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Darling completes sale of sausage casings business to SARIA
Sale positions company for continued growth and value creation potential while optimizing portfolio and reducing debt.
Anti-trans ballot measures are a political test run for the 2028 presidential election
LGBTQ+ movement leaders warn that anti-trans ballot measures in five states could become a testing ground for a broader political strategy in the 2028 presidential election.
MobileFuse Receives SBTi Validation for Its Science-Based Emissions Target
/PRNewswire/ -- MobileFuse, a leading advertising and technology platform, today announced that SBTi Services validated its science-based greenhouse gas...
Yale School of Medicine On the Science of Childhood Anxiety, Say, Anxiety Disorders Are the Most Common Mental Health Challenges In Youth
Credit: Matt Bradbury October 5, 2026 - By Isabella Backman - Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health challenges in youth. Left untreated, they can disrupt the lives of both children and their families. The good news is that with intervention, most children will overcome these conditions. Across Yale School of Medicine, scientists are working to understand anxiety at every level, from common anxious behaviors to molecular biomarkers in the brain. They are using their findings to develop and disseminate new evidence-based treatments for childhood anxiety. Today, the go-to treatment for childhood anxiety disorders is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This is a form of psychotherapy that teaches children skills for confronting anxious thoughts and helps them practice managing situations that cause anxiety. While it is the gold-standard treatment backed by considerable scientific evidence, up to 50% of children will not see sufficient benefit from CBT alone. Wendy Silverman, PhD, Alfred A. Messer Professor in the Child Study Center, co-directs the Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program alongside Eli Lebowitz, PhD, associate professor in the Child Study Center. One of their main interests is learning how to improve outcomes beyond CBT. “We’re developing cutting-edge, research-based knowledge that can reduce the suffering that anxiety causes children and their families,” says Silverman. Changing parent behavior YSM experts are investigating how to improve CBT outcomes for children by involving the parents. Silverman’s research has uncovered two main components of parent intervention that improve childhood anxiety: not enabling children to completely avoid the things that make them anxious and taking steps to enhance their autonomy. Parents may unintentionally reinforce their child’s anxiety by allowing them to avoid what makes them anxious. They also may unintentionally limit the children’s sense of autonomy by being overly intrusive. “One of the things that we take pride in is that we’ve focused on trying to understand what parents need to do, and to test our ideas and see if changing the parents’ behaviors is enhancing the effects of CBT,” Silverman says. “Our findings thus far suggest that they do." As much as CBT can be helpful, it can also be challenging to get one’s child to do the necessary steps for CBT to work. This is one important reason why Lebowitz created a novel intervention program for parents named Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE). Existing intervention programs often teach parents to act as therapists for their child, such as training them on how to practice breathing exercises. “It makes sense, but this doesn’t work very well in practice,” says Lebowitz. “And part of the reason, I think, is that it’s not easy to get your kid to do things, especially if they’re not excited about doing it.” SPACE is unique because it focuses entirely on parent involvement and changing parental behavior—children are not involved in the sessions. For example, parents learn how to use supportive messages that convey confidence that their child can tolerate and manage distress. “It might sound like a parent saying to a child, ‘I get that this is really hard for you, but I know that you can handle it,’” Lebowitz says. The program also works with parents to identify the ways in which they are accommodating anxious behaviors. “We’ll pick one thing that parents are doing that is an accommodation and help them make a detailed plan for how they’re going to change that,” Lebowitz explains. Treating Anxiety in Children and Adolescents Much of the existing research on SPACE has focused on parents of children under age 14. Ongoing studies are now exploring its use with parents of older teens. “Both anxiety and accommodation can interfere with normative developmental shifts during the teen years, including increased autonomy and individuation from parents,” says Rebecca Etkin, PhD, associate research scientist in the Child Study Center. “In this sense, SPACE may be particularly well-suited for anxious teens and their parents. We want to see whether it is effective during this distinct developmental window.” Unfortunately, many families in need of CBT face barriers, including limited availability of services and geographic constraints. One way to improve access is digital interventions. Silverman and her team are developing an evidence-based digitized intervention program for parents that they can access directly from their computer or smart phone. “The work we’re doing will be one of the very few parent interventions that is digitized and importantly tested for effectiveness,” she says. Creating interventions for anxiety-related challenges Silverman and Lebowitz recently received a generous gift to develop and test other interventions that help parents reduce other child anxiety-related behavioral and emotional difficulties, such as restrictive eating and unexplained somatic symptoms. One of these projects in particular focuses on understanding the risks of social media and its potential benefits, including offering a sense of connection. “A lot of research has focused on the idea that social media is harmful and the less of it the better,” says Lebowitz. “But we actually see is that this is not quite right—there are negatives, but there are also positives. So, we’re trying to get a little bit more nuanced of a picture.” The team is working with teens with social anxiety and their parents over an extended period to better understand their social media habits and how their anxiety levels affect engagement with different platforms. The teens will answer questions sent to an app on their phones about mood and social media usage in an effort to capture emotional responses as they unfold. “We hope to develop interventions that can help make the best of social media while protecting against the more problematic effects,” Lebowitz says. The brain’s role in anxiety Researchers are also testing therapies to address anxiety at the neurological and molecular levels. In collaboration with Dylan Gee, PhD, professor of psychology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Hilary Blumberg, MD, John and Hope Furth Professor of Psychiatric Neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine, Lebowitz and Silverman are using brain imaging to identify changes in a child’s brain before and after parents enroll in SPACE. In one study, children viewed anxiety-inducing images while undergoing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); the researchers conducted scans with and without the children’s parents nearby. Before SPACE, children’s brains were better able to activate the regulatory circuitry needed to turn off an anxious response when their parents were nearby. But after SPACE, children could activate this circuitry even without the parent around. “As parents work on gradually reducing some of their accommodations, you can see a child get better at regulating their own fear system in the brain,” Lebowitz says. “It’s remarkable.” Research into the molecular underpinnings of anxiety can also inform new childhood anxiety treatments. In a recent study, Lebowitz, Silverman, and Flora Vaccarino, MD, Harris Professor in the Child Study Center, discovered that a protein known as fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) could be protective from the toxic effects of stress. FGF2 levels in children and their parents were linked to the children’s risk of developing anxiety and depression, the study showed. The findings could help explain why some children who are exposed to early life trauma such as poverty or abuse are more prone to developing mental health disorders. And FGF2 could be a target for treatment. “This is very novel because it starts to give a clue to what is the molecular chain that connects those lived experiences to the actual psychological outcomes,” Lebowitz says. New ways to study and treat childhood anxiety Michael Crowley, PhD, associate professor in the Child Study Center, collaborates with Silverman and Lebowitz to study the role that attention plays in development and maintenance of childhood anxiety. There is a large body of research that shows that anxious children, like anxious adults, are prone to focus on threatening stimuli such as angry faces compared with neutral faces. This has led to innovative interventions that involve attention retraining. The idea is that if experts train children to look away from threatening stimuli, it may reduce their anxiety—especially children with social anxiety who are most prone to attend to threats. The researchers have just completed a clinical trial for attention retraining with 10- to 14-year-olds with social anxiety disorders and are currently analyzing the findings. Besides this innovative attention retraining research, as Crowly notes, “I like to design tasks that are engaging to kids,” Crowley says. “My goal is to assess something without the kids knowing what we are assessing.” With this goal in mind, Crowley has created a virtual game, named Boom, to study threat processing in children with anxiety disorders. The game is similar to that of hot potato—the child and three digital players take turns virtually passing a ball to each other’s gloves. At some point, the ball turns into a bomb, and as the bomb lands in each player’s glove, the outline of the glove turns yellow. The goal is to avoid having the bomb go off in your glove. What isn’t obvious is that the game is designed to measure different types of threatening stimuli, both ambiguous and direct. In the game, the direct threat occurs as the bomb is traveling towards your glove. The ambiguous threat is the yellow outlined glove as it is unknown where the bomb will travel next. While children play the game, Crowley’s team measures their brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG). The researchers have discovered that in kids with anxiety, the brain reacts more strongly to ambiguous threats than it does in their peers, but less strongly to direct threats. They believe that the initial abnormally large brain response to not knowing where the bomb is going impairs the brain's ability to properly respond when the threat is actually traveling the child’s way. “The brains of children with anxiety are unable to differentiate between threats you need to do something about and those that are not your problem.” Michael Crowley, PhD, develops innovative games for studying anxiety in children and adolescents.Credit: Matt Bradbury Based on these insights, Crowley hopes to study whether interventions like attention training could restore appropriate threat processing. Crowley’s team is also working on a test called the Balloon Risk Avoidance Task, which evaluates risk-taking and avoidance behaviors. It features a digital balloon that is full of air and about to burst. Kids have six seconds to let air out of the balloon. The more air they let out, the less risk they face that the balloon will pop. But at the same time, the balloon becomes less valuable as it deflates. “The more air you keep in the balloon, the more points you get,” Crowley explains. So far, the researchers have found that when the balloons pop unexpectedly, teens with social anxiety show distinct brain responses. Studying these responses can help psychologists understand the underlying pathways driving the