Location Milestone with Landmark Partnership Aboard Margaritaville at Sea
/PRNewswire/ -- Family Entertainment Group LLC (FEG), one of the nation's premier operators of family entertainment centers, today announced a landmark...
Count Binface, the man in a can with a plan, seeks Parliament seat in Britain’s wackiest election
Binface, a self-described intergalactic space warrior, has landed in the center of the U.K.’s political universe ahead of a special election against Trump ally Nigel Farage, among others.
UK PM Burnham promises business help within 'difficult' financial outlook
Britain's government will do what it can to help lower costs for business but against the backdrop of a "difficult financial outlook", Prime Minister Andy Burnham said in an interview on Wednesday.
SF politician apologizes over AI attack website, takes chatbot down
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi called the chatbot a "gross misuse" of AI.
Gates Foundation gives $540 million to UW health institute, the largest gift in university history
The Gates Foundation is giving $540.2 million over 10 years to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, the largest charitable gift in UW history. The grant will expand the institute's Global Burden of Disease study and comes as global health funding falls sharply.
Count Binface, the man in a can with a plan, seeks Parliament seat in Britain's wackiest election
Count Binface, an intergalactic comedic candidate with a garbage can on his head, is at the center of the U.K.’s political universe
Count Binface seeks Parliament seat in Britain's wackiest election
Count Binface, an intergalactic comedic candidate with a garbage can on his head, is at the center of the U.K.'s political universe
Entertainment Notebook: Pointe-à-Callière marks the 325th anniversary of the signing of the Great Peace of Montreal
The Montreal Ukrainian Festival returns August 29 to September 27 with a renewed program of cultural events, united under this year's theme: "Heritage of Generations." Inspired by the connection between
Entertainment Notebook: Montreal Ukrainian Festival Returns; The Great Peace of Montreal and more
The Montreal Ukrainian Festival returns August 29 to September 27 with a renewed program of cultural events, united under this year's theme: "Heritage of Generations." Inspired by the connection between
Man, 41, Inherits $2 Million From Parents — His Wife Wants To Put Half Into Her Sister's Struggling Business
A 41-year-old man in Georgia inherited $2 million after both of his parents passed away within a year of each other. The inheritance came from a combination of investment accounts, life insurance proceeds and the sale of the family home....
Sabalenka and Norrie exit Canadian Open in last 16
World number one Aryna Sabalenka suffers a surprise defeat at the Canadian Open, while Britain's Cameron Norrie also bows out in the last 16 in Toronto.
Spanish teen Jodar ousts eighth seed Lehecka at Montreal
Spanish teen Rafael Jodar defeated Czech eighth seed Jiri Lehecka 6-3, 6-3 on Saturday to reach the quarter-finals of the ATP Montreal Masters.Jodar will play for a semi-final berth against French 18th seed Arthur Fils, who defeated Britain's Cameron Norrie 6-2, 7-6 (10/8).
Driven Just 9K Miles, This 1977 BMW E21 Is About As Frozen In Time As It Gets
For more than 40 years, this E21-generation 3-Series remained under the stewardship of its original owner
171st Annual Old Settlers Festival Brings Heritage, Entertainment and Family Fun to Delphi
The 171st Annual Old Settlers Festival continues Saturday, August 8, in downtown Delphi with a full day of family activities, entertainment, and historic traditions. Presented by Delphi Main Street, the longtime community celebration invites families and visitors to enjoy Saturday’s festivities fro
Business Alum Builds a Marketplace for Cultural Style
Weddings, birthdays and celebrations often inspire people to wear attire that reflects their heritage and traditions. Through digital technologies, custom fashion — created to exact personal preferences and specifications — has provided an avenue for these occasions. But the growing field lacks standardization or best practices. Enter NOMAJI, the brainchild of Cal State Fullerton College of Business […]
In Britain, a comedy candidate plays political spoiler
The U.K. electoral system has long featured parody also-rans. But now, Britain’s foremost far-right leader could find himself upended by a man wearing a bin.
Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner on Rom-Coms and the Politics of ‘One Night Only’
In “One Night Only,” Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner play singles living in a world where the government has banned premarital sex. How far-fetched is that?
