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A stress hormone may help the brain repair itself
A surprising stress-related signal may help the brain repair itself after injury. Researchers found that myelin-producing precursor cells rapidly release the stress hormone CRH near damaged brain tissue, helping control how those cells mature and rebuild protective nerve insulation. The same system also influences brain development and the thickness of myelin later in life. The findings could offer new clues about how early-life stress contributes to psychiatric disorders.
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.
Mesirow Fiduciary Solutions Acquires flexPATH’s 3(38) Business
The transaction will deepen the company’s custom portfolio and investment lineup service capabilities.
Tyson reducing beef business footprint
Dakota City, Holcomb and Amarillo will be the anchor facilities for beef operations.
Yankees have major Heliot Ramos problem after Giants trade
The Yankees need Ramos to start producing soon.
BREAKING: Netflix to shut down two more game studios
Netflix is sticking with video games but once again reducing the number of studios it owns making games. The streaming giant is closing Los Angeles-based Night School studio, which it acquired in 2021 and plans to close Helsinki-based Moonloot, which was founded in 2022. Just six weeks ago, Night School had released Unhinged, a novel 30-minute first-person horror game, streamable on TVs to Netflix users. The game was hailed by Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters in a call with investors. Six weeks later, Night School is closing. Prior to its Netflix tenure, Night School had developed the award-winning supernatural thriller Oxenfree. A second Oxenfree game followed after the purchase, as well as a mobile game designed to tie in to an episode of the Netflix show Black Mirror. Netflix attributed the studio closures to a prioritization around kids gaming, party games, story-driven fare and games with mainstream hooks, such as a recently released FIFA game. “We see an opportunity to be more focused in our execution, so we are making organizational changes to the business to match those priorities,” a Netflix spokesperson told Game File. Netflix is also cutting jobs from its internal games team. A rep declined to say how many jobs were being lost by these cutbacks. “We are incredibly grateful to the talented colleagues we’re saying goodbye to today. We thank them for all their contributions to Netflix, and wish them the best,” the rep said. Netflix started releasing video games, initially on mobile as a free bonus to subscribers, in 2021. By 2023, Mike Verdu, then the head of Netflix’s game operations, was telling me that the company was committed to growing carefully, as it offered more games and built up internal game studios. At the time, it hadn’t made any gaming job cuts. Since then, Netflix has altered its approach. In 2024, it shut down Team Blue, a start-up studio led by ex-Call of Duty and Halo developers that was exploring making a high-end first-person game for the service. Last October, Netflix shut down another studio, Boss Fight, shortly after Peters praised the team’s Squid Game game to investors. (One of Boss Fight’s main developers now works on the Netflix FIFA game for outside studio Delphi.) And in December, Netflix sold cozy game studio Spry Fox back to its founders. Amid all of this, Netflix has shifted from emphasizing mobile games to offering games through TVs and PCs, via streamed connections, with phones used as controllers. That’s how Night School’s Unhinged worked, along with games such as Boggle and Party Crashers that have collectively helped the Netflix game controller app chart well on mobile app stores. The studio cuts leave Netflix with a central gaming team that works with external developers, and a dedicated first party studio in, Helsinki-based Next Games, which produced many of the company’s couch-centric party games. The move away from having a roster of internal game studios aligns with Netflix’s own approach to shows and movies, which are largely produced externally. The company owns few TV/film production studios of its own. The gaming industry overall is seeing large holders of multiple studios cut back, with Sony, Ubisoft, Embracer, Microsoft and other giants closing or selling off studios. Cuts in California-based studios, where costs often run relatively high, have been particularly acute. Netflix has faced skepticism about its gaming plans for years. The moves today are likely to fuel them, and the company has few upcoming projects to counter the narrative. Among the few hinted, acclaimed independent studio Don’t Nod said last year it was working on a game tied to a major Netflix franchise.
These Mysterious Ice Age Cave Symbols May Actually Be the First Image of Mind-Altering Plants
It's hard to say for sure, but the similarities are clear.
We smell different as we age. Here's why.
An odor-producing molecule 2-nonenal is only part of the story.
Lucid Diagnostics Provides Business Update and Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results
/PRNewswire/ -- Lucid Diagnostics Inc. (Nasdaq: LUCD) ("Lucid" or the "Company") a commercial-stage, cancer prevention medical diagnostics company, and...