various manifestations of anxiety. The genetics of anxiety When Thomas Fernandez, MD, associate professor in the Child Study Center and of psychiatry, was still in training, there was a lot of excitement about understanding the genetics associated with autism spectrum disorder. Since then, scientists have identified around 250 genes associated with autism. The genetic contribution to anxiety disorders, on the other hand, has historically received less attention. Anxiety is less heritable than autism, but the genetic contribution for anxiety disorders that emerge in childhood may be higher than for anxiety disorders overall. While scientists estimate the heritability of anxiety disorders in general to be around 30% to 50%, some studies suggest higher heritability for certain childhood-onset anxiety presentations. “I saw firsthand how researchers in the field went about finding vulnerability genes for autism,” Fernandez says. “So, we’re using a very similar playbook for childhood anxiety.” “I saw firsthand how researchers in the field went about finding vulnerability genes for autism. So, we’re using a very similar playbook for childhood anxiety.” Thomas Fernandez, MD Associate Professor In the Child Study Center and in Psychiatry Now, Fernandez and Emily Olfson, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the Child Study Center, are studying children and their parents to identify genetic changes that are present in the child but not the parents, known as “de novo mutations.” “All of us have some de novo mutations—maybe about 50 to 100 sprinkled throughout the genome,” Olfson says. “But when they occur within the coding regions of genes, they can be really disruptive.” Previous research shows that people with autism have higher rates of damaging de novo mutations than the general population. In 2022, Olfson, Lebowitz, Silverman, and Fernandez published a study on 68 children and their families that found that children with anxiety had similarly high levels of these mutations. Studying de novo mutations can help point the researchers to where they should be looking for genes associated with anxiety. “The end game is using the genes to steer us toward the right part of biology that we can then target to come up with better treatments,” Fernandez says. Building on those findings, the team is now studying more families to better understand how these de novo mutations, along with other genetic and environmental factors, shape pediatric anxiety disorders. They recently received a National Institutes of Health grant to enroll 750 new families over the next five years. Olfson is the principal investigator, with co-investigators Lebowitz, Fernandez, Silverman, and Shuangge Steven Ma, PhD, department chair and professor of biostatistics at Yale School of Public Health. Neurodevelopment, Risk Genes, and Mental Health Conditions - The Olfson Lab Joel Gelernter, MD, Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, is interested in how different anxiety disorders differ genomically. “We are studying social phobia, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder, working to understand why people differ in their risk to these specific anxiety disorders and evaluating various risk factors,” he says. Gelernter was recently involved in one of the largest studies to date of the genomics underlying anxiety disorder. The study included around 122,000 people with anxiety disorders and around 730,000 without. It found that some genetic differences associated with anxiety were linked to signaling that helps reduce overactivity in the nervous system. Many anxiety medications available today work by targeting this process. “It’s nice when the biology that you get out of a large genome-wide study ratifies things that we already know because that can help increase confidence in further findings from the study,” Gelernter says. Uncovering the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders John Krystal, MD, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Professor of Translational Research and chair of the Department of Psychiatry, is interested in the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), of which anxiety is a major symptom. In the late 1980s, Krystal’s team discovered that the drug yohimbine activated symptoms in patients with PTSD. “This was the first time we could link a specific biological mechanism to the symptoms of PTSD,” Krystal says. At the time, he adds, this finding was highly controversial. “A lot of people felt that PTSD was a purely psychological syndrome that didn’t have an underlying biology.” Since then, Krystal has dived deep into understanding the neurobiology of PTSD to learn how to better treat it. His team is evaluating the use of ketamine and psychedelics. These would be among the first treatments to be developed specifically for PTSD. They may also be applicable for other disorders including anxiety disorders, Krystal adds. An important gap in PTSD treatment is the absence of biological tests that inform how to best help patients manage their PTSD symptoms. A doctor doesn’t diagnose cancer based on how they feel. Rather, they use tests of the biology of the cancer to determine the best course of treatment. “And we can’t do that in any psychiatric disorder other than Alzheimer’s disease,” Krystal says. “But now we are building a foundation for this approach to the treatment of anxiety disorders for the first time.” Source: Yale School of Medicine
Novant Health hiring event kicks off in Greenville
FOX Carolina's Scottie Hunter has the details.
Euro pummelled by France's debt burden; stocks mixed
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Rashee Rice suffers hamstring injury in Week 4
Chiefs WR Rashee Rice doubtful to return in Week 4 because of injury
Boston 25 News
A local college student’s auto detailing business has grown from helping family and neighbors to servicing the vehicles of professional athletes across New England.
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The 52nd annual Black Cowboy parade kicked off at West Oakland’s DeFremery Park on Saturday.
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LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana's exhibit explores queer history
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How Americans’ Financial Health Is Faring In The “K-Shaped” Economy
Hey all, Jason here. Money20/20 is still two weeks away, but I’ve already started packing (not procrastinating for once!). My calendar is already filling up with various sessions I want to catch, meetings, and of course happy hours, dinners, and other side events. If you’ll be in Vegas and want to catch up, let me know by replying to this email, and we can try to find a time amidst the chaos of the Venetian. A big if not totally unexpected piece of news dropped on Friday: the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group that represents smaller U.S. banks, filed a lawsuit against the OCC and Comptroller Jonathan Gould, arguing that the regulator’s move to grant trust bank charters to firms seeking to use them to conduct substantial non-fiduciary activities exceeds the authorities granted to the OCC by Congress. I haven’t had time to fully digest the legal filing or speak to folks in my network about it, but you can expect to see coverage and analysis on it in next week’s newsletter. Subscribe or Support by Upgrading The NerdCon agenda just dropped. It’s stacked. Partner content: Nubank built an AI-first bank. Chime built its own banking core. Figure and Valon are rebuilding the mortgage stack. At NerdCon, you’ll hear from the people behind those bets: what they chose, what they learned, and what they’re still figuring out. The agenda is live, with leaders from Nubank, Chime, OpenAI, Remitly, Mercury, Figure, Valon and more. Follow the mainstage conversations, bring the problem your team is wrestling with to a hands-on workshop, or pull up a chair at a roundtable. Pick your quests. Meet us in San Diego, November 18–20. Fintech Business Weekly readers save 20% with code FBW20. Explore the Agenda Things To Know & Other Good Reads Federal Reserve Board finalizes changes to enhance the transparency and public accountability of its stress test and reduce volatility in its stress test-related capital requirements (Federal Reserve Board of Governors) FDIC Announces Conclusion of Independent Monitorship (FDIC) Modernizing Financial Regulation: Initial Observations from eSLR (Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman) The Data Version of Godzilla versus Kong: FRED Takes on AI (Fed Governor Christopher Waller) Financing the AI buildout (Brookings) Q3’26: Rules for Banks but Not for Crypto (Fintech Takes Banking) The Inevitability of Local Stablecoins (Lombard Notes) Delusions of AI Governance: The Human-in-the-Loop Comfort Blanket (Fintech Snark Tank) Stripe agrees to acquire Parafin to expand revenue opportunities for platforms and help small businesses grow (Stripe) Listen: Fighting Fraud in the Age of AI, with SEON’s Tamas Kadar (Fintech Business Weekly) How Americans’ Financial Health Is Faring In The “K-Shaped” Economy If there is one overarching theme across the economy and politics in the U.S. at the moment, it’s “affordability.” The term is vague enough to encompass a panoply of factors shaping Americans’ day-to-day lives: rising costs for the hallmarks of being “middle class,” including healthcare, housing, childcare, and education, inflation and rising interest rates, and a job market with the specter of AI hovering over it. At the same time, policy shifts under the Trump administration have resulted in reduced subsidies to those who get health insurance under the Affordable Care Act and new restrictions on qualifying for Medicaid and SNAP, the impacts of which have yet to be fully felt. These factors are contributing to declining consumer confidence and general dissatisfaction with the economy, despite continuing GDP growth and stock market records. This divergence is encapsulated in the idea of the “K-shaped” economy, in which a small proportion of Americans have seen their wealth balloon, while the majority of American households struggle to preserve the lifestyle they have. Perhaps the greatest determinant of which branch of the “K” a household is on is whether their wealth and income are primarily derived from employment vs. from assets. Nearly two decades of low interest rates and, more recently, elevated rates of inflation have benefited asset owners, while those whose income is primarily or solely derived from labor have largely seen real purchasing power stagnate or decline. This is reflected in recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that labor share of U.S. GDP — the fraction of economic output that accrues to workers as compensation in exchange for their labor — dropped to just 52.8% in Q2 2026, the lowest since the BLS began keeping records. In 1947, approximately 2/3rds of economic output accrued to workers; even as recently as 2001, labor’s share of GDP was 64.1%. Against this backdrop, we’ve seen the rise of more credit and credit-like products: cash advance apps, “no-fee” overdraft, earned wage access, and buy now pay later, which are often used as small-dollar short-term borrowing mechanisms to meet immediate consumption needs or pay other bills (eg utilities, cell phone, other debt payments). With the markers of a middle class existence and, increasingly, basic financial stability seemingly out of reach for many, it should be no surprise there’s been an increase in “financial nihilism,” something industry peers like Alex Johnson and Frank Rotman have discussed and analyzed the roots of. The explosion of gambling and gambling-adjacent products and services — often marketed under the guise of being an “investment” — is inextricably intertwined with the rise of financial nihilism. Crypto, sports betting, and, more recently, prediction markets offer an escape or even hope of sorts, like a contemporary, digital version of a scratch-off lottery ticket, while leaving the overwhelming number of people who use such products worse off. Share of Households That Are Financially “Vulnerable” Ticks Up The Financial Health Network’s 2026 Financial Health Pulse® report adds context on how American