Which type of thinker are you? + US explosive diarrhoea outbreak
Madeleine Finlay is joined by Ian Sample, Guardian science editor, to discuss three eye-catching science stories including an investigation that has identified four distinct types of thinker. Also on the agenda is the unprecedented cyclosporiasis outbreak in the US which has now been linked to two fatalities, and the funding cuts that threaten the iconic Jodrell Bank world heritage site, home to the Lovell telescope
Butterfly lilies wing their way to Science
Many animals and plants show left-right differences in how their bodies or organs are arranged, but we still know little about how such asymmetries evolve or how genes control them in natural populations. Mirror-image flowers, in which female and male sex organs are deflected to opposite sides in left- and right-handed forms, provide a notable example of such asymmetry. Here, we studied South African butterfly lilies, where individual plants produce only left- or right-handed flowers. Their mirror-image flowers promote outcrossing by depositing pollen from each floral form onto a specific region of a pollinator’s body that matches the stigma position of the opposite form. This suggests that selection for efficient pollen transfer between forms maintains this natural polymorphism. Our work uncovers a hemizygous supergene that coordinates the left-right orientation of female and male sex organs in mirror-image flowers by linking two independently acting genes for style and stamen handedness in a single, nonrecombining genomic segment. This architecture ensures the coinheritance of a matched pair of organ orientations that is essential for efficient cross-pollination between floral forms. At the developmental level, we show that floral handedness emerges from the interaction between an intrinsic tissue chirality and a gravitropic response that orients the style and median stamen relative to gravity. Together, these findings reveal how a supergene, hormone and microRNA signaling, tissue chirality, and an external physical cue combine to produce and maintain a stable left-right polymorphism in natural plant populations.
Britain clears $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger
The British government has cleared Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, saying it had received assurances, after earlier citing concerns over the deal’s potential to limit media diversity.
Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract
The White House's new science strategy should be required reading in the Berlaymont and every European capital.Not because Europe should copy it. Parts of it should concern Europeans deeply. But because it asks the question Europe has so far avoided while steadily losing ground in the global race for technological leadership.Europe already possesses many of the world's finest universities, scientists and research-intensive companies. It produces world-leading research in fields ranging from quantum technologies and biotechnology to climate science. Yet time and again Europe generates the scientific breakthroughs while others build the companies, industries and strategic advantages around them, particularly in digital technologies. Increasingly, we find ourselves regulating technologies whose underlying capabilities were developed elsewhere.This is not primarily a scientific failure. It is an institutional one.The settlement that shaped modern science policy emerged after the Second World War. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that governments should invest in fundamental research while protecting scientists from political direction. Public investment was justified precisely because no government, university or company could predict where the next transformative discovery would emerge.That scientific contract served liberal democracies extraordinarily well. It underpinned decades of advances in medicine, computing, energy and communications, but the world for which it was designed no longer exists.Artificial intelligence is transforming not only technology but the production of knowledge itself. Advanced chips, computing power, data and scientific instruments have become strategic assets. Scientific knowledge now diffuses globally almost instantly. Competitive advantage increasingly lies not in making discoveries first, but in possessing the infrastructure, capital, engineering capability and institutions required to translate those ideas into products, industries and strategic advantage.The old boundaries between science, industrial policy, national security and geopolitics have largely disappeared. Dual-use technologies now underpin both economic power and military deterrence.The US has recognised this shift. In July, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, a comprehensive attempt to rethink the relationship between science and national power. The report builds on Bush's legacy, but departs from his framework in important ways. Science is no longer treated simply as the source of future discoveries. It is presented as the foundation of economic resilience, technological leadership and national security. AI, advanced infrastructure and the capacity to build become as important as discovery itself.Yet the report also reveals a striking paradox. The same administration calling for “a new golden age” of US science has simultaneously proposed deep cuts to the federal research enterprise while expanding political influence over the allocation of public research funding. Europe should therefore distinguish between the report's diagnosis and its prescription. The diagnosis, that science has become a strategic asset, is compelling. But the prescription is self-defeating. Long-term technological leadership depends on strong universities, academic freedom and the institutional autonomy that makes scientific discovery possible. This distinction matters. Bush's achievement was never simply to make science serve national strength. It was to establish a division of labour in which governments invested in research without attempting to direct discovery itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerge precisely because researchers retain the freedom to pursue questions whose value cannot yet be demonstrated and