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Meta trial reveals low adoption of Instagram 'Take a Break' feature
The head of Instagram testified during a high-stakes trial that the company spent years trying to persuade teens to use its well-being feature.
LSU Tigers Coach Lane Kiffin Defends Taking NFL Players
The LSU Tigers are under scrutiny for taking NFL players and putting them on their roster. Lane Kiffin is trying to defend the practice. The post LSU Tigers Coach Lane Kiffin Defends Taking NFL Players appeared first on HEAVY.
Movie review: 'Coyote vs. Acme' has a surprisingly deep message
There’s a poignant poetry in the Sisyphean quest of Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote. This born yearner roams the desert, trying to catch and eat the Road Runner, his
Patriots Executive Breaks Silence on Christian Gonzalez’s Contract Standoff
The New England Patriots have had a summer of trying to find common ground with Christian Gonzalez.With the regular season approaching and no extension in place, one of the Patriots’ top decision-makers gave a fresh perspective on the stalemate.Executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf addressed Gonzalez’s contract situation during his halftime interview with […] The post Patriots Executive Breaks Silence on Christian Gonzalez’s Contract Standoff appeared first on HEAVY.
WHO RUNS MARYLAND POLITICS NOW?
ByThe Maryland Wire The Machine Didn’t Die — It Broke Apart Mike Miller is gone. Steny Hoyer is retiring. The two men who helped define Maryland political power for generations are disappearing from the map. Nobody has inherited all of what they controlled. Instead, Maryland power has fractured among Wes Moore, legislative leaders, county organizations, federal figures and a new generation fighting to connect the pieces. By The Maryland Wire For decades, there were two names in Maryland politics that required almost no explanation. Mike Miller. Steny Hoyer. You didn’t necessarily have to agree with them. You didn’t even have to like them. But everyone understood something: Not social-media power. Not cable-news power. Not the temporary power that comes from one big election. They possessed political infrastructure. Relationships. Institutional memory. Donors. Staff. Allies. County leaders. Lobbyists. Legislators. Operatives. And the ability to connect people who needed something with people capable of delivering it. Today one is gone. The other is preparing to leave Congress after more than four decades. And Maryland faces a question it hasn’t had to answer in generations: The answer may be: Nobody. At least not the way Miller once did. Maryland’s old machine wasn’t inherited by one person. It fragmented. And now several ambitious political networks are competing to assemble the pieces. Miller presided over the Maryland Senate for 33 years, becoming one of the longest-serving legislative leaders in American history. He stepped down as Senate president in 2019 and died in January 2021. (Behavioral and Social Sciences) But Miller’s real power wasn’t the title printed on his door. It was the accumulation of relationships behind it. Miller came from Maryland’s old Democratic organization and developed into an extraordinarily adaptable political operator, retaining authority even as the Senate around him became younger and more liberal. (The Washington Post) He understood something fundamental: politics is information. Who wants what? Who owes whom? Which senator needs help? Which county executive wants something in the budget? Which committee chairman can move a bill? Which lobbyist represents which client? Which candidate should receive support today because that candidate could be a senator ten years from now? Miller knew the answers because he’d spent decades collecting them. Miller’s influence wasn’t confined to elected officials. Former Miller aides became prominent Annapolis lobbyists. Maryland Matters noted figures such as Joseph Bryce and Timothy Perry among the high-profile lobbyists who had once served as top Miller aides. (Maryland Matters) That was one of Miller’s greatest political achievements. He didn’t merely accumulate power around himself. He produced alumni. Staffers became lobbyists. Legislators became committee chairs. Allies became power brokers. And decades of relationships reinforced one another. By the end, Mike Miller wasn’t simply a person. He was an ecosystem. Hoyer’s network was different. Miller’s power was rooted in Annapolis. Hoyer connected Maryland to Washington. He served in the Maryland Senate before winning election to Congress in 1981 and ultimately became one of the longest-serving members of the U.S. House and a longtime No. 2 in House Democratic leadership. In January 2026, Hoyer announced that he would retire rather than seek another term. (The Washington Post) His influence stretched through: Prince George’s County, Southern Maryland, Congress, federal agencies, donors, campaign organizations, and generations of Democratic candidates. And Hoyer had something machine builders value enormously: a succession network. That became obvious almost immediately. When Hoyer announced his retirement, Maryland’s 5th Congressional District exploded with candidates. Twenty-four Democrats entered the race. But when the votes were counted, the winner was Adrian Boafo, Hoyer’s former campaign manager. Boafo wasn’t running without establishment help. He was endorsed by Hoyer. He was endorsed by Governor Wes Moore. And he ultimately won the Democratic nomination. (AP News) In his victory speech, Boafo described the result as voters deciding it was time to “pass the torch to a new generation of leaders.” (AP News) That phrase captures the transition perfectly. Hoyer’s seat isn’t simply being vacated. Parts of his network are being transferred. But they aren’t being transferred to another Steny Hoyer. They’re being absorbed into a newer political constellation. And standing prominently inside that constellation is Wes Moore. If someone forces you to name the single person sitting nearest the center of Maryland Democratic politics today, the answer is Governor Wes Moore. The 2026 Democratic gubernatorial primary underscored the scale of his position. Moore won renomination overwhelmingly, receiving roughly 88% of the Democratic primary vote. (WBAL-TV) But raw votes tell only part of the story. Look at the party infrastructure. The Maryland Democratic Party says Steuart Pittman ran for state party chairman in 2025 “at the suggestion of Governor Wes Moore.” Pittman took office that July. (The Maryland Democratic Party) That’s important. Governors traditionally influence their state parties. But party leadership plus fundraising, endorsements, executive appointments and national relationships creates the beginning of something bigger: a political network that could survive the governor’s term. Moore also played a role in the Hoyer succession by backing Boafo. That’s how political organizations reproduce themselves. You support tomorrow’s politician today. And that’s the distinction that matters. Moore has enormous statewide visibility. Miller had decades of accumulated legislative control. Moore can endorse candidates. Miller could influence the environment in which legislators lived every day. Committee assignments. Leadership positions. Legislative priorities. Relationships that had been accumulating since before many current lawmakers entered politics. Moore may have a larger national profile than Miller ever possessed. But he doesn’t possess Miller’s half-century of Annapolis memory. Nobody does. Which is why the modern Maryland political structure looks less like a pyramid and more like several power centers connected by overlapping relationships. One of those centers belongs to Senate President Bill Ferguson. Ferguson controls an institution no governor can simply command. The Senate. Maryland’s official 2026 legislative records identify Ferguson as Senate President. (Maryland General Assembly) That means influence over: committee structure, Senate leadership, legislative priorities, confirmations, and negotiations with the House and governor. But Ferguson is not Mike Miller 2.0. Miller’s extraordinary longevity allowed him to become almost inseparable from the institution. Ferguson possesses the office. Miller possessed the office plus decades of political mythology and accumulated relationships. Those aren’t the same thing. The House now has its own new center of gravity. Official 2026 legislative records identify Joseline Peña-Melnyk as Speaker of the House of Delegates, alongside Ferguson as Senate President. (Maryland General Assembly) That makes the current Maryland governing triangle: Executive power. Senate power. House power. None fully controls the others. And that fact alone demonstrates how different modern Maryland is from the Miller era. The governor proposes. The legislature disposes. Committee leaders negotiate. County interests intervene. And political coalitions shift issue by issue. That’s not one machine. That’s a networked power structure. Then there’s U.S. Senator Angela Alsobrooks. Her significance isn’t that she is the new Hoyer. She isn’t. Hoyer spent decades constructing his network. Alsobrooks brings something different: Prince George’s County roots, a statewide electoral organization, a United States Senate platform, and relationships with national Democratic leaders. That makes her a critical bridge between Maryland and Washington at precisely the moment Hoyer leaves. Hoyer’s retirement therefore doesn’t necessarily weaken Prince George’s influence. It changes who carries it. Prince George’s itself is undergoing a dramatic generational transition. Official 2026 results show Aisha Braveboy winning the Democratic County Executive primary with 87,944 votes and 73.31% of the vote. (Maryland State Board of Elections) That’s political infrastructure. Prince George’s is one of Maryland’s central Democratic vote engines. A county executive with that level of primary support gains: appointments, budget influence, organizational relationships, donor access, and a platform for cultivating the next generation of political leadership. Braveboy therefore isn’t merely another person on the Maryland power map. She controls a place from which a political organization can be built. Boafo is particularly interesting because he sits almost perfectly at the intersection between the old and new worlds. He worked for Hoyer. Hoyer endorsed him. Moore endorsed him. Then Boafo beat an enormous Democratic field for Hoyer’s seat. (AP News) That doesn’t make him powerful on Hoyer’s scale. He’s