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Executive Summary: A Patients’ Bill of Rights To Lower Health Care Costs
CAP’s plan would limit unjustified premium increases; reduce deductibles by reining in outlier hospital prices; and replace prior authorization with independent, evidence-based clinical review to lower health care costs and increase access to timely care.
Mullin pledges progress on disaster relief during his first official trip
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin toured North Carolina areas devastated by Hurricane Helene in 2024.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Sporting Life
The way Jackson carried himself in the sports world offers lessons progressives would do well to remember and carry forward.
Immunic COO highlights the importance of science-led innovation to mark World Health Day
Immunic Inc (NASDAQ:IMUX, FRA:10VA) chief operating officer Jason Tardio talked with Proactive's Stephen Gunnion about the importance of science-led innovation in tackling neurological diseases, particularly multiple sclerosis, on World Health Day 2026. Tardio highlighted that the biotech industry is fundamentally grounded in scientific research and data, noting that “everything we do is rooted in science.” He explained that Immunic is focused on developing innovative therapies designed to improve patient outcomes and address significant unmet medical needs. The discussion centred on multiple sclerosis (MS), a complex neurological disease that continues to present challenges despite decades of progress. Tardio pointed out that while advancements have been made, “the disease is not solved for,” with many patients still experiencing disability progression and requiring safer, more tolerable treatments. He emphasised the urgent need for innovation, particularly in progressive forms of MS where treatment options remain extremely limited. Immunic’s lead asset, vidofludimus calcium, is being developed as a novel approach aimed at addressing the full spectrum of the disease. Tardio also reinforced the broader mission of the healthcare and biotech sectors, stating that the ultimate goal is to help individuals “live a better quality of life” and “a healthier life longer.” Watch the full interview to learn more about Immunic’s approach to advancing MS treatment through science. For more videos like this, visit Proactive's YouTube channel, like this video, subscribe to the channel, and enable notifications so you never miss an update. #Immunic #MultipleSclerosis #BiotechInnovation #Healthcare #MSResearch #DrugDevelopment #ClinicalTrials #Neurology #WorldHealthDay #ScienceDriven #VidofludimusCalcium #PharmaNews #BiotechNews
Penguins provide Blake Lizotte injury update ahead of playoffs
The Penguins got some seemingly positive updates on a key penalty killer just before the end of the regular season. The Sportsnet Pittsburgh broadcast shared footage this weekend of Blake Lizotte, who has been sidelined since March 14 with an upper-body injury, skating and taking shots ahead of Sunday morning practice. “He’s continuing to progress,” […]
MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
Source: NBER With all the other terrible news right now, you may not have noticed that Donald Trump is in the process of killing American science. OK, that’s an exaggeration — but not that much of an exaggeration. The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal calls for a gigantic increase in military spending combined with severe cuts to social programs. But as the chart above shows, it also calls for debilitating reductions in research funding. Furthermore, Trump appointees have already been strangling science by sharply reducing the rate at which research grants are approved. Here, for example, is the number of new grants approved by the National Science Foundation: Source: Nature Large numbers of existing grants have also been frozen or terminated, especially in the study of infectious diseases. Add to this a sharp drop in visas issued to foreign students, who often play a direct role in research and who help support academic departments that do research: Put all of this together, and much U.S. scientific research is set to come to a screeching halt — not a few years from now, but over the course of the next year or two. This new assault on U.S. science is taking place at a time when the role of American science in the world has already been greatly eroded. The chart below, based on research recently reported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, measures national strength in science by the share of publications in highly ranked journals. In the 1990s the United States had more such publications than the rest of the world combined. Since then we’ve dropped into third place — well behind China and slightly below the European Union. And this was before the Trump administration’s attack on science had time to take its full effect. Source Some erosion in U.S. scientific preeminence was inevitable given China’s growing sophistication and wealth. But we’ve also fallen behind Europe, even though everyone says that Europe is lagging economically and technologically. Claims about Europe’s underperformance are, in fact, dubious if one looks hard at the data. But it’s still striking to see America lagging. What’s going on? There are presumably multiple factors behind America’s scientific lag. But even before Trump II the growing hostility of the U.S. right to science surely had some negative effect. And since the rise of MAGA G.O.P. attitudes toward science in general have become overwhelmingly hostile. This is true even for the Republican rank and file: And while I haven’t been able to find good survey data, it’s obvious that the anti-science turn has been even more pronounced — and began earlier — among the Republican political elite. Chris Mooney published The Republican War on Science in 2005, and even then was describing a longstanding trend. Why have Republicans turned so anti-science? Part of the answer is that they believe that scientists don’t support them. And they’re right! A study of who scientists give money to shows that only a small percentage gave money to Republicans even 20 years ago, and that almost none of them donate to Republicans now: Social scientists have always been strongly pro-Democratic, while there used to be a significant number of physical, “hard” scientists supporting the GOP. But these days physicists are almost as uniformly Democratic, or at least non-Republican, as sociologists. Why are there almost no Republican scientists? It’s not a mystery. GOP political orthodoxy includes positions that are at odds with the scientific consensus on multiple issues, ranging from the validity of the theory of evolution, to the reality of climate change, to the efficacy and safety of vaccines. In each case the scientific consensus is solidly grounded in evidence. But even before the rise of MAGA the U.S. right was increasingly hostile to evidence-based policymaking — especially, of course, where the evidence is unfavorable to fossil fuel interests or quack medicine, both financial mainstays of right-wing politics. So scientists don’t support Republicans, and the feeling is mutual. Today’s Republican Party doesn’t like science or scientists. It doesn’t like having its preconceived views challenged by appeals to evidence. It knows that very few scientists are on its side electorally. In general, it sees scientific research as a threat to its grasp on political power. Add in MAGA’s combination of rabid anti-intellectualism and allergy to any hint of criticism, and one has the makings of a drastic anti-science turn in policy. “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto. And as I said, we aren’t talking about something that will happen over the course of multiple years: The U.S. scientific enterprise is threatened with severe damage, even collapse, over just the next year. There are many reasons to find this prospect horrifying: Think of all the beneficial advances, affecting almost every part of life, that won’t happen because U.S. science — still crucial to the world — has been eviscerated. But think, also, of America’s international standing. Can a nation that has forfeited its role as a leader, or even a contender, in global science, still be a Great Power? No. MUSICAL CODA
Construction on Rockrose Sports Complex ‘ahead of schedule’
Over six months since the initial groundbreaking of Kids Inc.’s Rockrose Sports Complex, progress continues to be made on the project.
US sexual health report card: High pleasure, low testing, stark gender disparities
A new sexual health survey reveals a mix of progress and persistent gaps. Overall, many Americans report positive experiences—interest in having sex, sexual pleasure, and good communication with partners—yet ...
Standing with Science in a Post-Truth World
Scientific progress against emerging threats will matter only if societies can defend trust in evidence from the distortions of the post-truth age
What impact is the science of reading having so far in Ohio classrooms and on college campuses?
The science of reading is being taught in classrooms across Ohio, but the state's education department stresses it will likely take time to track students' progress.
On plant health and embracing new plant-breeding techniques in South Africa
The major challenge currently confronting South Africa’s agriculture is the spread of foot-and-mouth disease. For many farmers across the country, the most urgent tasks are both securing sufficient vaccines and rolling them out quickly in the coming months, particularly as the beef and dairy industries continue to suffer big losses. There is also pressure on sheep, goats, and other livestock to prevent the disease from spreading. As efforts to get the country through this monumental challenge continue, I believe it is important to sharpen our focus on the broader task at hand: strengthening biosecurity. This covers both animal and plant health. In recent years, we haven’t focused much on plant health, except a few times, such as when we had a goss’s wilt scare in the maize industry, a few cases of citrus black spot, or cases of sclerotinia in sunflower seeds. But the fact that South Africa managed to control the outbreaks of these particular diseases when they occurred a few years ago was due to organized agricultural and government scientific capabilities, and, most importantly, the availability of crop protection or agrochemicals necessary to address some of them. Therefore, as the animal health division in the Department of Agriculture focuses on the pressing challenge of the day, the foot-and-mouth disease, there is an opportunity for the plant health division to assess if they have all the requirements to tackle any outbreak that may occur on fruits, vegetables or crops in future. The challenge with crop diseases is that they can spread quickly and cause much more rapid damage in the field than we typically see with livestock. Therefore, speed is everything in ensuring the appropriate controls are available. I raise this as an important area, particularly given the drastic climate variation we observe across the country. The production conditions in some areas have changed noticeably over time, which may introduce new risks. The other essential part is ensuring that South Africa has access to the best crop protection technology available in the market. Many technology developers worldwide have operations in South Africa. Therefore, the Department of Agriculture, along with the Agricultural Research Council, must continuously interact with technology developers to assess the various crop protection technologies they are releasing globally and determine their suitability and need in South Africa. This will require a proactive approach from the government, unlike the current approach, in which technology developers typically approach regulators with new technologies. The government, recognising the food security risks, must take a proactive approach to ensure that South African farmers have access to the latest crop protection technologies, thereby safeguarding the country’s food security. Beyond crop protection, we must never forget that South Africa’s agriculture is key to ensuring that the country is the most food-secure country at the national level in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa is also the only African country in the top-40 global agricultural exporters, having more than doubled since 1994 on the back of the adoption of high-yielding seed cultivars. South Africa has been the only African country to adopt a bold approach to embracing science and adopting genetically engineered seeds for grains and oilseeds in the early 2000s. Since then, we have seen crop yields improve noticeably, contributing to the gains we mentioned above. But ensuring that South Africa improves further is not a given. The key lies in South African regulators’ attitudes towards new technologies. We have to maintain a progressive approach and not give in to the politics of non-food and non-scientific voices that shout on the sidelines. Food security is national security, and the government must ensure we progress, leaning on science. Therefore, the registration of high-yielding new genomic techniques is required. South Africa cannot afford to fall behind the EU, the USA, South America, and many of its competitors in global agriculture. The Department of Agriculture’s crop science division must adopt a progress-and-science-embracing approach for the good of the country. Thanks for reading AgriView! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe Share
WHO commends Indonesia’s leadership in One Health action to reduce risks from priority zoonotic diseases
On World Health Day, the World Health Organization (WHO) highlights Indonesia’s progress in reducing health risks from zoonotic diseases through a strengthened One Health approach. One Health recognizes that the health of people, animals and the environment are closely connected and must be addressed together. Led by the Government of Indonesia and supported by WHO and partners, the country has expanded joint prevention, surveillance and response efforts across sectors.
FULL SHOW: Inside INdiana Business 4/5/26
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State rankings: How are the Durango High spring sports doing?
April is here, and that means it’s time to look at the progress of the Durango High School spring sports teams. Demons sports squads have been practicing for over a month and have been competing in ga...
Times Opinion: Big money in politics makes progress in Tennessee impossible
Take a look at governmental policy and the public's broad position on any given issue, and you'll see a glaring disconnect.
Album Review: 6WA by BigXthaPlug & 600 Entertainment
BigXthaPlug spent eight months in Nashville making a country-rap album that debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200, put “All the Way” with Bailey Zimmerman at No. 4 on the Hot 100, got him a Rolling Stone cover, and filled arenas with Jelly Roll. And then he came back to Dallas, rounded up four of his signees, and made a gangsta-rap record with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton on the cover. 6WA is the second group release from 600 Entertainment, named after the 600 block of Meadowridge Street in Ferris, Texas, where BigX and his people grew up. The whole thing is loaded with West Coast samples. From N.W.A.’s “8Ball,” Eazy-E’s “Real Muthaphuckkin G’s” and “Boyz-N-The-Hood,” Ice-T’s “6 in the Mornin’,” Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” and more. BigX is staking his name on the lineup he built—Rosama, MurdaGang PB, Yung Hood, KevanGotBandz, KaineMusic—and claiming a lineage from 1,400 miles away while insisting Dallas is its own thing. A million dollars in cash, split and handed straight to his mother. That’s the first place BigX goes on “From the Bottom.” He’d probably still be in the streets if he didn’t have his son and daughter. He only started rapping to make life better for Carter. Couldn’t start his car back then, now people get starstruck at Starbucks, and he throws the whole field away in one sentence: “How you think we competin’? You on the same bag, I just made me some millions off country.” Goyard bags off a Nashville payday, and he wants you to know exactly how far he’s come from everybody else. “Safe to Say” does something similar but looser. It’s a straight Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day” flip, and BigX nails it. Wakes up, checks both phones, nobody’s locked up, kid accounts look good. Gets pulled over, only catches a warning. Pulls up on the squad to liquor, ladies, and haze. Rosama takes the second verse and matches him. Wakes up to his girl cleaning his cuticles, twins playing peekaboo, pays off his car, calls a cousin, sees the opps and they don’t trip. Lawyer calls, he beat his case. Rosama is the strongest voice in the 600 camp after BigX, and “Life of a Gangster” is why. Third person, riding low, blacked-out windows, snub-nose revolver. A character who chose sticking people up over selling dope. “Quick eraser like a number-two pencil.” He never breaks character, and his delivery drops lower and slower than anything he does on the group cuts, like he’s telling you something at a cookout that he probably shouldn’t. Then on “Long Live Fre$h” he’s a completely different rapper. “Short-bus diamonds, these bitches retarded,” wide-body Durango he can’t even park. That kind of range matters on a group record. MurdaGang PB’s best verse is on the title track. Feds at his door at 6 AM, cameras busted, flushing dope, ram truck putting everybody on the floor. Yung Hood on “The Hottest” just lays out four reasons to keep hustling. Who wants to be broke, women cost money, you need bail, and home has to be straight. It’s funnier and more honest than most rappers get when they’re trying to explain why they sell drugs. KevanGotBandz on “Ain’t Never Slowin’ Down” talks about his father getting caught on the dope while he’s sitting on $300K somewhere in the hills, which is a specific kind of guilt that doesn’t usually make it onto crew tapes. KaineMusic, the newest signee, takes the back half of “Who Dunnit” and introduces herself in third person—“Took flight just to show these hoes how to perform”—but it’s too short to know if she can hold a full song. The flex tracks fill the middle of the LP and mostly run together. “I Go” is Rosama and PB trading brands, guns, and food punchlines. Rosama’s “anemic, my iron tucked low in this shirt” is a slick gun bar, PB fires back with “.223 with a clip ‘bout as big as a toddler” and “I go Burger King, stay with that whopper.” Quick, funny sometimes, but it’s all shopping lists. “Dopeman” is a chant. “6ixer Party” brings Snoop Dogg, who does exactly what you’d expect Snoop Dogg to do. BigX contributes the night’s wildest overshare: “She say she brought a friend too, well, I’m tryna put sausage on her dental.” These songs move fast and don’t overstay, but three or four of them could trade verses and nobody would catch it. Midway through, The D.O.C. shows up for a spoken-word interlude. Tracy Curry. West Dallas native, former N.W.A affiliate, co-writer on a lot of the records getting sampled on this very album. He thanks BigX for the tribute and then gets direct: “This your time, this DFW time. You need to do it like we do it down here.” Leave bread crumbs so everybody behind you can eat. Keep God in your life. It’s fatherly and generous, and it does raise the question of whether 6WA follows that advice. The album borrows heavy. The cover art, the Eazy-E samples, “Amerikkka’s Most Wanted” opening with a direct “Boyz-N-The-Hood” lift, Yung Hood rapping “Flag on my left side, Crip until I die.” But the stuff that actually stays with you is Dallas. BigX talking about Pleasant Grove, Rosama calling himself a country boy, PB recounting a raid that could’ve been last Tuesday. The record smells most like itself when it smells like Ferris, Texas, and least like Compton. BigX on “The Hottest” says his father was the first person he knew who had chickens. Not the way rappers usually wave at the drug trade. He means his actual father, his actual family. On “600 Degrees,” Rosama compares his chopper’s stutter to a speech disorder, PB claims he still has the block on his back even after leaving the city. BigX closes that one saying he used to spin and smack, and now the plaques are platinum. Thirty-two minutes was right for this. Nobody overstays, Tony Coles and Rance and Charley Cooks keep the production punchy, and BigX gives his signees real room instead of crowding every song. 6WA doesn’t reinvent anything. Five rappers, good beats, short clock. Most of what they say you’ve heard before. Some of it—the million to his mother, the cuticles and peekaboo, the four reasons to hustle—you won’t forget. Solid (★★★½☆) Favorite Track(s): “Safe to Say,” “From the Bottom,” “The Hottest” Subscribe
SF Supervisor Jackie Fielder Steps Back for Mental Health
Jackie Fielder, one of the most progressive members on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, is taking a medical leave for a mental health condition.
How The PENN Entertainment (PENN) Turnaround Story Is Shifting With New Targets And ESPN Progress
PENN Entertainment's fair value estimate has shifted from US$18.44 to US$19.11 per share, putting it closer to a cluster of recent Street targets in the mid to high teens and low US$20s. This revision aligns with analyst commentary that combines optimism around the interactive segment and free cash flow with lingering doubts about management credibility and the turnaround story. Read on to see how to track these changing targets and keep up with the evolving narrative around PENN. Analyst...
Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Having written a lot of model release blog posts, there’s something much harder about reviewing open models when they drop relative to closed models, especially in 2026. In recent years, there were so few open models, so when Llama 3 was released most people were still doing research on Llama 2 and super happy to get an update. When Qwen 3 was released, the Llama 4 fiasco had just gone down, and a whole research community was emerging to study RL on Qwen 2.5 — it was a no brainer to upgrade. Today, when an open model releases, it’s competing with Qwen 3.5, Kimi K2.5, GLM 5, MiniMax M2.5, GPT-OSS, Arcee Large, Nemotron 3, Olmo 3, and others. The space is populated, but still feels full of hidden opportunity. The potential of open models feels like a dark matter, a potential we know is huge, but few clear recipes and examples for how to unlock it are out there. Agentic AI, OpenClaw, and everything brewing in that space is going to spur mass experimentation in open models to complement the likes of Claude and Codex, not replace them. Especially with open models, the benchmarks at release are an extremely incomplete story. In some ways this is exciting, as new open models have a much higher variance and ability to surprise, but it also points at some structural reasons that make building businesses and great AI experiences around open models harder than the closed alternatives. When a new Claude Opus or GPT drops, spending a few hours with them in my agentic workflows is genuinely a good vibe test. For open models, putting them through this test is a category error. Something else to be said about open models in the era of agents is that they get out of the debate of integration, harnesses, and tools and let us see close to the ground on what exactly is the ability of just a model. Of course, we can’t test some things like search abilities without some tool, but being able to measure exactly the pace of progress of the model alone is a welcome simplification to a systematically opaque AI space. Share The list of factors I’d use to assess a new open-weight model I’m considering investing in includes: Model performance (and size) — how this model performs on benchmarks I care about and how it compares to other models of a similar size. Country of origin — some businesses care deeply about provenance, and if a model was built in China or not. Model license — if a model needs legal approval for use, uptake will be slower at mid-sized and large companies. Tooling at release — many models release with half-broken, or at least substantially slower, implementations in popular software like vLLM, Transformers, SGLANG, etc due to pushing the envelope of architectures or tools. Model fine-tunability — how easy or hard it is to modify the given model to your use-case when you actually try and use it. The core problem is that some of these are immediately available at release, e.g. general performance, license, origin, etc. but others such as tooling take day(s) to week(s) to stabilize, and others are open research questions — with no group systematically monitoring fine-tunability. In the early era of open models, the days of Llama 2 or 3 and Qwen pre v3.5, the architectures were fairly simple and the models tended to work out of the box. Some of this was due to the extremely hard work of the Llama, Qwen, Mistral, etc. developer teams. Some is due to the new models being genuinely harder to work with. When it comes to something like Qwen 3.5 or Nemotron 3, with hybrid models (either gated delta net or mamba layers), the tooling is very rough at release. Things you would expect to “just work” often don’t. I’ve been following this area closely since we released Olmo Hybrid with a similar architecture, and Qwen 3.5 is just starting to work well in the various open-source tools that need to all play nice together for RL research. That’s 1.5 months after the release date! This is just to start really investing more into understanding the behavior of the models. Of course, others started working on these models sooner by investing more engineering resources or relying on partially closed software. The fully open and distributed ecosystem takes a long time to get going on some new models. All of this is lead-in for the most important question for open models — how easy is it to adapt to specific use-cases? This is a different problem for different model sizes. Large MoE open-weight models may be used by entities like Cursor who need complex capabilities in their domain, e.g. Composer 2 trained on Kimi K2.5. Other applications can be built on much smaller models, such as Chroma’s Context-1 model for agentic search, built on GPT-OSS 20B. The question of “which models are fine-tunable” is largely background knowledge known by engineers across the industry. There should be a thriving research area here to support the open ecosystem model. The first step is to understand characteristics of different base and post-trained models to understand what they look like. The second step is to tune pretraining recipes for open models so they’re more flexible. Interconnects AI is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe For The ATOM Project and other Interconnects endeavors, we’ve put in substantial effort to measuring adoption trends in the open ecosystem. Everything takes a long time to unfold after a model is first publicly available — and adaptability is why. What we know for sure now, when Qwen has been going from strength to strength with its releases, is that technical staff across the industry has gotten comfortable working with Qwen models. Countless research methods and datasets were made to work with Qwen. It’ll take patience for any other model family to get to this point — a patience I’m not sure many open model builders have. This takes us to Gemma 4, Google’s latest open models. Gemma 3 was released more than a year ago, in March of 2025, and is a bit underrated. Gemma 4 comes in 4 sizes for now, with a bigger, MoE model of over 100B total parameters rumored but not released yet. The models we have today come in sizes of ~5B dense, 8B dense, 26B total 4B active MoE, and 31B dense. I’m most excited that they’re finally adopting a standard Apache 2.0 open source license. This’ll massively boost adoption. The standard of better licenses for strong open-weight LLMs was set by mostly Chinese open model labs in the last 1-2 years, and now U.S. companies are following suit. I will personally be so happy if the horrible Llama licenses and Gemma terms of service were an ~18-month transient dynamic of the industry being nervous about releasing strong open models. The Gemma 4 scores look very solid, the small models have incredible benchmark scores (especially in general domains like LMArena) and the 31B model rivals the recent Qwen 3.5 27B, which is the leading member of that class. The ~30B size range is an important one, as it’s accessible both to researchers and to enterprises looking to deploy the model in real use-cases. Where the 7B model scale is the default for tinkering and research, a 30B model is the default for seeing if an open model can unlock substantial value in your specific workflow — a good mix of intelligence, low price, tractability for downstream training, etc. This takes us back to the above adoption criteria I mentioned for open models and the bigger question — do I think Gemma 4 will be an overwhelming success? Previous Gemma models have been plagued by tooling issues and poorer performance when being finetuned. Gemma 4’s success is going to be entirely determined by ease of use, to a point where a 5-10% swing on benchmarks wouldn’t matter at all. It’s strong enough, small enough, with the right license, and from the U.S., so many companies are going to slot it in. I’m cautiously optimistic that Gemma 4 is going to work better here. Winds are shifting for open models built in America. We saw GPT-OSS go through a bumpy launch to become an overwhelming success. There’s a collective energy around the likes of Reflection, Arcee, Nemotron, Gemma, Olmo, and peers that show substantial demand for building new stacks around open models. There’s capital to be spent on AI stacks across the economy by those who want more ownership of everything, including the model. After launching The ATOM Project 240 days ago, the conversation is shifting into the next stage. Summer of 2025 was a crisis moment where the U.S. AI scene realized it can’t wait and figure out open models after building AGI. The two markets will capture different areas and proceed in parallel. Now that more companies in the U.S. are releasing strong models, we need to improve the ecosystem so that these models are easy to use, understand, and build value around. It’s the hard work to build another inflection point in these adoption plots I’ve been updating consistently, but that’s the work to be done. Join me in it. More data coming soon! Here’s a sneak peek:
Rady Children’s Health in Orange County Receives Patient Safety Award
The honor reflects the organization's commitment to driving industry-wide progress in safety and care quality.
We all need to become better science storytellers. Here’s why and how.
Last week, in a lovely New Haven bar, six people gathered in front of a crowd to tell stories that were somehow related to science and public health. It was magical. One person talked about learning how social determinants of health helped them forgive their mother’s alcoholism. Another shared what it’s been like navigating a dementia diagnosis. Another described their last dinner with their mother before they left Nigeria to come to the U.S. and how that moment, plus the diagnosis that followed, shapes their career goals today. As the Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at Your Local Epidemiologist, I was ecstatic to bring this event, “Science and Storytelling,” to the community surrounding the Yale School of Public Health. Stories are not the default way most people communicate about science and public health. In fact, we are taught to take all the emotion out of data, but that makes it pretty darn boring to everyone else. And if people can’t see themselves in it, feel themselves in it, or influence it, how can we ask them to support it? Why do stories stick? How can we all—from community members to public health scientists—do better? And what are some examples?
How the Chattanooga INCubator became a powerhouse for small business growth and innovation
In 2025, the Chattanooga Chamber's INCubator program solidified its role as one of the Chattanooga region's most powerful engines for small business growth, innovation, and economic resilience. As a flagship program of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce and manager of the 127,000-square-foot Hamilton County Business Development Center, the INCubator exists for one clear purpose: to help entrepreneurs scale their businesses, create jobs, and strengthen the economic heartbeat of the region. The programs progress in 2025 demonstrated that mission in action -- through expanded programming, deeper engagement, and measurable impact across the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Politics Chat, April 2, 2026
A newsletter about the history behind today's politics.
Rockets showing progress on ball control with Jazz up next
Down the stretch on Wednesday, when it became obvious that the short-handed Milwaukee Bucks refused to roll over, the Houston Rockets faced a defensive tactic that'd previously given them fits.
2026 National Public Health Week
Each April, National Public Health Week shines a spotlight on the systems, people, and partnerships that keep our communities healthy. This year’s theme —Ready. Set. Action! — was chosen by the American Public Health Association (APHA) and calls on each of us to look back at the progress made and look forward to the steps needed for an even healthier future.
Pistons give update on health of star Cade Cunningham
The Detroit Pistons announced on Thursday that Cade Cunningham is making progress in his recovery.
Pistons give update on health of star Cade Cunningham
The Detroit Pistons announced on Thursday that Cade Cunningham is making progress in his recovery.
Sharing her passion for science
By Danielle Rush Communications Specialist, Indiana University Kokomo Hisako Masuda, Indiana University Kokomo professor of biochemistry, was honored by the Indiana Academy of Science (IAS) as its 2026 Distinguished Scholar. The award is given to an individual who is recognized by the IAS as having an exceptional record of scholarship. Recipients are selected from nominations submitted to its awards committee. “I was surprised,” said Masuda, who joined IU Kokomo’s faculty in 2013. “I feel there are many good scientists in the Academy, so I wasn’t expecting it at all.” Patrick Motl, dean of the School of Sciences, said the Academy recognizes up to one member per year, and that Masuda is the second or third IU Kokomo faculty member to receive the commendation. “Clearly this speaks to the strength of Dr. Masuda’s accomplishments in research and scholarship and that her work stands out amongst her peers in Indiana,” said Motl, who received the award in 2019. “Many of the institutions that participate in the IAS are undergraduate institutions or primarily undergraduate institutions, but even having that caveat, Dr. Masuda has built and maintains a very active research program in her lab, working exclusively with undergraduates. She is passionate about science and can share that passion with her students. To carry on a quality research program with so many students involved in so many projects is truly remarkable and I am glad that the IAS acknowledged that for Dr. Masuda.” The IAS specifically commended her for involving more than 50 undergraduates in her research in bacterial metabolism, genomics, and their phenotypic plasticity at IU Kokomo, and publishing 23 articles with many student co-authors. Masuda’s current work primarily focuses on biodegradation and chemical repurposing of nylon. Using soil bacteria, her lab studies bacterial biodegradation of nylon and other environmental pollutants. She applies principles of green chemistry while developing a method to convert nylon waste into other nontoxic polymers. In collaborative work with health scientists, her lab investigates gut microbiomes of Indiana native birds as well as human subjects in a clinical study. She became interested in converting plastic waste while earning her Ph.D. at Rutgers University, working on methods to remove environmental waste not using chemicals or other intrusive methods. She learned about Nylon 11, which is used in pipes for transferring oil, interior components for cars, catheters, and in other industrial hard plastics. Nylon 11 is nontoxic, she added, so it is safe to include students in the research. “Those are considered to be nonbiodegradable, and have to go to a landfill,” she said. “I thought if we could come up with a way to biodegrade it, that would make some kind of impact.” Eventually, she wants to develop a product that would convert nylon waste to something useful, and to reduce waste and microplastics in the environment. “That would be my goal at some point, that we can make that change, and also make people more aware of their use of plastics,” she said. “I hope students stop to think about what we can do as scientists to address issues currently impacting us.” She appreciates the IAS for its support of scientific research at Indiana institutions, and IU Kokomo and the School of Sciences for providing funding for students to attend the Academy’s annual meeting. She added that IU Kokomo has also supported her research with funding from the School of Sciences and Academic Affairs. “Without that, I couldn’t do my research,” she said. Masuda has also earned a Senior Research Grant from the IAS, IU Kokomo’s Distinguished Research Award, and the IU Kokomo Junior Faculty Annual Research Award. She is a Fellow of the Indiana Academy of Science. Education is KEY at Indiana University Kokomo.
Texas A&M QB Marcel Reed discusses Aggies' spring football progress
Texas A&M quarterback Marcel Reed discussed his progress and the Aggies' spring football season on the SEC Network.
LACLxS Work in Progress Seminar | The River Will Cry Out: Jesuit Politics and Mapuche Diplomacy, or The Spiritual Conquest Across the Biobío River (1612-26)
Ignacio Veraguas, a student in the Spanish & Portuguese Program in the Johns Hopkins Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, will give a talk titled "The River Will Cry Out: Jesuit Politics and Mapuche Diplomacy, or The Spiritual Conquest Across the Biobío River (1612-26)" for the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.
Stephen Lewis, Leftist Canadian Politician and AIDS Activist, Dies at 88
Part of a political dynasty, he led Ontario’s main progressive party, became Canada’s U.N. ambassador and campaigned against the spread of AIDS in Africa.
Arc Raiders' Flashpoint update addresses a major player complaint, throwing geared players into less games in-progress
Arc Raiders' latest update has fixed a major player complaint, increasing the odds a geared player will join a fresh match rather than one in progress.
'Fighting' Bob La Follette's Progressive legacy lives on in Madison
A century after Bob La Follette's death, his ideas live on at The Progressive magazine and UW-Madison's growing School of Public Affairs.
Georgia lawmakers tackle childhood literacy as session nears end
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Democrats try new tactic to win a House seat in Utah — running as progressives in a red state
For decades, Democrats' only chance of getting elected to Congress from the conservative state of Utah was by convincing voters that they were sensible moderates. But the political landscape has changed, thanks to a redistricting shakeup that created a deep blue district anchored by Salt Lake City.
David Silverberg steps away from notepad to run for Kathleen Passidomo's Senate seat
The Paradise Progressive founder hopes this is the cycle that Southwest Florida will elect a Democrat.
Is longevity science stuck? Researchers call for a strategic reset
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Schumer had a plan for Maine and other states. Some Democrats aren't on board
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Jaguars' Travis Hunter progressing well in rehab from knee surgery
Jaguars coach Liam Coen said Travis Hunter is making progress from his knee surgery.
Coatue Projected $1.995 Trillion Valuation for Anthropic in 2030
In a presentation to prospective investors in January, Coatue offered a rare look at how it justifies Anthropic’s heady valuations. An anonymous source sent me the slides, which give a unique look at how a top investment firm values Anthropic’s business. This is a moment in time when some of America’s most valuable, growing technology companies remain private. In the January presentation, Coatue estimated that Anthropic would lose $14 billion in EBITDA on $18 billion in revenue in 2026, ending the year with $30 billion in annualized run-rate revenue. Most recently, it’s been reported that Anthropic is at $19 billion in ARR, which could suggest Anthropic is already running ahead of Coatue’s expectations. By 2031, Coatue projected that Anthropic would be generating $48 billion in EBITDA profits on $200 billion in revenue, with $224 billion of ARR. That would give Anthropic a 41x forward EBITDA multiple at a projected $1.995 trillion valuation in 2030. Coatue told the investors it was pitching that Anthropic could be worth $2.413 trillion in 2031. In February, Coatue co-led a $30 billion Series G investment in Anthropic that valued it at $380 billion. Coatue declined to comment on this story. I first shared this slide and talked about the presentation on my new podcast, the Cerebral Valley Show, which I host with my CVAI co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman. I’ve got a few other slides from the Coatue presentation for Newcomer subscribers.
Progressive groups in Maine push for wealth taxes
On Friday, a coalition of 21 business groups, led by the Maine Association of Realtors, said they are urging lawmakers to reject the 2% tax on incomes over $1 million and a measure to increase taxes on individual high earners.
Sport NI CEO leaves role after two-year absence
Antoinette McKeown has left the post of Sport NI chief executive after a two-year absence from the role. Chair Gavin Boyd confirmed to employees in a message seen by BBC Sport NI that Ms McKeown had left the post on 24 November 2025 to "take up new opportunities" and the recruitment process to replace her was "progressing". Sport NI, the leading public body for the development of sport in Northern Ireland, has come in for criticism in recent years.
Lee Health: Parkinson program – Support, movement and connection
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurological condition that affects many systems of the body, but it is referred to as a “movement disorder.”