whose conclusions cannot be anticipated.Neither China, nor the USAs science becomes more strategically important, the temptation to politicise it inevitably grows. But scientific freedom is not an obstacle to technological leadership, it is an essential precondition.China represents the opposite model. For decades it has integrated science, manufacturing, infrastructure and industrial policy into a single national strategy. Its ability to mobilise resources around critical technologies is formidable. But it does so within an authoritarian system where scientific priorities are increasingly inseparable from political power.Europe should imitate neither model. It should learn from the strategic ambition of the US without importing its growing politicisation of science. And it should learn from China's capacity to build without adopting its concentration of power.Instead, Europe needs a scientific contract of its own. Bush's scientific contract protected the freedom to discover because the defining challenge of the 20th century was producing new knowledge. Europe's next scientific contract must preserve that freedom while ensuring that scientific discoveries can be converted into technological, industrial and strategic capability. Because in a transactional world, Europe's freedom to shape its own future depends on its capacity to build it.Related articlesThe US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationNIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research fundingThis does not mean subordinating free science to competitiveness or industrial policy. On the contrary. Scientific autonomy remains the first principle of Europe's next scientific contract. Governments should not direct scientific discovery. Their responsibility is to ensure that Europe's scientific, industrial, financial and regulatory institutions work together rather than in isolation.Meeting that responsibility requires far more than research funding. European researchers need access to world-class computing infrastructure, advanced laboratories, shared datasets and scientific facilities. Innovative companies need patient capital, testing environments and a genuine single market in which they can scale without facing 27 different regulatory regimes. Public procurement must evolve from purchasing existing technologies to creating markets for new ones. Regulators must become partners in experimentation rather than guardians of yesterday's rules.A connecting architectureEurope does not need to invent the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) model from scratch. Britain's Aria, Germany's Sprind and Wellcome Leap already show that Europe can build institutions capable of taking high-risk, mission-oriented bets while preserving democratic accountability. The challenge now is not to create more isolated initiatives, but to connect them to Europe's broader scientific, industrial and financial system so that breakthrough discoveries can scale.Above all, Europe must stop treating research, innovation, industrial policy, finance and security as separate policy domains. The challenge is no longer to create excellent institutions in each of these fields, but to make them work as one European innovation system. Europe's strength will increasingly depend not on excellence within institutions, but on excellence across them.Europe's ambition should be neither to imitate the US nor to emulate China. It should demonstrate that scientific freedom, democratic legitimacy and technological capability are not competing objectives, but mutually reinforcing strengths. In an age of geopolitical rivalry, Europe's greatest advantage may ultimately be its ability to attract the world's best talent by combining scientific freedom, democratic openness and technological ambition.Bush's scientific contract helped define the 20th century because it protected the freedom to discover. Europe's challenge is not to abandon that achievement but to extend it. The defining task of Europe's next scientific contract is to preserve the freedom to discover while building Europe's capacity to translate scientific discovery into technological power.Kaare Nielsen is founder of Pomus, a Danish think tank on science and innovation.
Veritas to acquire McLean tech company
Veritas Capital announced that it had entered an agreement to acquire McLean-based government technology consulting company Steampunk.
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.
47th West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival announces 2026 entertainment lineup, schedule
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — The 47th annual West Virginia Italian Heritage Festival will return to downtown Clarksburg over Labor Day weekend, bringing three days of Italian culture, food, competitions and free
Upcoming events at the Old Courthouse Heritage Museum
Despite the high temperatures outside, the fall season is gearing up for some cool programs at the Old Courthouse Heritage Museum.
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” 🌹🎵
Science funding cuts will harm Britain’s global standing
Letters: Readers respond to an editorial about the threat to research funding, including plans to close the Jodrell Bank Observatory
Time for Andy Burnham to smile on UK science
Waning support for basic research threatens Britain’s technology ambitions
Debt Digest | Federal Debt is a Health Care Problem