households are faring. (I linked to this report in last week’s newsletter, but wanted to take time to further unpack the data in the report this week.) The Financial Health Network publishes the report annually, providing insight into how Americans’ financial circumstances are changing over time. The 2026 report is derived from a survey fielded in April and May 2026. The report leverages survey responses to assess indicators of financial health across spending, saving, borrowing, and planning/protecting and to determine a zero to 100 “FinHealth” score. Those with scores between 0 and 39 are considered “Financially Vulnerable,” consumers with scores ranging between 40 and 79 are defined as “Financially Coping,” and those with scores of 80 to 100 are “Financially Healthy.” The report found that moderate improvements in 2025 were reversed, with the share of respondents considered financially “vulnerable” rebounding to 17%. The longitudinal data reflect the impact of pandemic-era programs, like expanded unemployment, cash stimulus payments, and pauses of federal student loan payments. The positive impacts of those programs, as reflected in the Financial Health Pulse reports, had largely disappeared by 2023. While pandemic-era inflation — to be fair, in part caused by the various support and stimulus measures — had come down from as high as 9% in 2022, it has rebounded since the start of Trump’s second term, with tariffs and energy market disruptions owing to the war in Iran pushing prices back up. Specific indicators in the survey that deteriorated from 2025 to 2026 include the share of respondents spending less than their income over the past 12 months, the share paying all bills on time over the past 12 months, the share that have a manageable amount or no debt, the share that are “moderately” or “very” confident their insurance is adequate to cover them in an emergency, and the share that “somewhat” or “strongly” agree that their household plans ahead financially. Unsurprisingly, lower- and moderate-income households are more likely to struggle to pay their bills on time and have any funds leftover to save. The share of low-income households whose income exceeded their spending dropped from 35% in 2025 to 31% in 2026, while the share of upper-income households whose income exceeded expenses remained unchanged at 63%. Households with student loans or revolving credit card debt reported having “a bit more” or “far more” debt than was manageable at rates far higher than those not carrying these types of debts. The share of those with student loan debt indicating their debt load was too high to manage increased from 50% in 2025 to 55% in 2026, while the share of those with revolving credit card debt saying the same ticked up from 51% in 2025 to 54% in 2026. Households that had student loans were markedly more likely to be financially “coping” or “vulnerable” vs. those without student loans. In 2026, 27% of households with student loans were considered financially vulnerable, a jump of 6% points vs. 2025. Households without student loans saw just a 1% point increase (not statistically significant) in those considered financially vulnerable. Households’ perception of the affordability of categories of goods and services paints a stark picture, with less than one-fourth considering higher education affordable, about a third deeming childcare affordable, and less than half viewing healthcare as affordable. Fintech Business Weekly is made possible by the generous support of paying subscribers — bringing you independent analysis of banking, fintech, and crypto without fear or favor. You can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber if you aren’t already. Paying subscribers enjoy: access to the entire archive of nearly six years of newsletters extended versions of the weekly newsletter, with additional content and analysis and (for founding member tier) quarterly personal 1:1 fintech Q&A / strategy calls with me, tapping into my unparalleled knowledge of the intersection of banking and fintech and experience working in the sector, including helping to launch Goldman Sachs’ retail bank Marcus Support Fintech Business Weekly You can also support Fintech Business Weekly by sponsoring a newsletter or podcast, putting you in front of 93,000+ of the most influential decision makers in banking, fintech, and crypto. Learn more about sponsor opportunities or request a media kit by dropping me an email. Democratic Senate Report Highlights How Iran Uses Tether to Evade U.S. Sanctions Iran uses stablecoins, specifically Tether, to evade sanctions, fund regional proxies, and to purchase military drones, a report released last week by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations says. The report was authored by committee ranking member Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and the minority staff. Crypto and stablecoin proponents will often push back on criticism that criminals make use of these assets by arguing that, on an absolute dollar basis, far more illicit funds flow through traditional banking systems and payment rails than via crypto and stablecoins. And while that is likely true, it elides the reality presented in news story after news story: whether state actors — Russia, Iran, North Korea — or criminal groups, those looking to engage in illicit transactions increasingly favor stablecoins and, specifically, Tether (USDT). The report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released last week adds context to how Iran uses Tether has a lynchpin in its shadow banking system. The report analyzed 846 wallets that have been sanctioned or targeted for seizure, finding that 84% of them transacted exclusively or primarily in Tether. The ability to create near limitless, anonymous wallets and to move funds effectively instantaneously and irreversibly have made crypto a favored financial mechanism for bad actors. Stablecoins solved key drawbacks of bitcoin, namely, the original cryptocurrency’s highly volatile value in dollars. And while Tether (the company) has the technical ability to “freeze” or destroy funds, the company is often limited and reactive in its approach to doing so, the Senate report argues. Tether, which is nominally based in crypto-friendly El Salvador, “has stated that its compliance with OFAC sanctions is ‘voluntary’ and that it follows ‘OFAC guidelines,’” the Senate report says. Owing to these favorable attributes, Tether “became a primary cryptocurrency for Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Houthis beginning in 2023 and has expanded in scale since,” according to the report. Tether’s role in Iran’s shadow banking system, the report says, is enhanced by crypto exchanges like Bybit, Kyrrex, OKX, Gate, and Binance, and through “over the counter” exchanges and hawala networks. The consequences of these financial flows aren’t hypothetical. The Senate report links Tether as a funds transfer mechanism to Iranian proxies in the region, including Hizballah, the Houthis, and Hamas. Tether has also been used to make payments to secure components necessary to manufacture drones, the report says. The report concludes by arguing that “[s]tablecoin issuers with a significant nexus to the United States, particularly those that offer dollar-denominated stablecoins, should be subject to American sanctions law rather than being allowed to hide behind foreign jurisdictions.” Stablecoin issuers like Tether must be held accountable for repeated failures to prevent illicit finance and sanctions violations by law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and OFAC, the report argues. [Paying Subscriber Exclusive] OUSD Goes Live, Make Your Own Neobank, U.S. Sanctions Russia’s A7 Network As “Transnational Criminal Organization” OpenUSD, the stablecoin issued by the Open Standard consortium that includes Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, core providers, crypto firms, and numerous banks, went live last week. Social commerce platform Whop raised eyebrows in fintech by offering creators on its platform the ability to launch their own neobanks, which the company describes as “great businesses that are easy to run,” in just 15 minutes. And OFAC and FinCEN target Russia’s “shadow banking” A7 Network — more on these stories after the paywall.
A Black community in Louisiana faces a future without a champion in Congress after redistricting
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How Trump Moved Ethical Lines With His Ads, Businesses and Summits
The president’s decision to hold an international summit at his own private golf club, an idea rejected in his first term, illustrates how much he has shattered norms.
Rare police raid of Taipei gay bar sparks angry protest
Around 100 members of Taipei's LGBTQ+ community protested on Sunday after police raided a gay bar the day before and detained its customers, a highly unusual move given that Taiwan prides itself on its liberal image and legal support for sexual minorities.
Stray Kids follows BTS in Grammy boycott over Asian pop category
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Teens on target again as USA down Mexico 3-0
Cavan Sullivan became the youngest US international goalscorer in history as the United States defeated arch-rivals Mexico 3-0 in a friendly international in Arizona on Saturday.The United States completed the scoring in the 84th minute when Malik Tillman latched onto a poor Mexico backpass and smashed a shot into the top corner for 3-0. rcw/pbt
Politics At The Pump: Will NC Suspend Gas Tax
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Is AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) Fairly Valued As It Reshapes Debt And Governance?
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Gears of War: E-Day Devs 'Proud to Be One of Xbox's Main Titles' Amid Newfound Focus on Exclusivity
The Gears of War: E-Day developers at The Coalition say they are "proud to be one of Xbox's main titles" as Microsoft refocuses on exclusivity.
Women are turning to testosterone, but what does the science actually say?
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Popular College Football Personality Doubts Success For Syracuse Football
One of the most well-known college football personalities discussed the Orange this week.
Florida could be without top receiver against Missouri
Vernell Brown III is doubtful, Bailey Stockton is probable, and Missouri will be without several players on Saturday against Florida.
iPhone 18 Pro Max users on AT&T: Take these steps to save your service
If you still have service, update ASAP.
Governor candidate Bernadette Wilson has been sued repeatedly over unpaid bills, records show
Alaska judges have ordered the Republican candidate to pay thousands of dollars for overdue business and personal debts.
Can Skydance CEO David Ellison Make Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Fly?
David Ellison has to prove the merged Paramount-Warner Bros., dubbed Skydance, can become a profitable Hollywood powerhouse amid its massive debt.
Change to bankruptcy law may help speed up, give relief to small biz
Small businesses may get an easier path to restructure their debt faster while offering greater flexibility in negotiating with creditors under a change in law waiting President Trump's approval.
Is An Undergraduate Business Degree Worth It? 5 Questions To Ask
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Not Completely Out Of The Blue: Introducing The Longines Spirit Pilot And Spirit Pilot Flyback With Blue Dials
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Juan Luis Arsuaga, paleontologist: ‘Corruption is very Paleolithic, very chimpanzee-like’
The co-director of the Atapuerca archaeological site shares with EL PAÍS the key points of his new book, ‘The Answer,’ a luminous text that exudes admiration for our own species and love for nature
As beef prices climb, Texas A&M’s meat science program feels the pinch
Demand for beef hasn’t slowed down.
South Korean official says Trump announcement on Alaska LNG went ‘far beyond what was agreed’
The governor and Republican incumbents in competitive U.S. Senate and House races said they expect South Korea to ultimately invest $54 billion. Some industry observers cast doubt on that prospect.