Steven Fulop on Fighting for Business Interests in Zohran Mamdani's New York
Steven Fulop, the new President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, the city’s leading big business advocacy group, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of March 19, 2026. Fulop recently began in the role after 12 years as mayor of Jersey City and a 2025 run for governor of New Jersey. He replaced longtime Partnership President/CEO Kathryn Wylde. (photo by Liena Žagare) Participating journalists: Nicole Gelinas, Josh Greenman, Alyssa Katz, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Harry Siegel, Ben Smith, Liena Žagare Full Transcript **Ben Max**Good morning. Thanks for being here. So start us off: The people who hired you for this role, what did they make clear were their top priorities for you coming into it, and for the Partnership, and what did you sort-of pitch as the direction you thought things could go? Give us a little of that bifurcation of where the minds met in terms of the priorities and the leadership for the new era. **Steven Fulop**Let me explain to you how I ended up in the job, OK? That’s probably a good starting point, because I don’t think anybody initially thought that I was the pick that they coveted or thought that would be an ideal fit for this position. I’d run for [New Jersey] governor, as you guys know, and I was very deliberate in the lane that I was taking as a candidate for governor. The same candidate when I ran for mayor and city council — it was outside the establishment. It was building on issues, single-issue voters — very, very concentrated on detailed policy. And I thought that if I could build an organization, outside of the typical political organization, of single-issue voters, you could become viable because they’re passionate people generally, OK? And one is mayor, outside the establishment doing that. You won two races in the country that Obama actually engaged in as president. Rahm Emanuel and Jeremiah Healy, my predecessor, was a ten-year incumbent. So we won based on this structure. Run for governor, kind of in that same model. And I thought at the time that 550,000 people would turn out in the election. That was based on history in a similar election, when Chris Christie left and it was Trump’s first-year primary, you know, changeover in governor. There was five hundred or four eighty-seven [thousand]. So I thought five-fifty was a bump up. Same numbers Sherrill had, Ras Baraka had. I thought five hundred and fifty thousand people in the election, six candidates running that are viable — two congresspeople, two mayors, senate president, and the teachers’ union president — that if I got to a hundred and thirty thousand votes, single-issue passionate voters, I would get in through the primary with twenty, twenty-five percent, and then put it back together even though I was kind of the outside establishment guy. I think I did everything perfect during that election, OK? With the exception of winning. Which is the big deal. But I miscalculated one thing. And I don’t know in hindsight how I could have changed anything. But I miscalculated that the turnout ended up spiking to eight-fifty, OK? So I said five-fifty. We all said five-fifty. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, and I’m a pretty pragmatic person. Going into Election Day on Tuesday, if you said, Steve, are you gonna win? I would have told you, we caught them and we’re gonna win, OK? We have more volunteers. I mean, to give you perspective on it: Uber, which is a data company, like, the week before, they wrote a million-dollar check to my super PAC, five hundred [thousand] to Sherrill, five hundred [thousand] to Ciattarelli. Election Day, the New York Times embedded one reporter, photographer for most of the day with only one of us, me. CNN, the day before, me, right? The trend was there. I miscalculated that there was an additional 300,000 people that came out. I saw, similar to here [in New York City], the voter numbers surging early, and I just thought it was a displaced Election-Day voter. I thought you were so excited to vote that you were voting early. I never imagined that there were 300,000 additional people voting. And if you tuned in late, then you would have ultimately– I had the wrong message. My message was, Trenton was broken, these are the things we would fix. And Sherrill, for example, was: I’m a helicopter pilot to fight Trump, right? Her message was better for that. It was over in five minutes. So why do I tell you that? I was shell-shocked, didn’t really know what happened, and the way this business works is when you lose, your phone goes dead. Nobody calls. It’s just, that’s it. Silence. And so, I’m trying to think about what happened and two weeks after the fact, I get a phone call by this guy. His name is Jim Simpson. He was Christie’s DOT chair, OK? Commissioner. And he worked on the widening of the Pulaski Skyway with me as the mayor of Jersey City. And Christie went after me with Bridgegate, and I was a government witness during Bridgegate. But even when nobody in the Christie administration could talk to me, Jim Simpson was always like, I have this major project going through Hudson County, predominantly Jersey City. I’m gonna deal with the guy. And he would tell you that Steve was a professional, good guy to deal with. I think that’s what Jim Simpson would say. I didn’t talk to Jim Simpson for 12 years. I lose the election. Two weeks after, I get a phone call. He leaves a voicemail. Hey, Steve, it’s Jim Simpson. Can you give me a call back? And I was kind of like fuck the world at that point. I didn’t want to call anybody back. And I called Jim Simpson back, and I was like, Hey, Jim. How’s it going? And he says to me, he says, Look, I’m very thankful you remember who I am, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, Look, I had an issue in a warehouse I own in Jersey City. Didn’t know really how to navigate the building department. I figured it out, right? But thanks for calling me back. That was the conversation, OK? And I’m like, OK, great. You know? Whatever. So the conversation ended. He says, You know, I moved to Pennsylvania, but I’m sometimes up in New York. If I’m up there again, why don’t we just get together? I said Sure. I got nothing but time, right? And so he calls again about a week-and-a-half later, says, I’m gonna be in New York tomorrow. Wanna grab breakfast? Sure. So we meet for breakfast, and he knew nothing about me. When I got there, he was googling me, OK? Like, he knew nothing about my deeds. He’s like, Oh, you were in the military. That’s amazing. Like, it was a weird conversation. And, you know, towards the end of the conversation, he says, What are you gonna do next? And I said, I honestly don’t know. You know, I think maybe this, maybe that. And he says, You know who you should call? I said, No idea. Who, Jim? And he says, I don’t get along with her, he said. I used to be a Rockefeller fellow. I do not get along with her. We do not see eye to eye, but you should call this woman named Kathy Wylde. And I said, I met Kathy, ten years ago once. I don’t know if I would call her, and I don’t…That’s a weird conversation, just to call a stranger and ask for help with a job, right? And he says, No, you should figure out how to call her. We’re gonna figure out how to get you in touch with her again. I gotta think about it. I said, OK. We left. I never thought anything of it. He calls me four days later, and he says, I was giving it some thought. I was googling and I saw she’s leaving [as President and CEO of the Partnership for New York City]. You should apply for the job. And I said, I don’t know anybody. It’s a weird dynamic. And he said, We gotta figure it out. You know? Good guy. A couple weeks later, I was going to a conference in Montana, and three years earlier, I had met Rob Speyer at the conference. Spoke to Rob probably twice in my life since then, OK? But, we had a night we sat next to each other at a dinner, had a nice conversation. So I texted him. I said, Are you going to this conference by chance, in a couple weeks? He said, I am going, right? I said, Oh, can I grab you when you’re there for a couple minutes? He said, Sure. I go with my wife. He comes over, says hello. He knew my wife from a couple years ago, pleasantries. I said, Hey, Rob. you know, I texted you, if I could speak to you. He said, Yeah, yeah. What’s up? And I was, like, nervous at this point. I’m, like, sweating. Like, I’m gonna give a pitch. I said, I see you’re very involved with the Partnership. I think I’d be killer at that job. And he says, Why? And I gave him a pitch, which I’ll tell you in a second. And he said, Honestly, he said, Steve, there’s 12 people in the search committee. He says, I couldn’t even help you if I wanted to, nor would I. But what I can do when people ask me is just get in touch with Heidrick & Struggles and, go through the process. I said, That’s all I could ask. It’s fine. So I send him a text two days later with my resume, and I said I was serious about this. Can you connect me to the person? He says, Sure. Heidrick & Struggles would tell you that they did the interview as a courtesy. And that they thought that it was going nowhere, largely because when the search committee, which is a who’s who of business, outlined who they wanted, they said they wanted somebody from New York City, and they wanted somebody who was not in elected office. So here I am. I would go through these interviews, and I would outline what I thought the Partnership was doing wrong, and how politics has changed, and where I thought the potential was. Largely that the model of shuttle diplomacy, of relationships in the way that it worked 20, 30 years ago, doesn’t work anymore. And today you see, both with Mamdani and Trump— The assets that they [Partnership member companies] have are that they have 800,000 employees. They have the ability to communicate at scale, and they have a general centrist message, and none of those things are leveraged in any meaningful way, is what I would outline. And I really believe, and I continue to believe, that if the Partnership is perceived as a voice of very wealthy people and the CEOs, it will no longer exist in five or ten years. And the reason I say that is because one of the assets that people value is this convening component. And it’s a convening component because you have everybody from, you know, the CEO of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs towards mid-level to low-level CEOs, and they want to be in the room with the next person in that food chain, so to speak. And when people view it as not good use of their time, because it’s not effective, you start seeing deterioration and you no longer get that involvement. And I would explain this to them, and I would say, This is how we’re going to organize employees, and I think is the most effective way to do it. It’s something that I did as a [mayor] or a candidate when I was running these campaigns, so it’s something I know. And they would ask a lot of questions, and we would go through this model in detail, and they would ask, and they would just move me along in the campaign in, in this situation. And then at the end, probably ten interviews in, the woman from, you know, Heidrick says, You know, I think, you know, as crazy it is, you might land this plane. And I said I knew I was going to land the plane. But— **Josh Greenman**Can I ask? So you mentioned— **Steven Fulop**Sorry to take so much time on that, but— **Josh Greenman**Three hundred thousand, or I forget the number. **Steven Fulop**Eight hundred thousand. **Josh Greenman**Eight hundred thousand employees. And correct me if any of the assumptions embedded in the question are wrong. But you’re a membership organization, you’re supposed to be speaking for the large employers. **Steven Fulop**Yes. Large employees. Employers and employees. **Josh Greenman**Employers and employees. But you don’t canvas them every time an issue comes up. You described it as centrist. OK. An issue comes up. First of all, how do you, as the head of the Partnership, decide whether to get engaged and involved in that particular issue? And second of all, how do you decide what the posture of the Partnership is, if it’s not predefined? How much of it is your instinct? How much of it is, Let me take the temperature of the employees and the employers first? **Steven Fulop**The honest answer is I think it’s a hybrid. At the last board meeting, I spoke about being more narrow in the things that we’re going to be involved in. I think it’s very important we’re very deliberate and specific on issues that we care about and being less involved in kind of broad things that don’t necessarily touch 250 of the different companies. **Josh Greenman**Even though you made a statement about antisemitism. **Steven Fulop**I made a statement on antisemitism because it touches a lot of our companies, if not all of them, because they have Jewish employees, and they’re all very invested here. **Ben Smith**What’s something that you think the Partnership should get out of? **Steven Fulop**We had a lot of time last year in the fashion industry. I think the fashion industry is important. I don’t know who reads that report ultimately or how you move the needle ultimately on the fashion industry. We did some work very publicly on short-term rentals. Not really sure that that’s the best place to be spending a lot of time, because I don’t think it pertains to every single person here. I think that there are things that do pertain, quality-of-life issues that touch everybody. How do those things come to light? So I spoke broadly at the executive board meeting about things that I thought were important. They had lots of questions, Why this, that, and I outlined things both in a framework of government and politics: This is what I think. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the vulnerability is, et cetera, and we went through some of that stuff. When we’re working, for example, now, I gotta review it. We’ve been going back and forth on a blueprint of things to change for New York City that I think, or our team thinks, are meaningful, practical, and tangible things that you could change that would impact the budget in a meaningful way. And a normal person would say, You’re probably right about that. And the politics could be tough for those. So put a litany of, let’s say, 330 of them together. A lot of it’s our team’s ideas. Some of them are a little bit maybe venturing into a place that the Partnership historically has felt maybe uncomfortable. Those are broader conversations because I don’t yet have 20 years of trust with those people. So I say, Here’s what I’m looking to do. Here’s the reasons why. And we have those conversations with the executive board. **Liena Žagare**Does universal childcare fit into that? **Steven Fulop**Universal childcare is a part of it ‘cause— universal childcare is a part of it. It’s definitely in there. And I’ll tell you this. We polled our employee base because we were curious. It’s something again that touches, I believe, the affordability crisis. I think Mamdani and Hochul are right on this. It touches everybody who lives here in some way or another. Roughly two-thirds of our employers provide some sort of childcare today. Some is on-site, some is off-site, some is subsidies for low-income, some is subsidies for everybody, some is using a tax credit. And I’ve said this to the mayor before, that our knowledge of this space is vast because we have experience, practical experience on this sort of thing that others don’t have. They may have abstract experience or be ideological in a certain way. We experience it. We can tell you what works and what doesn’t work in the Building Department, what the challenges are in the bureaucracy, what the issues are in accomplishing this in a different way, because a lot of us have tried to provide that, right? So how do we communicate that publicly in a way that makes sense from our objective, which is improving New York, and at the same time in a way that’s value-added to the mayor or the administration, is kind of where we are. But it’s a hundred-percent part of that blueprint. There is a section on this. **Akash Mehta**It’s interesting to hear you emphasize that you represent the employees, not just the employers. Are there formal structures that put that into practice? Are there elected board positions from the employee base, or anything like that? **Steven Fulop**What we’re starting to do now— So it’s a shift, OK? And what we’re doing now, the short answer is no. What we’re doing now is starting a lot of these town hall-type conversations with the CEOs and me. It is an April, May, June, two, three-year initiative, where we’re talking about civic involvement, the importance of New York, and people can opt to sign up for information from us. So we’re communicating in that way. People will opt in, and then we’ll have the ability to better communicate with the employee base with regards to what we’re doing. You know, there’s no secrets to what I’m saying. I mean— **Ben Smith**But you think the opportunity is to mobilize employees? **Steven Fulop**The opportunity is to better communicate because I think there’s a disconnect between a lot of the things that happen, and how and when we communicate to employees things that may impact them. Because you have all sorts of legalities, and general counsels, obviously, that put obstacles in place on this stuff. And we need to figure out a way, because people are invested here in a meaningful way, so they should have knowledge of this. I don’t believe– Of course, our employee base is different than working for the Hotel Trade Council or Carpenters [union] or whatever, right? They’re monolithic, told to do something, they’re gonna do it. Employee bases aren’t that. I think that’s an asset. Having a generally college-educated employee base, if you lay out an issue in a reasonable way, they could make an informed decision whether that works for them or doesn’t work for them. The— **Akash Mehta**Wait, the carpenters can’t make an informed decision? **Steven Fulop**I didn’t say they can’t make an informed decision. I’m gonna say they’re more monolithic in what they do, and it’s driven by the decision of a leader, specifically in the Carpenters. The Carpenters would say from their executive board, maybe in Washington, maybe in New York, maybe in New Jersey, say, Directionally, we are supporting Ben. And then we support Ben. We don’t have that luxury. That’s not the way we’re structured. **Akash Mehta**What does that have to do with them being college-educated? **Steven Fulop**Well, it doesn’t have to. I mean, I think that you don’t have to necessarily be college-educated, it’s a fair question, to weigh something. But I think generally somebody that’s gone through some sort of rigorous education and training on pragmatic thinking has a better chance because they’ve been educated to think that way. I don’t think it’s a referendum on, you only could understand an issue if you’re college-educated. **Alyssa Katz**But I want to dig in a little more to that when you’re talking about pragmatic thinking, because it’s not an elephant exactly, but the sort-of power in the room is the mayor, who’s elected with actually a lot of college-educated support. And also based on a sort of different way of looking at pretty much everything in some ways, right? Like around– OK, we’re gonna start with principles, we’ll figure out the practicalities later. And also around mobilizing large numbers of people who have interests potentially at odds with capitalism, right? Tenants, people who generally think that money and politics and billionaires are the core problem, or a core problem to address, and on and on. So I’m interested in your efforts to mobilize people in that light. I mean, are you looking to build a counterforce? How does that factor in? **Steven Fulop**I don’t use a “counter force.” I don’t think people are generally sympathetic or upset with capitalism or sympathetic to socialism. I view it more as a couple of things were true in the November election. A, you had an alternative to Mamdani that was tremendously flawed. So they had a ceiling. It was an exact situation that happened in Jersey City, where you had a former governor who resigned in disgrace running for mayor, my old seat, same exact outcome. So it wasn’t, it wasn’t a reflection of, everybody’s sympathetic to socialism. I think elections are choices ultimately, and these are the four choices that you ultimately had. Do I think that people are frustrated and more fiscally liberal than they’ve ever been before? Yeah, absolutely. I think that when people say that I, people say, a twenty-year model ago would say, I am, you know, fiscally conservative and socially liberal, that model has flipped really. People are fiscally liberal because what’s going on today isn’t working for them. They’re not necessarily sympathetic to socialism, but they’re open to trying things because there’s an acknowledgement that what’s happening isn’t working. And we see that too. We’re not blind to that. So do I think that you can organize a counterweight, was the question? Is that what it is? I don’t know if I would frame it as a counterweight. I think that you need to organize something that has a voice that is relevant in the political atmosphere, definitely. **Josh Greenman**Can you just explain both the number and percentage of people the Partnership represents of employees, versus the employment base of the city as a whole? **Steven Fulop**Yeah, I don’t know the— **Josh Greenman**What’s happened to that over time? I’m curious, like, is it— **Steven Fulop**I can get that to you. I don’t know. I don’t know that— **Josh Greenman**And then the other is inside the Partnership. What are the constituent companies and groups, and…Are there a couple of companies that have a highly disproportionate share of Partnership members? **Steven Fulop**No. **Josh Greenman**So how broad-based is it? Can you just describe it? **Steven Fulop**I mean, there’s 350 companies. They range in size from– I mean, they would be significant companies, maybe 50 employees, OK, to several thousand employees. But on the executive board, you can see from the site and the broader board, they vary in size and background. Most of the companies you would have some familiarity with. But, they vary in size. **Josh Greenman**How