just beginning. But it illustrates how power actually transfers: not through a ceremonial handoff, but through endorsements, donors, staff, relationships, and voter confidence. Boafo may become Hoyer’s congressional successor. He will not automatically inherit Hoyer’s 40-plus years of political capital. That part has to be rebuilt. This is the part that often gets overlooked. When a machine breaks apart, power doesn’t only move upward. Some people’s relationships become less valuable. Former Miller aides still know Annapolis. Former Miller allies still possess institutional memory. Veteran lobbyists don’t forget how legislation works. But something fundamental disappeared when Miller did: the common center. The person capable of connecting all of them instantly was gone. That changes the value of a political network. Imagine knowing everybody in Annapolis. Useful. Now imagine the person who introduced many of those people, appointed committee chairs, influenced Senate priorities and understood decades of relationships is simultaneously Senate President. Much more useful. Remove that person and the individual relationships remain. But the system becomes decentralized. First: Bill Ferguson. The Senate’s institutional relationships now run through his leadership rather than Miller’s. Second: the House leadership. With the Miller-Busch generation gone, today’s House leaders are building their own committee chairs, alliances and relationships. Third: Wes Moore. Moore became governor after Miller was gone. That distinction matters. Earlier governors had to operate with Miller sitting across State Circle. Moore entered office during a generational reset. Instead of negotiating with the old machine, he has the opportunity to help build the next network. Fourth: Angela Alsobrooks and the emerging Prince George’s generation. Hoyer is leaving. Miller is gone. The county’s political leadership now belongs to another generation. Fifth: politicians who were outside the old Miller organization. When someone dominates an institution for 33 years, inevitably some politicians develop within that organization and others outside it. Miller’s departure created room for people who may never have risen as quickly under the old structure. That’s the biggest point. If Mike Miller’s power had simply transferred to Bill Ferguson, Maryland would still have a machine. If Hoyer’s influence simply transferred to Boafo, Maryland would still have a machine. If every county leader simply took orders from Moore, Maryland would have a machine. None of those things happened. Instead: Moore controls the statewide executive platform. Ferguson controls the Senate. Peña-Melnyk controls the House. Alsobrooks has statewide and federal reach. Braveboy has Prince George’s executive power. Pittman leads the state Democratic Party after Moore encouraged him to seek the role. (The Maryland Democratic Party) Boafo represents the beginning of the post-Hoyer congressional generation. And Baltimore, Montgomery County, organized labor, donors and other county organizations maintain their own centers of influence. That’s not one machine. If you want to understand where Maryland power is moving, don’t simply watch office titles. Watch endorsements. Who does Moore support? Who does Alsobrooks support? Who gets Ferguson’s allies? Who gets House leadership? Who gets Hoyer’s blessing? Who gets labor? Who gets major donors? And most importantly: That is where the new Maryland network becomes visible. The Boafo race was a textbook example. Hoyer’s successor didn’t emerge randomly from 24 candidates. He had ties to the outgoing incumbent and support from the governor. The old network and the emerging one overlapped. And voters chose him. (AP News) Moore may ultimately become the most important person in determining whether Maryland develops another durable statewide political organization. But the test isn’t whether Moore himself remains popular. The test is what happens to the people he supports. Which delegates become senators? Which senators become committee chairs? Which county officials become executives? Which staffers become candidates? Which appointees become statewide leaders? Who gets his donor network? Who gets his political advisers? Who eventually gets his endorsement when Maryland faces a post-Moore gubernatorial succession fight? That’s how we’ll know whether Moore was merely a successful governor— or the founder of another generation of Maryland power. There’s another category worth watching: politicians who came from Miller’s Maryland but remain active in the new one. Dereck Davis is one. Anthony Brown is another. Veteran legislators and former officials throughout the state still possess old relationships that newer politicians don’t. These people can function as bridges. That’s important because political systems rarely reset completely. The new machine usually grows partly from pieces of the old one. Donors don’t disappear. Lobbyists don’t disappear. Operatives don’t disappear. Institutional memory doesn’t disappear. They find new centers of gravity. If you want one name: His overwhelming 2026 Democratic renomination, executive authority, national profile and influence within the Maryland Democratic Party make that difficult to dispute. (WBAL-TV) But saying Moore “runs Maryland” the way Miller once ran the Senate would oversimplify the reality. Maryland power today looks more like this: WES MOORE Statewide organization.Appointments.Fundraising.Executive government.National Democratic relationships. BILL FERGUSON The Senate.Committees.Confirmations.Legislative leverage. JOSELINE PEÑA-MELNYK The House.Committee leadership.Budget and legislative leverage. ANGELA ALSOBROOKS Statewide electoral organization.Federal platform.Prince George’s relationships.National Democratic connections. AISHA BRAVEBOY Prince George’s executive organization.County government.A major Democratic vote base. THE POST-HOYER GENERATION Boafo and the emerging political class that will have to rebuild Hoyer’s Washington-Maryland network rather than simply inherit it. It did something more interesting. Mike Miller’s influence was too personal, too old and too deeply rooted in his own relationships to be inherited whole. Hoyer’s network is too extensive and too intertwined with decades of congressional politics to fit neatly inside one successor. So the pieces are moving. Toward Moore. Toward Ferguson. Toward Peña-Melnyk. Toward Alsobrooks. Toward Braveboy. Toward younger candidates and new county organizations. And toward veteran political survivors who understand both eras. That’s the next chapter of Maryland politics. The person who eventually connects: Annapolis, Prince George’s, Montgomery County, Baltimore, labor, business, donors, the Maryland Democratic Party, and the congressional delegation will possess something Maryland hasn’t truly seen since Miller’s heyday. Not merely another elected official. And maybe that’s why searching for “the next Mike Miller” is the wrong exercise. There may never be another one. The more important question is: Miller spent half a century becoming that person. Hoyer spent decades becoming another version of it. Maryland’s current political leaders are still competing for the privilege. And until somebody actually connects all those pieces, the most accurate answer to the question “Who runs Maryland?” may be the most fascinating one of all: No one does. Not anymore. But there are plenty of people trying. Sources University of Maryland and Maryland Matters — Miller’s 33-year Senate presidency and political legacy. (Behavioral and Social Sciences) Washington Post historical reporting — Miller’s rise from Maryland machine politics and ability to retain power as the Senate evolved. (The Washington Post) Maryland Matters — former top Miller aides who moved into Annapolis lobbying and the changing Senate power structure. (Maryland Matters) Washington Post and Reuters — Hoyer’s January 2026 retirement announcement after more than four decades in Congress and his long Democratic leadership career. (The Washington Post) Associated Press — Adrian Boafo’s 2026 victory in the Democratic primary to succeed Hoyer, including Hoyer and Moore’s support and Boafo’s “pass the torch” remarks. (AP News) Maryland Democratic Party — Steuart Pittman’s official biography stating that he sought the state chairmanship at Moore’s suggestion. (The Maryland Democratic Party) Maryland General Assembly — official 2026 records identifying Bill Ferguson as Senate President and Joseline Peña-Melnyk as Speaker. (Maryland General Assembly) Maryland State Board of Elections — official 2026 Prince George’s County results showing Aisha Braveboy’s dominant County Executive primary victory. (Maryland State Board of Elections) 2026 election reporting — Moore’s overwhelming Democratic gubernatorial primary victory. (WBAL-TV)
Orioles Announce Pete Alonso Decision During Crucial Rays Series
The Baltimore Orioles have been battling all season long, trying to get themselves back into playoff position.That goal got a little clearer when slugger Pete Alonso launched a go-ahead home run into the outfield in the opening game against the Tampa Bay Rays. The dinger was the 30th of the year for the Orioles star, […] The post Orioles Announce Pete Alonso Decision During Crucial Rays Series appeared first on HEAVY.
Lakers' Luka Doncic's chemistry with Jaden Hardy is Bronny James' worst nightmare come true
The Los Angeles Lakers are still trying to figure out their roster and rotations for the upcoming season. It seems Bronny James could already be doomed.
I tested open source Android storage tools; this app reliably freed 5GB of system space
My analyzers kept pointing at the apps I was trying to save
How a decades-old logger blockade is shaping Troy Jackson’s pitch in Maine’s Senate race
Jackson is trying to win over working-class voters who have drifted away from Democrats. At least one of his fellow former protesters isn’t convinced.
Danielle Fishel says she was promised ‘Girl Meets World’ wouldn’t be a ‘Boy Meets World’ reboot: ‘Frustrated’
Danielle Fishel said she was ‘frustrated’ by ‘Girl Meets World’ writers ‘trying to shoehorn’ ‘Boy Meets World’ elements into the follow-up series: ‘It was going to be a whole new show.’
Montrose business targeted twice in less than a week in copper wire theft attempts
A Houston dessert shop owner says her business was targeted twice in less than a week by people trying to steal copper wiring. Doorbell camera video shows both of the incidents — leaving her with electrical damage, a power outage and thousands of dollars in lost inventory.