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Studying Science in an Anti-Scientific Time
This Chronicle Review Deep Cut was first published in 2025. By Julianne Werlin Thanks for reading The Chronicle Review! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe The last two decades have not been kind to science studies. Already bruised and battered by the “science wars” of the 1990s, by the 2000s sociologists of science — who had long argued that science had to be understood in its human context — were encountering the funhouse-mirror version of their own views in right-wing critiques of climate scientists. It was enough to give some prominent scholars pause. “Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?” asked Bruno Latour, the most famous sociologist of science in the world, in 2003. “Should we apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: What were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts?” In response, Latour proposed a change of method and attitude. Science studies, now chastened and contrite, would no longer seek to strip facts of their authority, but to enrich and enhance them. What this meant in practice was never fully clear. But his diagnosis of problems resonated, even if his solutions did not. Latour’s exercise in public hand-wringing signaled a shift in mood. By 2016, with the first election of Donald Trump, the idea that skepticism of science was a right-wing position, not a left-wing one, had become a commonplace, discussed eagerly in The New York Times. For liberals, vaccine denial during the Covid era and Trump’s second-term attacks on the funding of scientific research, covered extensively in these pages, added a new urgency to the defense of science on both practical and principled grounds. There was little appetite for a sociology or philosophy of science that emphasized the messiness and missteps of the scientific process rather than its integrity and triumphs. The distinguished historian of science Peter Dear’s new book, The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science (Princeton University Press, 2025), which seeks to tell the story of 18th- and 19th-century science for a general public, may seem comfortably remote from these bitter contests. In its 16 short chapters, Dear draws swift, sure sketches of major discoveries from Newton to Einstein, ably guiding the reader through debates on stellar nebulae, animal taxonomy, atomic chemistry, evolution, and other flashpoints in the history of science. But though a work of history, Dear’s book must still negotiate our polarized present. In a blurb on its back cover, the historian of biology Lynn K. Nyhart alludes to the “present moment, when scientific knowledge is being swamped by misinformation and its institutions are under siege.” Dear himself, in his conclusion, refers to the “yard signs” and “bumper stickers” that proclaim “Science Is Real.” One antidote to both anti-science propaganda and to reductive slogans in science’s defense is a robust history and philosophy of science: exactly what Dear’s scholarship has long offered. But his new book illustrates how difficult such work has become. Dear, an emeritus professor of history at Cornell University, is best known as a creative and philosophically minded historian of the Scientific Revolution. His edited volume The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument (1991) analyzed the rhetoric of Galileo’s thought experiments to brilliant effect. Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (1995) was a major contribution to the analysis of scientific experiments in early modern Europe and beyond, while Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge in Transition, 1500-1700 (2001), now in its third edition, remains one of the best overviews of the profound epistemological upheavals of 16th- and 17th-century science. But Dear has also ventured into later periods. Nearly two decades ago, in The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (2006), he turned to the 18th and 19th centuries to sketch a history and theory of scientific knowledge. Aimed at a generalist audience, Dear’s simple prose belied serious philosophical ambitions. Science, Dear argued, has two aspects: “natural philosophy,” the quest to understand the true nature of the universe, and “instrumentality,” the applied skills and technologies that allow us to manipulate the world for human advantage. Both strands are ancient, but the innovation of the phenomenon we call “science” was to yoke them together. As Francis Bacon wrote, “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known, the effect cannot be produced,” an insight typically abridged to “knowledge is power.” Or, in Bertrand Russell’s characteristically blunt phrase, science has two functions, “1. to enable us to know things, and 2., to enable us to do things.” So far, so conventional. But Dear took issue with this familiar story in one respect. Bacon’s formula implied that theory and practice could be fused in a single method. In fact, Dear argued, the quest to understand nature and the desire to manipulate it were coupled only loosely. They could come together, but they could also pull apart. Focusing on natural philosophy, the “knowing” half of the scientific circle, he used a series of case studies from cosmology, taxonomy, chemistry, electromagnetism, and quantum theory to show how theories changed over time, in dialogue with practice, but never reducible to it. Take the case of matter, the basic substrate of the physical world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, scientists not only disagreed about what it was, but also about how well it could be known. In 1789, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier dismissed speculation about the atomic composition of chemicals as “discussions entirely of a metaphysical nature,” as he sought to orient chemistry away from philosophical abstraction and toward laboratory results. But in the 19th century, atoms returned with a vengeance in the atomic chemistry of John Dalton, who wanted to explain the underlying structure of nature. It was not just that Dalton and Lavoisier had a different set of experimental results, or even a different theory, Dear showed. What counted as an explanation had changed. In arguing that scientific theories depended on their intelligibility to human beings with complex arrays of beliefs and commitments, Dear was in sympathy with science studies. Key figures such as the sociologist Steven Shapin emphasized the importance of psychological mechanisms like trust in the formation and acceptance of scientific ideas. But in focusing on the scientific pursuit of knowledge, not its politics or economics, Dear resisted the more cynical perspective of some of his colleagues. The Intelligibility of Nature strikes a very different note than Shapin’s collection of a few years later, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People With Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (2010), to name just one example. Walking a very fine line, Dear depicted science as driven at once by complex social dynamics and by the intellectual power of real discoveries. It was a testament not only to his own acumen but also to the vitality of the field that he was able to do so. Nearly two decades later, The World as We Know It returns to the questions broached in The Intelligibility of Nature. Like Dear’s earlier study, it begins with the Newtonian cosmos and ends with debates between Einstein and Bohr on quantum physics. Beyond its terminal figures, many of the same characters appear in both studies, including the naturalists John Ray and the Comte de Buffon; the chemists Étienne François Geoffroy, Antoine Lavoisier, and John Dalton; as well as Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday, among others. Its subject is nearly identical: As in The Intelligibility of Nature, The World as We Know It considers natural philosophy as opposed to instrumentality, here defined as the “desire to create a picture of what the world is really like — the world as God knows it — rather than simply having instrumental or operational control over it.” The two books also overlap in insights — and sometimes even in language. The reader who has learned in The Intelligibility of Nature that Buffon’s method of classifying animals “reflected his belief in the importance of the senses and empiricism in learning about nature (a doctrine associated with Newton and the philosopher John Locke)” will experience a sense of déjà vu on reading, in The World as We Know It, that the classification “reflects Buffon’s commitment to the epistemological stance of Newton and his philosophical underlaborer John Locke, who stressed the role of the senses in creating natural knowledge.” Later in the passage, we read that, “because of its stress on understanding the ways of life of animals in their environments, Buffon’s approach could almost be labeled (anachronistically) as ‘ecological.’” And again, “an anachronistic way of putting it would be to say that Buffon recommends an ecological mode of understanding.” Likewise, in The Intelligibility of Nature we read of Dalton that he was initially drawn to meteorology, and that: He did a bit of experimental work on these things, especially having to do with the water-holding capacity of gases, but his real interest lay in understanding what, at an underlying natural-philosophical level, was really going on physically.” Whereas, in The World as We Know It: He did experimental work on these things, especially concerning the water-holding capacity of gases — although not at a very refined level quantitatively — but he was continually trying to develop a theoretical conception of what was happening physically. The final full chapter of each book closes on the same resigned note. Intelligibility: These days, most serious work on the natural philosophical underpinnings and implications of quantum mechanics is performed not by physicists but by philosophers of science. Among scientific practitioners themselves, Bohr’s attempt to use instrumentality as sufficient grounds for a respectable science has met with a high degree of success. And again, in The World as We Know It: Bohr’s and Einstein’s concerns are now questions that are mostly discussed by philosophers of science rather than by physicists themselves. The marginalization of these sorts of questions amounts to the demise of natural philosophy, at least in physics, in the 20th century. Quantum mechanics “works,” and that’s good enough for most scientists who encounter it. Examples could be multiplied. When handling the same subject matter, some echoes are inevitable. Scholars should not feel that because they have written “Isaac Newton died in 1727” in one book, in the next they must describe him as perishing, expiring, or meeting his maker. But the repetitions of language and arguments (not to mention six reproduced images) threaded throughout The World as We Know It are more extensive than that. They should have been caught by Princeton University Press or its reviewers, and revised. Because the two books have so much in common, it is easy to see where they diverge. The World as We Know It is a less theoretical work than its predecessor. The sociology of knowledge that organized The Intelligibility of Nature has been reduced in scale and folded into readings and examples. The taut interplay between history and theory, which gave the earlier study so much interest, is there, but it is subtle. In the earlier book, the case studies demonstrated theoretical claims about the character and development of science. In the later work, each narrative of discovery is an end in itself. Insights emerge from the history, but they do not control the organization of the study. With the theory muted, it can be hard to understand the logic uniting Dear’s sprawling history of more than two centuries of scientific knowledge. The 16 brisk chapters cover an enormous amount of material. But the closer the volume edges to comprehensiveness, the more obvious the missing elements become. A chapter on “Institutions and Pedagogy,” describing the birth of the research university, illustrates the problem. Inserted roughly halfway through the book, the unnumbered chapter is designed as an “entr’acte,” in acknowledgement that it does not fit the study’s organization around scientific discoveries. Yet as Dear is well aware, no general history of the development of modern science can bracket its 19th-century institutionalization and professionalization. It was the 19th-century university, after all, that gave us the “scientist,” a term coined by the Cambridge philosopher William Whewell. Dear’s history of scientific discoveries implies a wider social and institutional history, but it remains largely subterranean, only occasionally extruded under the pressure of the narrative. It must be said that the balance is not all on the side of the earlier study. There are some advantages to the more historical, less theoretical organization of The World as We Know It. Dear’s accounts of paradigm shifts are remarkably lucid, no small accomplishment given that they span fields and centuries. He makes excellent use of the wealth of new scholarship on Darwin and his influences, to which he has himself contributed. It is satisfying to see puzzle pieces from Buffon’s natural history, Georges Cuvier’s animal taxonomy, Thomas Robert Malthus’s demography, and Charles Lyell’s geology recombined seamlessly in the Darwinian jigsaw. Likewise, Dear’s discussion of stellar nebulae, divided between chapters two and 15, shows vividly how Newton, Kant, Herschel, and Hubble reimagined insights and observations as they sought to discover whether the diffuse light that filtered through early telescopes was a glowing, gaseous substance or discrete but distant stars. Yet despite such pleasures, the book remains a more modest work than The Intelligibility of Nature. Dear has clearly not changed his views about the history of science. But in the two decades that have elapsed, the discipline and the world around it have changed, making it harder to write a sociologically and philosophically ambitious history of science for the general reader. That is a shame, because in the age of Silicon Valley and biotechnology, both the reciprocity and the tensions Dear identified between the epistemological and instrumental ambitions of science are more evident than ever. In recent years, some of the most exciting new books on the history of science in early modernity have focused precisely on this pressure point. Important studies such as Pamela H. Smith’s From Lived Experience to the Written Word (2022), James Poskett’s Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science (2022), and Vera Keller’s The Interlopers: Early Stuart Projects and the Undisciplining of Knowledge (2023) all shed new light on how early modern science negotiated the relationship between its instrumental and epistemological ambitions, or in Russell’s phrase, knowing and doing. There is every opportunity for a philosophically informed approach to draw new insights from this wealth of material. Dear, unfortunately, has not done so in The World as We Know It. But for future scholars of the history of science, his body of work over nearly four decades may provide just the model. Julianne Werlin is an associate professor of English at Duke University. Thanks for reading The Chronicle Review! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe
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Ten bucks says you’ll love this community science project
Today marks the first day of Rut Watch 2026 With another season of Deer Spy in the books thanks to community scientists like you, biologists are now on a mission to pinpoint the peak of the white-tailed deer breeding season in Maine. Every observation of deer breeding behavior and sign helps define the timing of the rut, and this project uses the power of community science to collect deer data all fall long. Hunters, hikers, and wildlife watchers - Rut Watch pairs well with any outdoor adventure you have planned this season. It’s a perfect excuse to slow down and connect with nature as you look for clues. So get outside, rack up that deer data and submit rut reports from now through December 1. The online form is science made simple: Location Date and time Breeding behavior observed Submit a Rut Report What to watch for Active Breeding The most obvious breeding behavior to observe is a buck mounting a doe, but that is a rare sight as it only lasts a moment. You are more likely to witness a buck “tending” a doe, following closely, chasing, nuzzling, or pawing at her rump until she is receptive. Sparring After bucks shed their velvet, sparring helps sort out who is who in the dominance hierarchy. Early season matches are often less intense than later season matches between similar sized bucks. Most sparring is complete by the time breeding begins. Rubs Don’t just look for deer, pay attention to the trees. Rubs are marks made by bucks when they rub their antlers on trees, removing bark and leaving their scent calling card in the process. Scrapes Look to the forest floor for this sign of breeding season behavior. Scrapes consist of two parts - a licking branch, and a patch of cleared earth. Bucks break a low branch around head height, then paw at the leaves below to expose the dirt. Covered in scent, a scrape tells does and other bucks, “I’m here!” Learn More More information What’s next for deer community science: Northern Maine Wintering Deer Survey Other active community science projects: Fish Tag Reporting Maine Golden Eagle Study Maine Amphibian & Reptile Atlas Project Maine Deer Management: Maine’s Big Game Management Plan Game Species Conservation & Management Report The Benefits of Hunting: Supporting Wildlife, Conservation, and Community Subscribe Share Leave a comment
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How Washington Funded the Politicization of Science
Over the last half-decade, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects designed to influence academic policies, both in the sciences and other disciplines. The aim was to foster a progressive conception of social justice in these fields. In pursuit of this end, the foundation earmarked nearly a million dollars for a project titled “Creating Inclusive Scientific Societies through Policies and Practices,” over a million for a project on “Faculty Online Learning Communities for Gender Equity,” and over $2 million to foster “racial equity focused departmental change.” Through a public records request, I’ve obtained the proposals and progress reports for dozens of NSF grants designed to promote social justice. Although funding for these grants was eventually halted by the Trump administration, the projects illustrate an important facet of recent higher-education policy. Many of the university policies that promised “social transformation” didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were actively encouraged by outside funders—often by the federal government itself. Subscribe Accreditation—the peer-review process which enables universities to receive federal grants and student loans—has recently become a policy battleground, with accreditors wielding significant power over both universities and academic disciplines. In 2020, when Oregon Health and Science University’s medical school issued an extensive diversity action plan—which promised “consequences” for employees who failed to support “DEI, anti-racism and social justice”—it specifically pointed to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the medical-school accrediting body, to justify the overhaul. The NSF actively promoted DEI-focused accreditation policies. The proposal for a $1.2 million program on promoting “community engagement” in STEM, which I obtained through a records request, notes that the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology was exploring changes to its criteria “that would incorporate JEDI [justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion].” The proposal promised to “support broader JEDI efforts in the general criteria for engineering.” Another grant funded a conference designed to “identify and share best practices and strategies to integrate IDEA principles in accreditation criteria”—referring to an acronym that stands for “inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.” Scholarly societies have become another flashpoint in debates over higher education. Critics argue that many of these societies, which have the power to shape entire disciplines, have become increasingly politicized. Again, through its giving, the NSF played a role in promoting this politicization. In one million-dollar grant that received funding in 2024, a group of psychologists proposed a series of social-justice reforms to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. The proposal, which I obtained via a records request, asserts that “[r]edistributing resources (such as moving different people into leadership roles) is not enough” and that the society’s “governance structures do not yet reflect its stated values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Its solution: review and rework the society’s criteria for leadership development, academic awards, conferences, and publications. Adjusting review criteria informed by “intersectionality” designed to fight “epistemic exclusion” is an easy way to introduce de facto ideological litmus tests into the peer-review process. For many of the grants I obtained, such litmus tests seem to be the point. “Academic departments are racialized social systems that produce and sustain the byproducts of systemic racism,” a proposal for a $2.7 million project funded in 2024 asserts, promising to develop “departmentally-focused change efforts that cultivate values, assumptions, and behaviors that advance racial equity.” The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign’s million-dollar “I-ADVANCE” project, which effectively created a small DEI bureaucracy on campus, promised to Embed 28 ADVANCE faculty fellows in STEM departments” to amplify its equity goals. Another $1.2 million project promised to create “faculty online learning communities,” made up of scientists at universities around the country, that would eventually build department-level diversity action plans. “Ultimately,” the proposal asserts, perhaps more perceptively than its authors realized, “both organizational change and intersectionality frameworks deal with power.” Indeed, such grants confer a great deal of power to administrators and scholar-activists, who can even use the mere availability of funding as a tool to advance their causes. That history is worth remembering amid today’s debate over federal involvement in higher education: Washington has been shaping university priorities for years, including by financing efforts to instill progressive ideas about race, gender, and equity into academic institutions—and many of the policies those grants encouraged remain embedded within universities long after the federal money has stopped flowing. John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute. Share
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Good science requires much more than evidence
Empiricists believe that scientific theories are true only if they make correct empirical predictions: if we can't verify these predictions, then there is no reason to expect that they tell us anything about reality. However, Professor of Philosophy at King's College David Kyle Johnson argues that this is mistaken. In response to Bas van Fraassen, who has written on this subject for the IAI, he argues that we have many reasons for believing a theory to be true, such as it being parsimonious and having large scope — qualities which have been used throughout the history of science as criteria for judging theories. In 2024, Princeton philosopher Bas van Fraassen wrote a short article for IAI News entitled “Science Does not Describe Reality: The Limits and Benefits of Explanation.” At the time, I was working on two projects (a science book and a Great Course) that, when completed, would (among other things) defend science’s ability to describe reality. I wanted to write a response to van Fraassen, but the projects demanded too much of my attention. But now that those projects are complete, I am in a position to explain the objections to van Fraassen’s thesis. Summarizing van Fraassen’s argumentIn a nutshell, his argument is this: What scientists do is make predictions based on theories and then invite others to test to see whether those predictions are borne out. “If theory T is right, result R should happen in experimental condition C.” Many think that running an experiment that shows that R happens in condition C is proof that theory T is true (and should be believed). But, van Fraassen argues, that R happened in condition C is only a reason to think that R happens in condition C. That’s the only observable, or empirical, result we can actually see, so that is all that we are really justified in believing. (The underlying theory that made that prediction still may or may not be true.) That is why he calls those who accept his position “empiricists.”Before I explain what is wrong with this position, let me explain what it gets right. What van Fraassen Gets RightFirst, a theory correctly predicting the results of an experiment is not, strictly speaking, “proof” that the theory is correct. The basic line of reasoning is this:If the theory T is true, result R should happen. Result R did happen. Thus, theory T is true.In other words:“If T then R. R. Thus, T.”This is a deductively invalid, fallacious mode of reasoning, called “affirming the consequent.” Those premises do not guarantee that the conclusion follows. “If I am in Pennsylvania, then I am in the USA. I am in the USA. Thus, I am in Pennsylvania.” Clearly that argument doesn’t guarantee its conclusion; neither does the above argument.However, science is not a deductive method of reasoning; it is an inductive one. And inductive arguments merely try to raise the probability of their conclusion, not “prove” them for certain. Thus, the fact that an experimental result doesn’t prove a theory is true is irrelevant; it’s not supposed to. That is not what scientific reasoning is about.___If the hypothesis that something exists clearly provides the best explanation for what we can observe, then the belief that it exists is what is rational.___Second, it’s also true that a single experimental result doesn’t provide enough justification to believe that a theory is true. Scientists do not come to a consensus about whether a theory is true by looking at a single experiment; they look at all the evidence to determine where the preponderance of evidence points. The mere fact that I am in the USA raises the probability that I am in Pennsylvania, but not nearly enough to conclude that I am in Pennsylvania. However, if I am also regularly encountering people wearing Eagles and Phillies hats and seeing advertisements for Founding Father tours, I probably am. In the same way, a theory successfully predicting the outcome of one experiment is not enough to conclude that it is true; but if a theory makes a wide variety of predictions that are all vindicated by multiple experiments, performed by many different groups and people, all actively trying to prove the theory false (which is what good scientific experiments are designed to do)—that is a good reason to conclude that the theory is true. In other words, if you repeatedly try to prove something false but can’t, that is a very good indication that it isn’t. The problem of underdeterminationIn reply, those whom van Fraassen calls “empiricists” often point to the “problem of underdetermination.” For any given theory that makes successful predictions about what happens in experimental conditions, there are countless other possible theories that make exactly the same predictions—and since they do, the experimental evidence in question is just as much reason to accept any of those theories as it is to accept our original one. Thus, the argument goes, we have no way of knowing whether our original theory is true, or one of the other “predictively equivalent” theories is true. SUGGESTED VIEWING How Occam's Razor changed the world With Johnjoe McFadden As an example of underdetermination, philosophers often offer this example. The evidence of fossils seems to provide reason to conclude that the universe is quite old; ancient fossils are what the “ancient universe” hypothesis predicts. But it’s also possible that God created an ancient-looking universe 200 years ago, complete with a “fake” fossil record for us to find, to make it look old. The existence of fossils is what that theory predicts too. So, the argument goes, the fossil record can’t be used as evidence that the universe is ancient; the fossil record supports the “200-year-old ancient-looking universe” theory just as much. The problem of underdetermination points out that, for any theory with supporting evidence, we could invent another completely different theory that predicts exactly the same evidence, and thus undermine that evidence’s ability to support the original theory.But this “argument from underdetermination” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what scientific reasoning is and how it works. To explain, let me use another rather strange (but very real and commonly discussed) philosophical thought experiment called “The Grue Problem.” The “Grue” ProblemSuppose I want to know what