is it determined whether you’re part of the Partnership as a company in New York City? **Steven Fulop**As part of the Partnership, is generally we go through a process of meetings. I meet with them initially, provide them some information. They express that they’re interested, I express that we’re interested. I take it to the board to make sure that we’re moving in that direction, and then the board validates that. This year we’ve had, I mean, a bunch more have joined, and we’ve restructured some things so some have left intentionally. It’s not intentionally, but I guess– **Nicole Gelinas**You’re running pretty hard against the two income-tax hike proposals that the mayor ran for office and won on. Do you see the employee base as part of the battle against those tax increases? Would Partnership company employees go up to Albany to make their point known against that? **Steven Fulop**Yeah. But I don’t think you’re gonna have that same sort of advocacy group that the DSA does. It’s a totally different type of person that would engage, number one. Do I think that a lot of the employees would be opposed to an increased tax structure in New York? I think without clear parameters on what that tax structure looks like, I think the answer is yes. And it’s not only the income taxes that we’re concerned about. So we’ll go into that, too. The reality on this is, if you look at it from a reasonable point of view, if you added the income tax, the payroll, the PTET tax, which is one that we care a lot about and we’re concerned about, the corporate tax, the estate tax, and the property taxes: You put all of those together, right? And you said, OK, we’re gonna do them all. And without some structural changes to the budget, you will be at the trough again in three years. And I think a reasonable person who’s even supportive of, maybe, the highest earners paying more would say, Does it make sense to do this every two or three years, and at what point is there a tripwire? So I think, yeah, the people would be sympathetic. It depends how and what information you provide and how those taxes are. But we don’t have that structure in place yet. I just got started. So we’re just building that stuff out, which I’ve told you, but it’s new days on this. **Nicole Gelinas**So there’s, there’s a reasonable person, and then there’s Albany. Now that the budget is— **Steven Fulop**No, I gotta be careful ‘cause I gotta work with people. So I can’t say they’re unreasonable. **Nicole Gelinas**Now that the budget is just a week-and-a-half away, what do you see as your prospects for stopping those tax hikes? And if you don’t stop them, does that hurt your power early on? **Steven Fulop**No. I don’t think any reasonable person would say that there’s a structure in place today, after two months of me being there, that is gonna push back against everything in Albany from a political standpoint. I don’t think that’s a fair thing to say. I don’t think the Partnership leadership think of it that way, and I think that most people wouldn’t think of it that way. I think the governor has been very strong [against tax increases], so that’s good. That pass-through tax that was put in place when the SALT reduction was eliminated, and now there’s a proposal to eliminate that, that would be an income tax increase on not only the wealthiest people, it would be an income tax increase on business owners throughout the city. And that is one that we’re keeping track of right now that I think doesn’t get the scrutiny that it deserves. Everybody focuses on the income tax and the corporate tax, which the governor is fairly clear, at least now, that she’s not supportive of, but we’ll see. **Josh Greenman**On the corporate tax, Mamdani has repeatedly said it shouldn’t harm the climate here in New York City because it applies to anyone who does business in the state, not if you’re headquartered here, so it shouldn’t lead to corporate flight of any kind. Is that how you see it? **Steven Fulop**No. So first of all, it’s challenging when it’s depicted as corporate flight, because then it becomes a conversation around, Well, you didn’t leave. You didn’t leave. So I know what I did is OK because you didn’t leave. The reality of how this works is that it’s attrition over time, and decisions on where to scale outside of New York. That’s generally how this works. And because the immediacy isn’t there, people don’t view it as, Well, I made this decision, and tomorrow you left. And that’s a challenge for us, because the argument we lose, even though what we’re saying happens to be true, that people constantly are making decisions to scale [businesses] elsewhere. You see it. You see it. So I think that his argument is flawed, although it’s a political argument ultimately is what he’s making, and I understand that. But if you do change the tax rate as he proposes, you will be one hundred percent higher than New Jersey, right, which is at 11 percent, and you would be at 22 percent, according to the CBC, when you layer in all these other things. So at that point, you start saying, Well, I have the same talent pool that I’m pulling from here in the New York system. I’m no longer making the decision to go to Texas or Florida or Tennessee, where it’s a geographic total distance, but at a hundred percent premium to be in New York City, is that worth it, and should I be elsewhere? Your competition is elsewhere at that point in proximity. That’s the dangerous thing to what he’s saying. **Ben Smith**Do you think even more broadly, there is just this sense among— ’cause I think you’re right. You talk to business leaders, and most of the really big businesses in New York don’t care about New York anymore. They’re not New York businesses. They’re global businesses that happen to be here, and New York taxes are a diminishing share of the thing they worry about. Because they’re so global now, they don’t have the kind of commitment they did when David Rockefeller was running the Partnership. And I think a lot of them and a lot of people just think, long-term, New York is cooked. There’s a flight not to Jersey, but to the Sun Belt — to Houston, to Dallas, to Atlanta, to Miami — that’s kind of unstoppable at this point. And you see just the growth of those cities demographically. You see it in terms of their businesses. You know, maybe that’s not this year or next, but I think if you just literally look at the lines on paper of New York, Philadelphia, Boston…these northeastern cities, versus the Sun Belt. Just feels like an irreversible trend: these places are in decline, these places are rising. This is probably beyond our professional careers even, we’ll be fine. But do you think long-term that it’s true, that New York is just sort of irreversibly declining? **Steven Fulop**I think it’s fragile. There’s a lot of indicators and pressure to push people away, and there isn’t an easy solution to it. First, let’s just talk about last week. Regardless of what you say about the corporate tax conversation, we could disagree or agree, regardless. You know, your job isn’t to agree or disagree. But using the estate tax that was proposed last week, OK, or two weeks ago, nobody above the age of 60 would live in New York City if that happened to be approved. Period. End of story. You would see flight, because no sane person would do that? Because the tax rates, that you’re not talking about the one percent, you’re talking about somebody who has a $750,000 home or apartment, OK? You know who that is. So you have pressure because of the dialogue that’s happening there for sure. You definitely have gradual attrition and people moving jobs elsewhere because they’re more portable. There’s no question about that. You have pressure at the bottom because it is very hard for entry-level people to find jobs, and at the same time to find housing. It’s a true thing here in New York, the pressure. So you have a lot of difficult situations going on and absence of a tough political solution, meaning willing to make decisions that are not popular, you won’t be able to change the trajectory. And that is only one that the mayor can actually drive, OK? So the property tax reform stuff that de Blasio and Adams both tried to do, it’s necessary. It’s really necessary, but it’s gotta be driven by the mayor leaning into it, making that a number one priority. Use things like FHEPS, OK? You guys have all written about that. **Ben Smith**I don’t know what that is, sorry. **Steven Fulop**It’s the rental assistance program, OK? It’s growing at four percent per month. It’s a billion-dollar-plus program. Four percent per month! It’s not sustainable. And if the mayor was sitting here, he would say, Well, I didn’t approve the expansion of the program. That’s what he would say. Because I had a conversation with one of his people last night on this, and I said, Yeah, but the expansion would have made it worse. The existing program is four percent per month, right? We need to solve for that. How do you solve for that? That program is a byproduct of the de Blasio administration when Cuomo got rid of the rental assistance program at the state, and so the city inherited that. There isn’t another city in the country that has a similar entitlement program. It’s not sustainable. That program belongs at the state or at the federal government, but it is a politically tough thing to do. So you gotta be able to make decisions like the property tax reform, that. Those are not easy things to do. But outside of that, your trajectory for the city is very, very dangerous. It’s a fact, you know? [Note: After this interview occurred but before it was published, the Mamdani administration continued the appeal of a court ruling requiring the city to expand the FHEPS program as dictated in a law passed by the City Council, while the two sides of City Hall negotiate a potential settlement.] **Akash Mehta**Do you broadly agree with Mamdani’s analysis that Cuomo shafted New York City — that Albany shafted New York City under Cuomo? **Steven Fulop**Honestly, it predates me, so it’s hard for me to kind of give you a fair assessment on that. I would tell you that I was mayor for 12 years in Jersey City, economic backbone for New Jersey. We drive jobs, we drive the statewide economy, we drive every number. It’s disproportionately housing growth. Everything is Jersey City. And I used to say, We don’t get what we put in. We don’t get that back. It’s true, OK. I know New Jersey and New York both say to the federal government, you know, they both pay much more to the federal government than what they get back. I mean, this is a narrative that people say. It’s probably true. Does it get corrected? I don’t know. You know, it’s on the governor’s situation. I have no idea, is the short answer, ‘cause I’m not in the weeds on that. **Akash Mehta**One quick question on the tax battle. The Partnership has a [501] C4 that was seeded with $10 million. What are your plans for the group? Are you planning to spend that money on this battle? **Steven Fulop**Um…unclear. And, conversations this week on that. You know— **Josh Greenman**Do you run the C4? **Steven Fulop**We hired an executive director this week. There is a willingness, we had a call this week and there is a willingness to spend real money to make sure that New York City stays competitive. So this was literally this week. There was a call. I would tell you that there is a serious appetite there. It’s literally a ripe conversation that’s happening in the last 24 hours. Good question, though. **Nicole Gelinas**Large donors proved last year that they’re very good at spending a lot of money — but it didn’t work. In fact, it may have worked against them. Are you confident that beyond the money, you understand local and state politics well enough that some of these people are actually listening? I mean, is [State Assembly Speaker] Carl Heastie, is [State Senate Majority Leader] Andrea Stewart-Cousins listening to these arguments and saying, We didn’t realize that the potential for attrition in the corporate side was this great. Because the money hasn’t worked before. **Steven Fulop**The short answer is, I’ve been there two months. I doubt at this stage, we don’t have that relationship. I mean, I’ve met everybody. I doubt that I have the standing or credibility with them to make, or the structure in place to make that argument today more compelling than it was made six months ago. It’s just the reality of the situation. I think that you have two types of people that exist in any political sphere. You have ideologues and opportunistic people, OK, that just think about their next election. Those are the two types only. And absent somebody that has an alternative, the opportunistic person will only always be sympathetic to the ideologue, because they view that as their best route to get reelected because that’s where the gravity of energy is. **Josh Greenman**What were you? **Steven Fulop**It’s a good question. I was a hybrid. **Josh Greenman**Oh, the only one. **Steven Fulop**[Laughing] That’s right. I was unique. I think that when you look at Albany, you have a growing DSA base for sure. The question that I would have as I get into it is how much of those— the rest of the people that aren’t pure ideologues are there because there’s not an alternative that they see, can be supportive, and helpful to a pragmatic view. So I don’t know what they’ll listen to — Carl and Andrea — in the next week-and-a-half. I mean, who knows? **Josh Greenman**Should we charge more for street parking? **Steven Fulop**It’s a good question. I happen to be a supporter of some of those proposals on street safety and better streets. I don’t think it’s a broader position that the Partnership has taken, and I don’t think it’s something, going back to what I said earlier, narrowing view and going back to your question earlier on how we approve things. I’ll tell you that, as I wrote out this idea of a blueprint of things that, pragmatically, that are politically difficult to change that I believe are the right things to do, I included it in there. And going back to what you said and questioned earlier in how we get these things approved, because the nature of what we wrote, you know, once we get it to a place, I will circulate that a little bit more to the executive board and get some more feedback on whether we wanna go down this road at this point or not, or not at this time. So there’s a process on this stuff. **Ben Max**What are a few other examples? So property tax reform, some streetscape stuff, universal childcare, what else? **Steven Fulop**If you can wait till next week, it’ll be better. OK. Like– **Josh Greenman**Are you fast enough for the political world? What I’m saying is, if you’ve got to go through that process, and these conversations are happening, the budget’s gonna be cooked in ten days, are you gonna be behind the curve? **Steven Fulop**I am obsessed with the political world. I mean, I, I lived in this— Ben MaxHe means the Partnership. **Josh Greenman**The Partnership. Is the Partnership behind the curve if it’s got to deliberate on all this? **Steven Fulop**Look, I think the answer is yes. The short answer is, I don’t know, right? Like, I don’t know. I’ve not been in long enough to have a gauge on all of this. But my gut tells me yes, because the leadership there is hyper-engaged in New York City and the Partnership, it’s not something where they just kind of parachute in once every three months and think about, kind of the Partnership and what’s happening in Albany and happening in New York City. They happen to be very engaged here on a regular basis. So I think the short answer is yes. They will be able to turn stuff around relatively quickly, and I feel pretty good about that. It’s not where I think about obstacles. **Ben Max**So big picture, I’m still trying to figure out right now: What does the Partnership care about, big picture. I know you’re working on a blueprint. I know you’re rethinking some of this, but is it first and foremost, the business climate and economic growth? **Steven Fulop**Right now, I wouldn’t say this is in perpetuity. I mean, obviously, in this moment in time, it’s competitiveness and the business climate. But when the C4 was launched initially last year, they spent money on one initiative, OK? Spent a couple million dollars on the discovery bill. It had nothing to do with finances, taxes. It had to do with public safety and what they viewed as in the best interest of quality of life. So their interests aren’t necessarily only about taxes. We happen just to be in this fire drill at this moment that I got thrown into, where there’s a new tax proposal every other day. So trying to deal with that is where we are right now. I think broadly speaking, the place of the Partnership is really wanting to have a relationship where we’re kind of helping bridge the gap between the public and private sector, and helping find solutions. We have a venture fund, a $200 million venture fund, which I don’t think gets the recognition it deserves. It’s been involved in creating 37,000 jobs, seeding very early-stage New York companies that do a lot of good here. We have a tech lab that partners with DOT, with the Port Authority, with New Jersey Transit, experimenting on technologies to make government more efficient. It is a collaboration that has happened for 15 or 20 years. A lot of companies are a part of that, new companies helping on that on-ramp. It is a unique and special thing. We actually, I think, at the end of this month, have kind of that shark tank at our office where everybody comes in and pitches, and the board of that is like a who’s who. So, I mean, there’s a lot of things beyond what you guys see on the C4 and the advocacy and the lobbying sort-of side. **Nicole Gelinas**So on the Transit Tech Lab, some of the ideas that have come out of there have been very good ideas. But more broadly, for the MTA or the state and local government to actually save enough money so that we don’t have what you described with them coming back for new revenue every couple years, you have to confront the unions on some big issues, whether it’s work rules on the construction side, whether it’s two people on every single subway train, whether it’s Department of Education rules that mean they can’t be as flexible as charter schools. Do you see the Partnership taking on the unions in any sense? **Steven Fulop**Going back to the pragmatic that you said, I would use the word pragmatic and then you asked me about kind of a little bit more about that. You brought up the conductors on the trains and the proposals on that. It is very expensive. There isn’t a city in the country that has that structure. If you outline that to an employee of XYZ Corporation, and you said to them, Here’s the landscape, OK, We need help with XYZ, I would venture to say that they would be sympathetic to our point of view. That’s what I was getting at, just to give that to you earlier. You know, the New York Post called me the day that Mamdani entered into the— he said at the end of a press conference, I wasn’t there, obviously, but he mentioned that he wasn’t gonna do the sweeps of the homeless encampment. And it was probably my second or third day on the job. And the Post called and said, Do you want to comment on this? And I said, Yeah. And I said something critical of him at the time. Prior to doing that, because it was like my second or third day, I did say to some of the people on the team, going back to how nimble the organization is, I said, Hey, I would like to comment on this, OK? Because I think it’s wrong, his approach, and I think he’s gonna have to move off of where he is, ultimately. And some people said, Well, is that really the hill you wanna climb? Is that really that important to us? And I said, It absolutely is. Because, A, he’s wrong on the issue, and B, it’s a quality-of-life issue. Going back to the fact that it ended up being right, he ended up moving on, and you could see it from, like, far away, just based on being a legislator versus an executive and accountability. But I think our job is to call balls and strikes and just be fair about it. So do I think– Let me say it this way better. If you are gonna grow housing, OK, ‘cause he says it’s a priority. During his election, when he was a candidate, he would tell you if he was sitting here, he would tell you, you look at his CBS, the debates, he would talk about Jersey City and Tokyo, Jersey City and Tokyo as housing growth models. He would tell you that if he was sitting here — he said it on TV multiple times. Now, he followed that about what we did in Jersey City ‘cause we grew a lot. How are we able to grow? OK, A, you had layers of government here that we do not have there, so you need to clean that up. We upzoned, of course, more aggressively than the City of Yes around transit centers, which you have to do here for sure. And then the third part about it is that if you mandate affordable housing, community givebacks, the union labor, et cetera, et cetera, the projects financially cannot handle that. They don’t pencil out. So what we would generally do is that, on the union labor front, because the people that get squeezed the most were the ones that pressure the building trades better, because their jobs are usually the ones that get–are most competitive, are the less skilled parts of the building trades. So when you build a high-rise building, the electricians, the plumbers, the operating engineers, the ironworkers are generally gonna be union, because it’s a more complicated thing. Carpenters, laborers, painters generally are the ones that have competition from non-union, and that’s really where it is ultimately. And we would say in Jersey City, on the projects that are important to us, if they were coming to the city for some sort of subsidies or big zoning changes, and it was an important project, we would work with the developer to give the unions a last look to be competitive with the open-shop bid, and some sort of grace between five and ten percent to be competitive. Now, absent that, there is no way to get it built in union labor. So if the mayor continues to be strident that everything is gonna be a hundred percent building trades, you’re never gonna meet the objective of whatever he has a hundred, two hundred thousand units. So I think that our voice is gonna be that you need some practical reforms to these incentives, and practical reforms means that you cannot pay a 