American Board of Radiology taking cautious approach to AI
Rather than moving quickly to adopt new tools, the Tucson, Arizona-based doc-certification organization is studying developments, engaging experts and establishing guardrails before introducing any change.
Ask a Scientist: How Do We Track the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Science?
Introducing a multi-purpose tool for documenting AND fighting attacks on science that affect our health and safety.
Infleqtion: Losses Are Growing but So Is Its Crucial Federal Quantum Business.
Infleqtion says it remains on track to deliver a ‘utility-scale’ quantum computer later this year.
Cardiologists develop new anchoring technique for challenging TAVR cases
TAVR can be especially challenging in patients with PAR and an enlarged LVOT. Specialists in China have developed a new technique that could improve outcomes for some of these patients without introducing new risks.
Arizona's wild horses deserve science, not assumptions
Arizona is reducing its wild horse herds toward targets set without real science. Officials should prove the numbers before removing more.
NV lawmakers mull maternal health protections for '27 session, punt on child welfare funding fix
Nevada state lawmakers are considering a wide-range of health-related policies in the next year’s legislative session that includes implementing a slate of maternal health protections in a “momnibus” bill, bolstering efforts to investigate Medicaid insurance fraud, and reducing reporting requirements for state health agencies. Also at Tuesday’s interim Health and Human Services committee meeting, discussion […]
Ozempic may have revealed the brain’s hidden “craving center”
Ozempic-like drugs appear to weaken more than hunger—they may also reduce cravings for alcohol and other addictive substances. Scientists are increasingly tracing this effect to the lateral septum, a brain region that helps connect memories and surroundings with rewarding experiences. Packed with GLP-1 receptors, it may act as a crucial control point between thinking about a reward and feeling compelled to pursue it. The discovery could open new approaches to treating addiction as well as obesity.
Fauci, RFK Jr., and the latest in American health
Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera breaks down the public health breakdowns
Opinion | One Senate committee chases Dr. Fauci while another takes aim again at Steward’s elusive Ralph de la Torre
One Senate committee chases Dr. Anthony Fauci while another takes aim again at Steward’s elusive Ralph de la Torre.
Letters: Refocus public health priorities on current threats like food safety, measles
Recently, public discourse has been dominated by debates surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci and COVID-19. While leadership in managing a pandemic is important, our focus should be on the critical dangers
Bradley University adds AI and data science majors
Bradley University’s Department of Computer Science and Information Systems is introducing two new majors in data science and artificial intelligence to meet growing technological demand.
Lane Kiffin Feeling ‘Magnitude’ of LSU Job Entering Crucial Season
As the new college football season gets going soon, all eyes will be on the LSU Tigers and head coach Lane Kiffin.After a controversial exit from Ole Miss last year, Kiffin’s new role with the Tigers has been discussed more than ever. There is more pressure on Kiffin entering this season than he’s ever faced […] The post Lane Kiffin Feeling ‘Magnitude’ of LSU Job Entering Crucial Season appeared first on HEAVY.
Anthony Fauci Hysteria Reveals a Big Flaw of Our Political System
The hysteria around Anthony Fauci's tenure leading the NIH during the Covid-19 pandemic reveals a political system incapable of balance.
Get your fantasy football edge with USA TODAY Sports Fantasy
Introducing USA TODAY Sports Fantasy, the premium tool for fantasy football managers.
Ascensus Launches Enhanced Small Business 401(k) Solution
Ascensus enhances, rebrands small business retirement offering to Ascensus Essentials, adds 3(16) administrative fiduciary services
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
The Big Business Behind Texas’ Smallest Wells
Low-producing wells account for 5% of oil and gas production but roughly half of methane emissions at oil and gas well sites. The ownership data tells a story many Texans haven’t heard.
Tarik Skubal will make Dodgers home debut at crucial time
Tarik Skubal, the two-time Cy Young Award winner, will make his first home start for the Dodgers with Los Angeles in need of a spark.