color emeralds are, so I observe a few, see that they all appear green, and form the theory that “all emeralds are green.” I thus predict that the next 100 emeralds I find will also appear to be green. And let’s say that happens, and so I thus conclude that my theory that all emeralds are green is true. Now, one might rightly point out that I don’t know for sure that all emeralds are green—I have not seen them all. Maybe some I haven’t found yet are blue. Fair enough. After all, we used to think that all swans were white, until we found some black ones. But let’s say that I go on a quest and collect every emerald in the universe—and, for the sake of the argument, let’s say I can do this, and can even know that I have every one of them. So, I collect them all, look at them all, and verify that they all appear green. Can’t I now rightly conclude that all emeralds are green?Inspired by the problem of underdetermination, a friend might argue that I cannot.Sure, they all appear green now—but there could be another kind of color called “grue.” Something is grue if it is green up to a certain point in time, but then spontaneously turns blue. And there could be an infinite number of “shades” of grue. Something that is one shade of grue will turn blue at noon today, but something that is another shade of grue will turn blue at noon tomorrow, etc. So yes, the emeralds appear green now; and since they haven’t turned blue yet, they are not some “past” shade of grue. But they might be some “future” shade of grue (e.g., they may turn blue at noon tomorrow). And since all future shades of grue are consistent with “being green up to this point in time,” the evidence you have is completely consistent with the notion that all emeralds are some future shade of grue, rather than green. Indeed, that they would appear green until now is what the “some future shade of grue” hypothesis predicts. So, we have just as much reason to conclude that all emeralds are some shade of grue as we do to conclude that they are green.You’re probably thinking “It’s not equally possible that the emeralds are grue; they are obviously green.” You are right! But explaining why your instinctive reaction to my friend’s argument is correct will help inform why van Fraassen’s “empiricist” is wrong and science actually does describe reality.The main mistake my friend makes is in thinking that the “empirical evidence” (of all the emeralds appearing green) is (or even should be) all I am using to draw the conclusion that all emeralds are green. It is not. I am also considering known facts about how colors typically work; things don’t usually change color, and when they do, they don’t do so suddenly, without cause, and all at once. So, even though the simple evidence of the emeralds all appearing green up to this point is consistent with them being some future shade of grue—that is even what the grue hypothesis “predicts”—it is still exceedingly unlikely that they are. The hypothesis that they are green is much more likely. Understanding science refutes the problem of underdetermination The misunderstanding about science that the “empiricist” pointing to “the problem of underdetermination” makes is similar to the one that my friend made. Science is not just about considering experimental evidence; in fact, it’s not even just about considering empirical evidence. As Ernan McMullin and many other philosophers of science have pointed out, the inference that makes science is “inference to the best explanation” (sometimes called “abduction” or “retroduction” by McMullin). While, depending on the circumstances, scientists use many different kinds of reasoning, science as a whole is, simply put, the process of considering multiple competing explanations and comparing them to certain criteria—explanatory criteria (the kinds of things explanations must be and do, by definition, to be a good explanation)—to see which explanation is the best.And these criteria do not deal only with empirical results. Yes, successful predictions raise the probability of a hypothesis, but it’s also the case that the more new assumptions a theory makes, the less likely it is to be true; every new assumption presents an opportunity for the theory to be false. (The fewer assumptions a theory makes, the simpler or “more parsimonious” it is said to be.) Likewise, the more existing evidence a theory contradicts, the less likely it is, because in order for a theory to be true, every piece of evidence it contradicts has to be somehow faulty. (The fewer established theories a new theory contradicts, the more “conservative” it is said to be.) And, obviously, the more something explains, the better explanation it is. (This is called having “scope.”) If a theory raises unanswerable questions, it’s not expanding our understanding, and thus is not wide-scoping. Scientists consider all these things when deciding which theory to accept, because the theory that adheres best to these explanatory criteria is most likely to be true.___the mere fact that a theory’s predictive success is why it “sticks around” or “becomes accepted” in the scientific community is not a reason to be skeptical about its truth.___The reason the grue hypothesis is no good is because it invents an entirely new kind of color—not just a new shade, but an entirely different category of color (a different way colors work)—and thus is not parsimonious. It raises unanswerable questions about how and why emeralds would just spontaneously change from green to blue (and thus does not have wide scope). And it contradicts what is already well established about how color works (and thus is unconservative).The theories that the problem of underdetermination points to do the same thing. Yes, the theory that God created an “ancient-looking universe” (complete with an ancient-looking fossil record) two hundred years ago is also consistent with the empirical evidence (of a fossil record) that presently exists; but that theory is monumentally unparsimonious (it requires many extra assumptions about infinite entities) and not wide-scoping (it raises unanswerable questions about why God would do such a thing). So, I can rationally conclude that it is false.Indeed, the history of science includes many examples of theories that were rejected because they lacked parsimony and/or scope, even before their falsity (and the truth of their competing theory) was confirmed by observation. As I point out in my book, geocentrism was rejected by the scientific community because it lacked parsimony, almost 200 years before the observation of parallax confirmed that the Earth moves around the sun. And the continuum theory of matter was completely rejected by 1860, because it couldn’t explain chemical reactions or organize matter into a periodic table, even though the experiments that eventually confirmed atomic theory weren’t even proposed until the 1870s. Solving the best of a bad lot problemIn response, the “empiricists” are likely to object, this time pointing to the “best of a bad lot” problem. “We have no reason to conclude that an explanation that has been shown to be better than others is true because we have no guarantee that the true theory was among those that we were considering.” If you have a “lot” (a collection) of poor explanations, even the best one is not true.The responses to this problem, however, are numerous. Peter Lipton argues that the set of hypotheses that scientists consider are not just randomly selected and thus unlikely to contain a theory that is true; they use existing knowledge to home in on what is most likely to be true. A doctor trying to explain abdominal pain is not going to bother wondering whether demons are causing it; they are going to stick with things like appendicitis and kidney stones, because they are most likely. Further, despite its name, inference to the best explanation is not just the process of comparing hypotheses and accepting the best one; we also want one that is a good explanation in its own right. If it’s not, we are going to keep looking until we find an explanation that is. And while that process does not guarantee that we will come across the exact truth, it’s very likely that the theory that emerges as the best will be at least approximately true, and thus we will be justified in believing it. And lastly, as I point out in my book, although many theories not based in scientific evidence (like geocentrism and continuum theory) have been completely overturned, science almost always progresses by the refinement of scientifically established theories—not their replacement. (Although our sun is not the center of the universe, heliocentrism was our first step in understanding the Earth’s true place in the universe.) So even if a theory we accept today may not be completely right, accepting it is a step on the journey toward the complete truth. The example of atomic theoryNow, it’s worth pointing out that most empiricists are not skeptical of all scientific theories; they are only skeptical of the ones that hypothesize the existence of “unobservables.” It’s not like they think that round Earth, heliocentrism, and germ theory are just useful (but untrue) “instruments” for making predictions about how to most efficiently navigate the seas, predict planetary motion, and treat diseases. They admit that the Earth actually is round, that the planets revolve around the sun, and that germs exist and cause disease. These facts and entities can be observed; the theories that suggest they exist are true. It’s only when theories start hypothesizing the existence of unobservables—like electrons, or quantum fields—that can’t be observed directly, that we should start doubting the theories’ truth. And to be fair to van Fraassen, in this published work, he doesn’t really say that we should doubt the truth of such theories. Only that scientific reasoning does not rationally force us to accept them as true. Skepticism, or agnosticism, he argues, is warranted. SUGGESTED READING Science is based in metaphor By Andrew Reynolds But the history of atomic theory throws a monkey wrench into that argument. Atoms used to be unobservable; again, scientists first accepted the theory that they exist because it had such grandiose explanatory power. But then atoms were seen with electron microscopes. They thus moved into the category of the observable. But this didn’t substantially change anything about what scientists were justified in believing; it certainly didn’t change any “atomic skeptics’” minds. It just confirmed what everyone already knew! If the hypothesis that something exists clearly provides the best explanation for what we can observe, then the belief that it exists is what is rational. The fact that the thing itself is not technically observable does not make doubting its existence rational.What’s more, the atoms were seen with an electron microscope. But electrons are themselves unobservable. How can an electron microscope reveal an atom if electrons are not real? This leads us to what is famously known as Hilary Putnam’s “miracle argument.” It’s (not) a miraclePhilosopher Hilary Putnam’s miracle argument is somewhat famous. Basically, he argued that a scientific theory being able to repeatedly make successful predictions—even about unobservables—without being at least approximately true would require a “miracle.” In other words, it would be such an improbable occurrence that it could not rationally be believed—the better explanation for why scientific theories about unobservables make the right predictions is because the unobservable entities and structures they hypothesize exist.Van Fraassen has addressed this argument. Indeed, in his original article, where he references Alison Gopnik’s point about orgasms not being “necessary for procreation” even though the desire for orgasm “drives the creation of progeny,” he is pointing to his own argument about how organisms are not naturally selected by evolution to get true beliefs; to the extent that belief-forming processes are selected for, the ones that are selected are the ones that are useful for survival—not the ones that produce true beliefs. In the same way, van Fraassen argues, scientific theories are accepted, not because they are true, but because they aren’t falsified; they make successful predictions; that’s what makes them “stick around.” So, the fact that they make successful predictions (and thus became accepted) is not a reason to think they are true.This argument is similar to C. S. Lewis’s “argument from reason,” which he used to argue against evolution: “The truth of evolution undercuts our ability to know that it is true.” Lewis’ argument famously failed; Elizabeth Anscombe, by Lewis’s own admission, demolished Lewis in a debate on the topic, and I have explained elsewhere why modified versions of the argument fail as well. In short, it’s because it fails to recognize that a belief-forming process can make an organism more likely to survive because it reliably produces true beliefs. It is therefore not the case that beliefs generated by naturally selected belief-forming processes are automatically false or unjustified.In the same way, the reason a theory “sticks around” could be because it’s not falsified, because it “makes correct predictions.” But the reason it makes correct predictions is most likely because it is true. (In pointing this out, I am echoing the arguments of Musgrave, Lipton, Psillos, and Kitcher, who refuted van Fraassen’s argument and analogy long before his 2024 article.) It would be a huge coincidence that it could do so without being true. And that is the point of Putnam’s miracle argument. Thus, contrary to van Fraassen’s suggestion, the mere fact that a theory’s predictive success is why it “sticks around” or “becomes accepted” in the scientific community is not a reason to be skeptical about its truth. ConclusionLet me close by saying something about the fact that empiricists don’t doubt the truth of all scientific theories, just the ones that hypothesize unobservables. In today’s society, this theory is dangerous to espouse publicly. The nuance between being skeptical about all of science, and just the highly technical theories about unobservables, is guaranteed to be lost to the average reader. And there is so much unjustified skepticism and doubt about the findings of science and experts that a headline like “Science Does Not Describe Reality” could easily fuel the anti-science movement, worsen climate change denial and cause the next pandemic.This is why I believe it was important to still respond to van Fraassen’s article, a full two years after he wrote it. Not only, as I have argued, does it represent a philosophically inaccurate view of how scientific reasoning works and what scientific reasoning can do, but it is a dangerous view to boot. It should thus be rejected.