30 percent premium for the carpenters. **Nicole Gelinas**So something very simple on that, though. Two people on a train. Would you see yourself making a statement similar to the encampments that, you know, Hey, intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave people in encampments. Intuitively, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mandate two people on a train. Would you just call up the Post and say that, or that’s a different— **Steven Fulop**I don’t think that— I think if you called me and you said to me, What do you think? I’d probably just answer you, that I think it’s not something that any other city does, and in a financial crisis, you probably gotta be reasonable about that. **Ben Max**This is what you got hired in part for, right? To be out there more and to be a voice pushing back. **Steven Fulop**I think that it’s just my personality. I don’t know if it’s necessarily, it’s just like this is— You’d ask me, and I would say it. I wouldn’t go call up the Post and say, Let me-- Carl [Campanile], let me comment on this, right? I wouldn’t do that. Like, that’s not how I would think about it, right? I’d be going with my day, and then Carl would say, Do you care to comment on this? Or he would call, and I would just be like, Yeah, I think so and so. And he would say, Is that on the record? And generally, I’m not gonna say, This is off the record, on anything. I generally just talk. OK? So— **Josh Greenman**You talked about incentives, government incentives. I want to talk about literal government incentives, like, Amazon, right? Remember how many years ago, half of Amazon’s HQ2 was gonna be here. **Steven Fulop**Yeah, I remember. We tried to pitch it too. **Josh Greenman**It didn’t happen. You tried to pitch it, too. What do you think of the state’s current corporate incentives? Do they make sense as currently structured? To try to attract businesses to New York State, to try and attract businesses to New York City, there are various programs. There’s been a lot of talk about restructuring those programs to make them more rational, and there’s a larger question of, should we have this environment in which cities chase corporations by throwing money at them or tax abatements at them, or should there be some kind of compact where cities agree that they don’t do this to each other? **Steven Fulop**Yeah. I generally think — putting on my mayor’s hat — that the structure exists today is a race to zero, and it’s not healthy from the public side. But you cannot unilaterally disarm, is the unfortunate part of the conversation. And so absent governors getting together and having some sort of détente where they’re no longer doing that, I do not see how a state doesn’t participate in this. That said, I think that the competitiveness conversation in New York and New York City is more complicated than just incentives. I think that, you think about other places in the country, where people have mobility to get to, and there’s opportunity, there’s more of a deliberate effort to attract beyond just the incentives. Texas reordered their entire court system to replicate Delaware, to make it more friendly for corporations. They’re having a Texas stock exchange to have better access to capital markets. It’s more of a deliberate strategy than just saying, Hey, we’re gonna give incentives. Now, it is not helpful– you know, people, absent certainty on communication, they try to interpret a lot of what somebody means or what they say. So, governor or mayor says X, Y, Z in a statement, they try to interpret, what does that ultimately mean? How should I envision that to manifest itself for what I’m trying to do? And the thing that we are trying to calibrate for, and I say this publicly and privately, is that a lot of the rhetoric out of City Hall, which is consistent tax, tax, tax on any front that’s possible, whether you make $500,000, whether you have a house that’s $750,000, whether it’s a pass-through and you have a small business, it creates a very volatile environment. And that’s the problem ultimately. So I think you need certainty on that. **Josh Greenman**I have one other topic that we haven’t talked about that I just wanna make sure we discuss, which is AI. You represent a lot of employees. And AI is going to be increasingly a large employer, in theory in the city, but it’s also coming for some of those employees’ jobs, maybe many of those employees’ jobs. **Ben Smith**And the employers are very excited about it. **Josh Greenman**And some of the employers, the CEOs, are excited about being able to save dollars and innovate in various ways. **Steven Fulop**Well, they don’t communicate that with me, but just go ahead. **Josh Greenman**So how do you, how do you balance those tensions, which are very, very real, among employees who might be excited and employers who might be excited about AI, and those who might say, Holy shit, my job is gonna be gone in 10 years, or five? **Steven Fulop**I think that that is— I said this, maybe I touched on it a little bit earlier, I think that young people not being able to find jobs and the housing crisis was pressure from the bottom that is one of the most at-risk situations for New York. AI is part of that conversation, potentially — so you have macro environment, why people aren’t hiring, and then AI might be part of that too. You know, though they don’t clarify that with me. They don’t say, Here’s the reason I’m doing this or doing that. I do think that one of the biggest risks over the next 12 or 18 months is the AI impact on jobs. I agree. And I don’t think anybody has a good solution, both in the Partnership or in City Hall, yet on that. And in order to kind of figure out how to do that and solve for that, I think that you need to have some sort of broader conversation on implications. I will tell you that one of the things that we outlined in kind of what we were talking about on this blueprint was that, I do think that part of the procurement process for city government services needs to factor in who is training and who is factoring in the AI conversation, and those scores should be appropriately weighted, beneficial for companies that are thinking about training or have a training program as part of it. So we’re trying to think of ways to kinda think about training people and getting people into another space and using the leverage of City Hall to do that. I don’t think there’s a broad enough plan yet to solve for it. It is the biggest risk for New York, because New York City relies on white-collar jobs disproportionately for its budget. And where AI is coming is directly at the white-collar jobs as opposed to the blue-collar jobs. And so New York City is poised to get hit in a different sort-of way than anybody else. Short answer is, I don’t think anybody has a clear-eyed solution on that. Some of that’s gotta be set by the mayor, you know, that’s the truth too. I said earlier in the conversation, we had a roundtable on childcare in December with the mayor. And the mayor, at the end of it, I said to his staff, I said, You know, we outlined some of the inefficiencies and bureaucracies to getting these childcare centers open, which we’re familiar with. I told you earlier. We can help you with that from a technology standpoint, okay? And this goes back to making tough decisions. You’ve seen employee headcount since COVID skyrocket at City Hall. Whole, another conversation. I mean, that’s a fair thing to say. We said we’d help you with some efficiencies on that from a technology standpoint. And they were nice in their response but there was really no follow-up on that. And, and my point on that is we can only do so much from the Partnership. You need a dance partner in order to dance, right? Like, that’s really the reality of this. So, I do not know the solution, and I push back. People aren’t— They don’t, at least they don’t express to me they’re happy about, you know, not hiring jobs. You know, maybe to you, Ben. But, and AI displacement, I think people are very concerned about it in the Partnership too. **Harry Siegel**You said maybe without some changes, the Partnership won’t be there in five to ten years. We just did have a big turnout election, that led to an avowedly socialist mayor. Can you just step back and say— **Steven Fulop**No, I think the Partnership— I think I clarified that on the, that current trajectory of how it positions itself needed to change. So I think that’s part of the reason we’re here, to make sure it’s relevant for the next ten years, but— **Harry Siegel**But the business community seems increasingly less relevant to the political direction of the city. The Partnership seems less relevant. This is a bit of an inside conversation. For people who maybe vaguely know what it is or just spot its name in headlines or whatever, what is the point of the Partnership? And frankly, what is the good and utility that the business community brings to the city, if you just want to explain that? **Steven Fulop**What does the Partnership add to the city? **Harry Siegel**Sure. **Steven Fulop**Or the politics shifting left. **Harry Siegel**However you want to take it. **Steven Fulop**I think, forget about the Partnership as an organization for a second. I think the big corporations add a disproportionate amount of philanthropy, revenue, budget help, employee help to the ecosystem here in New York City. If those larger corporations migrate out, you would have a massive budget problem, you would have significant more unemployment, and the amount of philanthropy, which is tens of millions of dollars a year across, which sometimes is underreported or undershared, is a good thing ultimately, helps private institutions or public institutions, culture and arts institutions disproportionately, hospitals disproportionately. So I think that the business community here has a huge impact. The Partnership acts as a conduit from them to the public sector, and has multiple layers to it as I touched on earlier, where we help incubate early companies, facilitate connection to New York City, help advocate for policy change, et cetera, et cetera. **Harry Siegel**Outside of real estate, the business community, as you and Ben [Smith] were talking about, is less and less rooted here, and the problem is sort of a slow trickle to other regions, as opposed to people just pushing out and moving. Lots more people are voting. They seem less interested in the priorities of the business community. You’re talking about employees as a sort of base for the organization, 800,000 of them. I’m just trying to understand how business makes itself more relevant. **Steven Fulop**That’s a little bit of a process that I touched on earlier, a little bit of the transition that I touched on earlier on why we’re here. I think that people, as you saw in this last election, are struggling, an affordability crisis is real. There’s a lot of pressure, whether it’s jobs or housing. I think that’s all real. And I think that people have become, as I said earlier, fiscally more liberal because what’s working for them today and not working today has shifted from 10 years ago. So in order to be relevant, we need to be cognizant of that. **Alyssa Katz**People mentioned earlier that antisemitism is a priority for you, fighting it, and you know, I know you— **Steven Fulop**It’s a priority for us, yeah. **Alyssa Katz**Yeah, and we had a couple incidents that may have coincided with right when you arrived at the Partnership, right? The most visible one was, you know, this Israeli drone company. **Steven Fulop**Oh, the Israeli drone company, Easy Aerial? Yeah. OK. **Alyssa Katz**Yeah. What’s the other one? **Steven Fulop**It was the Park East Synagogue situation. **Alyssa Katz**Oh, right. Well, listen, but I’m talking purely on the business side. We can talk about it more broadly. But you know, there’s a company that was in a city-owned property. The city says it was a lease issue but it had been the target of a campaign saying, Well, you’re providing drones to the Israeli military, and we need you out of here. And then sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. And I’m just kind of curious about how you are approaching that kind of pressure on Israeli individuals and their businesses to get out of town, basically. How do you address that? **Steven Fulop**I think it’s a new conversation, obviously. We do think that antisemitism is rising, and it’s a significant concern. The BDS conversation and singling out one country to different standards than other countries that the U.S. or the public agrees with or disagrees with, or that has human rights violations or doesn’t have human rights violations, is a totally different conversation that we don’t agree with — singling out a single country. And the reality is that that BDS conversation, building on that, is not acceptable to us. And as you see elected officials more vocal in this space, unfortunately, if that ends up being, I think that is a place you’d definitely see us spend money. **Liena Žagare**Do you think Mayor Mamdani is doing a good job, and where would you— **Steven Fulop**Doing a good job? **Liena Žagare**Yeah. Doing a good job in the city and— **Steven Fulop**I think— Yeah, look, I think— **Liena Žagare**Where should he be more careful? **Steven Fulop**I think, I think there is— The short answer is, it’s been two-and-a-half months, so it’s hard to tell. I think that there’s a lot of mixed signals between things he says sometimes in smaller meetings versus what he says publicly. I think that, there’s been some missteps along the way, like for example the real estate tax proposal I thought was a misstep. I think that there’s been some really encouraging things. How he’s handled the president has been terrific. And I think that the city is in a better place than anybody would have thought post-election with regards to the president as a result of his communication there. I think that he has shown some willingness to move away from an extreme left position that he came in. That transition from a legislator to an executive is a transition, and from being a backbench Assemblyperson to a prominent front and center mayor, that transition is always complicated. Homeless encampments, the library funding, the FHEPS situation, he’s moderated some of those views, which are good. And at the same time, I think sometimes going back to how we interpret things that he puts out there, sometimes he’ll put something out that we’ll interpret in a way that I – ‘cause you have no choice but to interpret this stuff – you’re concerned about. You know, like, and I’ve said to them, Look, when American Express announced their headquarters, right? It’s a big deal. You know, a big American brand establishing a significant presence again here, recommitting. It’s good for his narrative ultimately, right? You know, that was in the works for some time. Or the Bank of America situation. If you look at the kind of statements that came out as a result of that, they never acknowledged the corporate side. They talked about the building trades. And that signals to us, A, questions about the housing conversation, right? And B, whether you understand the ecosystem that American Express employs thousands of people here, and they’re hugely involved philanthropically and committed to the city, and what that means. So I would say it’s mixed. **Nicole Gelinas**One thing that’s been missing from the ecosystem is a person like Dick Ravitch, who passed a...
Brittany Jones discusses plan to unseat Gov. Tina Kotek in May’s Democratic primary
Brittany Jones, an Army reserve veteran and progressive activist, is challenging Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek in May’s Democratic primary.
Science Central unveils new planetarium
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FULL SHOW: Inside INdiana Business 3/29/26
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Hingham Schools Eye Business Curriculum Expansion as Class Size Concerns Mount
HINGHAM - March 23, 2026 - The Hingham School Committee moved to modernize its high school offerings Monday night, reviewing a comprehensive plan to expand the “small but mighty” Business Department while simultaneously grappling with data that places Hingham as an outlier in elementary class sizes. Director of Social Studies Andy Hoey presented a two-year program review that highlighted the department’s success in community partnerships but warned that high student demand is testing current staffing limits. Meanwhile, committee Chair Jen Benham presented independent research showing Hingham is the only benchmark district with second-grade classes hitting a 25-student cap, sparking a directive for the Policy Subcommittee to review class-size standards. Editors note: South Shore News is going paid in April, subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss a story. Reach out for group or organizational pricing. Subscribe The Full Story The meeting opened with a look into the future of Hingham High School’s (HHS) curriculum. Andy Hoey, who oversees the Business Department, presented the first formal program review for the department since 2009. [15:09] Hoey characterized the department as a vital elective hub that currently serves between 14% and 27% of the HHS student body in any given year. [31:31] “We are very proud of our business department here at Hingham High School... while we’re very proud of it, we are always striving to make improvements and enhancements.” [15:55] — Andy Hoey, Director of Social Studies A key highlight of the presentation was the announcement of a new AP Business with Personal Finance course launching next year, pending enrollment. [20:08] The review team found that while the program is “well-aligned” to national standards, it remains a high-school-only offering. Hoey outlined an action plan to explore “vertical articulation,” potentially introducing business or financial literacy units at the middle school level to fill a “gap” identified between fifth and eighth grade. [41:48] However, the department faces “smoke and mirrors” regarding student GPA, according to Hoey. Currently, most business courses are “unleveled” and do not count toward a student’s GPA, which survey data suggests may deter some students from enrolling. [28:15] The committee discussed the possibility of offering Honors or College Prep (CP) credit for advanced courses, such as investing or marketing, to better reflect their academic rigor. [38:27] The discussion took a sharp turn toward elementary education during an enrollment update. Superintendent Dr. Katie Roberts noted a net gain of four students mid-year, but it was Jen Benham’s “rabbit hole” data analysis that caught the committee’s attention. [50:35] Benham researched 13 benchmark towns—representing 34 elementary schools—and found that Hingham was the only district with a second-grade section reaching 25 students this year. [51:36] Benham’s findings suggested that while many districts lack formal class-size policies, Hingham’s current cap of 25 for second grade may be too high. “I think if we could at least have 23 at a cap for grade two,” Benham suggested, noting the importance of that grade level for literacy development. [53:09], [54:55] Dr. Roberts cautioned that smaller classes require more staff, which is a significant hurdle following a budget season where nine general education positions were cut across the district. [55:56] The committee also finalized the 2025 Town Report, which was updated to be more “student-centered” and highlight staff early in the document. [11:12] Additionally, a series of food service policies were approved to align with Massachusetts’ universal free school meal mandate, including new protocols for meal modifications due to allergies or religious needs. [59:23] Share Why It Matters The meeting underscored a tension between Hingham’s desire to offer elite, specialized programming and the foundational pressure of class sizes. The expansion of the Business Department—including potential Microsoft certifications and AP courses—aims to prepare students for a “real world” where credit scores and financial literacy are paramount. [46:20] However, the revelation that Hingham’s second-grade classes are larger than those in all neighboring benchmark towns suggests a potential strain on early education that could impact long-term student performance if not addressed by the Policy Subcommittee. Official Minutes & Data Key Motions & Votes Motion: To approve the Hingham Public Schools 2025 Town Report. [13:16] Vote: Unanimous (7-0) ([01:13:28]) Motion: To approve the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) for summer counselor work regarding course placement. [57:33] Vote: Unanimous (7-0) ([57:50]) Motion: To approve Policy EFBA (School Food and Nutrition/Meal Modifications). [01:00:32] Vote: Unanimous (7-0) ([01:00:44]) Motion: To approve Policy EFC (Universal Free School Meals). [01:00:54] Vote: Unanimous (7-0) ([01:01:07]) Public Comment No members of the public spoke during the meeting or via the remote link. [01:02:30] What’s Next The Policy Subcommittee will take up the review of elementary class-size caps over the next year to determine if the Grade 2 limit should be lowered from 25 to 23. [52:18] The Business Department will monitor enrollment for the new AP Business course and continue exploring dual-enrollment partnerships with Quincy College. [38:13] Source Video: Harbor Media South Shore News is a reader-supported publication. 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S.F. progressives worry about Jackie Fielder’s health emergency
As of Saturday,, Fielder had not resigned from her office representing District 9. An aide said they would provide “updates as they become available.”
Peter Alexander is leaving NBC News to join MS NOW as an anchor
Alexander will have a daily daytime newscast and handle breaking news for progressive-leaning cable news channel formerly known as MSNBC.
Brian Cox says physics faces ‘unquantifiable’ threat under punishing funding cuts
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Consumer Discretionary - Casino Operator Stocks Q4 Recap: Benchmarking Golden Entertainment (NASDAQ:GDEN)
Quarterly earnings results are a good time to check in on a company’s progress, especially compared to its peers in the same sector. Today we are looking at Golden Entertainment (NASDAQ:GDEN) and the best and worst performers in the consumer discretionary - casino operator industry.
