Search headlines

World Cup and presidential runoff: How Colombia’s yellow jersey got political

Colombia plays its first game in the World Cup and votes for its next president this week. Its national soccer jersey has ended up stuck in the middle.

Jun 17 • 5:00 AM EDT • Politics • csmonitor.com

College sports built a new body to police itself. A year later, order has not been restored

The entity that was created in some ways to replace the NCAA has been stuck fighting similar battles in its first year of existence.

Jun 16 • 8:28 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

In Retrospect: Poland, Russia, Europe

In April I spent a few days with Zryw, a Polish non-profit organization that recruits young people to enter politics and public life. Their aim is to build a new generation of civic leaders in Poland. I’ve followed their evolution from the beginning; my son is one of the founders. (“Zryw” means “impulse” or “burst of speed” in Polish). Julie Chmielewska, one of Zryw’s leaders, interviewed me at the event. Here is the conversation, lightly edited for grammar and context: Julia Chmielewska: Assuming that culture shapes institutions, could we conclude that some cultures are more prone to authoritarianism? Anne Applebaum: I don’t think so. Every culture, every nation, and every country has the potential for change. When we look at history, we can see that nations do change. Poland has changed, for example, from the 1980s to today. There’s a completely different mentality here than the one I encountered when I first visited, in 1988. The current generation sees the world through a different frame. So no, I don’t believe that certain nations are doomed to authoritarianism, or to anything. Of course, there are political and cultural traditions, but they can always be challenged. JC: So do you think there’s something intrinsic in human nature that pushes people to democracy, freedom? AA: I think there is something in human nature, a deep instinct, that pushes people towards freedom, yes. People who live in authoritarian countries – and I’ve heard this from them over and over again – sooner or later find themselves angered by a feeling of helplessness. They can see the unfairness of crooked courts, irrational political decisions. They naturally dislike the fact that somebody has all the power while they have none. In those circumstances, people who have no political background at all sometimes are politicized just by that frustration. I’m thinking of Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, for example, who was a Belarusian housewife, until the circumstances of her husband’s arrest forced her to become a politician. I met a woman who is a Uyghur from China, and who had come to live in Turkey. After several of her family members were arrested, she too was propelled into a political role. These kinds of experiences make people interested in democracy or political reform, even if they thought they didn’t care. I also think that the opposite is true: some people instinctively prefer homogeneity, order, hierarchy. They don’t like the confrontation of opinions or the noise of debate, and they lean towards a single leader or a unified regime. I think that most of modern history is shaped by the clash between those two different sides of human nature. JC: Which force do you find more powerful today? AA: I think they both have a lot of power and there’s no way of predicting who wins. Even in countries that seem very shut off or stuck in an authoritarian system can change. We’ve seen that happen. And vice versa, I think democracies can also begin to fail and slide into authoritarianism. So it’s very important not to be complacent in either direction. JC: I want to go into your history and your experiences. You’ve lived in Russia during a time of incredible change in the late 80s, and then you came back to do research in post-Soviet Russia. AA: I was a student in Russia just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I then traveled and worked there extensively in the 1990s, and I met people who really were full of hope. They hoped that Russia could become a democracy, or at least a place that guaranteed freedom of speech, freedom of the press. These weren’t ideas that came from Washington. Although now the narrative in the Kremlin is different, I met many people who were working towards exactly that kind of transformation. A friend of mine ran a series of seminars – once a year, and then later several times a year, in cities all over Russia – designed to get people to discuss politics in new ways. She invited young politicians and journalists, as well as foreigners. I went to many of them, in Moscow as well as Volgograd and Novosibirsk. Over two decades, hundreds of people came to these seminars, and all of them wanted Russia to be different. I remain convinced that many Russians still want Russia to be different. It’s just that the old system, in the form of Putin, a representative of that system, returned. The KGB reimposed their power. And this wasn’t because of something to do with culture, this was to do with money and politics, and who was in charge. JC: You’ve partially answered my question... I wanted to ask whether that excitement of the 1990s was an exception from the Russian historical norm which has been rather authoritarian? AA: Of course, if you look at the history of Russia since the 18th century, there have always been liberal groups, reformers and revolutionaries. There were the Decembrists, in the early 19th century, and the rural populists later on, who tried to organize the peasantry. A significant group of liberal Russians appeared at the turn of the 20th century, people like the father of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was a Russian politician before the revolution. These groups were small in number, but sometimes had a broader significance. The Russian dissident movement in the 1950s and 1960s actually invented the modern human rights movement. It was their idea to hold the leaders of the Soviet Union accountable for the language they used, to remind them of the treaties they had signed and the promised they had made. They created the Helsinki group, for example, that held Soviet leadership to the language of the Helsinki Treaty, which formally ended the Second World War and which contained guarantees of human rights, at least on paper. That idea spread to Eastern Europe, and similar tactics were used here in Poland. (Benjamin Nathans recently wrote a great book about the Soviet dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause) JC: But seemingly, even if they do ever get power, they could never hold on to it. AA: We don’t know, because they have never really had power. But in any case, we also don’t know what will happen in the future. There is no reason to assume that Russia will forever be condemned to totalitarianism. Even during the first fifteen years of Putin’s regime there was some form of democratic politics. Only when the full-scale war began did he bring everything to an end: he shut down all remaining independent organizations and killed his most important opponent, Alexi Navalny. But does that mean he is popular, that he enjoys legitimacy? Even now, we don’t really know what Russians think about him, or about the war. There is no way of doing real polling in Russia because nobody will answer an independent pollster over the phone. JC: Do you think that the flock of young people, especially young men, who fled Russia after the start of the war represent a continuation of liberal movements that refuse to partake in the authoritarian state, or do you think they are moving for the sake of self-preservation – “I don’t want to go to the army, so I leave”? AA: I’m sure it’s both. I actually know many people who left Russia for political reasons either in the very last years before the war, or else just after the war began. JC: And do you see a change in the young generation versus the old one that have fled? AA: It’s hard for me to say because the people who I know were mostly already politicized. I do know some younger people who left, but most of them were