Welcome David Ditch to the Debt Dispatch! We are pleased to announce a new regular contributor: David Ditch will be joining the Cato Institute as a Policy Analyst for Budget and Entitlement Policy later this week. David has more than a decade of experience in fiscal policy issues, with a particular focus on federal spending. He previously worked at the Senate Budget Committee, the Heritage Foundation, and the Economic Policy Innovation Center. David’s areas of expertise include appropriations, transportation, agriculture, federalism, grantmaking, and policy options for deficit reduction. Originally from the Rochester, N.Y. area, David has a BA in Economics and Political Science from the University of Rochester and a MA in Political Management from George Washington University. David currently lives in Arlington, VA. You may have enjoyed his earlier guest posts: CBO: New Highway Bill Has More Spending, Taxes, and Deficits Trump Administration’s Proposed Changes to Federal Grants Highlight Problems of Big Government Here are this week’s reading links and fiscal facts: The federal debt is largely a health care problem. In a new report, the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation find that “In 2026, federal subsidies for health insurance, net of related payments to the government, are projected to equal $2.4 trillion, or 7.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In CBO and JCT’s projections, those subsidies grow by 65 percent, reaching $3.9 trillion, or 8.4 percent of GDP, in 2036. Subsidies for Medicare contribute most to that overall growth, increasing by $900 billion. Over the entire 2026–2036 period, federal subsidies for health insurance total $33.6 trillion.” Cato’s Michael Cannon emphasizes, “The long-term federal debt problem is a health care problem. […] Only two categories of federal outlays will grow faster than gross domestic product (GDP): health care subsidies and interest payments on the debt. The former is, therefore, the primary driver of the latter.” The bond market fears deficits, not the loss of tariff revenue. Responding to a New York Times essay claiming tariff revenue has grown too important for a future administration to unwind, Cato’s Kyle Handley argues: “Bond investors are not attached to customs duties as a line item revenue source. They care about the government’s overall fiscal position.” He continues, “tariff revenue is a side hustle. And the Trump administration has already promised to dole out the funds through schemes like tariff dividend rebates, farm subsidies, and pay-fors on tax cuts or other spending.” Furthermore, “tariff revenue is simply not large enough to transform the government’s fiscal trajectory.” Take net interest for example: it “reached $970 billion in fiscal year 2025, absorbing 18.5 percent of federal receipts. Customs duties accounted for only 3.7 percent of receipts—and that was before refunds (see Figure 2).” Handley concludes, “The real bond-market concern is a large and growing interest bill, persistent budget deficits, and a political system unwilling to bring spending and revenue into alignment.” Medicare’s spending growth is driven by more volume and utilization. A Congressional Research Service report finds that Medicare spending “grew at an average annual rate of 7.3%” from 1985 through 2025, and the trustees project health care expenditures will keep rising “faster than gross domestic product (GDP) in most future years.” Citing CBO, the report attributes Medicare’s projected 2026–2036 spending growth to “23% from higher enrollment, 31% from inflation, and 47% from the growth of inflation-adjusted spending per beneficiary. In other words**, the largest single driver of Medicare spending growth during the next decade is expected to be higher volume and intensity of health care services.”** Boccia and Thakur explain: “as the economy grows, Medicare spending tends to grow at least as fast—and often faster—because the program automatically pays the bill for more and more healthcare consumption by seniors, even as prices rise.” The Fed has little control over market interest rates. Cato’s Jai Kedia documents that the Fed has held its rate target steady since December, yet “nearly every rate Americans actually borrow at has climbed over the same stretch.” Kedia continues, “The Fed did nothing, and the cost of credit went up anyway. […] Markets spent these months repricing macroeconomic events such as sticky core inflation, a volatile energy market driven by the conflict in the Middle East, and global trade disrupted by tariffs, among others. None of that required a policy change to show up in borrowing costs because markets, not the FOMC, set prices.” He concludes, “Accurately priced borrowing rates will come from credible disinflation and disciplined budgets and from a Fed content to follow the economy rather than pretend it leads it.” Nearly half of US farm income comes from taxpayers. Former Reagan OMB director David Stockman notes that “in the most recently completed full year (FY 2025) farmer incomes in the US totaled $97.8 billion, but fully 42.7% or $41.8 billion of that amount came from taxpayers, not the marketplace. Nor is this some kind of one-year aberration. If we look at the most recent decade as a whole, total farm income posted at nearly $708 billion, but, as indicated, fully $322 billion or 45% of this came compliments of US taxpayers.” Cato’s Chris Edwards explains why so little of that income is market-earned: “Farmers are businesspeople, but the government shields them from just about every type of weather and market risk. Furthermore, just about every part of the agricultural industry is subsidized, including insurance, loans, marketing, research, export sales, and land improvements.” The Debt Dispatch is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Will Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage unite the right in British politics?
Restore Britain leader has made a surprise offer of cooperation with Reform but some say it’s a trap
Rupert Lowe urges Nigel Farage to work with Restore Britain
Lowe says the two should put ‘personalities and our past disagreements aside for good of the country’
Watch Why Think Tanks are a Billion Dollar Business
Think tanks bring together experts and shape debates in Washington, but how do you measure the value of an idea? From the Aspen Institute to the Heritage Foundation, this episode explores the business of ideas, the billions of dollars behind America's leading think tanks, and how they measure success.
2026 Tobacco Heritage Day at L.W. Paul Living History Farm in Conway
For many in attendance of Tobacco Heritage Day on Saturday, Aug. 1, tobacco farming wasn't just history — it was part of their childhood. Generations of Horry County families made a living in the tobacco fields, where children often spent summers priming leaves, loading wagons or stringing tobacco by hand before it was cured in barns. Once the county's dominant cash crop, tobacco shaped the local economy and way of life for decades, with thousands of acres planted each year and warehouses bustling during auction season.