Long Island Science Center faces renewed eminent domain threat from Riverhead
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From pause to progress — a better path on AI policy
By Brittany Morris Saunders and Loren Furman Last year, following the Special Legislative Session, we wrote in Colorado Politics that delaying Colorado’s AI Act was not a setback. It was an opportunity. We asked state leaders to pause, bring more voices to the table and take the time to get this right. That is exactly […]
UABTeach Program Achieves Record Retention and Largest Math & Science Teaching Cohort - Alabama Department of Labor
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 26, 2026 BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The UABTeach program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, supported by The Alabama STEM Council via the Alabama Department of Workforce, is reporting strong student retention with a record number of STEM majors progressing toward graduation with the additional bonus of earning their teacher certifications. […]
Progressives on Capitol Hill want to rein in sports franchise relocations
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In the First Year, President Trump’s Tariffs Have Cost Small-Business Importers $306,000 on Average
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Good Morning, Nashville! Talking Immigration Data Politics at Vanderbilt University
After a busy day on Capitol Hill yesterday, I landed in Nashville, Tennessee, last night for an exciting two days on campus at Vanderbilt University. Carwil Bjork-James, an anthropologist whose creative use of database construction to support critical scholarship resonates strongly with my own work, generously invited me to give a talk today about the politics of immigration data and to join a Wikipedia edit-a-thon tomorrow on the topic of immigrant detention. I encourage you to check out Carwil’s database project “Ultimate Consequences” about political deaths in Bolivia after 1982, and his book The Sovereign Street: Making Revolution in Urban Bolivia. My talk today is titled “Untangling the Messy Politics of Immigrant Detention Data.” I’ll focus on how immigrant detention data (not just detention centers themselves) become sites of controversy—from the collection and classification choices that shape what we can know, to the strategic withholding and distortion of data for political ends. Drawing on research spanning multiple administrations, I’ll trace how current data controversies in the second Trump administration connect to long-standing tensions in how we measure, interpret, and communicate about immigration. My goal is to move beyond simple partisan narratives and offer a practical guide for anyone working with immigration data to explore both the pitfalls to avoid and the creative opportunities for more transparent, rigorous public communication about immigration realities. If you are on campus, please stop by. Tomorrow I will join Carwil and Vanderbilt students for a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon to edit and update Wikipedia entries related to immigrant detention with the latest robust information and data. This event is designed to orient participants into how to edit on Wikipedia, provide them with data-driven starter templates on detention facilities, and allow each person to produce an initial article on one element of the network of ICE facilities or one death in custody this year. The workshop is also a demonstration of how to use open data sources to build public knowledge—something I am deeply passionate about. Thank you to Vanderbilt University, the Spatial Histories series, and Carwil for hosting me. I would love to be a part of conversations and workshops related to immigration data on your campus. Students are really eager these days to have informed, critical, and data-driven explorations of our current immigration system. Reach out anytime if you want to discuss the possibility of bringing me to your campus. Subscribe
Encouraging progress in inclusive health policies for refugees and migrants
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Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders push bill to impose AI data center moratorium
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Glyphosate: A story of science, risk, and nuance
In the summer of 2014, a California groundskeeper named Dewayne Johnson started noticing patches of raw, weeping skin spreading across his body. He had spent years applying Roundup, Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide, for a school district, sometimes drenched in it when equipment malfunctioned. By 2014, he had a diagnosis: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. In 2018, a jury awarded him $289 million in damages, later reduced on appeal. Tens of thousands of lawsuits followed. The story hasn’t quieted down. It’s all over the internet, swinging between “this will kill you, buy organic” and “relax, you’re fear-mongering.” Some of that recent chatter stems from an Executive Order protecting glyphosate and its production, which set off intense infighting within the MAHA movement. Some of it reflects a deeper truth: Americans genuinely care about harmful chemicals in their environment (see poll below). And the conversation isn’t going anywhere, with a Supreme Court case involving Monsanto set for this April. Glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. But does glyphosate cause cancer? And how much exposure is actually risky? With so much mistrust in institutions and corporations (and some genuine conflicts of interest), making sense of the actual scientific evidence is genuinely hard. Here is a translation of what the scientific evidence actually says. Does glyphosate cause harm? Glyphosate is an herbicide that kills most plants it contacts rather than targeting specific species. It works by blocking an enzyme pathway (EPSPS) that plants and many microorganisms need to produce essential amino acids. Without those amino acids, the plant can’t grow and dies. Glyphosate was first developed by Monsanto in the 1970s and became ubiquitous after the company introduced “Roundup Ready” crops in the 1990s. In 2024, Bayer removed glyphosate from residential Roundup-branded products due to litigation pressure. But today it is still the most widely used herbicide in the world. Farmers also discovered they could spray it directly on crops like oats, lentils, beans, and peas just before harvest to dry them out faster and make harvesting easier. Because of its widespread use, it’s obviously really important to understand if it’s harmful to humans. The key principle: The dose makes the poison The most important concept in toxicology is that “the dose makes the poison.” Sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus articulated what remains the foundational principle of toxicology: sola dosis facit venenum. Water will kill you if you drink enough of it. Aspirin saves lives at 81 milligrams and causes internal bleeding at higher chronic doses. So, at what dose is glyphosate poisonous? The LD50 in rats (the dose that kills half the test animals) is around 5,600 mg/kg body weight. Table salt is roughly 3,000 mg/kg. By that classic measure, glyphosate is less acutely toxic than salt. But some people are exposed to a lot of glyphosate through their work. And among the general public, there are many questions about low-dose, cumulative exposure from multiple sources over long periods. Does glyphosate cause health problems? Cancer Correlation maps are striking, with one analysis finding that 60% of counties that spray the most glyphosate have non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma rates above the national average. But correlation alone doesn’t establish cause, which is why animal and human studies matter. In animals: Rat studies are typically what most fear is rooted in, but most people don’t know the study details on the dosage given to rats. A pooled analysis of the 13 most rigorous rat studies found evidence that very high doses, around 55,000 times greater than typical food residue exposure, can cause certain cancers. In humans: One of the strongest studies followed 55,000 herbicide users over 20 years and found no overall increased cancer risk. There was one signal: among those with the highest use, rates of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) appeared elevated. A broader meta-analysis of 18 human studies also found no overall cancer risk, though a separate meta-analysis focused specifically on non-Hodgkin lymphoma found that people with high cumulative glyphosate exposure faced a 41% higher relative risk compared to those with low or no exposure. These human studies are observational studies (randomized controlled trials would be unethical), and meta-analyses are only as reliable as the studies they pool. But the story seems consistent: at very high exposure levels, there may be some cancer risk. But that’s about as far as the science currently takes us. Emerging research: gut and reproductive health Gut: Because glyphosate targets a pathway that exists in some gut bacteria, scientists have questioned whether it could affect the microbiome. In mice, a 2023 University of Iowa study found that glyphosate altered gut bacterial composition and raised markers of intestinal inflammation. A 2024 systematic review found similar patterns: disrupted gut bacteria and problems with the mucus layer that protects the intestinal wall in mice. Whether this translates to humans is an open question. The human gut is highly variable and resistant, and we don't yet have strong studies confirming the same effects in people. Reproductive health: Animal studies have found that glyphosate-based herbicides can interfere with reproductive hormones, including disrupting egg cell development in mice and reducing the number of eggs available in sheep’s ovaries. However, the doses used in these experiments were high, so it’s not yet clear whether the same effects would occur in humans. On the human side, a 2021 pilot study led by Mount Sinai researchers tested urine samples from pregnant women across the U.S. and found glyphosate in 95% of them. The study also found a possible connection between higher glyphosate exposure during pregnancy and a subtle physical difference measured in female newborns. That said, some connections weren’t statistically reliable and this was a small study. The researchers themselves said more and larger studies are needed before drawing firm conclusions. What do regulators say about glyphosate safety? In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans" (Group 2A). The classification is worth taking seriously. But, there’s an important distinction: IARC classifies hazard, meaning the potential to cause harm under some conditions. It does not assess risk, which accounts for actual exposure levels and the real-world probability of harm. The U.S. EPA, the European Food Safety Authority, Health Canada, and regulatory agencies in Australia and Japan have all concluded that glyphosate is “unlikely to be carcinogenic to humans” at realistic exposure levels. They’re asking a different question: given how much of this people actually encounter, what is the probability of harm? Your actual exposure is what determines your actual risk. What does glyphosate mean for your daily life? At the grocery store: Food residues are small. The EPA’s acceptable daily intake is 1.75 mg/kg of body weight per day. To hit that threshold from oatmeal alone, a 150-pound adult would need to eat roughly 50 pounds of oats every day. But this calculation addresses only one pathway (food), and we don’t yet have robust tools to measure people’s actual total exposure. If reducing exposure matters to you, organic certification prohibits synthetic herbicides, and organic oat products generally test at lower or undetectable levels. Either way, a diet rich in whole grains, conventional or organic, is far better for your health than one that omits them out of fear of residues. On the farm: Occupational exposure is orders of magnitude higher than consumer exposure. Farmers and farm workers who mix, load, and apply glyphosate-based herbicides, especially without protective equipment, face meaningfully different risk profiles. Proper PPE isn’t optional. Integrated weed management strategies that rotate chemical modes of action are also worth taking seriously, both for health and for long-term effectiveness. If you live near a farm: Spray drift is real. Concentrations near field edges can spike during and after application, particularly on windy days. This is an area where I think public health could really step up and empower rural communities with buffer zones, rather than placing the onus on individuals. But for now, knowing your local agricultural calendar and keeping windows closed during application are the first steps. Bottom line Dewayne Johnson was exposed to glyphosate at levels most people will never encounter, and a jury decided he deserved compensation. That outcome is not evidence that the oatmeal in your pantry is dangerous. But it is a reminder that the dose, the context, and the person doing the exposing all matter enormously. Glyphosate is a chemical tool with benefits, trade-offs, and genuine open scientific questions. Learning to hold that complexity without collapsing into panic or dismissal is, honestly, one of the most useful and hardest things to do in navigating modern health science. Love, YLE Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is founded and operated by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, wife, and mom of two little girls. Hannah Totte, MPH, is an epidemiologist and YLE Community Manager. YLE reaches more than 425,000 people in over 132 countries with one goal: “Translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe
RPI Athletics Celebrates 50 Years of Women's Sports
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute proudly celebrates 50 years of women's varsity athletics—a milestone that reflects decades of progress, achievement, and opportunity for generations of student-athletes. What began as a commitment to expanding access in intercollegiate athletics has grown into a vibrant and competitive tradition that continues to shape the RPI community today.
Amer Sports publishes annual report 2025
Amer Sports today published its annual report for fiscal year 2025 providing an overview of the company’s financial performance and progress on strategy execution.
In politics, common decency still matters
I am a conservative. He was a progressive. Still, we had many productive conversations and worked together on a few important issues where our views converged.
Billings' Daylis Stadium reconstruction 'slightly ahead of schedule'
Driving by Daylis Stadium recently, it's easy to notice a lot of dirt and all sorts of construction rigs. So, where does the renovation progress stand?
Sherrill flexes political muscle in midterm battle between moderate Democrats and progressives
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill launches Mission to Deliver PAC, aiming to boost moderate Democrats in key federal and statewide 2026 midterm races.
Marathon has sold 1.2M copies across Steam, PS5, and Xbox
Alinea Analytics estimates show that Marathon has generated gross revenues of $55M via 1.2M copies sold on Steam, PS5, and Xbox: Looking at the split between Steam, PS5, and Xbox, Steam is clearly the main platform for Marathon, accounting for a little under 70% of the audience (800K copies sold). Meanwhile, PS5 takes about 19% (217K) and Xbox (including console, PC, and cloud) accounts for a bit over 11% or 133K. Marathon is technically a first-party Sony title, so seeing the home console struggle to break 20% of the volume is a notable data point for the ongoing platform-agnostic debate. PlayStation Studios online games will almost certainly continue being multiplatform (despite Sony reportedly pulling back on PC releases). Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe As for Marathon, the consensus among hardcore players who pushed through the awkward onboarding phase – myself included – is that it’s fantastic. The gunplay, aesthetic, and presentation are among the best in the shooter genre. A great game doesn’t always equal an immediate hit, though, as shown by our estimates. Things are looking lukewarm right now. But this might be one of those marathon-not-a-sprint situations. Had to, didn’t I? Why wasn’t Marathon a hit on the same level as Arc Raiders? One topic that came up in a lot of conversations at GDC this year was why Marathon hasn’t hit the same stratosphere as Arc Raiders. On paper, they’re both extraction shooters, and Marathon has the Bungie pedigree – the house that built the gold standard for gunplay in Halo and Destiny. Marathon’s neon-futuristic aesthetic also distinguishes itself from the gritty realism of Tarkov or the post-apocalyptic hope of ARC Raiders. But vibes can only get you so far for first impressions if the onboarding feels like a brick wall. Marathon is a sweaty PvP-focused experience with a first-time user experience and UI that I can only describe as dreadful. Players are dropped into a complex ecosystem where the UI, though visually striking, is functionally uninformative, forcing users to manually hover over nondescript, identical icons just to identify basic gear or weapon mods. This lack of clarity is compounded by punishing mechanics like a severe heat gauge for movement and a scarcity of vital resources, all without a clear tutorial or a low-stakes mode to learn the ropes. Most people – even top streamers and veteran shooter players – have no idea what’s going on in Marathon at first. Arc is on the complete other end of the spectrum. As we covered here and here, Arc Raiders offers a more collaborative, approachable loop where players often work together toward shared goals. And the objectives are instantly clear. To many players, this contrast only emphasised Marathon’s issues, especially during the testing period. Players understand the Arc Raiders loop within 30 minutes, while Marathon acts as a massive filter, chewing up newcomers and spitting them out before they can experience the depth of Bungie’s signature gunplay. What I’m getting at here is that the poor first-time user experience of Marathon’s Server Slam likely stifled launch sales, while the opposite was true for Arc. Let’s look at the pre-launch copies sold for each game during their respective Server Slams (launch-aligned) : Looking at the trajectory: Arc Raiders saw a massive 80% jump in copies sold during its three-day Server Slam (day -13 to -11). Players jumped in, realised the water was fine, and immediately opened their wallets. Marathon, meanwhile, saw a 49% increase in the four days following its Slam (Day -7 to -3). At the time of each game’s respective launch, Arc Raiders had nearly double the Steam footprint of Marathon – and word of mouth only continued to grow. Bungie could have had more time to fix the onboarding process had the beta happened earlier. But Marathon launched three days after the beta finished. These factors limited the launch sales quite a bit, I reckon. Marathon has found a niche audience, though Despite the friction-heavy start, the data suggests that those who survived Marathon’s onboarding are loving life. We’ve been tracking cross-platform DAUs, and while there’s the expected post-launch leakage, many players are sticking with it. After peaking at 478K total DAUs on its first Saturday, Marathon has settled into a respectable rhythm, holding 345K DAUs as of yesterday and averaging 380K DAUs across the weekend. Steam continues to do the heavy lifting here, consistently accounting for the lion’s share of the daily players. Players have been putting in the hours, too: On Steam, Marathon’s average playtime has climbed to 27.8 hours, significantly outpacing the console averages on PS5 (16.5h) and Xbox (17.3h). Even more telling than the averages: 22% of the Steam audience has surged past the 50-hour mark, and nearly 7% have already logged over 100 hours. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe This data suggests that once the Bungie magic clicks, it hooks players deeper than the average extraction shooter. There’s also started to be a shift in the game’s discourse. Marathon launched as one of those games that’s cool to hate. But as Marathon’s 100-hour club grows, we’re seeing conversations around its mechanical merit outweigh the negativity. Several high-profile creators, who were initially vocal critics, have spent the last week coming around on the mechanical depth of the endgame. It’s a subtle but positive signal; the hate train is losing steam, and a new narrative about the game is emerging. Bungie faithfuls unite Another interesting metric in Marathon’s first few weeks is who, exactly, is playing. Bungie leans heavily on its prestige as the “makers of Halo and Destiny,” in its marketing, and that message has clearly hit the mark. On Steam, the gravity (hammer) of Bungie’s previous work is unavoidable. A staggering 78.2% of Marathon players also played Destiny 2. The trend carries across other platforms, with 74.2% of PS5 players and 82.7% of Xbox players also having played Destiny 2. The Halo legacy lives on, it seems. More on that in a bit. While Destiny 2 went free to play, these numbers still represent a high-intent migration of a fanbase that trusts Bungie’s specific brand of kinetic gunplay and cryptic world-building. The Xbox data adds another layer of legacy. About 85.7% of Marathon players on Xbox have played Halo Infinite, while over half of the Steam audience has spent time in Halo Infinite and 36.1% in the Master Chief Collection (a paid collection of the old Bungie-made legacy games). Interestingly, we see a 55.9% overlap with ARC Raiders on Steam. Overlap is even higher there on PlayStation (60.5%) and Xbox (66.5%). And there’s also significant crossover with Helldivers 2 on all platforms, too. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe Bungie has found some of its fans with Marathon, and the challenge now is keeping this engaged in a high-stakes PvP environment when they’ve spent the last decade primarily enjoying the power fantasies of PvE. On that note… Go the full 26 miles? Or cut and run? Time for some could’ve, should’ve, would’ve. These things would have improved Marathon’s performance at launch: A more robust onboarding process, perhaps in the form of a short single-player/PvE campaign. We know Bungie fans love this stuff. A traditional arena-based mode akin to Destiny’s Crucible could have been a bridge for the cautious players who’d have been otherwise deterred by the Server Slam. It’s also a great palate cleanser after getting merked. Introducing a dedicated PvE environment would have similarly diversified the conversation and lowered the barrier for the Bungie faithful who found the pure PvP extraction loop too abrasive. PvE is safer than PvP these days. There’s an argument that a thin PvE mode would have just felt like a budget Destiny, potentially hurting the brand more. But given how dire the FTUE is, I think it would have been a net positive. Any kind of tutorialised loop that demystifies the stakes, really. While there is merit in a studio sticking firmly to a singular creative vision, and going all in on the hardcore extraction loop. Less forgiving is the technical reality is that the user interface and first-time user experience (FTUE) were not at a commercial standard for launch. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe In a landscape where player time is oversaturated and the most contested currency, a flawed FTUE is a critical failure point. But it’s not all doom and gloom, as Marathon has an incredible, unique gameplay loop, suggesting that financial success is still attainable if Bungie can pivot effectively. Bungie and PlayStation now face a difficult strategic crossroads, though – one within a challenging games market. They could: Double down on Marathon with a long-term Rainbow Six Siege- or No Man’s Sky-style recovery plan, which is something I heard Last Stand Media’s Chris Maldonado mention last week. While this could be a sunk-cost fallacy in action, it could eventually yield the audience the game’s mechanical depth deserves. Shift focus toward the inevitable Destiny 3 or another project, mitigating the escalating opportunity cost and cutting their losses, so to speak. Doing both is an expensive proposition, given the high overhead and burn rate of operating out of Bellevue, Washington. With Sony recently demonstrating a lower threshold for underperforming studios and projects, the margin for error has vanished. Whatever happens, the next six months will determine whether Marathon becomes a cornerstone of Sony’s live-service portfolio or a cautionary tale of vision exceeding accessibility. I’m hoping it’s the former, because Marathon rocks. As always, hit subscribe to get updates on Marathon and other relevant games. Subscribe Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free? We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
Subtle health changes may signal progressive supranuclear palsy years in advance
Drawing from UK Biobank data, Mass General Brigham researchers have uncovered specific health factors linked to higher or lower risk of developing progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), a rare but devastating ...
Opinion | Climate Science Is Creeping Into Courtrooms
Judges are fed biased information from progressive activists and a flawed scientific reference manual.
Scientists Develop New Gut Health Measure That Tracks Disease
Scientists have identified a new way to distinguish healthy guts from diseased ones and track how some illnesses progress by measuring how gut bacteria interact with one another. According to a study published in Science, a Rutgers-led team of scientists found that healthy and diseased digestive systems behave like two distinct ecological states, driven not by individual microbes but […]
We disagreed on politics. We agreed on wine. That was enough.