already either active in the opposition, or working as journalists. Many of them very self-consciously think of themselves as maintaining Russian culture abroad, just as in the 20th century the Soviet dissidents or the anti-communist White Russians once thought of themselves as people who maintained the true Russian culture, outside of Bolshevik Russia. JC: Let’s move on to Poland. One of your first experiences with Poland was reporting on Margaret Thatcher’s first state visit, in the autumn of 1988. You followed her around the farmers’ market. AA: She was making a symbolic gesture. She wanted to welcome free markets, but the only one she could really visit was the farmers’ market at Hala Mirowska. JC: And I want to talk about this area because today you can look out of any window in that district, Mirów, and see rows and rows of skyscrapers. How does it feel to see a country built from the ground in such a short time, both politically and economically? AA: You know, when you’re living in a period of dramatic change, it’s always hard to know whether the change is positive or negative. The transformation in Poland created winners and losers, as well as new classes of people, new political movements of different kinds. At the time, it sometimes just felt like turbulence. Now, we can look back at the 1990s and early 2000s in Poland and see in retrospect that the country was headed in towards prosperity and European integration. In around 2009 or 2010, I remember speaking to a woman who worked cleaning government offices, and who asked me if her daughter should study in Amsterdam or in London. This seemed to me to be a real transformation, and it happened very fast: within a few years, Poles stopped feeling like second-class Europeans, and a generation of younger Poles appeared who had no qualms about crossing borders. JC: We again live in turbulent times. Do you think we’re heading towards positive outcomes? AA: I can’t make predictions, because everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today. Also, history doesn’t have a trajectory. It doesn’t move in a particular direction. You only think it does afterwards. As I said, you can look afterwards at Poland in the 1990s and you could say this was a period of great progress. But not everybody at the time saw that. Sometimes people are very wrong about a given country’s trajectory. I remember people writing about Ukraine in the 1990s, about how dangerous it was that Ukraine was independent, that this was going to be an anti-semitic state, that Ukrainian nationalism was going to come back... and although you can say many bad things about Ukraine, the country made many bad choices, actually it became a pretty tolerant state which now has a Jewish president and until recently a Muslim defense minister. JC: In the 1990s Poland’s and Ukraine’s GDP were roughly similar. Ukraine was even a bit richer. So the starting point was similar for both of these countries, but they’ve turned out very, very differently. Even if we stop in 2014. Why do you think Ukraine “chose East”? Was it external influence? AA: No, I think Ukraine was in a different position. First of all, central and eastern Ukraine had been part of the Soviet Union since the 1920s, and had therefore experienced a longer period of occupation, repression, Sovietization and even Russification. Ukraine did not have, as Poland did, an alternative elite: a large cadre of economists and politicians, who already had some experience in opposition politics and in independent thinking. In Poland, the transformative finance minister, Leszek Balcerowicz, had already thought about how an economy might be decentralized before he took office. We can argue about how successful he was, but at least he was prepared to try something new. In Ukraine, people weren’t prepared. For one, there hadn’t been much space even for an illegal opposition in the previous couple of decades. Ukraine was also in many ways still emerging from colonial occupation. For the previous couple of centuries, many of the most capable Ukrainians had moved to Russia, and the first generation of leaders in independent Ukraine tended to be former Soviet apparatchiks. They didn’t immediately seek to become closer to western Europe. Instead, they looked for some kind of economic and political “third way” and an accomodation with Russia. Ukraine became stuck in this position, half-in, half-out and became pretty profoundly corrupt. JC: The Polish alternative elite had a vision of where they wanted the country to go. I think the general perception now is that this vision ends with the next election, right? Is this a natural process of gaining power? AA: Their vision, and it was shared by the time by politicians who now call themselves both left and right, was that Poland should join the EU and NATO, as fast as possible. My husband (Radek Sikorski) was in the very first government that said it wanted to join NATO. At the time this was taken very badly in Washington: the demand for NATO membership absolutely came from Poland, not from the US. But even then, in the early 1990s, many Poles already understood that the Russian sphere of influence would grow once again, that it was important to become part of the transatlantic alliance and an integrated Europe as fast as possible: NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe, all of the trading and security alliances. That consensus lasted through several different governments and over many years, even governments containing former communists. For twenty years, right, left and center disagreed about many things, but they all agreed on the direction that the country should go. In retrospect, that consensus created the basis for prosperity in Poland. JC: And regarding the Polish-Ukrainian relations. We know that antagonisms, e.g. the myth of Wołyń [a massacre of Poles that took place in what is now Western Ukraine, in 1943] are increasingly used in Polish political discourse today. In Ukraine, nationalist historians make heroes out of UPA, the Ukrainian revolutionary army, which is held responsible for this tragedy. Where do you see a start for burying the hatchet? Is the reconciliation of our nations possible? AA: So here’s a strange thing: For more than a decade after they both gained independence, Poland and Ukraine participated in a number of projects that were designed to solve exactly these kinds of Polish-Ukrainian differences. Books were published that were jointly written by Polish and Ukrainian historians, monuments were built. These projects were successful: If you’d asked me this question in 2010, I would have said that there are no real historical issues between Poland and Ukraine, that the two countries had mostly reconciled. For a number of reasons, this began to shift. In Poland, children and grandchildren of victims of the Wołyń massacre felt their tragedy hadn’t been fully recognized. In Ukraine, nationalist groups wanted the UPA partisans who had fought against the Soviet Union recognized for their heroism, despite the fact that some in this broad and not well-defined group were also linked to Wołyń. In both eastern Poland and western Ukraine, the memory of the ethnic cleansing that took place there in the late 1940s - Poles were moved West, Ukrainians East - to accomodate new borders has left feelings of displacement and bitterness. The wave of Ukrainian immigration, which started before the war, may have provoked some of this. But don’t underestimate the role played by Russia, which has always wanted to create discord between Poland and Ukraine, and pumps out propaganda to that effect in both countries. Vandalism on both sides of the border, damage done to cemeteries and monuments, is sometimes carried out by provacateurs working for Russia, just to create bad feelings. The Polish-Ukrainian conflict also hides a different reality: although there are real grievances and bad memories, the truth is that the biggest tragedies both nations experienced in the twentieth century were inflicted by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. That should unite these two countries, not divide them. JC: This week (19.04.2026 – Ed.) in Hungary we saw that using historical narratives to create grievance has no longer worked. Are you optimistic about the direction after Orban’s loss? AA: The Hungarian election was really important because it shows that people can actually resist powerful, dominant propaganda. The ruling party Fidesz controlled all of the TV, 90% of the newspapers, the constitutional court, the bureaucracy... and yet people had the nerve to vote against it and resist it. It’s also an important election because Hungary created a huge network of well-funded think tanks and foundations that were funding other far right groups and projects. So that loss is going to have a knock-on effect in other places too, maybe even in Poland. JC: What you’ve said about resisting propaganda reminds me of one of the interviews you did about talking to Russians in the post-Soviet era who claimed that people knew that the system was lying. Why do people choose to believe in these regimes anyway? AA: Because it’s useful. Stephen Kotkin, an American historian, once described how people would learn how to “speak Bolshevik”: It was just a language that you needed to use in order to get by in society. If you didn’t talk the way the regime wanted you to talk, then you might have problems, or lose your job, or your kids would not get into university. It was a way of getting along. Communist Poland was similar, at least in the early years. When I was writing a book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after World War II, I met a lot of people who wanted to talk a lot about the war, when many of them had done really heroic things. But almost nobody wanted to talk about the decade afterwards, between 1945 and 1956. This was when you had the short period of terror, violence and Polish Stalinism. To stay safe, people felt the need to just go along with what others were saying, or stay out of politics, or use communist jargon without necessarily believing it. I don’t judge them for it, and I wouldn’t describe all of those people as collaborators. It’s easy to feel moral certainty in retrospect, because we know that communism ended. But if you were living in 1949, it might not have been clear to you that communism was going to end. In very repressive societies, maybe about 10% of people who are really evil – collaborators, torturers. Maybe 10% of people are really brave and who find ways to resist. And then around 80% of people have kids, they have parents, they have to have jobs and they’ve had to get through it somehow. Strange though it may sound, I’ve found that the work I did on that book is now very useful in explaining some of what’s going on in the United States today. There are plenty of members of the Republican Party in Congress who know perfectly well that Donald Trump says many things that aren’t true. But they avoid criticizing him because it’s inconvenient, because they would get in trouble, because someone would attack them on the internet. So actually you don’t even need mass terror to get people to conform. JC: Is Gen Z reinventing agency? AA: We’ll see. In any generation you can find groups of people who want agency. If you live in a society that’s unfair, for example where a tiny number of people have captured most of the wealth, then at a certain point people rebel. This is always easier for younger people, who have you have less to lose. The question now is how the internet will affect the relationships between citizens and the state, and how it will change organizations. The “Twitter revolutions” people spoke about as early as 2008-9, mass protests organized online, have often proved to be very superficial. Although you can easily join something just by clicking, the work of creating a real movement requires physical participation. Successful mass movements of the past, for example the Civil Rights movement in the United States, were built by people who had spent many years together. They had participated in non-violent workshops together. They practiced and prepared. Just using the you can get everybody to show up at a certain moment, but then when the protest is broken up, nothing happens. It’s also true that the repressive regimes have more recently learned how to use the internet to undermine leaders and movements. Most of all, they now understand how to make people cynical. The form of propaganda that most modern authoritarians use - and I think the Russians really pioneered this - deploys sneering cynicism. Instead of praising the rulers, the regime propagandists mock the opposition movement leadership for being supposedly corrupt or sexually degenerate, with the goal of undermining any kind of idealism. JC: MAGA grew on the internet? AA: MAGA is a real grassroots movement. They had symbols, red hats, they showed up at rallies. But you’re right that the cynicism, the sarcasm and the distrust that the movement embodies came originally from the internet, and this is different. Fifty years ago, most European political parties had a social base in real organizations, in trade unions for Social Democrats, in church groups for Christian Democrats. As people stopped going to church and as the trade unions became smaller, the social base of these parties disappeared. Now people who wouldn’t have known one another in the past meet on the internet and create new movements, many of which don’t last. JC: Is history ending? Going in stale circles? AA: History never ends. In truth, human beings want contradictory things at the same time: order and freedom, stability and change. These things are never resolved, and when a society swings too far in one direction, people always push it the other way. But each time that happens, the result is different. Certainly it is true that we are now in a period when old philosophers and ideas from the 1930s are undergoing a revival. Carl Schmitt, who was a philosopher who was very influential on the Nazis, is back as an influence on both the far left and the far right, once again inspiring people to think that all politics has to be existential, that all politics is about defining and defeating enemies. In the US, some are also bringing back dominionism, the idea that we need a Christian and not a secular state. It’s also true that we are living through a more fundamental shift. The old left-right divide, which was mostly about the size of the state, is much less important now. Instead, we are arguing about more fundamental things: what are our rights, what protects our freedom. Or how much power do we want to give small elites, versus how much power to give ordinary people. In America a small group of very wealthy people now control information, because they control the social media platforms and AI, which means they determine what people will read and learn. Finding a way to preserve preserve zones of autonomy and independent thinking, this is going to be the main task for the next generation. JC: What is the one book that a person interested in Central Europe should read? AA: You could read my book “Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe” which tells the story of how the Soviet Union imposed its culture on the region. Or read Tim Snyder’s history of the region, “The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999.” And everyone should read “The Captive Mind” by Czesław Miłosz, which describes exactly the phenomenon we were talking about: why do people collaborate? I joined Scott Galloway and the brilliant Fiona Hill in a discussion about the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the future of global power, and what these conflicts reveal about America's role in the world. Scott told us that this was the 400th edition of his podcast, which is quite a number: My friend Francesco Chiamulera runs a brilliant series of literary events, Una Colline di Libri, A Hill of Books, in the Prosecco Hills, a region of vineyards and elegant hill towns in the Veneto, north of Venice. We did an event in Vittorio Veneto and also drove and biked around the countryside. Buy Autocracy Inc Buy Iron Curtain Open Letters, from Anne Applebaum is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