How often are married people having sex? What to know about the intimacy standard in America
Research reveals once a week may be the sweet spot for marital satisfaction, with no added happiness boost from more frequent sexual intimacy.
Help Business Report recognize the Capital Region’s most charitable companies
Baton Rouge Business Report is building a new ranking of the Capital Region’s most charitable companies—and we want your organization to be part of it. For our December philanthropy edition, we’re surveying businesses across the region to measure the scale and reach of their corporate giving. Companies will be ranked by their total cash and in-kind […]
Charitable Events Calendar | July 31
A weekly listing of upcoming nonprofit and community events.
Personalist politics pave the way for Indonesia’s authoritarian revival
As personalistic political parties displace institutionalised electoral competition, only broad-based structural reform can help put down Indonesia’s authoritarian resurgence.
UK's IG Group agrees to buy sports gaming firm Underdog for up to $1.3 billion
Britain's IG Group said on Thursday it has agreed to acquire U.S. daily fantasy sports and prediction markets operator Underdog for up to $1.3 billion, in a deal that would strengthen its position in the fast-growing U.S. retail trading market.
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Introducing: The TAG Heuer Carrera Chronograph x Team Ikuzawa, A Glassbox Inspired by Japanese Racing Heritage
TAG Heuer, Team Ikuzawa and Bamford Watch Department reunite for a second edition, this time based on the 39mm Carrera Glassbox Chronograph.
Pediatricians and health officials are sidestepping Trump's CDC on vaccine advice
The Trump administration's upending of years of vaccine advice puts many pediatricians in a quandary. Some are steering patients away from the CDC to other authoritative websites, including their own.
Young entrepreneurs turn sports card collecting into charitable business
Cards2Tuff founders plan charity livestreams benefiting Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota and DeSoto Counties
Legal Analysis Offers Insights for Improved Data Sharing, Better Health
State public health and Medicaid agencies each collect large amounts of data, and sharing that data across agencies could offer a more complete picture of residents’ health and the factors that shape it. To support expanded data sharing, The Pew Charitable Trusts commissioned a first-of-its-kind legal analysis of federal and state laws governing how such critical information is shared.
VERITAS project could change the way scientists secure AI
VERITAS is an NSF-funded project bringing AI security to research infrastructure, screening models and data for hidden risks.
Turning AI Plant Science Into a Commercial Tool: Heritable Agriculture’s Next Chapter
Heritable says its platform can match plant genetics to geography with 10-meter field-level accuracy, helping users predict how varieties of nearly any crop could perform in specific locations around the world.
Shohei Ohtani Skips Bullpen Session Due To Left Knee Irritation
Shohei Ohtani has skipped a tentatively scheduled bullpen session, and won't throw off a mound again until his irritated left knee feels 100%.
Andy Burnham and the rise of ‘aura farming’ in politics
Is “aura farming” the new political superpower? There are some days in TV news when you find yourself standing in the middle of a farm, surrounded by baby goats, trying to explain internet slang. Subscribe This was one of those days. There I was, in wellies, trying to unpack aura farming - a Gen Z term for carefully cultivating your image online so that you look effortlessly cool, authentic and charismatic. The trick, apparently, is that it can’t look like you’re trying too hard. Which, I’ll admit, felt slightly ironic as we filmed an entire report on a farm purely because the word farming is in the title. ‘Shaped by algorithms’ Whether you like it or not, politics increasingly feels like it’s being shaped by algorithms as much as manifestos. Take Andy Burnham. Since arriving at Number 10, he’s been impossible to miss online. One minute he’s out for a casual jog with Mo Farah. Next he’s announcing policy alongside TikTok high priestess Bus Aunty. His social media paints a very deliberate picture: less polished Westminster operator, more bloke from the North who just happens to be running the country. It’s not accidental. Burnham’s “King of the North”, New Order-loving persona has become part of a carefully constructed political brand. Authenticity is now something politicians work incredibly hard to make look effortless. But Burnham isn’t inventing this playbook. Like so many of us doomscrolling on an evening, he’s been influenced online. The digital strategy of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, pictured above right, has become a case study in viral political communication, and some of the people behind that campaign have recently been advising the Labour Party in Britain. Their message is simple: if you want to reach younger voters, you need to show up where they already spend their time. Embracing content creators And increasingly, that doesn’t mean traditional news interviews (awkward). It means speaking to content creators like Max from The Career Ladder, whose channels reach around 20 million followers worldwide. His interview with Burnham, pictured below, was posted almost immediately after he became Prime Minister. What struck me wasn’t just the audience size, but something Max told me afterwards: many people in the comments said they’d discovered Britain had a new Prime Minister through his interview. Think about that for a moment. Not through rolling news. Not through newspapers. Through a creator they were already following while scrolling. Share That’s a profound shift in