THE WEEK OF AUG 10, 2026
- Scientists decry Fauci prosecution threat - National Academies orders probe of peer-review process - DOE secretary referred to DOJ
Scientists Release Biggest 2D Map of the Universe
Key Takeaways The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys combined more than 263,000 telescope exposures to make the largest 2D map of the universe in visible and near-infrared light. Astronomers can pair the Legacy Surveys map with their own observations to explore our universe and search for rare phenomena. The 2D map serves as the foundation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey to measure the universe in 3D and investigate dark energy. Hold on to your telescopes: the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. The data is available for all to use and publicly viewable through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer. Astronomers and citizen scientists can explore the map or combine it with their own observations to better understand our universe. Researchers can search for rare phenomena like gravitational lenses, observe fleeting events like supernovae, and investigate two of physics’ biggest mysteries: dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for most of the mass in our universe, and dark energy, the force driving our universe’s accelerating expansion. The new map builds on earlier versions from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys that have already proved invaluable. To date, more than 1,800 science papers that reference the Legacy Surveys data have been published. “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” said David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you’re working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.” Covering roughly 75% of the sky in visible and near-infrared light, the updated map provides a deep view of the extragalactic universe not blocked by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way. Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come. More than 160 scientists contributed to data collection for the project, and a team of 20 produced the final dataset released today. It was built by combining 263,407 telescope exposures from three ground-based sky surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS) at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. That was supplemented by years of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite mission and additional public data. “For our team, these data are fundamental to our investigation of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of our galaxy,” said Arjun Dey, co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and an astronomer at NSF NOIRLab. “But the skies belong to everyone, and this survey gives everyone the chance to explore the sky and marvel at its wonders.” Here be galaxies The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys were originally conducted to prepare for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. The Legacy Surveys’ 2D map is essentially a deep photograph of the sky; it records where galaxies and stars appear and how bright they appear. This crucial step enables DESI to select objects and measure their light in different wavelengths to determine their distances, building the largest high-resolution 3D map ever made. Scientists study the way galaxies have clustered at different ages of the universe to track dark energy over time. In April 2026, DESI completed its original five-year survey ahead of schedule and with vastly more objects than expected. The early results have shown surprising hints that dark energy’s impact may be weakening over time — a paradigm shift that could potentially shape the predicted fate of our universe. DESI expects to publish improved results using their first five years of data in 2027 and is continuing observations into 2028. DESI was so efficient at observing galaxies, the Legacy Surveys map needed to expand. Early on, “it became clear we might run out of galaxies to look at and run out of sky, and we better start doing something about that,” said Schlegel, who also works on DESI. The new Legacy Surveys map has been used to select DESI targets since June 2026 and will guide the telescope’s operations over the coming years. Computing the cosmos Merging hundreds of thousands of images taken on 2,285 nights, each with unique atmospheric and telescope conditions, was a massive computational effort. It took about a year to develop the computer code and eight weeks to process all the images at the Perlmutter supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab. Beyond supporting DESI, the Legacy Surveys will be a foundational reference for the next generation of telescopes. As new observatories like the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (jointly funded by NSF and DOE’s Office of Science) and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope come online, researchers can compare their observations with one of the deepest and most comprehensive views of the sky ever assembled. The Legacy Surveys data will also help scientists train artificial intelligence tools to analyze petabytes of astronomical data and accelerate new discoveries. It will be among the datasets used in an astrophysics pilot project within the American Science Cloud, part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys are supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of High Energy Physics; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility; the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences; and the partner institutions. DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and NERSC. Additional support for DESI is provided by the NSF; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
"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
In an unprecedented move for video games, Rockstar is debuting a new GTA 6 trailer exclusively on subscription service Netflix. Will you watch it there?
SanDisk Announces Three New Expansion Cards For Xbox Series X|S
"Introducing the SANDISK Optimus GX C50 Storage Expansion Card for XBOX"
Pain, stigma and barriers to care: The burden of cysts and fibroids in Africa
As a teenager in Kenya, long before Evelyn Okinyi Owala became a professional bodybuilder, she attended school, spent time with friends and helped her parents around the house. But during her period each month, she said, she experienced excruciating pain, vomiting, fever, lightheadedness, heavy bleeding, pelvic pain and acne.
Seminoles Legend Remembered on Anniversary of His Passing
Honoring the legendary Florida State icon whose faith and discipline forged a Tallahassee dynasty, producing two national championships, two Heisman winners, and a prolific college coaching tree.
Cost of Living Worries Give Democrats Lead Over GOP on Economy
Persistent cost-of-living worries are eroding a crucial GOP asset, giving Democrats an edge ahead of the midterms.