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Dems: Blakeman Should Not Get Matching Funds - Long Island Life & Politics
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We polled two must-watch House races. There are good signs for Democrats.
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Entertainment RX: Cancer treatment, concern for a gender-fluid grandchild
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What The PENN Entertainment Bears Got Right, And Where It Is Playing Out Again
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Australian businesses raise prices as card surcharge ban takes effect
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7 Takeaways From an Investigation Into Financial Aid at Texas Hospitals
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What You Can Learn From WEBTOON Entertainment's 39% Drop
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Victoria Monét’s ‘Frequency of Love’ aims to strike the optimal sonic vibration
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Hegseth Talks Tough as Republican Doubts About His Leadership Grow
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Eldridges look to build family-focused entertainment destination
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Looking at the Ugly Side of the Paramount-Skydance Merger...And How I’d Fix It
A Message from Our Sponsor Certified Fresh with 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, FX’s Adults is an ensemble comedy series about a group of twenty-somethings in New York leaning on each other to navigate love, work, friendship and family. Don’t sleep on “The Sitcom of the Moment” - Awards Buzz All Episodes now streaming on Hulu on Disney+. Watch The Teaser Trailer... (Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industr(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Before we dive in, I wanted to congratulate Broadcast Now for being the first to report that Netflix’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast has been cancelled. (I saw this in a write-up by Kasey Moore of Whats-On-Netflix.) More importantly, I wanted to note that, as of yesterday, none of the other trades had reported the news yet. I have half a guess that eventually one of them will report this. Anyways, it’s time to take a break from my deluge of streaming ratings reports to continue my analysis of the Paramount Skydance Warner Bros. Discovery (PSWbD) saga. As I noted last week, a lot of times when folks use the (sometimes cliched) “the good, the bad and the ugly” framing for an article, “the ugly” section is just more bad. Or very, very bad. In this case, yeah, I do think it’s ugly. In more than one way. Unfortunately, we’re only going to have time to tackle one of those ways today: the ugly pile of debt to finance this deal. (In a future article, I may cover the entire process for how it went down, which was very, very ugly.) Last issue, I explained why I liked this deal in a vacuum. Unfortunately, “vacuums” don’t exist outside of space. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - The Ugliness of the Paramount/Warner Bros. Merger More than one person sent me a note speculating that the big problem with Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros. Discovery is the “Warner Bros.” portion of the deal. In fact, that’s a take I read a lot about Warner Bros., ever since they caught Netflix’s, and then Paramount-Skydance’s, eye. In short, multiple companies (Time, AOL, AT&T, Discovery) have bought and then regretted buying Warner Bros. Since it’s nearing Halloween, you could almost say it’s like the folks think WB is cursed! It’s a haunted studio—like the town of Derry in movie studio form—and whoever takes possession of it will fall into misery! Yet...I just don’t like that story, because it doesn’t explain the “why” behind why those deals fell through. Especially when Warner Bros. has continued to succeed as a TV and film studio in the intervening two decades. Lord of the Rings? Harry Potter? Game of Thrones? Everything HBO? Considering it never fully owned a broadcast TV channel, this media company has done pretty well. So what went wrong? Well, in recent years, companies bought Warner Bros. instead of the other, smarter option. Explaining POCD (And Applying It to Mergers & Acquisitions) As I explained last issue, one of my favorite frameworks is the POCD tool for evaluating venture capital investments: People Opportunity Context Deal The bar to invest as a VC is high. (Or I might say “was” since cheap interest rates made life easier last decade.) You review a thousand prospectuses, get pitched by a hundred, and invest in the ten best, with the hopes that one of those ten would pay for the rest. That means every element of a deal needed to pay off: you needed the right people running the companies, who could capitalize on the right opportunity, in the context of an industry that was ripe for disruption. If you could then not overpay, you could make some money in a smart deal. The analogy isn’t perfect here, but close enough. For a merger or acquisition to work, you need the combined company (which is the opportunity) to make more than the price you need to pay (which is the deal). Note: the people and context still matter, but with M&A, it’s a little more straightforward: does the opportunity exceed the cost? And usually with Warner Bros., it hasn’t. If you want to find out the single biggest mistake made by the Warner Bros. suitors over the last few years (and my simple fix) become a paid subscriber. I’ll also touch on who I think Paramount-Skydance could (shockingly) consider buying next, TBD, and more. Sign up here.
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MAHA Gone Mild
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Miami-Dade County’s Small Business Certification Program Creates New Pathways to Opportunity
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City seeks housing developers for vacant North Corktown lots
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Debt service and the Pentagon. Private equity and the politics of the US housing market. The return of black lung disease & the Franco-Prussian War in color.
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email. RALPH BALSON. 1890—1964. Oil and enamel, signed. Source: Gavekal This going to hurt - the two 7s in the US: diesel and mortgage rates Source: Gavekal In the US housing market, costs are soaring and the role of corporate, private equity-backed buyers is high on the mid-term election agenda. HEY READERS, THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button. If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $60. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to. Subscribe It is striking how, since 2020, big banks have dropped out of the political spotlight in the US. For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Rates of the lung disease pneumoconiosis among working US coal miners have risen to levels not seen in nearly 40 years Source: Bloomberg Chinese Clean Technology Exports For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Ralph Balson (1939) Portrait of Grace Crowley Cole, G. O. & Haseman, S. M., (2023) “‘The Substance of Paint’: Class and Materiality in the Work of Ralph Balson”, Open Library of Humanities 9(2). Ralph Balson (1890–1964) was an English plumber and house painter who emigrated to Australia in 1913 and subsequently became a key member of Sydney’s artistic avant-garde. He is credited with having the first solo exhibition of purely abstract painting in Australia in 1941. Despite his role in developing Australian non-objective painting, Balson remained principally a house painter, working on his art practice at weekends. In 1955 he retired on a state pension and became a full-time artist. Balson’s artistic education and methods were critically shaped by his working-class background. He did not travel abroad until 1960 and was an avid auto-didact. His materials, palette, techniques and compositional strategies were likewise informed by his trade. Balson’s profession as a painter-decorator made him conspicuous within the predominantly middle-class Sydney art scene, though his painting partner Grace Crowley considered it an advantage in their pursuit of constructive painting. This paper explores the impact of Balson’s trade on his trajectory towards pure abstraction. While his art was at odds with the predominantly figurative mode of class-conscious art in Australian Modernism, we argue that it is embedded in the experience of class through its creative adaptation of labour into aesthetics. Source: OLH Svetlana Alexievich, The Art of Oral History No. 1 Paris Review Issue 257, Fall 2026 Interviewed by Elena Kostyuchenko INTERVIEWER How were you able to go to Chernobyl? Did you need special papers? ALEXIEVICH It was a time of chaos. They let me right into the zone. … More than anything, there was confusion. Adamovich [Ales Adamovich, the Soviet Belarusian writer], I remember, persuaded Gorbachev to send in the scientists, who showed up without even bringing their shaving kits. They were told that there had been an explosion at a nuclear power plant, but for some reason they thought that they’d be there for only a day or two. The first time I went was several months later, and people kept telling me about things they didn’t understand—how the fishermen couldn’t find worms, because they’d burrowed deep into the earth, how the milk wouldn’t curdle at the cheese factories. The honeybees wouldn’t come out of their hives. The evacuations started, I think, in the first month. The old women hid, they wouldn’t leave. I mentioned radiation to one of them and she said, “I’ve seen that radiation, all right! It’s yellow with green in it. I saw puddles of it in my garden, and I told the other women, and we ran and looked, and she had it in her garden, and the other one, too!” God, it was wild, the way the mind made sense of it. There was a story going around about Gorbachev telling the scientists to show him the radiation. “We can’t, it’s invisible.” “But I want to see it!” I also ran into the soldiers who’d been flown in on helicopters from Afghanistan. I asked them, “What are you doing here with your machine guns?” They said, “We’re collecting the radiation, that’s what.” So you had some of them running around with their guns, others out in the village washing off firewood or burying soil in the soil. These were the kinds of things that exploded our worldview. They made you realize that culture was just a chest filled with old manuscripts. There were no books in there that could help me. Our philosophers turned out to be useless when faced with the unprecedented. Derrida, Baudrillard—philosophy fell silent. What was happening? How would we live with it? That’s when I decided it simply needed to be witnessed. Which is what I did. INTERVIEWER I wanted to ask about how you talk to people. … ALEXIEVICH Yes, we sit and we talk—about what interests me and about life in general. About love, about everything in the world. That way, what comes out is three-dimensional. If you cut straight to the part you need, which is what journalists do, it won’t be interesting, and it won’t be the truth, either. Not the whole truth. INTERVIEWER Do people always open up when you ask questions, or can questions get in the way? ALEXIEVICH You have to ask questions, of course. Your job is to scour away the banality and return people to their true selves, to make them face what they rarely tap into. With every new person, you have to find a new way to do it. When you ask an interesting question or you share what happened to you, you help people really think about what they’re saying and not just repeat whatever they’ve picked up from the newspaper. But not everybody is capable of it, not everyone wants to put themselves through that. Either the chemistry starts to kick in or it doesn’t. A person might be wonderful, but you can tell that the conversation just isn’t going to happen. You can try to push it, but it will be a product of your own intellect, rather than of that mysterious connection. Life doesn’t come from the mind. Some people I can call two years after our last conversation, and they’ll say, “Oh, Svetochka! I think of you all the time,” and we’ll start talking again. With others, that won’t happen. That doesn’t mean they’re not extraordinary people, just that you can’t connect with them. They might have some insight, but you don’t have the right antenna to pick up their signal. Source: The Paris Review Colorized Franco-Prussian war … the ruins of Strasbourg with a French photographer and his mobile dark room. Ralph Balson (1961) Matter Painting If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: Subscribe
Esteban Ocon to leave Haas putting F1 future in doubt
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See photos of 2026 Community's Choice Awards at Four Winds Casino
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Ken Paxton, G.O.P. Nominee in Texas, Privately Said Trump’s Convention Hurt Him
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What is Alaska LNG and why does the project face doubts?