Jun 13 • 4:15 AM EDT • Politics • anneapplebaum.substack.com

Hantavirus Cruise Passenger Talks Quarantine Dispute Between CDC, Florida: ‘I’m Being Held Hostage’

A Florida woman says she is not being allowed to return home to finish her quarantine despite being told she could voluntarily leave a facility in Nebraska.

Jun 11 • 1:01 PM EDT • Health • today.com

GOP immigration bill runs into turbulence amid backlash to Trump’s $1.8 billion ‘anti-weaponization’ fund

The push to pass a $70 billion GOP immigration enforcement bill has temporarily stalled, with Senate GOP leaders stuck in talks with a trio of Republican holdouts who are so far refusing to vote down a Democratic attempt to kill the Trump administration’s controversial “anti-weaponization” fund.

Jun 4 • 11:57 AM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv

Jensen Huang Says Nvidia and Microsoft Just Reinvented the PC. But There Might Be 1 Problem

For years, the PC industry has been stuck in a rut. Consumers stretched upgrade cycles from three years to five or more, smartphone sales stole attention, and innovation often boiled down to slightly faster processors and better battery life. So when Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang declares that the PC has been “reinvented,” investors should ... Jensen Huang Says Nvidia and Microsoft Just Reinvented the PC. But There Might Be 1 Problem

Jun 2 • 7:08 AM EDT • Technology • finance.yahoo.com

The Autism-Therapy Business Is Booming—and So Is the Billing Abuse

Insurers warn of fraud and exorbitant charges from providers, including one that stuck a parent with a surprise $911,400 bill.

Jun 1 • 9:00 PM EDT • Business • wsj.com

Coral Reefs in French Polynesia Are Stuck Between Life and Death

Scientists’ discovery of hollowed coral skeletons after a 2019 bleaching event reveals a reef that isn’t coming back.

Jun 1 • 5:00 AM EDT • Science • insideclimatenews.org

Longview, a town built on mill industry, caught between loss and fear

After what Gov. Bob Ferguson called the most fatal industrial disaster in the state’s modern history, the community is stuck in limbo.