Documentary celebrating Miami University’s ‘Cradle of Coaches’ coming to Peacock
Some college football programs are known as Linebacker U or Wide Receiver U for consistently producing great players at those positions. When it comes to Miami University RedHawks football, the program is best known for the people who roam the sidelines. Hence, the “Cradle of Coaches” nickname. That nickname and the school’s decorated history of…
We know sleep, exercise and diet are vital for health. But why?
The benefits of all three come down to a crucial piece of cellular kit
Why haven't Mississippi Democrats found a governor candidate?
The election for governor in 2027 is a crucial moment for the Mississippi Democratic Party. The problem? The party still doesn't have a candidate.
Fauci Contempt Vote Reflects the Enduring Politics of COVID
Experts say the focus on COVID grievances shows that some wounds it opened were never closed
Barbara Eden says Lucille Ball ‘appreciated’ her avoiding Desi Arnaz on ‘I Love Lucy’ (exclusive)
Barbara Eden tells EW about her memorable guest appearance on ‘I Love Lucy,’ and how she managed to get along with Lucille Ball.
Fauci contempt vote reflects the enduring politics of COVID
Republican lawmakers and Secretary of Health RFK Jr. continue to scrutinize the legacy of COVID-19, recently voting to hold retired immunologist Anthony Fauci in contempt after his refusal to testify before a Senate committee.
What happens when progressives stop reproducing?
A research finding indicates that a significant demographic divide is emerging in America, where lower birth rates among progressive, highly educated populations contrast with the stable fertility …
UCI Health opens inpatient rehabilitation hospital in Irvine | UCI Health
UCI Health — Irvine Rehabilitation Hospital is now serving patients throughout Orange County and the surrounding region. This is the academic health system’s newest facility, a 52-bed, 68,000-square-foot freestanding center developed through a joint venture partnership with Lifepoint Rehabilitation.
Silver nanocatalysts switch reaction sites between power generation and hydrogen production
For the first time, researchers have discovered that the same silver (Ag) nanocatalyst operates at different reaction sites depending on whether a solid oxide cell is generating electricity or producing ...
Fault lines for both parties emerge after Michigan’s primaries: From the Politics Desk
Plus, Bill Cassidy provides crucial support for Todd Blanche.
In 1934, scientists heard reports of mushrooms causing visions of tiny people; in 2026, DNA linked the phenomenon to one species in China and the Philippines
In 1934, Western scientists first heard reports from Papua New Guinea of wild mushrooms causing visions of tiny people, a phenomenon called "mushroom madness." Nearly a century later, DNA sequencing has confirmed that a single, identical mushroom species causes these same hallucinations in communities thousands of miles apart in China and the Philippines.
Take-Two CEO On The Industry Going All Digital: 'Discs Don't Really Make Sense For The Consumer'
Strauss Zelnick thinks his company will still produce some physical games "now and then"
A third clinic settles with DOJ over trans care
Anthony Fauci held in contempt, crackdowns on the organ donor network, and more health news from Morning Rounds
Is Misbehavior by Politicians Finally Having a Reckoning? | WSJ Politics Newsletter for Aug. 7
Plus, a Senate committee votes to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress and U.S. intelligence assesses Putin could launch incursion into a NATO member state
The Next Generation: Jak Crawford
Throughout 2026, Motorsport is introducing you to the most promising youngsters on the single-seater scene. Meet Jak Crawford, Formula 2’s 2025 runner-up and Aston Martin’s reserve driver
Trump did many of the things Republicans criticize Fauci for
After years of criticism, Republicans are bringing the heat in their longstanding efforts to target former health official Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Localized immunomodulation with cytokine-producing cells to mitigate foreign body responses in rodents and a nonhuman primate
Encapsulated IL-10–producing cells locally suppress fibrosis and extend graft function in rodent models and a nonhuman primate.
As Michigan ages, are we overlooking a critical type of caregiver – the friend?
Friends may not see themselves as caregivers, yet when they help with activities of daily living, they are crucial to a person’s independence and longevity. That, in turn, can save tax dollars by curbing the odds at nursing home care.
Educators & Teens Get Hands-On With TEMPO Data to Help Investigate Local Air Quality
On Day 1 of the Institute, the CosmicDS Science Principal Investigator Pat Udomprasert led a hands-on immersion session introducing educators to TEMPO-Lab, a
Republican-led Senate panel will ask Justice Department to charge Dr. Anthony Fauci with contempt of Congress
A Senate committee voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, advancing an audacious effort by Republicans to prosecute the well-known scientist over his role in the US government response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Scientists identify mushroom behind ‘tiny people’ hallucinations
DNA sequencing links independent reports of ‘Lilliputian’ hallucinations to a single mushroom species—one with no previously identified psychoactive compounds, suggesting the presence of a new...