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Out on campus: My identity is not your political stance
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VCU Health tops off new outpatient heart center in Richmond
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Dixie National Rodeo announces 2027 entertainment lineup
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Gambit's Best of New Orleans 2026: Entertainment
Design by Dora Sison / Gambit Best Bounce Artist googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('ad-1492300'); }); 1. Big Freedia (Instagram: @bigfreedia)2. Ha Sizzle (Instagram: @hasizzlethevoice)3. Subtweet Shawn (Instagram: @subtweetshawn1) Trixie Minx Photo by Sophia Germer / The Times-Picayune Best Burlesque Performer1. Trixie Minx (Instagram: @trixienola)2. Bella Blue (Instagram: @bellablueforever)3. Miss Angie Z (Instagram: @missangiez) Best Casino1. Caesars New Orleans (8 Canal St., 800-427-7247; caesars.com/caesars-new-orleans)2. Treasure Chest Casino (4550 Williams Blvd., Kenner, 504-443-8000; treasurechest.com)3. Boomtown Casino (4132 Peters Road., Harvey, 504-366-7711; boomtownneworleans.com) Best Drag Performer1. Debbie with a D (Instagram: @debbiewithad)2. Katrina Waters (Instagram: @katrinawaters504)3. Laveau Contraire (Instagram: @laveaucontraire) Best Festival (that's still around)1. New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (nojazzfest.com)2. French Quarter Festival (frenchquarterfest.org)3. Hogs For The Cause (hogsfest.org) Best Food Festival1. New Orleans Fried Chicken Festival (friedchickenfestival.com)2. Oak Street Po-Boy Festival (poboyfest.com)3. New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (nojazzfest.com) Tipitina's Photo by Sophia Germer / The Times-Picayune Best Live Music Venue1. Tipitina’s (501 Napoleon Ave., 504-895-8477; tipitinas.com)2. The Broadside (600 N Broad St., 504-766-0871; broadsidenola.com)3. The Fillmore (6 Canal St., 504-881-1555; thefillmorenola.com) Best Live Music Club1. Maple Leaf Bar (8316 Oak St., 504-866-9359; mapleleafbar.com)2. Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro (626 Frenchmen St., 504-949-0696; snugjazz.com)3. Chickie Wah Wah (2828 Canal St., 504-541-2050; chickiewahwah.com)3. Blue Nile (532 Frenchmen St., 504-766-6193; bluenilelive.com) Best Local Blues Artist/Band1. Little Freddie King (littlefreddieking.com)2. Samantha Fish (samanthafish.com)3. Tab Benoit (tabbenoit.com) Best Local Brass Band1. Rebirth Brass Band (rebirthbrassband.com)2. Hot 8 Brass Band (hot8brassband.com)3. The Soul Rebels (thesoulrebels.com) Best Local DJ1. Paul Lakeway (Instagram: @paul_lakeway)2. DJ Soul Sister (Instagram: @djsoulsister)3. ANTWIGADEE! (Instagram: @antwigadee) Best Local Funk Band1. Dumpstaphunk (dumpstaphunk.com)2. Galactic (galacticfunk.com)3. Big Sam's Funky Nation (bigsamsfunkynation.com) Kaye the Beast Provided Photo by Catherine Debuys Best Local Hip-Hop Group/Artist1. Kaye the Beast (Instagram: @kayethebeast)2. La Reezy (Instagram: @lareezymusic)3. Pell (Instagram: @pellyeah) Best Local Movie Theater1. The Broad Theater (636 N. Broad St., 504-218-1008; thebroadtheater.com)2. The Prytania (5339 Prytania St., 504-891-2787; theprytania.com) googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('ad-1492297'); }); 3. The Prytania Theatre at Canal Place (333 Canal St., 3rd floor, 504-290-2658; theprytania.com) Best Local Music Artist/Band1. Robin Barnes & The Fiya Birds (robinbarnesmusic.com)2. Trombone Shorty (tromboneshorty.com)3. Sweet Crude (sweetcrudeband.com) Best Local Rock Band1. The Revivalists (therevivalists.com)2. Better Than Ezra (betterthanezra.com)3. Cowboy Mouth (cowboymouth.com) Best Wedding Band/ DJ1. The Mixed Nuts (themixednuts.com)2. Bucktown All-Stars (bucktownallstars.com)3. Warm Advice (warmadvice.com) Doreen Ketchens Provided photo Best Local Street Performer1. Doreen Ketchens (doreensjazz.org)2. Jourdan Blue (Instagram: @jourblue)3. Sariyah Idan (ariyahidan.com) Best Local Theater Company1. The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans (504-264-2580; twtheatrenola.com)2. Le Petit Theatre (616 St. Peter St., 504-522-2081; lepetittheatre.com)3. The NOLA Project (504-302-9117; nolaproject.com) Best Local Traditional Jazz Group/Artist1. Preservation Hall Jazz Band (preservationhalljazzband.com)2. Kermit Ruffins (@ruffinsbbq)3. Trombone Shorty (tromboneshorty.com) Best Marching Band1. St. Augustine High School Marching 100 (Instagram: @staugmarching100)2. Edna Karr High School Marching Band (Instagram: @theofficialkarrband)3. The Roots of Music Marching Crusaders (therootsofmusic.org) Best Mardi Gras Parade1. Muses (kreweofmuses.org)2. Iris (kreweofiris.org)3. Endymion (endymion.org) 610 Stompers Photo by Chris Granger / The Times-Picayune Best Mardi Gras Dance Krewe1. 610 Stompers (610stompers.com)2. Amelia EarHawts (aecabinkrewe.com)3. The Jamettes (Instagram: @thejametteskrewe) Best Place to See Burlesque/Drag1. The AllWays Lounge & Cabaret (2240 St. Claude Ave., 504-218-5778; theallwayslounge.net)2. The Original Nite Cap (1300 St. Bernard Ave., 2nd floor, 504-224-2854; Instagram: @originalnitecap)3. The Country Club (634 Louisa St., 504-945-0742; thecountryclubneworleans.com) Best Place to See Comedy1. Sports Drink (1042 Toledano St.; sportsdrink.org)2. The Howlin' Wolf (907 S. Peters St., 504-529-5844; thehowlinwolf.com)3. Big Couch New Orleans (1045 Desire St.; bigcouchnola.com) Best Local Comedian1. Ryan Rogers (ryanrogerscomedy.com)2. Mark Normand (marknormandcomedy.com)3. Cyrus Cooper (Instagram: @cyrusjcooper) Best Strip Club1. The Penthouse Club (727 Iberville St., 504-524-4354; penthouseclubneworleans.com)2. Rick’s Cabaret (315 Bourbon St., 504-524-4222; rickscabaretneworleans.com)3. Larry Flynt's Hustler Club (225 Bourbon St., 504-524-0010; neworleanshustlerclub.com) Best Performing Arts Center1. Jefferson Performing Arts Center (6400 Airline Dr., 504-731-4700; jeffersonpac.com)2. Saenger Theatre (1111 Canal St., 504-525-1052; saengertheatreneworleans.com)3. Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts (1419 Basin St., 504-525-1052; mahaliajacksontheater.com) .donate-gambit-article-module-container { text-align: center; padding: 10px; /* background-color: #24da6d; */ background-color: rgb(153, 0, 0); margin-bottom: 20px; } .donate-gambit-article-module-title { font-weight: bold; color: #fff; } .donate-gambit-article-module-copy { color: #fff !important; font-size: 16px; } .donate-gambit-article-module-button { background-color: black; width: 50%; border-color: black; font-size: 16px; } .donate-gambit-article-module-button:hover { background-color: black; } @media only screen and (max-width: 600px) { .donate-gambit-article-module-button { font-size: 14px; width: 100%; } .donate-gambit-article-module-copy { font-size: 14px; } } BECOME A GAMBIT MEMBER AND JOIN OUR KREWE TODAY For more than 40 years, Gambit has covered New Orleans, for New Orleans. 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