May 31 • 9:00 AM EDT • Business • seattletimes.com

Scientists found the hidden switch fueling alzheimer’s brain inflammation

Scientists at Scripps Research have uncovered a molecular “switch” that appears to fuel the damaging brain inflammation seen in Alzheimer’s disease. They found that a protein called STING becomes chemically altered in a way that keeps the brain’s immune system stuck in overdrive, harming the connections between nerve cells.

May 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Stowaway Fox Gets Clean Bill of Health and a Name: Basil (Like ‘Dazzle’)

He made his way to New York on a ship from England and then found himself stuck in quarantine at the Bronx Zoo for months.

May 22 • 1:40 AM EDT • Health • nytimes.com

Stuck in the hospital? A WA program offers a path to speed recovery, save money

On any given day in Washington, state estimates show nearly 850 patients are medically ready for discharge, but myriad barriers keep them in the hospital.

May 21 • 9:00 AM EDT • Health • seattletimes.com

WA kids were stuck in hospitals for months. New report shows progress

Legislation intended to curb youth psychiatric boarding has cut wait times for those with serious behavioral and mental health concerns, a new report shows.

May 15 • 11:00 AM EDT • Health • seattletimes.com

The Razr Fold is stuck in the middle

Motorola’s first book-style foldable is just fine.

May 14 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

Champions League would make Villa's breakthrough 'sustainable'

The long, lumpy third act of Aston Villa's season, encapsulated in the past week by two entirely contrasting games, has been crawling towards this point. It is understandable that any nerves at Villa's failure to nail down Champions League qualification already have obscured just what an achievement it would be, especially after they were stuck in the starting blocks for a month. The past two games illustrate the junction Villa have now reached.

May 13 • 10:11 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Small business owners 'increasingly pessimistic,' squeezed by higher costs, labor concerns

Small business optimism was flat last month, with an index that measures its level stuck below its long-term average for the second month in a row, the NFIB showed.

May 12 • 3:28 PM EDT • Business • foxbaltimore.com

Small business owners 'increasingly pessimistic,' squeezed by higher costs, labor concerns

Small business optimism was flat last month, with an index that measures its level stuck below its long-term average for the second month in a row, the NFIB showed.

May 12 • 3:28 PM EDT • Business • komonews.com

Why Republicans Are Still Drawing House Maps, While Democrats Are Stuck

The G.O.P. has seized an edge on redistricting thanks to two court rulings, and it has more room to maneuver for extra seats before the midterms.

May 11 • 4:36 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

NASA's Curiosity Rover Gets Its Drill Stuck, Recordings From The Arctic Seafloor And More Science Stories

This week’s science news.

May 9 • 12:30 PM EDT • Science • engadget.com

Shipping firms are being whipsawed by changing stances and risks as they wait for Hormuz to reopen

With hundreds of vessels still stuck in the Persian Gulf and costs piling up, shipping companies are being whipsawed by uncertainty over how and when the Strait of Hormuz might reopen more than two months into the Iran war.

May 6 • 1:09 PM EDT • Politics • ksat.com

The Latest: Trump launches a new effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz

U.S. forces have launched an effort to guide commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz, where hundreds have been stuck since the Iran war began.

May 4 • 10:05 AM EDT • Politics • ksat.com

Political blame game begins and upset passengers stuck after Spirit ceases operations

Republicans blame Biden administration block on JetBlue deal; Democrats point to fuel price surge amid Iran war

May 2 • 3:53 PM EDT • Politics • theguardian.com

The real reasons permanent Daylight Saving Time never stuck

We tried it once...and hated it.

May 2 • 3:05 PM EDT • Science • popsci.com

Despite the cascade of crises, Israeli politics remains stuck

***

May 1 • 4:28 AM EDT • Politics • haaretz.com

Youth sports complexes are big economic drivers across Louisiana. 'We're not saturated yet.'

"When my kids played travel sports, we were often stuck in a gym in the middle of nowhere with a crappy motel and bad coffee."

Apr 30 • 5:00 AM EDT • Sports • nola.com

Youth sports complexes are big economic drivers across Louisiana. 'We're not saturated yet.'

"When my kids played travel sports, we were often stuck in a gym in the middle of nowhere with a crappy motel and bad coffee."

Apr 30 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • nola.com

Phoenix wants a downtown entertainment district, but delays remain

Phoenix leaders want downtown to stay busy even when there’s no game or concert in town but that vision is stuck in limbo. A long-discussed entertainment district could reshape the area around Chase Field, Footprint Center, and the convention center. But as Zach Prelutsky reports, while the city pushes for a more walkable urban core, new roadblocks are slowing the plan.

Apr 30 • 1:31 AM EDT • Entertainment • azfamily.com

Florida Delays Children’s Health Insurance Expansion as Uninsured Rate Rises

Florida’s KidCare expansion has been stuck in legal limbo since February 2024. Since then, the number of uninsured children in Florida has risen to 400,000 — one of the highest state tallies.

Apr 27 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • kffhealthnews.org

NYT Spelling Bee Hints for April 25, 2026

Feeling stuck on today’s puzzle? We can help.

Apr 25 • 3:00 AM EDT • Technology • nytimes.com

A ‘Barbaric’ Problem in American Hospitals Is Only Getting Bigger

Patients are getting stuck in the emergency department for days while waiting for a spot in an inpatient ward.