At the Virginia Governor’s Cup Gala in Richmond earlier this month, a very dapper gentleman approached me and introduced himself. In his light-colored suit and bowtie, he looked very Southern in a classical sense, the sort of Virginia Gentleman you used to see south of the Rappahannock as recently as my college days. “I’m a longtime reader and fan of your writing, if not your politics,” he said. His comment was the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove, simultaneously conveying praise and disapproval while establishing boundaries. Man, I wish we still discoursed like this instead of shouting bromides and insults to try and “own” our opponents with a funny meme and a furrowed brow. Subscribe “Well, we’ll always have wine to share together,” I said, and thanked him for his kind words. We clinked glasses, exchanged pleasantries about the delicious gold medal-winning wines being poured that evening, and went our separate ways. Our exchange reminded me that more unites us than divides us. Wine brings people together to share a meal and a few hours of joy despite our differences.1 That’s why I refer to the wine community — including readers and consumers — rather than the wine industry. Together, we are so much more than production, distribution and sales statistics. A few minutes later the evening’s awards ceremony began. Applause grew as the 12 winemakers who made the top-scoring wines for the Governor’s Case took the stage, including a loud cheer for Jonathan Wheeler of Trump Winery and his 2018 Blanc de Noir sparkling wine. All the winemakers on stage had reason to be proud, Wheeler perhaps more so. Trump Winery was the only winery to win six gold medals in the competition this year. (Wineries are limited to six entries.) Two of Wheeler’s ciders also won gold medals in a separate competition. When you cover the labels and take the sour taste of politics off your palate, the wines are pretty darn good.2 Then Gov. Abigail Spanberger, newly elected Democrat and Virginia’s first female governor, was introduced to great applause to announce which of the 12 wines had won the Governor’s Cup. She spoke for a few minutes about the importance of wine to Virginia’s economy and tourism and the international acclaim Virginia wine has received. Just two weeks earlier, she gave the Democrats’ response to Trump’s State of the Union speech, but this night wasn’t about politics. That didn’t stop several people in the crowd from speculating on the irony should she have to present the trophy to Trump Winery. In the end, Valley Road Vineyards was displayed on the screen behind Spanberger as the winning winery. Blue Bee Cidery in Richmond took top honors for that category. The crowd cheered a female governor presenting the state’s highest trophy to a female winemaker and then resumed the evening’s festivities, united by their mutual love of wine. A whiff of politics couldn’t dim the cheer of celebration and a community united by its love of wine. In Memoriam: Michel Rolland The global wine community lost a giant March 20, with the passing of Michel Rolland. He was 78. Rolland was the original “flying winemaker,” a globe-trotting consultant who helped Bordeaux regain its mojo in the 1970s and then shaped the rise of Napa Valley cult Cabernet as consultant to Simi, Harlan, Newton, Screaming Eagle, Araujo, Dalle Valle and other wineries. He was instrumental in Argentina’s rise to prominence and even had his own winery, Clos de los Siete, in a partnership with other wine families. Rolland’s career arc paralleled that of Robert Parker, the world’s most influential critic. Parker championed many of the wines Rolland consulted on, helping build his reputation and demand for his services. It also made him a target for Parker’s critics. As W. Blake Gray wrote on Wine-Searcher in his excellent tribute to Rolland: Rolland created the type of wines Parker loved: rich body, plenty of fruit, soft tannins. He sometimes faced the accusation of creating a generic international style of red wine, where the great wines he made in Argentina were indistinguishable from the great wines he made in France. Rolland chafed at that critique, as did many of his fans. He was credited with championing green harvesting and leaf pulling, as well as careful selection of grapes in the winery, practices we nearly universally think of today for high-quality winemaking. “Michel was an incredible innovator who changed how wine was made and how grapes were grown,” Napa Valley winemaker Aaron Pott wrote on Facebook. “His work has transformed the wine trade. He created new ways of looking at wine, tasting wine, evaluating ripeness and quality. … This was not just a man with a ‘style’ that he imposed on vineyards but a man that understood how to make great wine from great sites.” Rolland started his consulting company in 1973 in Libourne, in Bordeaux, with his wife, Dany. Both had graduated the year before from Bordeaux’s Institute d’Oenologie. The couple sold their majority share in the business in 2020, according to Wine Spectator. Over his career, Rolland reportedly worked with more than 100 wineries in 20 countries. He even made it to Virginia, where he consulted for Kluge Estate in the mid-2000s. (Kluge Estate is now Trump Winery.) Reader feedback, please! Last week, I did my first WineLine Live! with Dr. Laura Catena of Catena Zapata winery in Argentina. We enjoyed a fascinating discussion about her efforts to preserve the genetic heritage of old vineyards in Mendoza. I conceived of WineLine Live! for paid subscribers, as a thank you for your financial support. And while only a few people joined live, the video now has more views than I have paid subscribers, so I guess that’s pretty good. Even so, I’m considering opening future installments to anyone on Substack to reach a broader audience. So my questions to you: Should these be public? And what format do you prefer? Live gives a chat feature with the potential for viewers to interact with me and the guest, while a video post would just be that. Another alternative is a podcast, which would just be audio, without video of my chins. Please let me know in the comments. Leave a comment In the Glass A few wines I’ve enjoyed recently: Bonny Doon Vineyard Take Me to Your Liter, Le Cigare Volant, Red Wine of the Earth. 2023, Central Coast, CA. Blend of Grenache, Syrah Cinsaut and Petite Sirah. Delightful wine with expressive red fruit flavors, casual drinking. Doon lovers of a certain age will remember Randall Grahm’s Big House Red; this is more in that style than his original Le Cigare Volant, modeled after Chateauneuf du Pape. The liter bottle makes it an even better value. I see this online at about $15. Great value. Albert Bichot Bourgogne Pinot Noir Origines 2023. 13% - Textbook pinot noir and an excellent, affordable entry (regional) Burgundy. Wine Enthusiast Top 100 Wines of 2025. $24 at Total Wine & More. Loma Larga Pinot Noir 2021 “Coastal Cool Climate Wine”, Valle de Casablanca, Chile. An older sample, showing beautifully. Spicy and fruit forward. I’m seeing widely varied pricing online, from $18-$32. At the lower end, it’s a terrific value. 13.5% Dr. Loosen Riesling Dry 2016, Mosel, Germany. Found this “in the stack.” And it stacked up well, shedding some of its youthful acidity for opulent Riesling character, including a hint of the mineral oil older Riesling often features. A great value, as I’m seeing it as low as $14 online. 12% abv. Red Tail Ridge Blau Franc Blend 2024, Sans Oak, Finger Lakes. 13.4% abv. The name is a neat portmanteau of Blaufrankisch and Cabernet Franc, thus Blau Franc. The blend is 50-50, no oak involved. The Blau dominates on the palate, with the spicy caraway seed (think New York deli rye bread). The Franc adds body. The result is juicy, energetic and joyful. Sokol Blosser Estate Rosé of Pinot Noir 2025, Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley, Oregon. This first rosé of 2025 was a welcome respite to our cold, snowy winter here in the Mid-Atlantic. Oh man, I needed this! Bright and energetic, exuberant even, it perks up the mood and goes down fast. 13%. Certified B Corp. Ingredient and nutrition labeling, and in a modest way that doesn’t occupy a lot of label space. (Since it’s not required, presumably there are no minimum font size requirements.) More wineries should follow this example. Dave McIntyre's WineLine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Thanks for reading Dave McIntyre's WineLine! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share 1 Some restraint may be required. 2 Especially the bubblies.
Trump orders War Dept to postpone strikes on Iranian energy sites, citing 'productive' talks to end war
President Donald Trump, in an all-caps post early Monday morning, declared progress toward "resolution" of the war on Iran.
The Christian Science Monitor Daily for March 23, 2026
Rethink the news: Reducing news to hard lines and side-taking leaves a lot of the story untold. Progress comes from challenging what we hear and considering different views.
Your Thymus and Your Healthspan
Our thymus gland plays a central role in the development or our immune system, specifically for supporting T cell development (how these cells got their name, maturation and differentiation in the thymus) and discriminating between self and foreign, non-self antigen proteins with production of dendritic cells. As we age, our thymus gland shrinks—the process known as involution—with progressive change from spongy to fatty tissue, with loss of functionality. But this process, with respect to timeline and extent, markedly varies from one person to the next. And to make things even more complicated, our thymus gland anatomy and precise location in the chest also is highly variable. So the famous Frank Netter diagrams from the 1960s (such as at left below) don’t capture the remarkable heterogeneity that a random set of 12 chest CT scans (below at right). What I consider as 2 landmark papers in Nature this week (here and here) used AI to quantify health of the thymus in 2 large cohorts, and then correlate the metric to a broad array of health outcomes. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’m going to cover three questions: (1) How was thymus health determined by AI?; (2) How is thymus health linked to key clinical outcomes? and (3) Are there ways we can promote a healthy (aka rejuvenate) thymus gland in our later years? Subscribe 1. How was thymus health determined by AI? This was accomplished by extensive work developing and validating an AI pipeline for 2 stages, the first for localization and segmentation of the thymus bed, and the second to quantify a digital marker, termed the thymic health score. There’s a lot to this algorithmic development, so I won’t go into all the details, but just provide a rudimentary outline of what was done. The 1st stage used supervised learning with 2 radiologists reviewing 2,461 chest CT scans. That work trained a 3D U-Net model to automatically identify the thymic bed’s 3D cropped region using center of mass coordinates, which reached 99.8% accuracy. The 2nd stage used a foundation model that was pre-trained with SwAV (which stands for Swapping Assignment between multiple Views), a self-supervised model, that generated a high-dimensional thymus representation of 4,096 features. That compares to the radiology reductionist and subjective scoring of 0 to 3 where 0 means the thymus is fully degenerated and fatty, and 3 is considered dense, intact glandular soft tissue. Notably, the self-supervised learning (SSL) performance was superior to supervised (AUC ~0.75 vs 0.55, respectively) reflecting the shallowness of the 0-3 classifier vs SSL’s holistic, self-taught AI. The thymic health score ranged from 0 to 100, with the highest number indexed to fully preserved thymic health. The algorithmic work extended to explainability with both Shapely value distribution, meaning the model was holistic not relying on any “magic” pixel, and occlusion sensitivity, demonstrating the model’s performance was not affected by ribs, sternum, lung tissue, but rather focused on the thymic bed directly. Below are a few saliency maps from the occlusion sensitivity that indicate the thymic bed focus, not affected by neighboring structures, using the jet color scale. Now the AI was ready for processing ~25,000 CT scans, each over 30 MB files, from the 2 large participant cohorts to provide a thymic health score, it did so in less than 14 hours, which is less than 2 seconds per scan! Share 2. How is thymus health linked to key clinical outcomes? The two cohorts were the National Lung Screening Trial, NLST (N=25,031) and the Framingham Heart Study, FHS (N=2,581) each with baseline demographics and long term follow up of >12 years for health outcomes. From the NSLT, you can see below that increased age and body-mass index were correlated to reduced thymic health. And, overall, men had reduced thymic health scores compared with women. There are a lot of graphs in the paper for outcomes, for both the NLST and FHS cohorts. To simplify the major outcomes, below is a composite Figure with striking reduction of all-cause mortality and for the different causes of death. The results were consistent between the 2 cohorts. For example, the cardiovascular mortality hazard ratio average was 0.57 in NLST and 0.38 in FHS (weighted to be 0.53 for the aggregate). The reduction of mortality also extended to digestive diseases and pulmonary disease (data not shown below). Lung cancer incidence was reduced by 36% for high vs low thymic health (Figure below, with a panel -incidence and b panel-mortality, adjusted for age, sex, BMI, smoking status). Notably, there was a smoker’s paradox: lower incidence and improved survival for lung cancer in smokers who had a high thymus health score. Smoking was associated with lower thymic scores whereas alcohol was not. Higher thymic health was linked to higher HDL cholesterol, lower triglycerides, lower fasting blood glucose, and lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Inflammation biomarkers, such as C-reactive protein and interleukin-6, were elevated in the people with lower thymic health scores. In their second paper, the same team looked at the relationship between thymic score and outcomes for 3,476 patients receiving cancer immunotherapy. The non-small cell lung cancer progression-free survival was reduced in patients with low thymic health score. A parallel relationship for survival was seen for other types of cancer including melanoma, breast, and kidney with a 44% lower risk among high thymic scores (Figure). A similar pattern was seen with different immune checkpoint inhibitors. The thymus health score outperformed programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1)and tumor mutation burden (TMB) assay of the tumor and was an independent prognostic marker of progression-free survival. In this dataset, a direct connect with thymus score and adaptive immune function was noted with a correlation before cancer treatment for both T-cell diversity and thymus T-cell production (a metric known as T cell receptor excision circles). Thymus Removal Study There is a highly relevant citation about thymus function before moving onto ways to rejuvenate it. In 2023, a very important study of thymus removal during cardiothoracic surgery was published, with 1146 patients undergoing thymus removal vs 1146 matched controls (mean age 55 years). The adverse outcomes for thymus removal were striking, with a 2.9 higher risk of all-cause mortality and doubling of cancer incidence, 1.5 fold increase in cancer mortality, and 1.5-fold increase in autoimmune diseases. The immune function showed marked compromise after thymus removal, as reflected by CD4+ and CD8+ T cells (Figure below) Share Ground Truths 3. Are there ways we can promote a healthy (aka rejuvenate) thymus gland in our later years? In recent months we’ve learned a lot about the process of thymus involution and the pathways by which this may be modulated. Thymus involution is primarily due to loss to thymus epithelial cells (TECs) and there are 2 subtypes with different functions: the cortical, responsible for positive selection of T cells, and the medullary, for negative selection. When adipose tissue infiltrates the thymus, thymic adipocytes are pro-inflammatory, knocking out T-cell output. Likewise, systemic inflammation, or “inflammaging,” from smoking, obesity, and chronic stress promote thymic adipocytes. Now, from preclinical studies, we know about key pathways that account for these processes. Historically, back in 2014, FOXN1 was recognized as a single master transcription factor essential for TEC function, with studies in mice with forced FOXN1 upregulation leading to thymus regeneration. That laid the foundation for potential regrowth of quiescent thymus cells. It took awhile to find pathways to accomplish this goal and to even refute its role as the master regulator. The Liver-Thymus Axis Feng Zhang and his team recently showed that injection of an mRNA vaccine to the liver encoding DLL1, IL-7 and FLT3-L in combination, factors known to support thymopoiesis (Figure), successfully enhanced immune function in aged mice. However, the effect was transient. The FGF21 Story Two reports in 2025 addressed the thymus gland’s production of FGF21, a growth factor (fibroblast growth factor 21) and its control of thymus involution. This growth factor is also produced by the liver, but it doesn’t have impact on the thymus in aged rodent models. In contrast, The liver’s hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) has been shown to reverse senescent TEC structural changes. Growth hormone stimulates production of insulin growth factor-1 (IGF-1) in the liver and the thymus. Two small studies in human participants (TRIIM, for Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation) of 6 and 50 people, respectively, treated with combined human growth hormone, metformin and DHEA, suggested the potential of slowing epigenetic aging and improving thymus mass and function. But the combination of drugs, small sample, and lack of controls make conclusions murky. Increased thymus FGF21 led to increased CD8 T cells in old mice and extended healthspan and improved physical performance. Building on the previous FOXN1 data, ablation of β-klotho, the obligatory co-receptor for FOXN1, accelerated thymic aging. The benefit to FGF21 was confirmed in a companion paper using an FGF21 knock-in mouse model showing thymus enlargement and increased TECs throughout the lifespan. (schematic Figure below). The accompanying editorial for these 2 papers speculated: “The proposed link between age-associated thymus involution and organismal aging is intriguing, and suggests we might seek to achieve systemic rejuvenation by counteracting thymic involution.” Other Factors Lessons from the Axolotl (Mexican Salamander) In an elegant set of experiments of the axolotl (Figure), known for its complete thymus regeneration after total surgical removal, mediators were identified. Surprisingly FOXN1 was dispensable. But midkine, a growth factor, appeared to be the driver, the initiator of thymus cell growth, survival, and repair. Other components that contributed were Postn+ (periostin-expressing mesenchymal niches) and Ccl19, a chemokine protein from the bloodstream. RANK and RANKL RANK (receptor activator of nuclear factor κB its ligand (RANKL) have been considered key regulators of medullary TECs. In a study of both aged mice and human thymus cell cultures, their key role was confirmed, with multiple benefits of resorting TEC function, recruitment of progenitor cells, and T cell development. Subscribe Summing Up This body of work strongly supports the health of the thymus gland as a critical regulator of human healthspan, not just a correlate or link. The new landmark studies are reinforced by the regenerative biology experimental models that have shown, via an array of mediators, that healthspan of aged mice is at least in part dependent on thymus gland function and its critical role for maintaining adaptive immunity. It sure seems that we’d be better off having an immune reservoir of naive T cells instead of a profile in older adults of exhausted, low quality, memory T cells, with a senescent phenotype. It is striking that we ignored the importance of the thymus gland for many decades. A wake-up call was the results of the thymectomy matched control study reviewed here, with the opposite of high thymic health score improved health outcomes. The convergence of AI and healthspan here is notable. The exceptional and laborious work for developing and validating (no less explaining) the AI to quantify thymus health set the foundation for probing the connect the major health outcomes in two cohorts with extensive follow-up. We’ve never had a way to meaningfully quantify the thymus gland before, so this represents important leverage of supervised, self-supervised, and transformer models. The study wouldn’t have been possible without AI. And it begs the question as to whether there are ways we can maintain our thymus at a high health score. But it’s not so simple to rejuvenate our thymus. There are multiple risks including the induction of autoimmunity, increasing the risk of cancer, and inducing a pro-inflammatory state. For example, factors that increase TEC proliferation could compromise the medulllary negative selection process and leak out auto-reactive (self-attacking) T cells. Thymic cells could be induced to proliferate, but we know, for example, that growth hormone and IGF-1 are associated with an increase risk of cancer. If thymus rejuvenation doesn’t clear out the accumulated senescent cells in older adults, then inflammation within the gland could block the production of TECs. Keeping these risks in mind, we now have identified many ways to keep our thymus healthy as we age that undoubtedly will be tested in clinical trials going forward. Ultimately, the benefit-to-risk tradeoffs will be defined. In the meantime, we have desperately needed an immunome. As I’ve stressed in multiple prior Ground Truths, we have no test in the clinic to assess a patient’s immune status! It was very encouraging for me to get an email from Hugo Aerts, the senior author of the landmark papers in the days after they were published: “I also wanted to say that your Substack on “Why We Need an Immunome” was inspiring for this work. We found it a very compelling perspective and greatly enjoyed reading it.” Just having an assessment of a person’s immune status via a chest CT scan, with millions of these performed per year, might help in guiding the right immunotherapy for cancer (e.g. more intensive, combinations for those with low thymic health scores) and help define people who are increased risk for age-related diseases of cancer, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative. The main theme of Super Agers is that we now have many layers of data (genetics, proteins, biomarkers, organ clocks that can be integrated via multimodal AI) for us to define a person’s specific risk decades before one of these age-related diseases leads to symptoms, enabling prevention. From the new studies this week, we can add thymus health score as yet another way to understand a person’s risk, a window into their adaptive immune system and healthspan. And perhaps someday we will be able to safely rejuvenate the thymus, or maintain its health through one’s life, and use the thymus health score to monitor. NB: I wrote this post (No A.I.) A Quick Poll Loading... ********************************************************************* Thanks to Ground Truths subscribers (now > 200,000) from every US state and 212 countries. Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile. Please join! If you found this interesting PLEASE share it! Share Ground Truths Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don’t hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Let me know topics that you would like to see covered. Leave a comment Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. It enabled us to accept and support 47 summer interns in 2025! We aim to accept even more of the several thousand who will apply for summer 2026.
Maine progressive Senate candidate Graham Platner responds to Gov. Janet Mills’ attack on his online past
Politics Unplugged (Full Episode) March 22, 2026
This week on Politics Unplugged, Progressive activist Kai Newkirk explains why he is running to unseat Democratic incumbent Greg Stanton in the congressional race in CD4. Then, consultants Marcus Dell’Artino and Matt Grodsky discuss the fallout from the Cesar Chavez allegations and the political importance of high gas prices.
Not all business owners: How Business for Good is building a new voice in San Diego
Business for Good, a network of San Diego business leaders, advocates for progressive causes in the region.