Reimagining how scientists study the chemistry of the air
Professor Victoria Barber and doctoral student Cooper Crabtree are spearheading Keck Foundation-funded project charting a path toward better understanding atmospheric oxidation. by Álvaro Castillo, UCLA College of Letters and Science From the vantage point of Victoria Barber, a UCLA assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, understanding the chemical reactions that shape air quality and climate are among the most pressing scientific challenges of our time. And thanks to a recent grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, she and doctoral student Cooper Crabtree will spearhead a new research project exploring exactly how pollutants form in the atmosphere. Specifically, the project will examine how volatile organic compounds transform through atmospheric oxidation and explore how pollutants, like smog, form in the atmosphere. VOCs are released by sources ranging from trees and wildfires to vehicle exhaust pipes and consumer products such as cologne and perfume. As they undergo atmospheric oxidation, they can transform into a wide range of other compounds. Anyone in Southern California can attest to the urgency of this area of research — for example, in late July of this year, Los Angeles County was under an active ozone pollution advisory for almost a full week. While many people associate ozone with the protective ozone layer high in the stratosphere, ground-level or tropospheric ozone is a harmful secondary pollutant formed through atmospheric oxidation. Understanding how VOCs transform into pollutants like ozone is therefore critical to improving air-quality forecasts and informing strategies to reduce exposure. “My group is focused on trying accelerate our understanding of these networks of reactions so that we can do a better job of predicting how those pollutants form,” Barber said. “When we make decisions about how we might alter emissions, we can understand how that’s going to influence the production of these downstream pollutants.” With support from the W. M. Keck Foundation, Barber and Crabtree are developing new experimental approaches that will combine — and improve — techniques to study hundreds of chemical systems more efficiently than traditional methods allow. Instead of spending years decoding a single VOC, the project seeks to dramatically expand the pace and scale of discovery. The grant comes at a particularly important moment for environmental research. Barber, who joined UCLA in 2023, says funding for climate and air-quality research, especially for early career scientists, has become increasingly difficult to secure, a challenge compounded for ambitious projects that require building entirely new research infrastructure. The Keck Foundation’s support, Barber said, provides the flexibility to pursue bold early-stage, high-risk ideas that may be more difficult to fund using conventional federal funding sources. “It’s really, really hard to do environmental research under the current federal paradigm,” Barber said. “By stepping in and providing stable and flexible funding to explore this new idea, the Keck Foundation is making a huge difference to my research program.” In addition to funding early-career faculty, the Keck Foundation’s support is also focused on empowering graduate students like Crabtree in their scientific growth. The project gives Crabtree the opportunity to help develop an entirely new experimental approach to studying atmospheric chemistry — an experience that will provide him with valuable technical skills, scientific training and preparation for the next stage of his career. Stable funding also allows doctoral students like Crabtree to devote themselves more fully to research rather than balancing their scientific work with additional teaching responsibilities needed to cover funding gaps. “Getting to devote more of my time to research this past school year has greatly improved the pace and quality of our experiments, data analysis and planning for our future work,” said Crabtree, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry. “I feel very lucky — especially amid the current uncertainty surrounding scientific funding — to be able to continue exploring exciting knowledge gaps in our field and growing as a scientific researcher.” For Barber, mentorship is among the most rewarding and important aspects of her role as a faculty member. “Our jobs as faculty are to do good science and make good scientists,” she said. “I believe the Keck Foundation shares this belief and sees the potential positive impact this project can have.”
Yankees' Pitching Factory is Attempting Another Miracle
The New York Yankees' pitching factory is trying to do the impossible yet again.
Hochul's business-friendly data center plan
The New York governor is trying to help Democrats find a data center position that isn't explicitly anti-business.
What Trevon Diggs said in his introductory Seahawks press conference
The two-time Pro Bowler said he’s trying to show he’s still one of the best in the game.
Arsenal exploring Yildiz move
Arsenal explore move for Kenan Yildiz, Atletico Madrid trying to finalise Nicolas Jackson signing and Manchester City in talks over Allan Elias, plus more.
‘I need a bandage’: A quick look at everything University Health Services offers
Going to college marks many firsts for a lot of college students—including going to the doctor or trying to schedule an appointment on their own for the first time. Luckily, University Health Services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga provides medical care for UTC students and helps make the healthcare process as smooth as possible.
Guardians lineup scuffling, 'banged up' with several injuries
The Guardians are trying to keep pace in the American League playoff races, but a scuffling lineup that is rife with injuries is forcing some changes.
Governors’ races are being increasingly buffeted by the toxic politics of data centers
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is just one of several governors across the country trying to address the hot button issue of residents not wanting data centers near them.
How the Wisconsin governor’s race became a data center hate-off
Both candidates are trying to surf the anti-tech wave — without fully betraying the AI boom’s beneficiaries.
Tijerina touts efforts to lower property taxes. Reality is more complicated
Tijerina is trying to oust longtime Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar in South Texas.
Why Should We Keep Trying to Talk Across Political Differences?
john a. powell makes the case for trying to bridge our differences even when it’s hard, while acknowledging when we might step away.
Searching for Answers From the Man Accused of Sabotaging Alaska’s Senate Race
Dan Sullivan, a retired schoolteacher from tiny Petersburg, Alaska, shares a name with the incumbent senator he hopes to defeat. Is he a spoiler trying to divide the Republican vote? We traveled to Alaska to find out.
Bally’s issues ‘going concern’ warning to investors
The warning underscores the financial pressures Bally’s faces while trying to finish its Chicago casino project and sparring with the city over video gambling.
Congress Funded Global Health. The Office of Management and Budget Is Trying Not To Spend It.
Two PIH experts analyze what is happening to global health funds that aren’t being spent as they were allocated by Congress.
Hospitals say they found a tool to help reduce childbirth risks: wristbands
Hospitals across the U.S. are trying to reduce maternal deaths and complications after pregnancies using one small tool: a silicone wristband stamped with the declaration “I Gave Birth.”
The national focus on politicians' health is making its way into the Oklahoma GOP race for governor
Mike Mazzei’s performance in recent debates have created a conundrum for him and our state’s pool of undecided Republican voters who are still trying to suss out their best nominee for governor.
The national focus on politicians' health is making its way into the Oklahoma GOP race for governor
Mike Mazzei’s performance in recent debates have created a conundrum for him and our state’s pool of undecided Republican voters who are still trying to suss out their best nominee for governor.
Some Democrats trying to reclaim the issue of faith from the Republican Party
In some of the most critical races this election cycle, several Democrats are sharing how their faith has shaped their views and politics.
Sports leagues’ concussion guidelines must be broadened as brain health concerns rise
Many sporting leagues are trying to reduce concussion risk, but their policies mainly fail to mention a growing threat.
Sports leagues’ concussion guidelines must be broadened as brain health concerns rise
Many sporting leagues are trying to reduce concussion risk, but their policies mainly fail to mention a growing threat.
Recently-released 49ers rookie finds new home with Rams
The Los Angeles Rams snagged a rookie the San Francisco 49ers waived after trying to cultivate a roster battle on special teams.
Naturally Sparkling: The Science Behind Pet-Nat Wine
This week’s Northern Express — sister publication of The Ticker — is the Ingredients issue, featuring stories about our farmers, growers, chefs, bakers, and winemakers. In the lattermost category, a few local wineries are trying their hands at a 500-year-old winemaking process, pétillant-naturel, or pét-nat. What makes it different from traditional wine styles are three main components: …
Young Receivers Trying To Emerge To Help Mendoza Develop
Las Vegas Raiders receiver Jack Bech caught passes from both quarterbacks against Arizona in the Raiders' new offense.
Musk’s headaches: meet China’s corporate matrix challenging his empire
From Tesla to SpaceX, Starlink and Neuralink, Chinese companies are giving – or trying to give – Elon Musk’s firms a run for their money.
His family fled socialism. He’s trying to spread it.
A young Cuban American is selling democratic socialism door-to-door across Miami. But he cannot bring himself to discuss it across his family’s kitchen table.
How Republicans Embraced Brandon Herrera, a Texas Republican Candidate and Gun Influencer
Brandon Herrera, long an anti-establishment outsider, is trying to help the party defend a red-leaning House district in West Texas. It’s proving messy.
Campbell still trying to find answers for Lions offensive line
With a dozen days of training camp and one preseason game in the books, questions remain about the Detroit Lions offensive line starters. Coach Dan Campbell learned more about the line in the loss at Cincinnati on Thursday. While most starters did not play, including left tackle Penei Sewell, Campbell got a good look at right tackle, rookie Blake Miller and at center Seth McLaughlin who both started.
Deals: Pixel 11 series goes on pre-order, Galaxy Z8 foldables and S26 models drop prices
The new Pixels will be available from August 20, but Samsung is already trying to undercut the newcomers. Google launched its new Pixel 11 series earlier...
Iran business leader admits U.S. blockade will inflict more economic damage than war, and the ‘worst thing that could happen’ is trying to evade it
The head of the Iran-China Joint Chamber of Commerce said "the consequences of the blockade far outweigh those of a direct war."
Prediction markets and sports betting: How this UK exchange is trying to do both in the U.S.
Smarkets is entering the U.S. prediction market race but also applying to run as a sportsbook within states amid regulatory uncertainty at the federal level.
Opinion | Republicans Are Trying to Hide These Health Care Cuts
Republicans are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable.
Rob Sand Has Figured Something Out
Rob Sand isn’t progressive or moderate. What is he trying to be?
National Science Foundation reverses $1 million cut to CU Boulder quantum center
“That was a very big relief, actually,” co-director of the Physics Frontier Center Andreas Becker said. “We were trying to work through this already and how we could adjust and mitigate the impact on the research and the…
Xbox Confirms Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Beta Will Feature Single-Player Campaign Mission for the First Time
Xbox is trying something new with the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta, as the company has announced this month's pre-release tests will include a single-player campaign mission for the first time.