Apr 24 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • kffhealthnews.org

With Midterms Coming Up, G.O.P. Is Bogged Down in Congress

Republican majorities are at odds on big issues as the Senate resorts to extraordinary measures to pass homeland security funding over a Democratic blockade.

Apr 22 • 10:11 AM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

The Terrible Limbo Between the Emergency Room and a Hospital Bed

Patients are getting stuck in the emergency department for days while waiting for a spot in an inpatient ward.

Apr 22 • 7:00 AM EDT • Health • theatlantic.com

Your bad habits are destroying your charging cables

Charging cables are the most overlooked technology in your life, until they break and you're stuck with a dying phone. Here's how to take better care of them.

Apr 22 • 5:07 AM EDT • Technology • bbc.com

Ilia Topuria goes off on 'dumb as f***' Arman Tsarukyan

Top UFC lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan has made as many headlines for his antics outside of the cage as in it. The 29-year-old has stuck a fan on his walkout to the octagon, head butted an opponent during face-offs, engaged in a post-fight brawl at RAF 6, got thrown off an airplane and ...

Apr 22 • 2:33 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Quit her job, moved to Italy, and bought a villa in Tuscany to rent

After moving to Italy, Linda Meyer started a Facebook group, inviting women stuck in the same midlife rut to visit and experience her village.

Apr 19 • 8:14 PM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Catholics in Trump Administration Are Stuck Amid Pope Leo XIV Attacks

Donald Trump's attacks on Pope Leo XIV are making J.D. Vance and Catholics choose between their religion and their fealty to the president.

Apr 18 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • rollingstone.com

The stunning underwater world that’s at risk as the Iran war drags on

Not far from the vessels stuck in the Persian Gulf is a one-of-a-kind marine ecosystem that’s home to dolphins, sea turtles and coral. How do oil slicks affect them?

Apr 17 • 7:30 AM EDT • Science • cnn.com

Living in rent-stabilized NYC apartment; feel stuck after 5 years

Winning New York City's affordable-housing lottery got me a rent-stabilized apartment. It's too small for my family, but giving it up isn't an option.

Apr 16 • 8:48 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Despite late-night maneuvering, agriculture bond fails enactment again

A final push for a $45 million agriculture bond was still not quite enough to get the legislation past the finish line and on the November ballot. Instead, the bond is stuck between chambers as the Maine Legislature ends the session.

Apr 16 • 7:31 AM EDT • Politics • spectrumlocalnews.com

Dexter Lawrence trade destinations: Giants are reportedly talking with teams after extension talks get stuck with star d-lineman

Apr 14 • 11:53 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

This simple change stops robot swarms from getting stuck

In crowded environments, more robots don’t always mean faster results—in fact, too many can bring everything to a standstill. Harvard researchers discovered a surprising fix: adding a bit of randomness to how robots move can actually prevent gridlock and boost efficiency. By allowing robots to “wiggle” slightly instead of marching in straight lines, they can slip past each other and keep tasks flowing smoothly.

Apr 14 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

How a moon mission and a phone call could help relieve trade tensions

The mission inspired goodwill by phone from the president at a time when Michigan and its largest trading partner have been stuck in a war of words.

Apr 11 • 7:01 AM EDT • Business • freep.com

How Sheng Wang finds 'Purple' comedy in a stuck drawer and a toothbrush choice

Comedian Sheng Wang discusses how his second special "Purple" represents a major evolution from his 2022 debut, reflecting his growth from intimate clubs to touring major theaters nationwide.

Apr 10 • 2:18 PM EDT • Entertainment • latimes.com

Masters 2026: Robert MacIntyre under fire for lewd gesture in Round 1

MacIntyre stuck up his middle finger — a no-no at Augusta National.

Apr 10 • 8:25 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Next Level Games wanted Link in Mario Strikers Charged

According to a developer that worked on Mario Strikers Charged, there was some consideration for having Link in Mario Strikers Charged. As a Mario game, Strikers Charged expectedly stuck with characters associated with that franchise. However, there was the possibility of bringing in that famous character from The Legend of Zelda. That tidbit was shared today by Did You Know...

Apr 4 • 3:13 PM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com

Is longevity science stuck? Researchers call for a strategic reset

After decades of progress, longevity science may be facing a paradox: more knowledge, but limited impact. Some researchers now suggest the field may have failed not because of insufficient data, but because of flawed strategy.

Mar 31 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org

West York entertainment complex stuck on hold without liquor license

Bakery Complex in West York is almost ready to open, but the state hasn't yet OK'd a liquor license, which the developer says is crucial.

Mar 30 • 4:55 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

West York entertainment complex stuck on hold without liquor license

Bakery Complex in West York is almost ready to open, but the state hasn't yet OK'd a liquor license, which the developer says is crucial.

Mar 30 • 4:55 AM EDT • Entertainment • ydr.com

Why 2026 politicians are stuck in 2016

Contemporary problems require modern solutions not defunct ideas.