how political information reaches people, one that’s been gathering momentum for some time. It also explains why politicians are embracing content creators and spending millions on digital marketing. Of course, this isn’t unique to one party. ‘Personality before policy’ In many ways, the right were quicker off the mark in building their aura online. Donald Trump built much of his political identity on social media. Nigel Farage remains one of Britain’s strongest political performers on TikTok. Politicians across the spectrum now understand that personality often reaches people before policy does. During a six-week UK general election campaign alone, overall digital ad spending routinely tops £11m. Share Channel 4 News Former Number 10 social media adviser Andrew Wong put it well when he told me that “vibes” can help someone get noticed, but they only work if they’re rooted in a genuine personality. Force it, and audiences spot it instantly. The bigger question is whether internet charisma can backfire on you - especially when you’re Prime Minister. Because behind Burnham’s carefully curated videos is a veteran politician with decades of Westminster experience. The spontaneity is produced. While the authenticity may be genuine, it’s managed. That’s not necessarily a criticism. It’s simply the reality of modern political communication. Aura farming alone is not enough to harvest change. But in the age of algorithms, winning attention may be the first battle. Subscribe Share Channel 4 News Leave a comment
Patriots putting new pieces together
LINCOLN CITY, Ind. (WEHT) — The Heritage Hills Patriots have been the most successful football team in southern Indiana over the past three seasons. “These guys, all the way back to their freshman year, have seen nothing but success,” Heritage Hills football head coach Kevin Tempel said. Three regional titles, two state championship appearances, and […]
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Margaritaville Ball Drop 2027 Gala Megawatt Entertainment
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APTOPIX Britain Politics
Britain's outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer and wife Victoria hug as they leave 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, July 20, 2026.(AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
APTOPIX Britain Politics
Britain's outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer walks out 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, July 20, 2026.(AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)
Britain Politics
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DREAMTEAM
RUARIDH McCONNOCHIE, THE FORMER BATH, ENGLAND, ENGLAND SEVENS AND GREAT BRITAIN SEVENS WINGER, CHOOSES THE BEST XV HE HAS PLAYED WITH OR AGAINST… 1. Beno Obano – I’ve always thought Beno has been criminally underrated at international level. Everyone sees his power, but his hands and footwork are exceptional for a prop. He’s been a […] The post DREAMTEAM appeared first on The Rugby Paper.
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Sports without politics is a fantasy and the World Cup proves it
From ancient Greece to Nazi Germany, sport and politics have long been intertwined. Nevertheless, we still imagine that international sport can be kept above the fray and serve as a neutral arena where nations compete on merit alone. In this article, diplomacy scholar Geoffrey Allen Pigman argues the 2026 FIFA World Cup shows this is a dangerous illusion. When international sport is left entirely to revenue-maximizing private bodies like FIFA, it doesn't escape politics, but rather surrenders to its worst expressions. With the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics fast approaching, the IOC must decide whether to learn that lesson or repeat the same mistakes. The largest and most lucrative FIFA World Cup ever draws toward its climactic conclusion amidst a swirl of controversy. Team members, staff, fans, and spectators have been denied their right to enter the United States to participate, and US President Donald Trump intervened with FIFA boss Gianni Infantino to overturn a referee’s call that Trump believed disadvantaged the US national team. It is a moment to step back and reflect on what the purposes of international sport mega-events like the World Cup, and international sport more broadly, are, and what they should be. Does international sport serve public purposes? Is there a public interest? Or is it primarily a private endeavor organized by commercial enterprises to entertain the global public (and generate profit in the process), which is occasionally used by governments and leaders for raisons d’etat? Central to the idea of sport is the principle of fair play, which in the international context demands that games be free from political interference. However, it is impossible to separate sport from politics, all claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The most positive political use of international sport through the millennia has been to facilitate diplomacy. The use of international sport for diplomatic objectives has existed since at least the time of the ancient Olympic Games, around which was instituted the custom of the Ekecheiria, or Olympic Truce, between participating states to facilitate fair competition and diplomatic achievements by ensuring that participants could travel safely to the Olympiad. In his seminal work On Diplomacy (1987), diplomacy scholar James Der Derian characterized the objectives of diplomacy as overcoming alienation and mediating estrangement between governments and between peoples. One increasingly important diplomatic tool in the technology-infused media environment over the past century has been public diplomacy, under which governments and non-state diplomatic actors (e.g. transnational