Fauci contempt vote shows lasting power of pandemic politics
Six years after the world was thrust into a global pandemic, Republicans in power aren’t leaving it in the past.
Fauci contempt vote reflects the enduring politics of COVID
Six years after the world was thrust into a global pandemic, Republicans in power aren’t leaving it in the past.
Fauci contempt vote reflects the enduring politics of COVID
Six years after the world was thrust into a global pandemic, Republicans in power aren’t leaving it in the past.
Senate panel votes on holding Fauci in contempt
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said he wasn't trying to entrap Fauci
Atlanta Business League Honors 20 Years of 'Men of Influence' at Annual Ceremony
Atlanta Business League marked 20 years of Men of Influence honors, introducing a new young leader award and inducting developer Egbert Perry into its Legends H...
The Latest: Senate committee votes to hold Fauci in contempt over refusal to answer questions
A Senate committee has voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress and refer him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution over his refusal to answer questions at a hearing last week on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic
Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look Premieres on Netflix This Month, Rockstar Confirms
Rockstar has announced that a special Grand Theft Auto 6: An Extended Look will premiere on Netflix later this month.
Why making Anthony Fauci the enemy will harm US public health for years
Republicans are trying to scapegoat the infectious disease expert, even as they have gutted healthcare amid outbreaks of measles, cyclosporiasis and Ebola
Senate committee set to vote on holding Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress
Hearing called after the former chief medical advisor invoked the fifth and refused to answer questions at a hearing on Covid-19
Student-Produced Beehive Block Party Opens Doors to Live Entertainment Careers
South Los Angeles students gained hands-on entertainment industry experience by producing the Live Nation-backed Beehive Block Party, the culminating event of the SoLa Live Accelerator Program.
Republicans may finally snare Dr. Fauci in Covid’s last culture war
The Covid-19 pandemic was a historic stress test that revealed American politics as too broken to deal with a national crisis.
Senate subcommittee obtains Fauci’s phone ahead of contempt vote
A Senate subcommittee investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci has obtained a copy of his iPhone, a spokesperson for the panel’s chair, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, told CNN on Wednesday.
Mike Macdonald provides update on Zach Charbonnet's rehab
Zach Charbonnet underwent surgery to repair the torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee on Feb. 20.
GOP senator obtains a copy of Fauci’s phone as contempt vote looms
Sen. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin) said the phone could address many questions that Fauci declined to answer at a hearing about the pandemic last week.
Fauci's HHS iPhone turned over to Senate investigators as contempt vote looms
Sen. Ron Johnson's subcommittee obtained a copy of Anthony Fauci's pandemic-era iPhone as Rand Paul's panel weighs holding him in contempt of Congress.
Nearly half of dementia cases may be linked to risks you can change
A long-term brain study found that common risks such as smoking, high blood pressure, heart disease, and high blood lipids were strongly linked to damage associated with vascular dementia. The findings suggest that healthier lifestyle choices could help delay dementia by reducing several harmful brain changes at once.
Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract
The White House's new science strategy should be required reading in the Berlaymont and every European capital.Not because Europe should copy it. Parts of it should concern Europeans deeply. But because it asks the question Europe has so far avoided while steadily losing ground in the global race for technological leadership.Europe already possesses many of the world's finest universities, scientists and research-intensive companies. It produces world-leading research in fields ranging from quantum technologies and biotechnology to climate science. Yet time and again Europe generates the scientific breakthroughs while others build the companies, industries and strategic advantages around them, particularly in digital technologies. Increasingly, we find ourselves regulating technologies whose underlying capabilities were developed elsewhere.This is not primarily a scientific failure. It is an institutional one.The settlement that shaped modern science policy emerged after the Second World War. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that governments should invest in fundamental research while protecting scientists from political direction. Public investment was justified precisely because no government, university or company could predict where the next transformative discovery would emerge.That scientific contract served liberal democracies extraordinarily well. It underpinned decades of advances in medicine, computing, energy and communications, but the world for which it was designed no longer exists.Artificial intelligence is transforming not only technology but the production of knowledge itself. Advanced chips, computing power, data and scientific instruments have become strategic assets. Scientific knowledge now diffuses globally almost instantly. Competitive advantage increasingly lies not in making discoveries first, but in possessing the infrastructure, capital, engineering capability and institutions required to translate those ideas into products, industries and strategic advantage.The old boundaries between science, industrial policy, national security and geopolitics have largely disappeared. Dual-use technologies now underpin both economic power and military deterrence.The US has recognised this shift. In July, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, a comprehensive attempt to rethink the relationship between science and national power. The report builds on Bush's legacy, but departs from his framework in important ways. Science is no longer treated simply as the source of future discoveries. It is presented as the foundation of economic resilience, technological leadership and national security. AI, advanced infrastructure and the capacity to build become as important as discovery itself.Yet the report also reveals a striking paradox. The same administration calling for “a new golden age” of US science has simultaneously proposed deep cuts to the federal research enterprise while expanding political influence over the allocation of public research funding. Europe should therefore distinguish between the report's diagnosis and its prescription. The diagnosis, that science has become a strategic asset, is compelling. But the prescription is self-defeating. Long-term technological leadership depends on strong universities, academic freedom and the institutional autonomy that makes scientific discovery possible. This distinction matters. Bush's achievement was never simply to make science serve national strength. It was to establish a division of labour in which governments invested in research without attempting to direct discovery itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerge precisely because researchers retain the freedom to pursue questions whose value cannot yet be demonstrated and whose conclusions cannot be anticipated.Neither China, nor the USAs science becomes more strategically important, the temptation to politicise it inevitably grows. But scientific freedom is not an obstacle to technological leadership, it is an essential precondition.China represents the opposite model. For decades it has integrated science, manufacturing, infrastructure and industrial policy into a single national strategy. Its ability to mobilise resources around critical technologies is formidable. But it does so within an authoritarian system where scientific priorities are increasingly inseparable from political power.Europe should imitate neither model. It should learn from the strategic ambition of the US without importing its growing politicisation of science. And it should learn from China's capacity to build without adopting its concentration of power.Instead, Europe needs a scientific contract of its own. Bush's scientific contract protected the freedom to discover because the defining challenge of the 20th century was producing new knowledge. Europe's next scientific contract must preserve that freedom while ensuring that scientific discoveries can be converted into technological, industrial and strategic capability. Because in a transactional world, Europe's freedom to shape its own future depends on its capacity to build it.Related articlesThe US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationNIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research fundingThis does not mean subordinating free science to competitiveness or industrial policy. On the contrary. Scientific autonomy remains the first principle of Europe's next scientific contract. Governments should not direct scientific discovery. Their responsibility is to ensure that Europe's scientific, industrial, financial and regulatory institutions work together rather than in isolation.Meeting that responsibility requires far more than research funding. European researchers need access to world-class computing infrastructure, advanced laboratories, shared datasets and scientific facilities. Innovative companies need patient capital, testing environments and a genuine single market in which they can scale without facing 27 different regulatory regimes. Public procurement must evolve from purchasing existing technologies to creating markets for new ones. Regulators must become partners in experimentation rather than guardians of yesterday's rules.A connecting architectureEurope does not need to invent the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) model from scratch. Britain's Aria, Germany's Sprind and Wellcome Leap already show that Europe can build institutions capable of taking high-risk, mission-oriented bets while preserving democratic accountability. The challenge now is not to create more isolated initiatives, but to connect them to Europe's broader scientific, industrial and financial system so that breakthrough discoveries can scale.Above all, Europe must stop treating research, innovation, industrial policy, finance and security as separate policy domains. The challenge is no longer to create excellent institutions in each of these fields, but to make them work as one European innovation system. Europe's strength will increasingly depend not on excellence within institutions, but on excellence across them.Europe's ambition should be neither to imitate the US nor to emulate China. It should demonstrate that scientific freedom, democratic legitimacy and technological capability are not competing objectives, but mutually reinforcing strengths. In an age of geopolitical rivalry, Europe's greatest advantage may ultimately be its ability to attract the world's best talent by combining scientific freedom, democratic openness and technological ambition.Bush's scientific contract helped define the 20th century because it protected the freedom to discover. Europe's challenge is not to abandon that achievement but to extend it. The defining task of Europe's next scientific contract is to preserve the freedom to discover while building Europe's capacity to translate scientific discovery into technological power.Kaare Nielsen is founder of Pomus, a Danish think tank on science and innovation.
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Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. 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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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