Mar 29 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • washingtonpost.com

AI compressed billions of years of evolution into seconds to create 'Lego-like robots' that can recover even when they lose limbs

Modular robots are easily expandable, know when they're upside down or stuck, and can march forward across all kinds of terrain.

Mar 24 • 11:30 AM EDT • Science • livescience.com

'Saturday Night Live UK' aims to take a comedy hit across the pond. The first verdicts are in

A British version of “Saturday Night Live” has debuted to largely positive reviews. The first episode of “SNL UK” was hosted by Tina Fey, a veteran of the American show, and stuck closely in...

Mar 22 • 9:23 AM EDT • Entertainment • greenwichtime.com

Amid US-Israel war with Iran, what will Pakistan do?

Pakistan has a defense pact and a friendship with Saudi Arabia, but shares a border and social ties with Iran. If the Saudis ask for help against Iran, Pakistan would be stuck. How is it managing these relationships?

Mar 21 • 7:37 AM EDT • Politics • dw.com

Kansas prepares to update Children’s Health Insurance Program eligibility stuck in 2008

Kansas is the only state where eligibility for the Children's Health Insurance Program is tied to income levels from 2008

Mar 14 • 10:00 AM EDT • Health • kansasreflector.com

Kansas moves closer to updating Children’s Health Insurance Program eligibility stuck in 2008

Kansas is the only state where eligibility for the Children's Health Insurance Program is tied to income levels from 2008

Mar 14 • 10:00 AM EDT • Health • kansasreflector.com

Why Can’t Orange County’s Brand New $86 Million Mental Health Facility Open?

A new facility set to house over one hundred people struggling with mental health and addiction is stuck in limbo amid a yearslong legal battle.

Mar 12 • 1:00 PM EDT • Health • voiceofoc.org

Intruder Releases the Security Middle Child Report, Revealing How the Cybersecurity Industry Is Leaving Midmarket Businesses Behind

LONDON, March 12, 2026--Intruder, a leader in exposure management, today released its Security Middle Child Report, which uncovered that almost half of cybersecurity leaders at midmarket businesses, e.g. companies with at least $50M revenue and between 400-6000 employees, say they don’t have the right technology solutions, leaving them stuck in what Intruder calls the "security middle child problem." 46% say enterprise platforms assume more staff, budget, or complexity than they can support and

Mar 12 • 7:00 AM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com

Manalapan couple's découpage business creates music for your eyes

Stuck on Découpage in Manalapan crafts custom découpage turntables, guitars and music-themed gifts as well as wooden boxes, frames, trays and more.

Mar 11 • 5:15 AM EDT • Business • app.com

Republicans face a growing conundrum on the ‘SAVE America Act’

The GOP appears stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the legislation the party has dubbed the “SAVE America Act.”

Mar 10 • 5:44 PM EDT • Politics • cnn.com

Berkshire Hathaway Posts a Drop in Earnings in Buffett’s Last Year

In his first report as C.E.O., Gregory Abel, stuck to a straight commentary rather than Warren Buffett’s folksy tone. The lower earnings were largely driven by declines in the insurance business.

Feb 28 • 9:59 AM EST • Business • nytimes.com

Why your next AI investment depends on proving returns

Boards are demanding real AI results and ROI. Here's how leaders can prove value, secure future funding, and avoid getting stuck in pilot mode.

Feb 25 • 11:10 AM EST • Business • businessinsider.com

Olympics recap: The sports staff share moments that stuck out to them during the 2026 Winter Olympic Games

From USA vs. Canada ice hockey to Alysa Liu tugging at heartstrings all across the nation — the 2026 Winter Olympics was full of unforgettable moments for our sports writers.

Feb 22 • 7:00 PM EST • Sports • thedartmouth.com

Texas Dems are stuck on identity politics with Senate…

Will intraparty fighting blow up the Texas Senate primary for both Democrats and Republicans? Plus, the House just passed a bipartisan housing package. Are real solutions to the affordability crisis…

Feb 13 • 3:00 AM EST • Politics • kcrw.com

Fresno city workers 'stuck in the middle' of Community Health negotiations with Blue Shield CA

Thousands of employees for the city of Fresno are now cut off from their health care as Community Health Systems and Blue Shield of California hammer out an agreement.

Feb 5 • 8:57 PM EST • Health • abc30.com

See how this Louisiana business became the largest outdoor advertising company in America

"Our audience is the driving public. As long as people get stuck in traffic, we’re in good shape."

Feb 5 • 5:00 AM EST • Business • nola.com

Let ABC15 Know helps local business stuck in 'Google jail' after 40 days.

A Surprise small business owner says his company was shut out of Google's platform for over a month, and he couldn't get a clear explanation why.

Jan 30 • 7:52 PM EST • Business • abc15.com

Is Wyoming hoops stuck in purgatory within modern college basketball?

Every season for a reasonably successful mid-major university begins in a similar fashion. They schedule a few in-state cupcakes as the season and home openers before, if they are lucky enough, participating in an ever-declining MTE tournament during the week of Thanksgiving. Throw in a dash of high-major money labeled as “buy games” to help […]

Jan 28 • 10:00 AM EST • Sports • mwcconnection.com

Boxes of tissues, binge-watching and DoorDash: How you’re making it through a record-breaking flu season

When CNN asked for your flu stories, we received hundreds of written responses from people stuck in bed, binge-watching TV, working from home and trying to keep their kids under control — all while feeling terrible.