corporations) communicate to global publics about their international policy objectives and to shape their global brand image. Political scientist Michał Kobierecki, in his important book Sports Diplomacy (2020), views sports diplomacy as falling broadly within the ambit of public diplomacy, as international sport intimately involves the participation of global publics as spectators and consumers of global media. Diplomacy scholar Stuart Murray and this author, in a 2013 article, distinguish between international sport used for diplomatic purposes and international sport-as-diplomacy, which encompasses the range of diplomacy that occurs as teams and competitors, spectators and fans, and government officials all converge for international sporting events like the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup. Diplomacy scholar H.E. Chehabi, in a 2001 article on US-Iran sports diplomacy, describes the interaction between spectators and fans at international sporting events as “people-to-people diplomacy,” in which relationships develop independently of governments and their objectives. Diplomacy by the aforementioned definitions is often unsuccessful. Moreover, all too often the tools of diplomacy may be employed by governments and other actors to thwart or oppose the objectives of diplomacy as characterized by Der Derian. Governments routinely use the tools of public diplomacy to disseminate propaganda, spreading misinformation in the attempt to deceive global publics about their objectives and to create misleading impressions about their brand identity. Within sports diplomacy, the term “sportswashing” has been coined recently to describe how governments invest in and promote international sport to create positive global public impressions of their nations and, in doing so, to distract the global public from their deficient records in areas such as human rights and democratic governance. Murray, in his 2018 book Sports Diplomacy: Origins, Theory and Practice, introduces the concept of sports anti-diplomacy, wherein governments intentionally use international sport to advance aggressive and nationalistic objectives. Obvious historical examples include Hitler’s use of the 1936 Berlin Olympics to glorify his Third Reich and the 1969 El Salvador-Honduras football “war.” SUGGESTED READING The beautiful game made ugly By Emily Ryall FIFA argues that it is and seeks to be apolitical in its stewardship of international Association Football (soccer). FIFA policies governing bids to host the World Cup require uninhibited and non-discriminatory access for players, team staff, and spectators of all participating countries to host nations and venues. It became clear soon after Trump returned to power in the United States in January 2025 that Trump’s political intentions and objectives to limit non-US citizens from living and working in the United States and, in numerous cases, even visiting the country, would collide with FIFA’s host nation policies. Beginning soon after the start of the second Trump administration, US federal authorities imposed restrictions on entry to the United States of citizens of between 20 and 40 countries for any purpose, with only limited exceptions. Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began arresting non-US citizens in the United States, including persons with and without legal status, holding them in jails, concentration camps, and other detention facilities until they were deported to their home or third countries, where they faced substantive risks to their personal safety. FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, in an effort to ensure the most successful and lucrative World Cup in history, engaged diplomatically with President Trump in an attempt to facilitate entry to the US for World Cup participants. Infantino did all in his power to ingratiate himself with Trump, to the extent of creating a FIFA “Peace Prize,” which he awarded to Trump in December 2025 at a ceremony in the then Trump-controlled John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on the occasion of the World Cup draw. The prize was an ersatz consolation for someone who aspired in vain to win the rather more prestigious and well-known Nobel Peace Prize. And in the run-up to the World Cup, conditions became worse. In February 2026, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a war of aggression against Iran, illegal under international law, under the false pretence that Iran’s government was preparing to attack the United States and Israel. During the US aerial bombardment of Iran, US planes bombed Azadi Stadium, the facility where Iran’s national football team trained. As the 2026 FIFA World Cup began, it was clear that Infantino’s efforts had been for naught: the Trump administration would not adhere to FIFA policies governing access to World Cup host nations. World Cup referee Omar Artan, a citizen of Somalia, was denied a US visa to enter the United States to participate in the World Cup. Trump’s government only granted US visas to Iran’s football team ten days before they were scheduled to arrive for the tournament. Numerous members of the support staff for Iran’s team were denied US visas. Iran’s team, which had been scheduled to train in Arizona, was directed to shift its training site to Tijuana, Mexico, notwithstanding that all three of their group stage matches took place at US venues. The US Department of Homeland Security only permitted the Iranian team to enter the US on the day before each scheduled match and then to return to Mexico immediately after playing. Members of Iraq’s and Switzerland’s football teams were delayed for hours by US officials at the US border, and an Iraqi team photographer was refused entry. Spectators and fans from Haïti and Iran were denied entry to the United States altogether. A large number of fans from