Trump Is Trying to Sabotage the Health of All Our Kids
His executive order on vaccines is classic Trump: authoritarian, nonsensical, and deadly.
Blue Jays Announce Starting Pitchers For Crucial Series vs Yankees
The Toronto Blue Jays are gearing up for a crucial three-game series with the New York Yankees this weekend. After taking a massive series against the Boston Red Sox, Toronto will be looking to keep up the winning ways against another American League East rival. The Blue Jays have been trying to battle back from […] The post Blue Jays Announce Starting Pitchers For Crucial Series vs Yankees appeared first on HEAVY.
Exploring how discretionary time impacts health | Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Time may be money, but is time health? That’s what doctoral candidate Laura Chen is trying to find out.
There Is No Reason Not To Play South Of Midnight Anymore
With Compulsion Games now newly independent, their BAFTA-winning game is now free from Xbox and anything else that might have kept you from trying it
Suno is trying to look more like a real music production tool
The latest version of Suno Studio adds MIDI, a chatbot, and custom AI effects.
The Kent County Health Department wants more teens to take its health survey
The Kent County Health Department is trying to get more teenagers to take its health survey.
AI needs science’s search history
“Actually, that’s where the gold is,” said Alasdair Russell, my graduate school friend who leads a pre-clinical genome editing group at Cambridge. He was talking about the winding road of science that is omitted from published papers. “When you’re discussing how to do the experiment, and why this way is better than another way, and what does the data really mean? I know what it shows, but what does it mean?” At RAAIS 2026, he described how his group has begun logging the twisting path of discovery as it happens, recording the verbal and written exchanges that normally disappear. Ideas become nodes in a living graph: they branch when a meeting produces two plausible experiments, merge when separate lines of evidence converge, and go dark when someone quietly stops pursuing them. In his implementation, one agent scores novelty, while another tries to learn “how scientists think and how they navigate through a complex world of data,” so that high-potential nodes can trigger deeper investigation. As frontier AI labs deploy agents toward scientific discovery, giving AI authentic scientific taste remains a trillion-dollar dilemma. The bottleneck is that the record we have kept for centuries of science might be insufficient to get us there. The experiments that never make the paper Peter Medawar, 1960 Nobel laureate and “father of transplantation,” asked in 1963 whether the scientific paper was a fraud, and answered yes: the form of the paper misrepresents the thinking that produced it. Sixty years on, the diagnosis is unchanged. A paper presents a clean progression from hypothesis to result to conclusion. Lost along the way are the unconventional theories, the abandoned or unaffordable methods, and the underwhelming and inconclusive data. It reads like a browser history with every dead end deleted: the ten open tabs, the four rephrased queries, the wrong turn down a subforum. All scrubbed, leaving one clean path from question to answer as the canonical path. What has changed since then is that the discarded material is now worth something. No high-impact journal wants these artifacts, but raw trial and error is the most likely source of the training data required to develop scientific intuition, or what researchers call taste. Earlier attempts to capture the discards were motivated by scientific integrity. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine launched in 2002 to publish rigorous studies that disputed established models or exposed ineffective treatments. Its archive preserved negative conclusions after they had become papers, rather than the live alternatives and arguments that produced them. BioMed Central closed it in 2017, saying the mission had been served now that other journals publish null results. A less generous reading is that in fifteen years it published around 200 papers because almost nobody wants to read a negative result, let alone write one up when it will not count toward academic tenure. AI models are different. Even an uninteresting negative result can be useful, provided it is labeled. Earlier this year, Anthropic put a version of this to the test. The company pulled 129 decision points from real Claude Code sessions between January and March 2026, showed models the work up to a human detour, and asked what should happen next. Claude Mythos Preview beat the human choice 64% of the time, while Opus 4.5 managed 51%. The comparison was tilted toward the models because Anthropic deliberately chose moments where the human decision had room for improvement. On 127 further scenarios where the human action was already strong, the models improved on it only about 20% of the time. The study was possible because Anthropic’s researchers work inside a tool that logs by default. The reasoning, detours and outcome are produced in the same working environment. Biology has no equivalent. Its reasoning happens in hallways, at benches, in Slack threads and on whiteboards, while the outcome arrives weeks later somewhere else. The record has to emerge from the work itself. Ask scientists to reconstruct it afterwards and we’ll create another polished account. Subscribe A log is not a label Before any of this becomes training data, a negative result has to say what failed. The first paper published in the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine examined 234 negative studies across five leading medical journals. Only 30% discussed statistical power, and half clearly defined a primary outcome. Tell a model an experiment failed, without telling it whether the assay was underpowered, a reagent had degraded, or the hypothesis was simply wrong, and it will learn noise with confidence. Decision histories have a second missing label too. When a lab considers five experiments and runs one, only the chosen branch returns an outcome. The other four are experimental counterfactuals. Researchers call this the selective labels problem: the data reveal results only for the actions someone chose to take. Such a record can teach a model to imitate a lab’s taste, but it cannot establish that the taste was good. It also smuggles local constraints into general lessons. A lab that never ran cryo-EM because it did not own a microscope teaches a model that cryo-EM is rarely the right call. Alasdair’s nodes preserve the candidate set, which is the necessary first step. To be useful, each decision record needs six fields: The evidence available at that moment, and nothing that arrived later. The candidates considered, including the ones dismissed in a sentence. For each candidate: the expected result, the confidence attached to it, and the cost in time and money. The route chosen, and the reason. What happened next. How the evidence changed the scientist’s view. These must be timestamped before the outcome, because hindsight turns uncertainty into inevitability. Disagreement also has to survive. Averaging three scientists into one clean rationale reproduces exactly the information loss we are trying to fix. But there is an obvious failure mode here. Once decisions are logged and scored, people log for the record post-facto. Anyone who has watched an electronic lab notebook fill up with retrospective tidying knows how quickly a research tool becomes a compliance exercise. A record that costs a scientist ten minutes of honest reflection per decision is worth far more than one that costs an hour of performance. A publication initiative called Registered Reports offers a useful starting point. Here, researchers submit their rationale, methods and analysis plan for peer review before the data exist, and the journal commits in principle to publish if they follow the approved plan. Nature has now expanded the format across every field it covers. This approach to paper writing timestamps intent before the outcome, but it freezes one plan. A useful search history must also preserve how the plan changed, which alternatives were rejected, when, and on what evidence. Subscribe Run the runner-up Autonomous labs show what happens when decisions and outcomes are connected in a loop. Liverpool’s mobile robotic chemist ran 688 experiments over eight days in a ten-variable formulation space. A batched Bayesian search used each result to choose the next experiments and found photocatalyst mixtures six times more active than the starting formulations. Every completed experiment changed what the system did next. The robot optimized within a goal and search space that humans had already chosen. It did not decide which scientific question mattered. So what this work demonstrates is narrower, but still useful: a search history pays off when the options return standardized outcomes quickly. Open-ended biology is harder because branches can take weeks and the discarded alternatives may never be run. Some exploration therefore has to be bought. Where two branches are plausible and the stakes justify the cost, a lab should sometimes run the runner-up. Otherwise the record captures what today’s scientists usually chose and stays silent on what they systematically overlooked. A funder could ring-fence a small fraction of a grant for the branch not taken, provided that the decision record and the outcome are both deposited. That costs money, but so does having every lab rediscover the same abandoned path. Test whether taste transfers When it comes time to evaluate if our new AI system exhibits taste, the comparison should run across laboratories and fields. At selected decision points in a live research campaign, we should freeze the six fields: the evidence, the candidates, expected results, confidence, costs and the choice made. Experts then rank the options before the outcomes are known, and those outcomes are checked independently later. We could give models one of two diets - papers alone, or papers plus decision histories - and ask them to rank the next experiment on unfamiliar projects. Then, we score information gained per dollar and week, calibration, and how quickly weak branches are abandoned. If histories improve choices only inside the lab that produced them, they amount to useful organizational memory. If they improve choices on unfamiliar problems elsewhere, Alasdair’s group will have captured something science has never managed to write down: a transferable record of taste. Until that happens, a scientific search history is a promising record, not yet a training set.