Jan 27 • 7:00 AM EST • Health • cnn.com

Killing Prompts Only a Defiant Response From Trump

Even as the second death of a protester in Minnesota brought demands for accountability, the president, insulated from dissenting voices, stuck to his pattern of reflexively blaming opponents.

Jan 25 • 8:00 PM EST • Politics • nytimes.com

Steelers hiring Mike McCarthy highlights franchise’s refusal to evolve

The Steelers are a franchise stuck in the past.

Jan 24 • 2:56 PM EST • Sports • behindthesteelcurtain.com

The science of the slush: How temperature profiles dictate precipitation

If you’ve lived in the csra for long, you know our winter weather is rarely simple. We often get stuck with a messy mix instead of a winter wonderland, and i built this graphic to show you exactly …

Jan 18 • 2:22 AM EST • Science • wjbf.com

iPhone 17e to Gain Dynamic Island But Display Still Stuck at 60Hz

Apple's upcoming iPhone 17e will feature a Dynamic Island instead of a notch at the top of the screen, but unlike the rest of the iPhone 17 lineup, the display itself will still refresh at 60Hz, according to a known Weibo leaker. Apple made major improvements to the iPhone 17's display last year, introducing ProMotion display technology with up to a 120Hz refresh rate, similar to recent iPhone Pro models.

Jan 15 • 6:03 AM EST • Technology • macrumors.com

Hytale's out now and its devs are advising those suffering download issues or errors to keep plugging away

Hytale has released and its devs have issued advice in response to many players running into issues with stuck downloads or launcher errors.

Jan 13 • 10:58 AM EST • Technology • rockpapershotgun.com

A couple turned a run-down RV park in Oregon into a boutique hotel

Robin Singh was feeling stuck in his job and needed a creative outlet, so he and his wife bought an RV park in Oregon and turned it into a hotel.

Jan 10 • 8:38 AM EST • Business • businessinsider.com

My family has been stuck in the Caribbean for days; expensive, chaotic

Canceled flights following airspace closures have left my family stranded in the Caribbean for a week. It's been expensive, but we've made it work.

Jan 9 • 12:45 PM EST • Business • businessinsider.com

'If we open, we have to start over from scratch.' Businesses still stuck a year after the L.A. fires

One year after the fires, some businesses are rebuilding while others have given up.

Jan 9 • 6:00 AM EST • Business • yahoo.com

‘If we open, we have to start over from scratch.’ Businesses still stuck a year after the L.A. fires

One year after the fires, some businesses are rebuilding while others have given up.

Jan 9 • 6:00 AM EST • Business • latimes.com

New York Islanders 2025 in Review: Mid-decade sea change

The calendar year 2025 for the New York Islanders comes to a close in a jarringly different state compared to one year ago. Instead of being a drifting, dull team guided by a GM that seemed…stuck in neutral, they are now a more entertaining (if risky) team, with new life, in the thick of a […]

Dec 31, 2025 • 2:57 PM EST • Sports • lighthousehockey.com

I cover side hustles and started my own in 2025. Here's the best business advice I heard all year.

Among the flood of advice I've received, read, and reported on in 2025, here's what stuck with me the most.

Dec 31, 2025 • 5:45 AM EST • Business • businessinsider.com

Two Colorado defensive linemen declare for NFL Draft

Two mainstays on Colorado’s defensive line are moving on, as Arden Walker and Amari McNeill have announced that they’ve declared for the 2026 NFL Draft. Both Walker and McNeill have played major roles in the Coach Prime era of Colorado football, as they came to Boulder with Deion Sanders in 2023 and stuck around until […]

Dec 28, 2025 • 1:20 PM EST • Sports • ralphiereport.com

Our Favorite Science Stories That Stuck With Us From 2025

The list below is a mix of the pieces we loved most and the ones you couldn’t stop reading.

Dec 25, 2025 • 4:37 PM EST • Science • zmescience.com

Worlds apart in water politics, Denver and Phoenix seek similar solutions to a drier Colorado River Basin

Western cities are stuck planning for potential cuts, without knowing what the cuts might be, as they wait for news about future Colorado River management.

Dec 16, 2025 • 5:30 AM EST • Politics • coloradosun.com

Blackhawks' Spencer Knight: Stuck with loss against Blues

Blackhawks' Spencer Knight: Stuck with loss against Blues

Dec 13, 2025 • 1:39 AM EST • Sports • cbssports.com

Santa brings gifts, holiday cheer to children at UM Health-Sparrow Lansing

Children stuck at UM Health-Sparrow Lansing during this holiday season received a visit from Santa this week.

Dec 12, 2025 • 4:10 PM EST • Health • lansingstatejournal.com

Trump is the President Who Just Won’t Grow Up

Instead of focusing on governing, Trump spends his days chasing entertainment, attention and renovation projects that reflect a presidency stuck in adolescence.

Dec 4, 2025 • 5:55 AM EST • Politics • politico.com