3 Democratic pastors in Iowa are running for Congress, a snapshot of a national trend
More Democrats are openly running on faith, as progressive clergy and other religious candidates push back on the idea that Christianity belongs to the right
“Loyal Slaves” and Campfire Entertainment in Frank Vizetelly’s Confederate Camp
Frank Vizetelly’s illustration titled “Night Amusements in the Confederate Camp” appeared in the Illustrated London News on January 10, 1863. It was one among a number of wartime scenes that Vizetelly captured for the newspaper. Subscribe Following the war, the illustration appeared in a number of books, including John O. Casler’s Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade (1893) and Campfires of the Confederacy (1898) by Ben La Bree. The scene depicts a Confederate camp at night with an enslaved man, most likely a camp servant, performing a dance around a fire with the music provided by a soldier playing a banjo. Another enslaved man looks on at the right. Vizetelly likely witnessed the scene—one that would have been common throughout the war. It’s a wonderful example of the way in which Confederates—slaveowners and nonslaveowners alike—experienced the presence of slave labor in the army. Vizetelly was deeply sympathetic to the Confederate cause. His depiction of the enslaved man as more than happy to entertain the very people who were fighting to keep him enslaved was precisely the kind of image designed to reassure a British audience that slavery was benign, and by implication, that Britain need not feel morally troubled about recognizing or supporting the Confederacy. Share Just as importantly, the sight of a dancing slave reassured Confederates themselves that the institution of slavery remained secure even after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. I’ve come across this illustration many times before and I plan on using it in my next book project on the role of enslaved labor in the Confederate army during the Gettysburg Campaign, but this is not the reason I am sharing it with you today. It has to do with where I recently found it, which came as a complete surprise and is incredibly revealing. Let’s take a look.
US Health Department official signals progress on selecting new CDC head
The top CDC job has been filled by acting directors since Trump fired then-director Susan Monarez last August, after she objected to Kennedy's proposed vaccine policy changes.
Markiplier to Microdramas: The Ankler x NAB Show’s Future of Entertainment
Share Subscribe Vegas, baby! The Ankler is heading back to NAB Show for a second year in a row — and doubling down on conversations with the smartest people in the industry. From April 18–22, we’re partnering again with the industry’s biggest media and tech gathering to break down the Business of Media and Entertainment as it’s actually evolving: faster, riskier and increasingly driven by new formats, new audiences and new power players. This curated series will bring together top creators, executives and innovators to tackle the forces reshaping the industry — from the AI disruption of Hollywood’s creative ecosystem to the rise of the creator economy, shifting audience behavior and the changing economics of production. We’ll be rolling out more programming in the coming weeks — including top speakers from leading AI studios, prediction markets and beyond — so keep an eye on the Business of Media and Entertainment hub. But first up, we’re announcing two panels about what’s actually working in Hollywood: The Scary-Smart Business of Horror A good scare has become one of the entertainment economy’s most reliable engines. With disciplined budgets, built-in fandoms and global box office upside, horror consistently outperforms. From theatrical releases to streaming-first originals and creator-driven IP, the genre is artistically flexible and financially durable — and one of the last truly communal experiences for Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences. Join YouTube creator Mark Fischbach, aka Markiplier, whose independent feature Iron Lung earned more than $50 million at the global box office, Atomic Monster president Michael Clear and screenwriter Akela Cooper (M3GAN, Malignant) for a conversation moderated by Like & Subscribe’s Natalie Jarvey about why horror travels so effectively across platforms and borders, how studios and independents are building sustainable genre pipelines and why the next wave of breakout franchises may emerge from unexpected sources. Inside the Microdrama Boom Short-form serialized storytelling is having a major moment. Microdramas, social-native series and creator-led narratives are capturing massive audiences with low-cost, rapid production cycles and direct-to-fan distribution. What was once dismissed as niche or experimental is now attracting major platform investment. Moderated by Jarvey, this panel of microdrama creators and executives — including one of the format’s top stars and producers, Kasey Esser, and Dhar Mann Studios’ head of vertical content, Erin McFarlane — examines how format innovation, fandom dynamics and algorithmic discovery are reshaping the economics of scripted storytelling and what traditional studios can learn from these agile models. For sponsorship opportunities, contact Lynne@theankler.com Share
New dispute emerges around Subnautica 2’s early access release
Lawyers for the ousted—and now partially reinstated—leadership team of Unknown Worlds, the studio behind Subnautica 2, are crying foul over news that the game will be released into early access in May. The release announcement earlier this week was made improperly, potentially “damaging the game and sowing additional confusion among the Subnautica community,” the lawyers said in a letter sent on Tuesday to Vice Chancellor Lori Will of Delaware’s Court of Chancery. In their letter, the lawyers also floated the idea of asking Will to find Krafton in contempt of the court’s ruling. The letter was sent just one day after Will’s bombshell ruling that publisher Krafton had breached its contract with Unknown Worlds’ executive team, when it fired them last June. The new issue isn’t necessarily the May early access timeframe, but how the news was announced. The letter and Krafton’s response have not been previously reported. A quick recap of prior events: Subnautica 2 is an unreleased, underwater survival adventure and the most-wishlisted game on Steam. Last year, longtime Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill, along with studio co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire, were fired by Krafton. They swiftly sued, saying the publisher had terminated them to avoid paying out up to $250 million in potential performance-based bonuses. The studio leaders had hoped to earn that with an early access release of the game, which Krafton had blocked. The publisher argued in court that Subnautica 2 wasn’t ready, which the ousted execs disputed. On Monday, Will ruled that Krafton had violated its contract, firing the execs to avoid the performance payouts, and that it had to reinstate Gill and give him full authority over any early access release for Subnautica 2. On Tuesday, IGN reported on a new memo issued that day to Unknown Worlds staff by Steve Papoutsis, the executive Krafton had put in charge of Unknown Worlds after the 2025 firings. In the note, Papoutsis said that Subnautica 2 had passed a key development milestone “last week” and that he and Krafton had determined the game “is ready for Early Access release in May.” This news appeared to catch the lawyers for Gill, Cleveland and McGuire by surprise. On Tuesday night, they sent a letter to Will expressing “serious concerns” about whether it would be possible to forge an agreement with Krafton consistent with the judge’s order. Papoutsis’ memo was a problem, they wrote. He didn’t have the authority to declare anything about Subnautica 2’s release. As of 9am ET on Monday, March 16, the effective date of Will’s order, Papoutsis wasn’t CEO of Unknown Worlds. Gill was. And, per Will’s order, only Gill could make Subnautica 2 release decisions. They continued: Krafton self-servingly announced the launch without any regard to its impact on the game, the team, or the community—let alone this Court’s Opinion. Announcing the release of a game is momentous, and it is typically accompanied by significant marketing activity, fanfare, and community coordination. And most importantly, the announcement is carefully designed to maximize excitement for the game. That entire process was supposed to be driven by Mr. Gill. However, in defiance of the Court’s Opinion, Krafton has now taken that away, further damaging the game and sowing additional confusion among the Subnautica community. The lawyers speculated that Krafton had “intentionally leaked” Papoutsis’ memo and then issued an official statement to confirm the leak. Game File is a reader-supported publication. My reporting is only possible through support from readers like you. To support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe On Wednesday, lawyers for Krafton defended their client in their own letter to vice chancellor Will, saying nothing they did violated her order nor showed contempt: Papoutsis’s message was simply celebrating the UW employees’ efforts toward a past event: Krafton’s pre-Opinion determination that Subnautica 2 was ready for Early Access release. There was nothing improper about conveying the results of the milestone review or thanking the development team for their dedication and talent. They added that Gill could still make his own call about Subnautica 2’s release: In his role as CEO, Gill will be able to assess independently his views on the state of Subnautica 2 and the appropriate release schedule; nothing in Papoutsis’s message alters Gill’s authority or discretion. Vice chancellor Will has not responded to the letters and doesn’t necessarily have to. Both parties were previously ordered by Will to confer this week and submit a proposed judgment consistent with her ruling. The letter from Gill’s attorney’s this week doesn’t indicate whether he would or would not support a May release for Subnautica 2. But it could limit his options. And, if Gill’s lawyers are right, the lack of marketing fanfare around the leak of the May date could dull the launch of the game. Any harm to Subnautica 2’s launch is an extra sensitive issue given the context of the legal dispute: millions of dollars of payouts are on the line, tethered to the scale of the game’s initial performance. In her ruling on Monday, Will noted that there was obvious “bad blood” between Gill’s side and Krafton but that the two would need to work together: “They can—and must—act in good faith to navigate their remaining contractual relationship.” Item 2: A new kind of couch co-op game A highlight of GDC each year is the Alt.Ctrl showcase that features games played with extremely experimental controllers. Perusing this year’s offerings last Friday, I found a game controlled with giant scissors, another with big toothbrushes and one that amounted to dumpster diving. My favorite was Pivot, a co-op game about collectively maneuvering a couch. It was developed by students at the University of Utah’s masters of arts and engineering games program. Players lift and tilt the physical couch in order to control the position of a virtual one. That virtual one is moving through an obstacle course on-screen, while being pursued by a giant skull. Developer Nishant Verma told me at GDC that the couch is made of styrofoam (this became more evident as I watched!) and that the name was a riff on an episode of the sitcom Friends. Item 3: In brief… 🚫 Ubisoft is laying off more than 100 workers at its Red Storm studio, as the North Carolina location known for decades for its Tom Clancy games, ceases in-house game development, VGC reports. 👀 On Monday, Nvidia’s revealed its DLSS 5 AI-driven graphics technology that purports to improve game graphics… and it has been roasted about it by the media and the online gaming public for the remainder of the week. The tech changed the faces of characters in footage from Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy and EA Sports FC, drawing accusations of giving carefully art-directed games the generic look of AI “slop.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had said on Monday that “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics—blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.” By mid-week, Huang was telling Tom’s Hardware that the new tech’s critics were “completely wrong” because game-makers could still “fine-tune the generative AI” to suit their game’s aesthetics.
German Health Minister Nina Warken and WHO Hub in Berlin highlight 2025 achievements
Germany’s Federal Minister of Health, Nina Warken, visited the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin today to review progress and launch its 2025 Annual Report. The report highlights advances in using artificial intelligence, data science and pathogen genomics to strengthen global preparedness for future pandemics.In 2025, the WHO Hub in Berlin worked with more than 160 Member States and over 190 partners to help countries and organizations develop new systems and tools to detect and understand new public health threats as quickly as possible, whenever and wherever they occur.BMG to confirm whether they wish to contribute a quote. “Detecting outbreaks early is one of the most effective ways to save lives and prevent epidemics from becoming global crises,” said Federal Minister of Health Nina Warken. “Germany is proud to host and support the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. Its work strengthens our safety at home and helps protect people worldwide.”Artificial intelligence is increasingly transforming the detection of outbreaks. In 2025, the Hub launched an upgraded version of the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) system, which uses enhanced AI functions to scan global online information in real time and help experts quickly identify unusual health events. The system is now used by 120 countries.To better anticipate health threats, countries need information beyond traditional health data. The Hub supports countries in implementing Collaborative Surveillance, which integrates data on climate, animals, travel, and population movement to provide a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of health threats.The Hub also expanded global access to pathogen genomics, which helps scientists detect new pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria, understand how they spread and how dangerous they may become. Through the International Pathogen Surveillance Network (IPSN), the WHO Hub in Berlin worked with 309 partners in 101 countries to expand access to these technologies.“We are in a new era of global health threats, and we need new tools to face tomorrow’s challenges,” said Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme. “The WHO Hub in Berlin helps countries use data and technology more effectively so they can identify risks earlier and respond faster. No country can address these threats alone. Strong cooperation remains our best defence.”“Berlin offers an ideal environment for our work. We collaborate closely with world-leading institutions such as the Robert Koch Institute and the Charité Center for Global Health,” said Dr Oliver Morgan, Head of the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. “Germany has supported the WHO Hub since its establishment, and we are pleased to welcome Federal Minister Nina Warken to the Hub today. This strong partnership helps us advance innovation in pandemic and epidemic intelligence and better support countries to prepare for future health threats.”The Hub is expanding the use of advanced analytics and mathematical modelling to forecast how outbreaks may develop and to assess which response measures are most effective. Through its Collaboratory, the Hub connects modelers and analysts with governments to ensure their work addresses real public health needs. In 2025, the community grew to 1300 members from 50 countries and 200 institutions. An AI-powered pandemic simulator, currently in the prototyping phase, will help decision-makers compare outbreak scenarios and help identify effective disease control measures.
George Kittle details fractured relationship between Brandon Aiyuk, 49ers as breakup remains imminent
Kittle saw firsthand how the Aiyuk saga progressed last season
Daniel Biss wins Democratic primary for closely-watched Illinois House seat
Biss, the mayor of Evanston, Ill., topped political newcomer Kat Abughazaleh, a first-time candidate who ran as an unapologetic progressive in the race to succeed longtime incumbent Jan Schakowsky.
Progress in reducing child deaths slows as 4.9 million children die before age five
An estimated 4.9 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2024, including 2.3 million newborns, according to new estimates released today. Most of these deaths are preventable with proven, low-cost interventions and access to quality health care.
Reflecting On Health Insurance Providers Stocks’ Q4 Earnings: Progyny (NASDAQ:PGNY)
Quarterly earnings results are a good time to check in on a company’s progress, especially compared to its peers in the same sector. Today we are looking at Progyny (NASDAQ:PGNY) and the best and worst performers in the health insurance providers industry.
The New Politics of Gender Equality at CSW70: From Progress to Preservation | Center on International Cooperation
CSW70 reveals a fundamental shift is underway in the logic of multilateral negotiations on women's rights.
Bicycle Therapeutics Reports Recent Business Progress and Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results
CAMBRIDGE, England & BOSTON, March 17, 2026--Bicycle Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ: BCYC), a pharmaceutical company pioneering a new and differentiated class of therapeutics based on its proprietary bicyclic peptide (Bicycle®) technology, today reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2025, and provided recent corporate updates.
Cornyn clashes with progressive Rep Greg Casar in heated airport face-off over DHS shutdown
Texas Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Greg Casar clashed over the DHS shutdown as TSA workers missed their first paycheck and airport delays continue to mount.
Bondholders Approve Saks Global’s Five-Year Business Plan
Saks Global Enterprises LLC said a key group of bondholders approved its five-year business plan, showing the operator of luxury department stores is progressing toward exiting bankruptcy.
Partisanship and science
I recently participated in a symposium of the Denver-based Institute for Science & Policy, during which I had a “fireside chat” with Tony Mills of the American Enterprise Institute. Mills has written extensively on the politicization of science, and the two of us had a very enjoyable hour-long conversation on the topic. You can watch it below. The main questions we dealt with are why there is such a vast partisan gap in trust of science, and to what extent this is a unique moment. Mills helpfully brings a good deal of data to the discussion, as he did in this useful piece at Issues in Science & Technology. Tusk depends on reader support. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. Subscribe Note this graph, drawing on a range of survey data to demonstrate partisan attitudes toward science since 1970s. As it demonstrates, there’s been a very sharp partisan divergence in confidence in science during the Trump Era, starting prior to the Covid pandemic. At least in part, we can attribute this to a rise in populist anti-science rhetoric embraced by Trump, his appointees, and those in his media orbit. But as the graph also shows, the partisan divide has existed in the past, and it’s not always in the same direction. The largest divergence in party views toward science prior to 2016 was in the 1970s, when liberals equated scientific achievement with the military-industrial complex and thus trusted it less. That era of scientific mistrust is often overlooked. Indeed, as Mills notes, the Moon landings (1969-72), which today are considered one of the last great moments of national unity, were experienced nothing like that at the time. There was sharp debate back then over whether the Apollo missions were worth the vast expenditures when the country had so much else to deal with. It’s outside the dataset, and we don’t have the partisanship lens for it, but the 1950s was another deeply anti-science decade, with critics of intellectuals and college professors alleging their ties to communism and their lack of commitment to basic American moral beliefs. This was the subject of Richard Hofstadter’s 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in which he quotes religious leaders like Franklin Graham: [In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship, the working power of government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these “intellectuals” have publicly stated that morality is relative—that there is no norm or absolute standard.… This fervor was heavily whipped up by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), although it’s clear that not all his fellow Republicans were on board with his red-baiting. What ended that era? The simple answer is the 1957 launch of Sputnik. Americans became afraid that they were losing to Soviet scientists, and suddenly university researchers and government projects were awash with funding. In our conversation, I asked Mills about the possibility of us having a Sputnik moment again that would rally the American public in favor of science today. Mills argued that the COVID-19 pandemic was essentially a Sputnik moment — a terrifying threat to all Americans that required scientific advances to address. But thanks in part to political polarization and the populist and conspiratorial leanings of Donald Trump, we got the opposite of a unifying moment. Many Americans turned against science, despite science actually stepping up in that moment. As we discussed in the chat, it’s not clear what scientists could or should be doing in this moment to increase faith in their work. As Mills notes, one of the chief complaints against scientists and professors is that they’ve become too political; scholars becoming even more political might not help them achieve their goals. This (mainly Republican-driven) anti-science era will end, of course, but it’s not clear what event will bring that about. Share
Alto Neuroscience Reports Full Year 2025 Financial Results and Recent Business Highlights
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 16, 2026--Alto Neuroscience, Inc. ("Alto") (NYSE: ANRO), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel precision medicines for neuropsychiatric disorders, today reported financial results for the full year ended December 31, 2025, and highlighted recent progress across its pipeline of clinical-stage product candidates.
In Illinois, Clashes Over AIPAC Erupt As House Campaign Closes
In a Democratic primary, accusations are flying that allies of a hard-line pro-Israel group are trying to divide progressives, exploiting a broader rift in the party.
In living room, Annunciation family laid bare their grief, one politician at a time
Amid polarized gun debate, Harper Moyski’s parents believe a focus on humanity is the only way to progress.
Dodgers' Blake Snell Takes Huge Step in Pitching Progression
The Los Angeles Dodgers' pitching staff is starting to take shape, and Blake Snell is soon to join the array of arms
Slow downtown recovery testing Seattle’s pragmatic progressives
At Wednesday’s annual Downtown Seattle Association gala, local progressive politicians tried to demonstrate their practical, pro-business side.
McCloskey: Is MAHA alive and well?
Abby McCloskey: One year in, MAHA retains grassroots energy but lacks substantive policy progress on children’s health, as rising obesity, chronic illness and...