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The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized
Now that Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the outcome of this crucial race will depend mainly on two things: Whether Republicans succeed in demonizing El-Sayed because he’s brown and a Muslim, and whether they succeed in demonizing him as a left-wing radical. I will defer for the now the question of whether bigotry will be effective this year, although I will address it another day. What I want to address instead is El-Sayed’s signature issue — healthcare. Yes, El-Sayed advocates Medicare for All, a position the usual suspects denounce as “socialism.” I will get to the politics of his stance soon. Today, however, I want to talk about the substance. We should be clear that El-Sayed doesn’t even call himself a socialist. On the contrary, he explicitly disavows the label, saying “I’m a capitalist who just knows about capitalism”. In fact, as I explained in a previous post, the policies that El-Sayed advocates qualify him as a social democrat, not a socialist. Still, El-Sayed advocates a system under which the government would pay almost all medical expenses. Isn’t that socialism? Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market. Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: While a majority of Americans with health insurance get it from private companies, well over 100 million of us are covered by government programs instead. And these government programs pay more total dollars for medical bills than the private insurers do. Why do government programs that cover a minority of the population account for a majority of health insurers’ outlays? Mainly because Medicare covers seniors, and we’re expensive. Also, while Medicaid covers many younger Americans, disabled and elderly beneficiaries account for most of its spending. Even by the raw numbers, then, U.S. health insurance looks as much public as private. But that understates the government’s role: Private health insurance in the U.S. is both highly regulated and heavily subsidized. This is obviously true for the insurance coverage purchased by tens of millions of Americans through the exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act. But employment-based health insurance, which covers 161 million Americans, is far more of a government creation than most people realize. For employment-based insurance exists largely because of huge implicit government subsidies that come with major strings attached. Here’s how that works. If your employer pays you $10,000, that’s taxable income. But if your employer pays $10,000 toward a company health insurance plan that meets certain criteria, it isn’t taxable. That’s a huge effective subsidy, running at more than $300 billion a year. Take that subsidy into account, along with the more than $100 billion per year spent subsidizing policies purchased under the ACA, as well as the outlays on Medicare and Medicaid, and net effect is that the government pays for more than two-thirds of Americans’ health insurance. Granted, there are strings attached. Roughly speaking, employment-based health plans can’t discriminate based on medical history — that is, they can’t deny coverage to employees with pre-existing conditions — and they also can’t offer the plans only to highly compensated employees — a health plan that is only for the C-suite is considered taxable income. So given the restrictions of the federal tax code, employer-based health insurance is a lot like Obamacare, which also prohibits discrimination based on medical history and provides subsidies to make insurance affordable to lower-paid workers. The fact is that virtually all of private healthcare insurance is already well under some form of government control through regulation and tax subsidies. How should we think about this system? First of all, is Medicare socialist? Don’t tell anyone, but the way Medicare operates — it covers every senior’s medical expenses, whatever they turn out to be, while being funded by taxes that depend on one’s income — could be summarized by the old Marxist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” And back in 1961, when Ronald Reagan was the face of a last-ditch effort by the American Medical Association to block the creation of Medicare, he denounced Medicare as “socialized medicine” and warned that it would destroy our freedom. In reality, American freedom survived until Jan. 20, 2025, while Medicare is immensely popular, with an 82 percent favorable rating in the most recent KFF survey. Medicaid, government health insurance for lower-income Americans, comes in at 73 percent. This is in sharp contrast to public views about private insurers, who are widely disliked if not hated and accused of denying essential care. Furthermore, if Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming off money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, that is, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated to get larger sums from Medicare. Assessing the waste from employer-based insurance is harder, but most evidence suggests that private insurers have substantially higher administrative costs than Medicare does. Furthermore, the complexity of private insurance, with multiple payers all trying to deny care when they can, is a huge burden both on providers — doctors, nurses, and hospitals — and on patients. What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? One must go through intellectual contortions to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites. Which brings me back to El-Sayed. In supporting Medicare for All, he’s basically calling for an end to the partial, parasitic privatization of a healthcare system that is already hugely dependent on public funding. When one looks at it that way, it’s not at all a radical proposal. Admittedly, the political lift requires overcoming the opposition to higher taxes to pay for Medicare for All. Political realism rather than economics was the reason I and many other progressives supported Obamacare, with all its complexities, rather than demanding an immediate move to Medicare for All. But the political calculus may very well have shifted since the 2000s, as Americans are fed up with a system of unaffordable premiums, rampant claim denials, and byzantine claim administration. Moreover, funding healthcare insurance through taxation would allow for a much more progressive distribution of the cost. That is, compared to the present system, middle-income households would pay less as high-income households would pay more. And the U.S. would stop wasting large sums on pointless administrative costs. So let’s be clear: El-Sayed’s healthcare platform is perfectly reasonable on the merits of cost, fairness and health efficacy. And with private insurers never more hated, while millions of Americans are losing their health insurance, 2026 may be its time. MUSICAL CODA
Democrats like AOC are trying to shrug off their ‘woke’ era. That’s bad for our politics
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"I'm sure you're going to watch it because everyone is" - GTA 6 premiering on Netflix represents Rockstar "trying new things", says Take-Two boss
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AI isn’t the biggest cybersecurity problem. People are
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Arsenal worried incredible star is about to jump to Liverpool
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Shadow bands are an eclipse mystery scientists are trying to unravel
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Take Action: Stand with the Disneyland Entertainment Cast Members! | New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO
The Character and Parade Cast Members who help bring the magic of Disneyland to life have been bargaining for their first union contract since October 2024. While there has been some progress at the negotiating table, Disneyland management will not come to terms for a deal. In fact, management is now trying to eliminate worker benefits!
High school sports tryouts and practices kick off Aug. 17
Our high school fall sports season will kick off on Monday, Aug. 17, with tryouts and practices beginning for high school football. Tryouts and practices for all other high school sports, including cheerleading, boys' soccer, girls' soccer, boys' cross country, girls' cross country, girls' tennis, girls' swimming and diving and volleyball, will begin on Monday, Aug. 24. Tryouts and practice schedules Tryout and practice schedules are available via the practice schedules button located on the fall sports page of our website. Please note that practice schedules are subject to change due to inclement weather or unanticipated circumstances. Registration information As a reminder, students and parents must fill out all required paperwork on Final Forms to participate in tryouts and practices. A physical conducted within the last 12 months is mandatory for any student interested in trying out for an athletic team and must be uploaded into Final Forms platform. Families are encouraged to get a completed physical from their child's physician. If you are unable to get a physical from your child's physician, you can schedule a free physical with Whitney Young's school-based health center by calling (518) 573-2556. Additionally, the district physician will also be available to facilitate sports physicals at Albany High in room 4253 on the following dates: Monday, Aug. 17 from 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20 from 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Sports physicals on Aug. 17 and 20 are free and no appointment is necessary. Academic Eligibility As a reminder, students must be in good academic standing to participate in athletics. Academic eligibility will start at the beginning of each academic year. Eligibility is determined based on quarterly grades, and interim progress reports will serve as an important academic checkpoint for all student‑athletes. For additional details about academic eligibility, please see our Athletic Code of Conduct. Falcons, we can't wait to see you soar this fall season!
WATCH: Trump signs executive orders imposing new limits on birthright citizenship
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US Stand Up for Science movement expands to Europe
A grassroots movement by scientists in the US pushing back against threats to academic freedom is setting up a Swiss outpost to take the movement global. Stand Up for Science started in February 2025 to protest against politically-motivated grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Since then, it has organised numerous rallies by scientists and turned into a broader campaigning organisation, supporting “pro-science” political candidates and attempting to impeach Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary the group accuses of advancing “quack” science. Now, Stand Up for Science is establishing a Swiss office to take some of its campaigning beyond the US, and its leader is urging European academics to organise similar pro-science groups in case they face similar threats in Europe. There will likely be “spillover” to Europe from what the Trump administration is attempting in the US, said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, who last month returned from a tour of Europe. “Are we going to see a Trump-style scientific [. . .] take over in the same way?” she asked.Delawalla, who is doing a PhD in clinical psychology, said she was driven to help found the organisation after the Trump administration started cancelling health research grants in politically taboo topics, such as transgender people, diversity and HIV, in early 2025. Since then, the administration has introduced several other measures that infringe academic and institutional autonomy.It threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless the university accepted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity.” And this year, it proposed explosive new rules that would allow political appointees at research funders to screen grants to make sure they “advance the president's policy priorities.”US scientists have been at times stunned by the volume of announcements, and the country’s researchers were relatively unprepared. “We sit in front of the fire hose every day,” said Delawalla. For this reason, European scientists need to prepare now for similar assaults. “If you've got a little bit of extra time to start thinking through, and making those preparations and building community and solidarity,” then European researchers will “start five steps ahead of where we were.” She plans to return to Paris in September to share experiences with concerned French academics. Is Le Pen the same?During her European tour, Delawalla said that French academics were beginning to worry about a National Rally (RN) victory in presidential elections next year. She said there were “chilling similarities” between Trump and Marine Le Pen, the RN’s likely candidate. However, so far, the RN hasn’t proposed anything nearly as radical as the Trump administration has carried out. Its current manifesto is all but silent on university and research policy. Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto bemoaned a lack of French R&D spending, including in fundamental research, and promised to modernise labs and strip away grant bureaucracy. The party’s 2024 European election manifesto explicitly supported the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, scientific exchange and joint European technology projects. However, a Le Pen victory next year could see France drastically cut its contribution to the EU, which would hit the budget for science and innovation. Meanwhile, more restrictive immigration policies could hit university recruitment of faculty and students. Climate science denial?As heatwaves and wildfires have ravaged France, the RN has sought to distance itself from previous comments casting doubt on climate science.In the UK, the radical-right party Reform UK, now second in the polls, denied climate research in a draft of its 2024 election manifesto, but its leader, Nigel Farage, then appeared to quietly U-turn and said he was “not arguing the science.” By contrast, Trump has repeatedly and explicitly denied climate change science, in 2025 calling it “the greatest con job.” Like the RN, Reform UK has been light on research and university policy. However, it did say in its 2024 manifesto that universities should suffer “heavy financial penalties” for allowing “political bias or cancel culture” on campus, building on laws brought in by a previous Conservative government. Ahead of September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, the poll-leading Alternative for Germany has proposed abolishing gender studies and postcolonial studies, and promised money for “critical” climate research and studies of Islam. Starts with rhetoricEven if European radical right parties aren’t currently planning the draconian policy measures of the Trump administration, Delawalla said that academics should not be complacent, and fight even small funding restrictions or anti-science talk from the start. “It starts off with sowing distrust about institutions,” she said. “It starts off with these small things, and then all of a sudden it's there.” There are other, more established science and university advocacy groups in the US aside from Stand Up for Science. But the group stands out because of Delawalla’s refusal to attempt to appear politically bipartisan or conciliatory. “I firmly believe that the US is experiencing fascism,” she said. “We’re not trying to win over the super Maga people,” she said, “and we never have been.” The lesson of the US is that even if universities or other institutions capitulate to government demands, this doesn’t save them from cuts and restrictions. “It doesn’t matter what people do,” she said. Global “pseudoscience”Another aim of Stand Up for Science’s push into Europe is to better coordinate a campaign to protect people in poorer countries from what the group describes as “pseudoscientific exploitation,” trials outside the US used to build a case against things like vaccines. Earlier this year, the group sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to investigate a controversial, Danish-run Hepatitis B vaccine project funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study would have withheld a proven vaccine from newborns, Stand Up for Science argued in a briefing it presented to Congress, risking their health. Significantly, the research group based in Guinea-Bissau, known as Bandim, focuses on the “non-specific effects” of vaccines: impacts on health beyond preventing the target disease. Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationData corner: which fields of health science is the US curbing? The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know The suspicion is that the study was funded as part of an attempt to shop around for results that could help build a case against vaccines in the US, said Delawalla. “This is just code for vaccines cause autism,” she said.Bandim has put out a rebuttal of Stand Up for Science’s criticisms, arguing its work has uncovered a number of vaccine side effects, both positive and negative, which need to be taken into account in public health. However, Congressional Democrats took up the Stand Up for Science cause, and in February, Guinea-Bissau said it had permanently halted the study. WatchdogBut for Delawalla, this is not the end of the fight. Kennedy has made a number of health claims that scientists think lack evidence, such as the idea that seed oils cause inflammation, for example. Delawalla worries that more studies could be launched in poorer countries to fish around for evidence to support this agenda. Stand Up for Science is talking to African science organisations to create a kind of “watchdog” to scrutinise any further trials. “Outsourcing the investigation to some of the most vulnerable children in the world who are desperate [. . .] is fundamentally wrong,” she said.