a range of countries had their applications for US visas rejected. There were multiple off-ramps through which participants could have avoided the negative consequences of Trump’s decisions for the 2026 World Cup. Once it was clear that the Trump government intended to violate the established expectations for World Cup hosts, FIFA could have shifted the matches scheduled to take place in the United States to Mexico and Canada. The three nations were already designated as co-hosts, and host cities and venues had been selected. Once it was clear that FIFA, governed by FIFA boss Gianni Infantino’s dependent and dysfunctional relationship with Trump, would never consider this option on its own, it fell to the national football federations to act. The national federations, particularly some combination of federations of the leading contenders (France, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Morocco, England, Germany, etc.), could have refused to participate under the US-imposed conditions or, at the least, demanded an ironclad agreement with the Trump government that FIFA policies on access would be respected. ___ International sport is inextricably entangled with diplomacy of different sorts, for good or ill, it cannot be considered to be in the purely private realm and left to revenue-maximizing private actors. ___ Why did neither FIFA nor the national football federations act to protect the interests of players, team staff, referees, fans, and spectators? In essence, the relentless engines of capitalism prevailed over norm observance, ethics, and fair play. The revenue interests of FIFA, sponsors, global media, and host cities won out. FIFA’s managers viewed hosting another World Cup principally in the United States as a veritable pot of gold for FIFA and its collaborators. FIFA has estimated its own revenue over the 2023-26 budget cycle, which includes the 2026 World Cup, at $13 billion, revised up from an initial projection of $11 billion, and 72% higher than the previous revenue cycle. Of that total, FIFA is estimated to have generated $8.9 billion from the Cup itself in revenue from TV rights ($3.92 billion), sponsorships ($2.69 billion), ticket sales ($3.1 billion), licensing rights, and other sources. A joint study by FIFA and the World Trade Organization estimates that the World Cup will contribute over $40 billion to global GDP, including nearly $14 billion in direct visitor spending in the three host countries (but principally in the United States, which hosted the lion’s share of the matches). The FIFA World Cup is now reportedly “the single most lucrative recurring commercial property in global sport.” And yet, notwithstanding the Trump government’s uses of the World Cup for sports anti-diplomacy, and the climate of anxiety that this created for participants and spectators, diplomacy that did not depend upon governments was able to thrive at the World Cup. Examples of successful people-to-people diplomacy were legion, as citizens of towns and cities across the States, as well as in Mexico and Canada, welcomed team members, their families and supporters, to training sites across North America. Fans of different teams joined together in person in stadiums for matches, at watch parties and bars, and at welcome events sponsored by host cities. The joy and camaraderie shared between the citizenry of Boston and Scotland’s “Tartan Army” of fans is but one example of how the “Beautiful Game” brings people together. Friendships forged across continents are likely to endure well beyond the Cup final. Even those achievements cannot be seen as unalloyed, however. As South African football fan Byron Pillay commented to Al Jazeera, “Football is called the Beautiful Game for a reason, for its ability to unite people. But it’s hard to believe in that magic with the politics and war rhetoric off the field of play, especially when one of the tournament hosts is central to that.” Ultimately, the experience of the 2026 FIFA World Cup illustrates that, as international sport is inextricably entangled with diplomacy of different sorts, for good or ill, it cannot be considered to be in the purely private realm and left to revenue-maximizing private actors. As long as there is the possibility of diplomatic progress in mediating estrangement between governments or between peoples, there is a broad and overarching public interest in international sport. Likewise, as it would be difficult to put on an international sport mega-event without international sporting organizations like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), global media firms, and companies purchasing sponsorships, public and private interests in international sport must coexist, most likely somewhere on a shifting spectrum between partnership and rivalry or cross purposes. As the World Cup wraps up, the IOC needs to consider its lessons before the scheduled 2028 Los Angeles Olympics if they want to avoid a media-hyped Trump version of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad. The IOC and the National Olympic Committees need to set conditions on and make demands of Trump’s government with clearly articulated consequences for non-compliance, up to and including cancellation of the Games. Time is running out for the IOC, as unlike with the FIFA World Cup, there is no at-the-ready alternate venue for Los Angeles.
Acknowledgments
This is a Pew Research Center report from the Pew-Knight Initiative, a research program funded jointly by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Find related reports online at https://www.pewresearch.org/pew-knight/. Primary Researchers Elisa Shearer, Senior ResearcherLuxuan Wang, Research AssociateKaterina Eva Matsa, Director, News and Information Research Michael Lipka, Associate Director, News […]
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