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Science|Business summer reads of 2026
As most people in the European research and innovation policy bubble are going on a well-deserved summer break, we have come up with a list of our favourite books, podcasts and essays from the past year that ask deeper questions about science, technology and politics.BooksPasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation, by Donald StokesIf you haven’t read Pasteur’s Quadrant yet, now is the time. In the EU and elsewhere, we’re living through a period of dwindling faith that curiosity-driven research automatically leads to economic growth and technological progress. Pasteur’s Quadrant, published in 1997 by the Princeton academic Donald Stokes, is the most influential critique of the standard “linear model” of R&D: the idea that new discoveries made in ivory-tower labs get neatly passed on for commercialisation by start-ups. In reality, Stokes argues, practical applications often inspire more theorical lines of inquiry. Of course, we have long known that things are more complex than the linear model, but even today, it’s still often assumed in Brussels discourse. The book is a useful corrective, and is being used now to argue for new types of scientific institutions. David MatthewsThe Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism, by Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis PattersonAre society’s problems solvable by technical expertise alone? “If only the benighted would listen,” say Jacob Hale Russel and Dennis Patterson, two professors at Rutgers Law School who got frustrated with how scientists and politicians handled public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the book, they argue that clichéd mantras about scientific evidence and expertise perpetrated by academics, journalists and politicians have harmed public trust in the very institutions they were trying to defend. Paradoxically, slogans such as “we believe in science,” “follow the science” and “defer to the experts” can fuel mistrust in science, experts and democratic institutions. The authors criticise “condescension” and “technocratic paternalism” in the public discourse and make the case for a more nuanced approach to scientific and expert policy advice that rests on humility, doubt, scepticism and open dialogue. “Most complex social questions in fact revolve around values, not the recitation of unambiguous facts,” they say. Florin ZubascuBreakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan WangIn this book, Dan Wang compares the structural differences between the US and Chinese industrial policies, but raises a very timely question for innovation policy wonks: how can advanced manufacturing know-how contribute to technology-intensive economic growth? Wang says technology has three components: the tools, the blueprints and patents, and the process knowledge. The third component represents the “proficiency gained from practical experience, which isn’t easily communicated and requires years of implementation.” According to Wang, rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, policymakers should see them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Over the past decades, China has amassed “process knowledge” because capital flowed to complex fabrication facilities, while investors in the West have parked their money in capital-light businesses such as digital platforms or chip companies that focus on design. As it turns out, thanks to its oversized focus on manufacturing, China has gained remarkable advantages in the global technology race. Florin ZubascuBaltic: The Future of Europe, by Oliver MoodyWhat can Europe learn from the nine countries surrounding the Baltic Sea? Alongside the familiar stories about Estonia's digital transformation, the book examines how the region has used technology, resilience, education, governance and long-term thinking to respond to geopolitical, economic and security challenges. Innovation policy wonks might find fresh perspectives on how innovation can strengthen defence, societal resilience and Europe's capacity to adapt in an uncertain world. Whether or not you agree with all of Oliver Moody's conclusions, the book is a useful guide to a region that is increasingly shaping European debates on security, competitiveness and technology. Goda NaujokaityteThe Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf This book chronicles the wild and adventurous life of natural science pioneer Alexander von Humboldt who at some point in the 19th century seems to have been just about the most famous person in the world. Through scientific expeditions to the Andes Mountains and to the depths of Siberia, von Humboldt contributed a host of discoveries and concepts. During his life he met and formed relationships with historical figures as different as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles Darwin. He is also claimed to be the person in the world with most things named after him, a list that includes an ocean current, a penguin and a region of the Moon. Still venerated in Germany, with numerous scientific institutions named after him, von Humboldt has slipped out of public consciousness in most of the rest of the world. For anyone not familiar with him, this book does a good job of describing his fascinating life. Ole EllekrogCareless People, by Sarah Wynn-WilliamsYou may have heard this referred to as the book Meta doesn’t want you to read. The 2025 memoir from Sarah Wynn-Williams, former director of global public policy at Meta, then just called Facebook, includes explosive claims about everything from a toxic workplace culture to how the company worked with advertisers to target vulnerable teens, and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order to break into China. It’s a fascinating insight into how and why the tech company gradually shifted its approach to policy, whether in the US, Europe or Asia. Meta has denied the allegations in the book, and last year won an emergency ruling to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting it. In response, the author is now suing her former employer. If that doesn’t make you want to read it. Martin GreenacrePodcastsThe Europeans: Europe’s anti-ElonThis podcast is a great choice for a light-hearted dose of European policy and culture news. Most of it has little to do with research, innovation and technology, but this particular podcast features an interview with Mastadon’s founder Eugen Rochko. He talks about his experience running an open-source, federated, European-made social media platform, and leaving it all behind. The conversation, which starts 14 minutes in, gently encourages us to reflect on what kind of technology we, as Europeans, want to make. Goda NaujokaityteSolarpunk and how we escape dystopiaNew technologies are very often taken from science fiction. Alberto Santos-Dumont, inventor the airship, was inspired as a child by the adventure stories of Jules Verne. OpenAI’s attempt to build a personal assistant with the voice of Scarlett Johansson was lifted from the 2013 film Her, completely ignoring the movie’s cautionary message. So if we want better tech, we need to imagine it first. Unfortunately, the state of current sci-fi is relentlessly dystopian, giving inventors precious few ideas or hope. However, a new genre, Solarpunk, which envisages a technologically advanced but ecologically harmonious future, is now taking off. The actual tech the genre imagines, such as permaculture, renewable energy or community repair workshops, while nice, isn’t all that inspiring or ambitious. But it’s a first step towards rescuing sci-fi from its pessimistic Blade Runner rut. David MatthewsEveryday AbundanceLaunched in June, Everyday Abundance is a podcast that tells the stories of the inventions we now take so for granted that we barely given them a second thought. For example, the washing machine, which liberated women from a lifetime “bent over washtubs and washboards.” Or modern dentistry, which ended the reality that “tooth pain was simply part of human life.” Historians of technology, Virginia Postrel and Charles C Mann are very much on the optimistic end of the spectrum when it comes to the capacity of invention to improve human life. Here, they set out their case: if it wasn’t for progress, you might be hunched over a washtub with toothache rather than reading these words. David Matthews‘We will not know what we lost’: Conservation fallout a year after USAID shutdownSince his return to the White House, Donald Trump has been on a mission to undermine science. He slashed jobs at federal agencies, terminated grants in some research areas, took unprecedented control over university affairs and, within hours of his inauguration, suspended the US Agency for International Development. While its initial focus was to administer health and food aid around the world, it had since expanded to conservation projects. The result? Some of these projects were stopped abruptly. In this Mongabay podcast, environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis tells the story of the EcoGuard conservation programme in Liberia, whose local patrols had helped protect rainforests, monitor endangered wildlife and track illegal threats. From one day to the next, these were left without salaries. Luckily, she notes, the initiative was able to get emergency funding from international NGOs, but its future remains “incredibly uncertain.” Juliette PortalaEssaysThe Mars Delusion, by Henry WismayerWhy is humankind so fixated on establishing a colony on Mars? asks London-based writer Henry Wismayer. From space evangelists promoting Martian settlement as an insurance policy, to billionaire Jeff Bezos, who said humans should settle on Mars “because it’s cool,” the mission is not running short of advocates. However, in this essay, Wismayer reminds us that some critics expect any future Mars pioneer to end up “irradiated, sick, mad and dead.” Scientists have already looked into the possible effects of prolonged exposure to Martian gravity, and it’s not pretty: muscle shrinking, bones weakening, changes to the central nervous system and other biological modifications to make us all reconsider the journey. “Some researchers have forecast that the future settler, after generations of evolutionary conditioning, will look less like an Übermensch and more like ET,” Wismayer writes. Juliette Portala
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GOP lawmakers keep trying to defang voters in their own states
The big headline out of Tuesday’s primaries was the slim victory of former public health official Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — proof that progressives are ascendant in the party, even in a key swing state.
Sanofi suspends chronic lung disease phase 2 study, tied to ‘strategic business reasons’
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Trump seeks to shield his business finances from BBC in libel lawsuit
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I Think My Brother Is Trying to Steal the Family Business. My Parents Refuse to Get Involved.
I want my share.
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Which version of Gavin Newsom will voters see if he runs for president?
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The quiet way Republicans are trying to undo abortion rights again
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I Help Professionals Buy Their Own Businesses: This Is the $1.1 Million Mistake I See All the Time
Waiting to buy a business because of fear or uncertainty often costs professionals significantly more in missed compounding wealth than the risks they are trying to avoid would cost.
If Not AOC, Then Who?
What do we do if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides not to run for president in 2028? It makes sense that many leftists are currently focused on calling on her to take the plunge. But the absence of a Plan B, or even much discussion about one, is worrisome. The US Left can’t afford to sit out the 2028 Democratic primary. Doing so in 2024 was a disaster: our abstention self-marginalized anti-billionaire politics from the national conversation and thereby gave space for Harris to pivot to the “center” (i.e. the policy preferences of corporate donors, establishment hacks, and AIPAC). Abstaining again in 2028 would be especially counterproductive since democratic socialists now have so much wind in our sails after our big electoral wins in NYC and across the country. It’s time to deepen our momentum, organization, and profile — not to retreat to the margins during America’s single most important political battle. Even more urgently, keeping Trump’s heir out of the White House may depend on whether leftists and the party’s unprecedentedly disenchanted base can force the Democrats in 2028 to take meaningful steps towards a very angry electorate and away from the corporate-consultant blob that has helped get us into this mess. If AOC (or Abdul El-Sayed) decides to run, we should enthusiastically go all in — DSA, fighting unions, progressive organizations, anybody who wants to see a better country and world. But, as far as I can tell from the outside, there’s a real chance that she doesn’t run. And we can’t just wait and see where she lands before discussing alternatives, since AOC’s decision might not come for quite a while, giving us little time to scramble at the last minute for an alternative. So we should start working now on getting a Plan B into motion, and recruiting a good candidate for the role. Here’s one idea. A Worker Candidate — Healthcare Not Warfare 2028 Run a union worker Leftists don’t need to always run experienced, well-known socialist politicians for high-profile contests. Lula, the current president of Brazil, began his political career as a metalworker militant who ran for governor of São Paulo in 1982. Especially in an era of institutional distrust, it’s possible to lean hard into making a virtue out of a working-class comrade’s distance from traditional politics. Experience abroad shows this clearly. Rachel Kéké — an immigrant hotel housekeeper — ran as the candidate of the leftist La France Insoumise for the National Assembly in 2022, defeating a former minister in the Macron government. The Belgian Workers’ Party in 2024 won its first Flemish seat in the European Parliament by running Rudi Kennes, a three-decade veteran of the Opel Antwerp auto factory. And the South Korean left in 2024 elected auto factory militant Yoon Jong-oh to the National Assembly. If a tiny French Trotskyist organization could make such a big splash in 2002 and 2007 by running a well-spoken postal worker cadre for office — the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot received about 1.5 million first-round votes — it’s not far-fetched to expect that a much larger organization like DSA, together with a broader coalition of the willing, could run this playbook to much greater effect. This is especially the case now that almost everything DSA does immediately becomes a national news story. We don’t need someone famous. We just need a charismatic, well-vetted comrade who works in a relatable working-class occupation — e.g. a nurse, or a worker in auto or construction, or at Amazon. Ideally, they have a compelling personal story or have been part of a significant strike or organizing campaign, but even those criteria don’t necessarily have to be deal-breakers. The main lesson of the Graham Platner fiasco isn’t that we should never run outsiders for office (the momentum he generated proves the exact opposite), but that they need proper vetting and roots in democratic membership organizations like DSA or a union. In any case, there are plenty of ways to signal working-class authenticity without resorting to Platner’s or Fetterman’s performative macho white dude affect. Better to have someone of any gender or race who is actually working class, with firm socialist politics, who can speak from experience about the day-to-day realities of trying to make it in America. There are surely at least a dozen such worker leaders in our movement nationwide; we just need to sit down and convince one that their personal sacrifice for the greater good (i.e. running for president) will be worth it. If we don’t have a frontrunner with a clear path to victory like AOC (or El-Sayed, were he to win Michigan), it’s better to embrace someone whose decision to run in itself tells an important story about US politics: workers have been iced out of our political system and are now fighting hard to break back in. The novelty factor, in itself, would generate press. And it would help democratic socialists signal to the American public that our movement’s defining characteristic is that we represent workers vs. bosses, not that we’re “the furthest left” force in American politics — a framework that suggests we’re extremists and that helps our opponents isolate us from non-college-educated voters by highlighting extremely minoritarian (and misguided) stances included in DSA’s platform like prison abolition. We don’t get many opportunities to speak to tens of millions of Americans; we need to use these opportunities to broaden our appeal beyond those already in our orbit. Run to polarize the 2028 primary and general election around “Medicare for All” and “End All Aid to Israel” Why should democratic socialists use our scarce time and volunteer energy to run in a race we’re unlikely to win? Running in the 2028 primary will not only recruit us scores of members (imagine having a DSA member intervening in eleven nationally televised primary debates!), but — more importantly — it has the potential to be a decisive leap forward towards an America that finally starts meeting the needs of working people instead of HMO and AIPAC billionaire donors. Polarizing litmus tests are good, actually — as long as they’re fought for around popular demands in a thoughtful and strategic way. Democratic socialists have an opportunity and responsibility to make the 2028 primary about two of the most widely and deeply felt issues of our moment: domestically, America’s unaffordable, family-breaking private healthcare system; internationally, America’s bankrolling of the genocidal Israeli government. A candidacy relentlessly demanding Medicare for All and No Aid to Israel would pose a sharp question to the American public, the Democratic Party, and other 2028 contenders: Why can’t working-class Americans afford their healthcare bills at the same time that our government is spending at least $3.8 billion yearly to fund an Israeli regime eager to keep dragging us and the world into more forever wars? Our candidate can agitate around a clear message: I’m running to give voice to all those working-class Americans who are struggling to get by. No matter what state you live in, who you voted for in 2024, or your background, it’s just plain common sense that we should make healthcare more affordable instead of spending billions to enable the Israeli government’s crimes against humanity. Every American who agrees with me when I say ‘Medicare for All — Not a Dime for Israel’ should make their voice heard through our campaign. Racking up a high number of votes for this agenda is a crucial way to show the Democratic Party and the country as a whole that we can’t keep supporting a life-destroying status quo in our healthcare system and in the Middle East. If we want to defeat Trump’s handpicked crony this coming November, we need to speak to ordinary people’s frustrations with the status quo — we can’t keep running the same tired establishment playbook and expecting a different result. For those highly engaged voters (or skeptical media pundits) who raise concerns about wasting votes, the candidate can take the time to explain why this isn’t the case: It's true I'm a long shot. But Zohran showed anything can happen — and voting for me is a pragmatic decision, not a wasted vote. In a heavily divided primary with a large number of candidates and a very discredited establishment, my campaign and the democratic socialist movement I’m part of are positioned to be the balance of power if we can get a large enough number of voters to loudly demand Healthcare Not Warfare. Since there’s a high chance no candidate will get to 50% in the 2028 primaries, the Democrats could very well be heading towards a brokered convention, where a disciplined, principled current committed to breaking from corporate donors can play an outsized role in making sure whoever ends up with the nomination raises the banner of single-payer healthcare and cutting aid to Israel. How exactly could running this sort of primary campaign be translated into actual leverage? The candidate replies: I’m aiming to win the nomination, but if I don’t achieve that goal, my delegates and I will pledge our support in the primary only for a candidate who agrees in the general election to call for ending US aid to Israel and establishing Medicare for All at home. These are both winning planks for November against the Republicans, and the only reason I can see that other candidates haven’t yet raised these is that they’re still more scared of the donor class than they are of the people. That needs to change. If Democratic leaders want young people, workers, and those sick of the status quo to show up in big numbers this November, they need to meet us halfway. In this way, whether or not we win the nomination, democratic socialists could still play a decisive role in 2028. The approach outlined here is similar to what radical left parties periodically do in parliamentary democracies like Denmark or Sweden when they find themselves as a junior partner electorally: they dictate to center-left allies what their terms would be for enabling, from the outside, the formation of a new government. Running a Healthcare Not Warfare candidate will make it significantly more likely that the 2028 Democratic candidate stands with ordinary people instead of donors on these two pivotal planks — a shift that will, in turn, make it easier to achieve the existentially important task of defeating MAGA’s heir in November. Look at how much popular traction the Uncommitted movement got with a similar strategy in 2024 with so little on-the-ground organization — surely we can go much further with a working-class candidate, a much bigger DSA, and a Democratic Party base that has turned against Israel, billionaires, and the hacks in the party who prop them up. Objections and Responses There are quite a few objections to this proposal, many of which are very reasonable. Let me briefly address each here. Socialists shouldn’t waste their scarce time and resources on a candidate unlikely to win. This is a good rule in general, but there are important exceptions, and presidential elections are the main one. There’s no other political contest that gets anything like this level of attention and engagement in the US, so if you want to be a serious force in nationwide politics, you basically can’t afford not to have a candidate. Far from being an overall drain on our resources, running a dynamic 2028 campaign would likely result in a major net increase in members and capacity. In that spirit, the very pragmatic Milwaukee sewer socialists — who mostly ran to win at home in Wisconsin — supported Eugene Debs’s propagandistic presidential campaigns, which they correctly saw as a crucial means of recruiting to the Socialist Party. And now that the (post-1972) Democratic Party gives more weight to voters than party operatives in determining its presidential nomination, it’s become feasible to run as a socialist in primaries without risking a split in the vote against the Republicans in November. We should just support Ro Khanna, who also supports M4A and ending aid to Israel. I like Ro Khanna and would enthusiastically vote and canvass for him for president were he to get the nomination. But there’s a real chance that Khanna’s bid for office doesn’t catch on; he lacks the grassroots organizational apparatus of DSA, and, because he’s not really of the Left or labor (despite his current very good positions), he’s unlikely to generate the type of buy-in and enthusiasm that a DSA candidate would. Moreover, Khanna would be running as an individual, not as someone emerging from and building an organized movement — his campaign would not likely focus on building sustained power from below, nor would it likely polarize the 2028 primary around M4A and Israel aid. Also, and not inconsequentially, the poor electoral results for Tom Steyer and Saikat Chakrabarti this spring suggest that there’s perhaps not much of a popular appetite in the Democrats’ base to support multi-millionaire class traitors. Much better, then, to run a democratic socialist worker. If by Super Tuesday it’s clear that our campaign has captured the main left lane in the primary, Khanna should drop out and endorse us; conversely, if he’s managed to capture this lane, DSA could at that point transform its Healthcare Not Warfare campaign into an independent campaign to elect Ro Khanna focused on winning (and holding him accountable to) those two critical planks. An openness to consolidating an anti-corporate candidate by Super Tuesday is a necessary component of the strategy I’m proposing, because otherwise we risk splitting the primary votes (per DNC rules, you need at least 15% to get any delegates to convention). We should convince Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson to run for president instead. I agree it’d be great if either ran for president, but my impression is that there’s basically no chance that will happen in 2028, because both are firmly focused on their union leadership duties (and, in the case of Fain, beating back a federal witch-hunt). This plan could have DSA end up endorsing a non-socialist, non-DSAer for president. That’s against our principles. It’s a myth, and bad politics, that socialists can’t ever support candidates who aren’t members of their organization and/or who don’t call themselves socialists. Bernie, after all, was not a DSAer. And socialists abroad regularly make tactical decisions about if and when supporting a non-socialist candidate makes sense from the standpoint of promoting working-class interests, defending democracy, and building a socialist current in the process. If your “principles” prevent you and DSA from helping achieve the momentous stride forward of having a Democratic candidate in 2028 run on Medicare for All and ending aid to Israel, those “principles” are not very good. In fact, they actively undermine the causes they’re aiming to support. We shouldn’t confuse principles (working-class independence) with tactics (the best way to advance this in a given context). In my recent article in Catalyst on Milwaukee sewer socialism (I’ve uploaded the full text here), I have a section showing how similarly rigid rules about endorsements had to be eventually discarded in the old Socialist Party nationwide after WWI because they tended to lead socialists towards a sectarian abstention from broader anti-corporate electoral insurgencies beyond their party’s control. For what it’s worth, Lenin’s current under Tsarism frequently backed bourgeois candidates in the second round of elections and Lenin himself advocated that British Communists support Labour Party candidates; for his part, Kautsky in 1912 defended the German Social Democracy’s electoral pact with the Progressives in the runoffs. If our predecessors could be that tactically flexible in an era before the limits of their underlying strategic assumptions about intransigent class politics in capitalist democracies were made clear, then there’s no need to insist on being more tactically rigid today, after a century’s worth of accumulated experience. As long as you maintain your own political profile and organization while engaging in broader coalitional efforts, there’s zero inherent contradiction with the principle of political independence. More specifically: DSA and allied organizations should enthusiastically back Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed if AOC declines to run and he throws his hat in the presidential ring. (I have no idea whether he’s even considering this path, but there’ll surely be chatter about it if he wins his Senate race this November.) Though he doesn’t call himself a socialist, El-Sayed is a principled Berniecrat, a consistent fighter for Palestine, and would have a clear path to victory. Using the “s” word is far less important than whether a campaign fights for the interests of working people at home and abroad — and whether actively participating in it can grow the organized working class and the Left. And the same holds true if a less anti-corporate candidate were, under pressure, to adopt our two Healthcare Not Warfare planks. Why focus only on M4A and ending US aid to Israel? There are so many other important issues to fight for! Obviously there are many pivotal issues beyond healthcare and Israel, and our candidate — and especially our organizations involved in the campaign — should be prepared to speak on all of these. But one of the crucial lessons of the Zohran campaign is that you have to relentlessly stay on message if you want to cut through the noise. CNN and Fox News will want to talk about DSA’s views on Venezuela and abolishing the police; we need to polarize the debate on the widely and deeply felt issues that are most favorable for growing the Left, isolating our opponents, and winning urgently needed changes. One recent poll found 63% of Americans support M4A, even after respondents were told it would raise taxes and eliminate most private insurance. Another found that 74% of Democrats opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel.” And focusing on two demands sets the campaign up to be able to leverage its mandate to make clear demands upon other candidates (which we can’t do if we run with a laundry list of demands). Talking about a Plan B is a distraction from the more urgent work of building a groundswell of calls on AOC to run. It’s good for DSAers, fightback unionists, and progressive organizations to try to convince AOC to run. This proposal is meant as an addendum to pushes to get AOC to run and to line DSA up for that eventuality, not as a substitute for those efforts. But I’m worried that, like in 2024, we might eventually find ourselves with no time to find a viable alternative unless we start now. DSA, with its abundant deliberative processes, moves slowly. The approach you’re suggesting seems risky. If a DSA candidate runs but doesn’t receive a lot of votes, it’ll undercut our current national momentum. This is a reasonable worry. All big initiatives always carry risks, and the path I’m advocating is certainly not free of these. That said, if a Healthcare Not Warfare campaign doesn’t catch on like we envisioned, it’s a pretty simple pivot in March 2028 to explain that in the future we really need our standard-bearers like AOC, or our growing bench of national electeds, to step up in presidential primaries. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the risk of my Plan B proposal is on the whole significantly less than the risk entailed by an AOC run. We should all back her if she runs, since she’d fire up the base, provide huge openings for organizing, have a real shot at defeating a Republican (especially given MAGA’s unpopularity), be a great standard-bearer for our issues, particularly M4A and ending aid to Israel, and be less willing than mainstream candidates to capitulate to any anti-democratic machinations from Trump and co. But it’s also true that AOC could lose, which would be a devastating setback to the country and the Left. Or she could win and find herself unable to pass much, if any, of her (and our) program, a demoralizing prospect. So if we’re willing to take these risks with AOC (and we should), it follows that we should be able to take lower-level risks if she doesn’t throw her hat in the ring. What’s Your Plan B? The US Left is facing its biggest opening for growth and influence since the 1930s. Initiatives that would have been impossible a few months ago are now potentially feasible. A President AOC is now easier to imagine, but if she ultimately assesses that the risks aren’t worth the potential reward in 2028, we can’t be left flat-footed. So even if you’re not convinced by the specifics of my Plan B, I hope you can at least agree that it’d be a disaster for us not to have one — and not to start getting a Plan B into motion. Hopefully other organizers and political currents will put forward their responses and alternative ideas ASAP. The stakes are too high to just wait and see. More As always, please share this article widely. This newsletter depends on all you lovely people to get the word out. Thank you! I uploaded the full text of my Catalyst article on Milwaukee sewer socialism here (it’s updated and 3x as long as the version published earlier on this substack). If you haven’t yet, please make sure to subscribe to Catalyst here; I read every issue front to back, highly recommend. 🌹🎵 Ivan Lins (arranged by Arthur Verocai) — “General da Banda” 🌹🎵
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